Five hours north of San Francisco in the cold, windswept foothills of California's mostly dormant volcano country lies the town of Hat Creek. The nearest semblance of a city is Redding, though the natural beauty of Lassen Volcanic National Park may be more familiar to outsiders.

California may have 34 million residents, the most of any U.S. state, but you wouldn't know it driving here.

Tonight on "Tech Live," see the first dishes in the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), which are set to go online in 2005. We'll also give you an amazing look at what others are doing to find life in the universe on TechTV's weekend special, "The Search for E.T."

Radio-free California

We're not here for mountains. We're here to see the glimmering, humming radio astronomy observatory built by the University of California, Berkeley and the SETI Institute. The university figured this place was best to host the telescopes, which are named after Microsoft founder and TechTV owner Paul Allen, who gave the SETI Institute a $11.5 million grant to build what will be 350 dishes. Their 6.1 meter-diameter shape will give astronomers an unprecedented listen to any potential signals coming from extraterrestrials.

"There aren't many places on the earth that still remain radio quiet. This valley is one of them and that's why the telescopes are being built here," says Dr. Jill Tarter, SETI Institute's director.

Tarter knows a little something about searching for E.T. Carl Sagan based his main character in "Contact," Dr. Ellie Arraway, on Tarter. And she paints a vivid picture of what it's like to be a SETI Institute astronomer.

Flexible dishes

Hat Creek ain't big, yet, but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in technology. Right now, three dishes form the first part of a 32-dish array. They're unimpressive, barely bigger than backyard TV dishes, and they're made in similar fashion. But eventually, 350 of them will pop up around the volcanic valley, and they'll be linked by some of the most sophisticated technology around.

"What we actually can do is use our telescopes at various frequencies to try to detect evidence of something else's technology," says Tarter. She says we can't tell if other beings are intelligent, only if they can make radio waves. But from that, we can infer that there's a smart civilization out there.

The key to Hat Creek is that it'll be running 24-7. But unlike the SETI@home project at Arecibo, these astronomers can point their dishes wherever they want, any time, day or night.

A personal mission

Tarter's search began as a child, walking along the Florida beaches with her father, looking up at the stars, realizing each might have its own planets. "The sky became really interesting, and the idea that some other small creature might be walking with their father on a beach somewhere was something I felt very comfortable with," Tarter recalled.

"What we require [at SETI] is people of vision. Obviously someone whose main thought is about what's on television tonight and what [they're] going to eat for dinner usually is not someone who's going to get really fired up about making SETI a reality long term, or build a telescope like this."

Despite Tarter's quest for focused scientists, we're worried about our television, and we couldn't stop thinking about what restaurants we'd find near Hat Creek. We ended up eating Safeway groceries at 11 p.m. that night. Despite the hunger, we're still mesmerized by the telescopes. And Tarter herself is one of those "people of vision."

"We could be bathed in radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations that we haven't yet discovered... they may have been around for a very long time, it's just going to be a question, perhaps, of finding the right technology, looking in the right place with the right technique. Then, perhaps we'll succeed, perhaps we won't."