Sedona resident Richard Factor has spent a lifetime using ham radio to contact every country on Earth except for North Korea. He’s now hoping to connect with other planets after the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute installed two LaserSETI stations on his roof in July to scan the skies for laser pulses originating outside the solar system.
“LaserSETI is a constellation of instruments, so it’s basically identical stations that we are putting at several [places] around the world, so we can search for laser pulses coming from extraterrestrial civilizations,” LaserSETI project manager Franck Marchis, Ph.D., said. “We can assume that if a civilization is more advanced than us, they have developed this technology that allows them to create powerful lasers, and those powerful lasers can be used to communicate between stations, or to basically accelerate a spacecraft. So if you look in the sky, if there is such a civilization, we may be able to detect them if we are aligned with the line of sight of [their] laser.”
Marchis added that because lasers emit a specific wavelength as opposed to the full spectrum of wavelengths from stars, finding indications of laser pulses could provide evidence of extraterrestrial life at a complex level.
The Sedona LaserSETI installation is the third of its kind, following setups at the Robert Ferguson Observatory in California and the Haleakala Observatory in Hawai‘i. SETI’s website states that the California and Hawai‘i observatories previously covered 18.5% of the sky and the addition of the Sedona site expanded coverage to 31.4%, with additional installations planned for the Caribbean, the Arabian Peninsula, Europe and the Himalayas.
One of the Sedona stations is linked to the Robert Ferguson Observatory in Kenwood, Calif., to provide redundancy, while the other will be linked to the newest station in Puerto Rico that Marchis said would be online by the end of April. Factor is currently troubleshooting a power distribution issue with the Sedona system that has left it running at half capacity.
“My audio career started with ham radio,” Factor said. “I built my own equipment back when I was in my teens. I worked in radio for several years at WABC, a New York City station.
“I ended up working in a defense plant where I learned about digital electronics. I worked in broadcasting, so I knew a lot about audio … [at] 26 I started this company Eventide and we started out by making audio equipment for radio and for recording studios.”
Factor and his business partner Anthony Agnello received a 2018 Technical Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for their innovations in sound engineering, which revolutionized the recording industry by introducing capabilities such as digital pitch shifting and delay.
Factor said that curiosity about whether extraterrestrials might have picked up on signals from his equipment led him to become the founding president of the SETI League, a nonprofit organization founded in response to Congress terminating SETI’s federal funding in 1993.
“Since its inception, the SETI League maintained an office in New Jersey, and supported a cadre of volunteer regional coordinators all over the world,” the SETI League wrote in October. “Now most of the founding members of the SETI League are aging, and all too many are deceased … Three months ago we lost [Heather Wood] our beloved secretary-treasurer, who ran the New Jersey office single-handedly. Lacking the staff or resources to continue serving our membership, our surviving trustees have made the difficult decision to terminate operations at the end of [2024].”
Factor said he was most excited about “possibly discovering space aliens. I use that term because everybody uses it. If we make that discovery, for one thing, it proves we’re not alone in the universe. For another, if we can actually establish communication, who knows what we could discover, not just from the existence of these people, but learn much more about the universe and about our place in it.”
To see the data collected in Sedona, visit laserseti.net/status.
