Fighting for space (BBC Prime: Digital planet) Christmas Eve 1998, a group of enthusiasts arrived to a remote English lighthouse, a place of token. They are all members of the South Bary? amater radio club, and they are paying homage to their hero Guliamo Marconi, who exactly 100 years before sends a brief radio signal, 8 miles across the English channel to an enchanted? lighthouse, and in doing so changed the world. Today, we are sourounded with an invisible silent cocophony? of radio wave, permiating? every corner of the world. From National Defence to a taxi cab, from a television to a mobile phone radio is the invisible link that holds us together on the Earth, and our only way of calling across the emptyness of the space. This is they story of a century of radio, from Marcomi's first groundbreaking transmittion to the probes we sent in the depths of space. In 1997 a space probe was lounched towards Saturn. A 7 years journey thought the cold emptyness of the space will be fallowed by a 4 years study of a giant planet. It is a miracle of a space technology, but also a miracle of communication. Rodney Buckland, Open Univ.: The Casiny-Hoyden? spacecraft will travel over 3 billion km to get to the Saturn system, and when it is there it will collect all the data required by a 27 different scientific team distributed all over the world. Bob Mitchell, JPL: When we first want to gather data we have to be able to point the cameras, the instruments at the target event, wether it would be Saturn or the ring or Titan or one of the rocky moons. So for the period of an each day of about 16 to 18 hours we will point the spacecraft whereever it needed to be to observe the targets and we recorded that data on board. We have to followed state taperecorders on board of the Casini spacecraft, and then for the remaining 6-8 hours of that day we will point the spacecraft corder? and then playback all of that data that we have been recording. Communication technology is somuch in everyday parts of lives on Earth that we take it for granted. Its limitations are even frustrated, but space exploration still provokes all. An echo of the magic that radio wants to seem a 100 years ago. Steve Judd, South Foreland Lighthouse: Guliamo Marconi eluminate in 90's to further his experiments in radio and one of his experiments was from South Foreland Lighthouse when his transmiting to the East Goodwin lightship, which is about 9 miles of shore behind us. And considering Marconi, who was using a 5 kW that is the power of 5 one bar electric fores?, so you imagine 5Kw to get across to the East Goodwin lightship and we can work the world on a 100kW, possibly Australia on a 100W of power of one electric lightbulb. This time you find maybe a communication to France he was using it for the transformation of information and the daily telegraph were involved, in the first transmition a message was sent througt free channels of Marconi via radio, so it really was a fareront of radio technology and making a usable tool for everybody. Since Marconi - magical discoverer, we evolved through the Industrial Age and event at something called the Information Age. But our information is not Earth path?, our radio signals leak out into space. A beakon? of humanity shining through the cosmos. And if anyone could chew in, Marconi's original signal would mark the beginning the barage? of the radio noise spreading out in space. 1000 upon 1000 of signals from wireless broadcast, TV, communication links and radar defences A space mission like a Casini is a remarkable display of communication technology. But is no less an amazing example of the natural property of the radio waves. From a transmiter with a power of a small lightball dishes on Earth are able to detect Casini's call. Supercoiled detectors within the deeps space network minimize the electrical noise that would otherwise swamp the incredible fine signal. And when all the datas is received earth bound communication would then be used to copy data across the globe, connecting the distant probe to Universities on every continent. Radio was not the beginning of the information age. 100 year ago the information revolution had already began. The telephone had just been invented, and the telegraph had already connected countries across the width of oceans but radio took the communications much much further. Radio was important beacuse it provided instantenious communications and did not relay on many miles of cuper wire strongelhold of telegraph poles. We have been through one rovolution, the telegraph, but that was very inflexible earthbound infrastructure. And radio ofered something that was radicaly new. Anlike the telegraph or the telephone a single transmiter could send a signal simultaneously to millions of receivers The age of broadcasting could begin. Everybody was hooked to the wireless, as the world continue to change. Becoming smaller as the speed and immediatency of the news led to a new age in which the communication would begin to dictate the peace of life the humans to follow. But despite the world getting smaller its countries were not getting closer. When war broke out in 1939 the national leaders understood how important radio had became. A propaganda tool to focus a society. The industrial technology of the ? seem to present the unstopable treath to Britain. But the radio ofered the glimur of hope. Military leaders saw in a magical invisible ways a new veapon, a force that could be hammers into an instant death ray? The government turned urgently to a young radio expert called Robert Watson Watt. I'd watched ?? sily stories developing even in the official channels ?? motorbicycle engines at a distance and killing unfortunate mice and rabbits by some kind of misterious radiation. but I said I do not think that in the present state of knowledge of Physics that I see a very good prospect, so off hand I would say I do not believe it would help. He could not make a death ray, but he did have another idea. Detection by radio instead of destruction by radio is been examined and numerical consideration will be submitted when desired. And at that moment civil service changed gire and came back quick saying the considerations are indeeed desired and that quicly. Working trought the nights the scientific team set up the room full of equipment. And the next morning the a local IRF plane was sent to the sky to pretend to be a hostile invador. The demonstration was a success and the system was developed. It was the bith of radar, a radical redirection of Marconi's wireless communicator. We should have been completely lost if our warnning system been had not enabled us to conserve the strangt of extraordinary group of 20-24 year old who really saved Britain. Radar was vital to the war?. Marconi? ? grow out of the existing communuication technology. It led out to new. Even our understanding of the Universe has been radically changed by the defence miracle to the WWII. From kitchen to cosmos world would never be the same again. The early 20th century the encredible gain in the astronomical knowledge, as vast optical telescops had been build to invetigate the haevens. The world's biggest telescop at Mount Willson in California had bacome a srine to science, following Edwins Habul's? discovery of millions of individual stars grouped in galaxys far beyond our own. But the optical astronomers hit the limits. No one knew how the galaxies move or if anything lays between the starts, or even between the galaxies themselves. But in 1944 a ?? Holland, a young Dutch physics student called Hendric van der Holst made a ground breaking prediction. He suggested that just as stars give off light hydrogen gas, which was thought to preveil the space between the stars might naturaly be emiting the long invisible wave of 21 cm, not optical but the radio wave that can travel across the entire universe on a ??. The potential was enormous. If the radio waves could be detected, it could open the whole new universe to study, not only the stars. This film discovered in the archives of the Leiden observatory shows the reconstructions of the meeting at which Van der Hoist presented his predictions to the Dutch astronomical society. The only problem was, that in 1944 there was no such thing as the radio telescop, and nobody knew if the theoretical radio really existed. Adriaan Blaauw, New Leiden Observatory: For most of, this was just a meeting like many others. And sure we must have been told this is very important, if you could measure it. But that big if was a very very big if, espacially at those moments when you were in an occupied country. You have no idea when the war would end. You had no idea how the world would look like after this. So I do not think our thoughts went very far beyond this was a very interesing talk, and now tomorrow we have to continue with our own problems. Henrik Van Der Hulst, New Leiden Observatory: The dramatic situation was that after that coloquium it lasted exactly 7 years before the first detection was made. When the war ended the Dutch astronomers fiberously reached an abondon German radar dish and turned it to the skys. Beginning the race between centers of astronomy across the world to confirm Van Der Huist prediction. Detection of the so called 21cm wave did not come quickly, but by the early 1950's Van Der Hulst was a hero and the radio was changing the view of the entire universe. Butler Burton, New Leiden Observatory: Radio astronomy had a tramendous impact on our view of the universe. It opened the entirely new window. It revailed for the first time in a great deal of detail the material between the stars and the material from which starts are formed and which later, when the stars die, returns to incastela? meaning?. Since then the radio astronomi is the single most important tool for unvailing secrets of deeper space. The technological optimism of the post war years heightened the desire to communicate over the greater and greater distances, until the Earth seemed almost to small to contain? it?. The moon walk seemed the pinakle of the technological achivement, but it was also the huge communication event. Seen live by a 723 million people across the world. Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut: While I was at the surface just that wild thought went trough my mind how ironical it is that Neil and I are on the surface and we are further away from Earth then everybody else - any two people have ever been, and yet we are talking to them right now and we know that they are very aware through communications as to what we are doing at this very moment. Even the astronauts could chat back home 1/4 of a million miles away. The moon landing was the culmimation of the space race, but is was also pointing towards a new communications future. Richard Nixon: Hello, Neil and Buzz, I am talking to you by telephone from the oval room at the White house, and it certainly has to be the most be the most historic telephone call ever made. Buzz Aldrin: It is the sense that is combined with the knowledge of a very close contact and you are very secure because of the communications, and if you lose the communications now, this would drastically alter the situation, because now without any contact at all you see how far away the Earth is and psyhologically this is gone have a significant impact on any individual. The telephone call between President Nixon and the American astronauts looked conventional, but in a very primitive way it used technology come to know as digital. The new electronic would make it all possible, transistors and later silicon chips enabled information to be processed easily and cheaply, as series of ones and zeros. Travelling beyond the limit? presented insemanseble? problems for the astronauts, but new communication technology was about to run the human space travellers absolete and opened out the secrets of our solar system for the very first time. The new digital technology made radio signal better deal with noise and its ? so that they could travel further. The distance from Earth was increasing but communication could still be maintained. In some sense we are even emagining a possibility of encountering ??. We think that the information were we are and when we are indicated in this part of the message by the configuration of cartain cosmic object called Pulsars will be completely obvious to any society cabable of travelling between the stars. These two objects will be more misterious, because it is not likely that they will be human beeings, eventhough there might be other creatures out there. and in fact it surved the very useful purpose in making us think about what sort of impression we might wish to give to the cosmic. Magnificant images of the solar system were send back from the Voyager probe lunched in 1976 and in 1977. The pictures of Jupiter like these could not be photographed. There was no way film could be sent back to Earth. So mages were recorded digitaly as a sequel of elements called pixels to be returned to Earth as a radio signal. On Earth the data was demodulated and assembled back into pictures for their interpretationa. Information liberated from data. Even transmition erros can be corrected by using special methods of coding the signal. Bob Mitchell, JPL: Typically in the course of transmitting the string of these billions of zeros and ones that come down. Every once on a while there is a glitch and you lose one. You will get it converted to - they flipped to the other value or there is just noise that is not recognizable. And the coding that has been put on to data when it left the spacecraft is such that up to some point we can reconstruct that and get data back error free. Similar codes will be used for Casini when it finally reached its destination in 2004, but 20 years after Voyager the technology on board of the new probe is far more sophisticated. Scientists are even using the radio communication to send a new software on board completed so that it will operate just the way the want at the time, not necesserily the way the scientists of 1997 might have imagined. A special one hour delivery straight from Earth. In a 20 years between Voyager and Casini the digital revolution that has dominated communications has also dramatically changed the way we talk on Earth. And space technology has lounched satelites to shatle data between continents. But very soon humanity is about to take another leap into the unknown. The information age that is about to make space its new information super highway and bill gates, icon of the digital age, is after some of the action, with the stake in the communication company TELEDEBIC. Russel Daggatt, Teledebic: Telecommunication is going to a radical transformation right now. Most of the world now does not have access even the basic telephone service. But even those places that have phone service get up to essntially 100 years old technology - analog twisted pair cupper wires. Those networks were not designed to for the kinds of digital data communication that are becomming the norm now. We are proposing to put up 288 satelites and that is required for full coverage of the Earth. As soon as you come out of the GST station orbit by definition the satellite moving relationship to the Earth. So to provide a continous coverage of London you have to provide continuous coverage really of the whole planet, and that requires the large number of satelites. Out in space satelites will its claimed provide bandwith on demand and internet in the sky speeding any amount of data instantly around the globe. Russel Daggatt: Today most people connect their computer through a 28.8 kb/s modem. With Teledebic we are talking at speeds up to 2000 times that data rate. So the communication that might take you hours with your current telecommunications connections would take you seconds. And as the data volumes increase the need for a high speed connection is also going to increase. Small low angle high elevation dishes will connect you directly to satelites by radio, while lasers will shuttle data between satellites themselves. Russel Daggatt: Data communications are increasing right now. Data over the internet is increasing at an anual rate of about 1000% a year. Voice communications are increasing at about 8% a year. At that rate the data communication will be about 99% of the trafic moving across the networks by 2004. There is a limit of how much voice trafic can be generated. It is limited by the number of people and how much they can talk. There is virtually no limit to the number of databits that the computers of the world can ??. But this avalanche of data might be on the verge of turning a communication dream into a scietific nightmare. A 100 year of harmony could be shatered as cooperations and scientists come into conflict, with radio waves at the center of the batle of the space, all because of our insishable? appetite to communicate. Nov. 21. Engineers switch on 66 new communication satellites. Jane Littlewood, Orange hall: As we all know, internet in the sky and there is gone be satelite internet and satelite mobile phones very soon available to us. And as soon as our daily usage of those goes up on a daily basis then we will halp the scientists to make sure they have access as soon as they needed. Conference centers are the modern tempels of communications. Cranige Hall at Shasha? ??? is now home to 1000 visiting executives who come to talk. The problem is their nearest neighbour. The level new telescop at Jodrell Bank. Ian Morison, Jodrell Bank: These new satelite based communication systems, the iradium system has just come on line, there are other ones, global style and of course Bill Gates internet system are really a major treat to us. The trouble is that any radio transmission beyond the normal band is allocated. There is no way you can stop that happening. The pile up is very low. We have very very sensitive telescopes. so if there is a satellite in the sky roughly in the direction we are looking, broadcasting near the frekvences we are allowed to use, then it will affect us. Allowing phone users from Antarctica to Alaska to confer. Hi Baz! Im on an ice-cap! So am I! Jane Littlewood: More and more people need their contacs with their offices. People are getting busier and busier during their lives. Everybody is using e-mail and a communication that they do not need to be face to face with. And they still need that access, and when they are in their centers. Although, the most important part is that they are face to face, but it is good that they still have their communication access to the every day communications, such as telephone, e-mail and the internet. However, up at Jodrell Bank... Fools! They are using our wavelengths! 60 years of radio astronomy down the toilet! Ian Morison: So this? means that there are more satellites in the sky or transmitting and it just means that basically the IRF noise background going up, just in the way the light background, all light from the sodium street lamps is now reflecting back from part? in the sky making opto astronomy so much more difficult. So I am afraid that light polution that they had to suffer for many years is beginnig to affect radio astronomy. Our window on the Universe is misting over! Now we may never know if there's anyone there! Jane Littlewood: I do not think as a company we would be able to have a say that we will ban the outright the use of mobile phones. We encourage people to come in and to use the conference centers they want to use it. So what causes problems to ban a mobile phone use is outright?. And that could mean we miss out to an answer the oldest qustion humanity has asked: Is there anybody out there? Elesewhere in the space/time continuum...: What are you getting, Zog? It's an ... an intelligent radio signal. Sir, ... it says .... E=mc^2... we are carbon based bipeds living on the 3rd planet of a main sequence star so hello and welcome to Gardener's question time. Fantastic! We must draft a reply! Since? the discovery of radio astronomy in 1950's the search has been on for the radio signal from space . Not the naturally mission the astronomers study, but the message from an alien civilization, an extraterestial life form. Frank Drake, SETI: Our civilization took a giant step in the mid 1950's. We did not realized that at the time, but at that time radio astronomy was a booming science all over the world. We were building much larger radio telescops that had ever existed, and at the same time new form of the radio receivers were invented. Radio receivers much more sensitive than anything we had before. And it turned out that the combination of those receives with those much larger radio-telescops gave us for the first time the ability to detect reasonable radio signals. And by reasonable I mean radio signals no stronger we were then transmitting accross the distances that separate the stars. Ever since Frank Drake first searches radio dishes had been scanning the skies for an elusive perhaps nonexistant signal that would tell us that we are not alone. Jill Tarter, SETI: SETI stands for the Search for extraterestial inteligence. It is really a missnoma? All we can do is try and find evidence of an extraterestial technology, and over many years we had debated what we should be looking for. And the idea of looking for radio signals generated by another technology, either as a beacon to atract our attention or for their own purposes, for information transfer, for navigation, radars to warn them from incoming astroids, something like that. Radio signals might in fact be a very detectable evidence of a distant technolog, so that is what we look for. Today the level teleskop at Jodrell Bank is part of the search linked to another radio teleskop in Portorico. The detectors are so sensitive that the domestic radio polution so intense that any signal can only be confirmed as an alian message if both telescops made the detection at exactly the right time. Ian Morison: This is the SETI equipment that we are using at the Jodrell Bank to confirm any possible signals detected by our receiver. On the ??? we can actually see the band frekvences we are analysing. But the real work is done by the follow up detectors. They are down here a very powerfull special purpose processors that holding on a particular frequences, where our receiver has detected signals. We basically try and confirm were they real or not. A signal from the space probe like Casini is fainting off, but an intelligent signal from the stars, so many billions of milles away, it is on the edge of human power detection, and the more we chat on Earth the harder it gets to hear in space. Ian Morison: If somebody was trying to trasmit to us in the bands that are currently being used, and will be using in the near future by the satelite systems I am afraid that it. We will just never know. 29 years in the future. Beep-beep! Hello? Hi! You do not know me, but I am calling from the planet 492 in the Constellation of - CRACKLE! CRACKLE! What the - ? Hello? Hmm..., Batery's gone ... oh well, probably some crank...