Greetings from the frontiers of science! Today’s assignment is a thought experiment involving “Active SETI” (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) which entails beaming powerful radio signals containing unmistakable proof that they emanate from an intelligent civilization out into the great void of space. The point of the exercise? To light earth up like a Christmas tree across the Milky Way galaxy so that any technological civilizations out there would have no trouble seeing us.
This method of actively seeking out intelligent life in our galactic neighborhood is the opposite of our SETI efforts to date where we use “Passive SETI” to try and listen for a message or beacon from another civilization. These passive programs date back to the 1970’s and have benefited from massive increases in our abilities to scan the radio spectrum for hints of life. Multi-channel spectrum analysis that allows us to listen to millions of “channels” from specific stars at one time has dramatically increased the chances of success – someday.
Alas, to date there has been no indications that anyone in the cosmos is interested in communicating with anyone else. We have found no beacon, no messages inviting us to make contact. And we haven’t stumbled across any inter-planetary communications networks that would prove the existence of alien life beyond earth.
But take heart. We have explored only a small piece of the sky so far and there are several good reasons why we may have even missed a message in past sweeps. We may not be technologically advanced enough to decode it. We may lack the imagination to recognize a message even though it’s been right in front of us. But the most likely reason we have yet to achieve success in our SETI efforts is that there just aren’t that many civilizations transmitting.
Does this mean that there are fewer advanced civilizations than we thought? This is a definite possibility. It could very well be that the deck is stacked against any intelligent civilization reaching our level of sophistication. Rouge asteroids or comets, an unstable sun or moon, a nearby supernova not to mention the possibility that the denizens of any technologically advanced society could blow themselves up all make it a distinct possibility that while intelligent life is abundant in the universe, it doesn’t necessarily stand to reason that it survives long enough to reach out and try and touch someone.
Then again, there could be another explanation for our failure to make contact with an alien race. And this reason is at the heart of the debate over the passive vs. active SETI programs.
Perhaps those alien civilizations know something about the neighborhood that we don’t; that calling attention to ourselves by lighting earth up like a flare in the blackness of space might bring unwelcome – indeed catastrophic – attention to our planet.
The question isn’t so much are there evil alien monsters out there bent on death and destruction of any planet luckless enough to come to its attention. The question is why take the chance?
Should it be our position that all alien races are benign and would mean us no harm? The more I think about that the less I agree with it. Not necessarily because aliens would be hostile. They may have the best of intentions. As Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel points out in his book The Third Chimpanzee that any contact with an alien race is likely to resemble the contact made here on earth between advanced civilizations and primitive ones to the catastrophic detriment to the primitives. It may be best that until we have reached a level of technology more equal to our neighbors, we remain passive observers of their civilization.
And beyond that, there is the question of who decides whether escalating our SETI program to include active measures to make contact should be our policy?
Author, lecturer, scientist David Brin has thought about these issues of First Contact and other SETI matters for many years. He serves on a SETI subcommittee of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) charged with developing protocols and policies regarding our SETI efforts. It was this subcommittee that came up with the very First SETI Protocol: “Declaration Of Principles Concerning Activities Following The Detection Of Extraterrestrial Intelligence” – a great read if you are at all interested in this stuff.
This is from a piece Brin wrote two years ago about the controversy of active vs. passive SETI:
With that success behind us, we on the IAA subcommittee turned to a Second Protocol dealing with Transmissions from Planet Earth. The widely accepted draft contained articles asking that all of those controlling radio telescopes forebear from significantly increasing Earth’s visibility with deliberate skyward emanations, until their plans were first discussed before open and widely accepted international fora.It seemed a modest and reasonable request. Why not present such plans, openly, before a broad and ecumenically interested community of experts in fields like exobiology, sociology, history and biology, at a conference where all matters and concerns could be honestly addressed? If for no other reason, wouldn’t this be common courtesy?
At first, the subcommittee drafting the Second Protocol deemed this to be obvious. Moreover, the core group at the SETI Institute seemed to concur. Indeed, this was not even a new document, but rather a revision of one that the Instituter’s own Jill Tarter presented to the UN six years ago — confirming that they once favored restraint and consultation before transmission. They are the ones who have changed their minds.
But recently… and after a draft appeared ready for submission to the IAA… several members of the IAA SETI Committee, including chairman Seth Shostak, abruptly balked and demanded alterations, abandoning even a collegial and moral call for pre-transmission discussions.
Indeed, suddenly all notions of pre-consultation or discussion — before making Earth dramatically more visible — were derided as paranoid, repressive of free expression and nonsensical. Almost no discussion of the matter was brooked; no questions were answered.
(HT: Instapundit)
I should add here for clarity that most of the scientists at the SETI Institute favor holding discussions on placing more emphasis on active search protocols. The balkers are a group of Russians for the most part who apparently have ideological reasons – among others – for not even allowing a forum for all interested scientists to participate.
Brin points out that the ideology grew out of the old Soviet model. The Russians believe any aliens receiving an active SETI message would be benign because they would be socialists! They figure any advanced intelligence would have developed along the socialist model of governing and would therefore, by definition, be peaceful.
On such stupidities might the fate of the world hang.
As I said, the question of whether or not to engage in active SETI research should hang on erring on the side of caution. This is especially true since what is driving the active SETI movement is impatience at the lack of progress in the passive SETI program. One can certainly understand the desire to reach out and attempt contact. But without examining all the ramifications by failing to invite other scientists and researchers into a debate before starting any active SETI search is not only foolhardy but unscientific.
It reminds me of the global warming debate. Scientists who will brook no opposition to their cherished beliefs vilify their colleagues who think differently. They are simply frozen out of the discussion, marginalized in the community. This has proven to be a huge mistake as more and more information challenging climate change orthodoxy is either dismissed out of hand or tainted with charges of coming from biased sources. It has had a deadening effect on scientific debate and thus has done a disservice to policy makers and the public who are groping for answers on who to believe and what to do – if anything – about climate change.
Recently, Brin updated his 2006 article with ominous news:
As of Summer 2008, Retired senior US diplomat Michael Michaud has resigned from the IAA SETI Subcommittee in protest over what he sees as continuing efforts to repress open discussion of these issues, and to disparage those who see anything wrong with METI. He was recently joined by Dr. John Billingham, one of the founding fathers of SETI and director of NASA’s long-running SETI program.
The METI folks make the point that in 20 years, anyone with a computer and a dish will be able to aim their own powerful signal at the stars so why oppose their efforts today? They make a good point while at the same time, obviating the need for active SETI research to begin immediately. There is time to discuss all of the issues surrounding active SETI before it becomes a reality.
Work on the Second SETI Protocol should continue and a consensus reached. For if we can’t come together on these basic questions regarding our potential role in a crowded universe where contact with other civilizations becomes a reality, we will be unprepared for any consequences that might arise from this success.
2:42 pm
I wholeheartedly agree that active SETI is a bad idea. We must not announce our presence to the universe.
Just think what would happen if the trillions of intelligent species in the universe were aware we were here. The amount of cosmic junk mail, spam and celectial billboards we would receive would be simply overwhelming. Can our civilization withstand this onslaught? I think not.
Dat’s a good ‘un!
3:11 pm
“But the most likely reason we have yet to achieve success in our SETI efforts is that there just aren’t that many civilizations transmitting.”
Or the transmissions haven’t gotten here yet. Even at the speed of light (radio waves obviously aren’t) and even if the closest civilization was the next cluster of rocks-and-a-sun over (Epsilon Eridani, an unlikely source for life as we know it) it would take over a decade for a signal to reach us. Slow the signal considerably, have it eminating from a more likely source (much, much farther away) and the signal would have to have been sent hundreds of years in the past (minimum) to even begin to arrive. Certainly might not be anybody sending a signal, but there’s a pleathora of reasons why there might be and we still haven’t heard them. Hope springs eternal, I guess . . .
“As I said, the question of whether or not to engage in active SETI research should hang on erring on the side of caution.”
2 comments to this:
a) With all the bandwith we already spewed out into the cosmos, worrying about waking potential neighbors is a bit too late. Frankly, I’m not sure why the need to send more powerful signals exists—they’re not going to move any faster than the ones we already sent. Our First Contact with another species will probably be episodes of I Dream of Genie, which might damn us to a quick oblivion or work in our favor (Ms. Eden certainly knew how to work a veil).
b) Why gamble the future of humanity against the risk of potentially meeting reeeeeely bad critters? Because that’s what we do. Better not send Pioneer out with a roadmap. Better not try to land on the moon. There might be baddies under the soil. To be safe, we better not even send somebody up in orbit. After all, they might catch an unknown space virus and then it’ll be Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Odds are slim, true, but can we be sure it won’t happen? Better not ride through the frontier to California. Probably isn’t a threatening society out there, but why take the chance? Better to stay on the East Coast and build defenses (btw, flying a kite on the rain is a dman fool stunt, Mr. Franklin. Save making discoveries until you can find a safer plan). We probably shouldn’t sail across the Atlantic looking for a shortcut to India either. I mean, nobody’s been out that far, and there might be sea monsters or Atlantis laser-tridents or something. Probaly not, but why risk it?
Because (foolishly) exploring is what we do. As a species undoubtedly, but beyond that I egotistically pride myself on being a member of (IMHO) the tribe that has more “Lets-do-it-because-we-can-and-we-haven’t-before” moxie than any other group of humans that have ever existed. To me, its a defining human and American characteristic, as deeply rooted in our national identity as The American Dream.
Sometimes, you have to damn the (imaginary) torpedoes and go full speed ahead. Or curl up with a nice comforter and a cup of hot choclate next to the fireplace and worry about Boogeymen. As I said before it’s really irrevelant at this point anyways, but my insignificant vote is for the former. It may be a risky gamble, but some bets need to be made.
Read Brin’s piece from 2006. He points out that the radar,TV, and radio emissions are very weak and don’t stay coherent for more than a few light years.
As for a more powerful signal, I imagine some kind of interferometer could be cobbled together with a bunch of space telescopes. Don’t know if that would make the signal more powerful or not.
ed.
3:20 pm
Wouldn’t the dominant species on any planet be top predator much like us,just food for thought.
5:07 pm
I’m not yet sure there is intelligent life on earth.
11:00 pm
Some Misc. Saturday “Science” and a Good UFO Yarn…
SATURDAY, JULY 12Mommy Cat must be nursing something. She has “tanks”. She’s starting to come upstairs more often. For the early part of the week she stayed in the closet – constantly. I have no earthly idea how many survivin…
2:06 am
@M. Wilcox:
“Wouldn’t the dominant species on any planet be top predator much like us,just food for thought.”
Actually, that was kind of my ultimate hope . . . that another species might be “just like us”. Somehow though I didn’t equate “just like us” with “detect another sentient species and immediately focus on their complete enslavement and/or annihilation.” Guess I’m a bit naive: I thought they might at least say howdy before launching Death Wave Alpha.
11:37 am
I give you something I wrote several years ago as food for thought…
Interview with a Famous Scientist:
Q: Do you think there is life on other worlds?
A: Oh, yes, almost certainly.
Q: Do you think intelligent life exists on other worlds?
A: Statistically, I think it is quite likely.
Q: Do you think interstellar travel is possible?
A: I think it will be in the future, perhaps the distant future, say in several thousand years.
Q: So, if life on Earth is about 4 billion years old, and the universe is about 14 billion years old, there could vast numbers of civilizations ahead of us by the few thousand years required to be able to travel between stars?
A: Yes, that could be the situation.
Q: So what do you think when you hear about people seeing what they think are alien spaceships, you know, UFOs?
A: They are all either crazy or hoaxers!!
No reputable scientist I know of today claims that people who see UFO’s are all crazy or hoaxers. That’s ridiculous. There is no doubt people are seeing something. But there is absolutely not one scintilla of evidence that they come from another planet. Eye witness testimony is not scientific evidence and scientists are not going to proclaim that it is a dead scientific certainty that we are being visited by aliens based on it.
With 97% of all UFO sightings explained to date as terrestial (or explainable cosmological phenomena) in origin, I believe it more than likely that the only reason we haven’t explained that last 3% is due to our own ignorance of earthbound phenomenons like ball lightening or other atmospheric tricks that have yet to be catalogued. This is the reasonable and logical position of most scientists and does not diminish what people claim they have seen in any way.
To quote Enrico Fermi about ET’s, “So where are they?”
ed.
1:22 pm
I certainly can’t recall the math but way back in the stone age when I attended college geology my professor made the point it was very, very long odds life formed and evolved on Earth. It makes me think that life on other planets is a relatively rare phenomenon.
Of course rare – we’re talking probabilities approaching the statistical impossible – in face of a universe of planets so vast in number it’s beyond our comprehension leads me to the conclusions there are a good many planets out there with life – at least at some point in time.
Because there’s geologic time to consider. Civilization (written word) has been around like 7,000 years on Earth. That’s nothing in geologic time measured in millions or billions of years. Other planets a ‘hair’ off our schedule could have civilization come and go hundreds of thousands or even millions of years out of sync with our own.
As has been pointed out we’re talking vast, vast distances as well.
But let’s buck the odds and say there’s a planet with a civilization relatively close to ours in distance and development. As has been pointed out, the politics on their planet may be to sit back and listen as well.
I’ve always thought SETI was worth the try but never really expected it to bear fruit. It’s fighting longer odds than playing the lottery.
Even in a Star Trek world of warp drives and life-detecting sensors, I think finding life in this universe is like digging for a needle in a hay stack. And, when we find it, it likely won’t be a case of a civilization a few years out of sync with our own. Life will be many thousands of years out of sync. Maybe we’ll find a civilization where they’re like gods to us or one where it’s stone knives versus dinosaurs.
Just my 2 cents worth.
All excellent points. Throw in the unknowns like how long an intelligent species lasts before going extinct and fold that into the 13-15 billion year age of the Universe and you may have millions of species who have come and gone before earth was even born.
And let’s go one step further and contemplate how many advanced civilizations last long enough to become space faring civilizations. That number must be very small (comparaed to life in the Universe). These are some of the reasons why I would love the idea of aliens visiting us (even that governments would attempt to hide that from the rest of us) I just don’t think the laws of probabilty are good enough to believe it.
ed.
3:38 pm
Will someone patch up my rusty physics? I keep thinking that any signal that we propagate over vast interstellar distances will disperse, downshift in frequency, and gradually fade out to unintelligibility. Probably, this would happen long before any residents of far flung planet systems try to pick the signal up.
4:25 pm
One more comment.
This galaxy contains approximaytely one hundred billion stars(~1011) and there are approximately one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe (~1011) which gives us at least 10^22 suns in the observable universe. There are enough suns and a virtualy infinite possibility of life so that literally anything is possible.
Let us assume that the universe is ten billion years old and that only one-hundreth of the stars have a single planet with intelligent life (10^20 planets with intelligent life). This is, in my opinion, a very conservative estimate but yet it is a number so large as to boggle the imagination.
I suspect that once we learn the theory and application of interstellar travel we will also fing that it also includes a method of viewing distant locations without having to be present. Just set the 3d coordinates of your viewing node and you would receive all of the inputes (visual, auditory, odors, etc.) as if you were there. I know; crazy wacko Star Trek stuff but 100 years ago walking on the moon, Dick Tracy-type cell phone wrist videos, laptop computers, etc. were all just as crazy.
8:15 pm
“But there is absolutely not one scintilla of evidence that they come from another planet.”
But the point of my little fictional interview is precisely that there is not one scintilla of evidence, or physical law, that says they CANNOT, either! You quote Fermi to me, as if somehow stating his paradox explains something, when it is the foundational basis of the paradox, the assumption that we have never encountered aliens, that I very simply pointed out may be flawed.
Forgive me, I am an amateur astronomer and a pilot, and the assertion that 97% percent of UFO sightings are easily explained does not comport with the facts as I know them. Throuugh my expertise, I have been able to deduce the probable cause of many UFO sightings I have read, but to say that 97% are explained is simply wrong, unless you count saying “It was a meteor” everytime a huge silent black triangle is reported flying slowly over someone’s house as “explaining” something.
And at that point is exactly where most scientists DO question the witnesses credibility. It is a simple strategy: like you they say they can explain almost all, and when they find ones that they can’t, they discredit or simply assume utterly idiotic levels of credulity on the part of the witnesses, and voila – no mystery!
I do not claim to know what UFO’s are, but my point is that many others seem to claim that they CANNOT be a certain kind of phenomenon, one for which there is absolutely no scientific prohibition, and they rely on excluding evidence they cannot explain to do so. That is not science.