The SETI Institute predicts that we'll detect an extraterrestrial transmission within twenty years. If that turns out to be true, it'll probably be the folks at UC Berkeley's Hat Creek radio observatory who will have heard the call. Hat Creek is home to the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array (ATA), funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
I just returned from a trip with two friends to Hat Creek, about five hours northeast of San Francisco. Leading Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher Jack Welch and his former student, astronomer Jim Gibson, were kind enough to give us a tour of the facility.
More about our visit to Hat Creek in my journal at TheFeature. Link
