| Description: | This is a presentation of the author's recent book about 'Mathematical SETI' (Maccone, 2012). This book is a research-level treatise on astrophysics, astronautics and mathematics behind SETI. It is divided into four parts that will be discussed in the talk. A brief outline of these four parts is given below.
Part 1, about SETI Statistics, is highly mathematical in its content. The Statistical Drake equation opens Chapter 1 and shows that, if all input variables are positive random variables, and if the number of inputs is made to increase at will, the resulting N (number of ET communicating civilizations in the Galaxy) will have to follow the lognormal distribution, This is a key result for the whole book, with many generalizations given in later chapters.
Part 2 deals with the FOCAL space mission (Fast Outgoing Cyclopean Astronomical Lens) to exploit the huge radio amplification provided by the Sun Gravitational Lens, but requiring the spacecraft to reach a distance of at least 550 AU in the direction opposite to the observable target, for instance Alpha Centauri.
Part 3 deals the with author's 30-years work (1982-2012) about the Karhunen-Loeve Transform (KLT), a principal axes transformation in the Hilbert space spanned by the eigenfunctions of the autocorrelation of the input stochastic process. In practice, the KLT is superior to the FFT in recovering very weak signals deeply buried into noise, but it also requires many more computations.
Finally, Part 4, deals with the United Nations and Protection of the Moon's Farside. On June 10th, 2010, the author briefed the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) about the need to save the Moon Farside radio-quiet zone (PAC = Protected Antipode Circle) from future real estate, industrial and military exploitation. |
