Extraterrestrial Expertise

Regular readers of this blog know by now that I am fascinated by the possibility of life existing on other worlds. The more science learns about the broad spectrum of life here on Earth and some of its extremes, and the more exoplanets we discover, the more likely it seems that we may not be alone in the universe; that Earth is not the sole island of life, because life is so variable and planets are so abundant. This possibility of life elsewhere has captivated humans for millennia. While it remains conjecture, astronomers have embarked upon studies in recent decades that are revealing some fascinating aspects on the issue. 

We are currently engaged in various searches of the heavens, looking for a revelatory piece of evidence that we are not alone. These studies have continually evolved, as our technology has evolved. Most of these efforts have been driven by the technology that we possessed at the time we began them. What I have found fascinating, for example, is that our SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) attempts have always been based upon what we could imagine alien technology might be like at the time these projects were initiated. They later became a bit outdated, as our technology advanced; so the SETI tools were accordingly updated. 

For example, many decades ago we looked into space for telltale flashes of light. Then we imagined that alien species might be sending out electromagnetic signals—radio waves. Recently, as more and more planets have been found (we have now discovered about 5000 exoplanets), some scientists maintain that we should be looking instead for how alien civilizations have altered the atmosphere of their home planets. They may have created biosignatures of gases as we have, such as oxygen and methane. 

Thus much of our search has been based on our guesses of the nature of alien technology that we had at the time. Given that our own technology has rapidly evolved and that extraterrestrial civilizations may be unimaginably advanced—how do we know that our current search methods are even sensible?

A recent question raised by some SETI researchers suggests a different approach. Rather than look for some sort of overt communication signal, might we instead seek what are called “technosignatures?” As life on Earth has evolved, our planet's atmosphere has changed (such as the increase of oxygen and methane mentioned above). Many millions of years ago carbon dioxide was the Earth’s dominant atmospheric gas, which later gave way to oxygen, with increasing touches of methane. As global warming is currently growing, however, carbon dioxide is once again increasing. We may soon be forced to choose to engage in planetary engineering, to control climate heating, since we lack the resolve to cut back on our consumption. Might we possibly be able to observe similar kinds of changes in the atmosphere of exoplanets?

As the field of SETI advances, we will likely continue to update our searches—based upon improved estimates of the possibilities and nature of advanced alien technology. Can we imagine the paths that other civilizations may have followed? If not, we may be looking down the wrong alley and missing the truth of alien technology. It's quite possible, for example, that they long ago decided to change direction, as they realized that their technology was leading them down a destructive blind alley; as we seem to be doing. Maybe they survived by moving other options higher up on their priority list—such as placing harmony and peace above technological advances.

UFOs Up in the Air—Part 2

There are, however, more realistic and relevant considerations of the possible existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life. One is the ongoing efforts for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Serious work has gone on in this area for a few decades now, using sophisticated scientific equipment. For some SETI folks, the lack of any convincing electromagnetic signal thus far from outer-space is discouraging. The hunt has become ever more technologically advanced and sophisticated, but still no contact. Maybe we are alone. Maybe the distances and time scales are just too vast for us to ever find alien intelligent life this way. The search continues, however, because it may be our only way to verify life out there, and the consequences of finding it are so momentous.

Then there's a recent study by a consortium of astronomers and universities, suggesting that although we've not yet heard from an ET out there, maybe some of them have heard from us! This suggestion is bolstered by the fact that, in just the last few years, we now know there are hundreds of planets within a few light years of us, and billions of them farther away, just within our galaxy. Computations in this recent study show that our TV and radio signals emitted over the last century could well be detectable at some of those closer planets. That's a rather unsettling thought: they could know that we're around, while we are as yet ignorant of them. 

Some of these planets are even Earth-like. Could there be beings on those planets who have been watching our TV programs? If so, would it lead them to doubt that these signals indicate their origin as coming from intelligent life? So many questions and speculations, with no definitive answers! 

Yet another viewpoint suggests that we may be expecting the wrong kind of visitation. The likelihood of meeting living beings who traveled here on an interstellar craft is quite remote, given the fact that the distances to be traversed are simply too great for any living creature to cover—given that travel times would probably be on the order of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. Despite the fact that those brilliant adventurers in the Star Trek TV series travel at warp speeds and visit several star systems in a few months' time, there remains the strong likelihood that spacecraft speeds greater than the velocity of light are simply not possible. If so, travel times between star systems won't be measured in weeks or months, but in eons.

It's hard to believe that any biologically-evolved alien beings could live for eons. It’s hard to conceive that their life spans could be so long, or their metabolic rates could be so incredibly slow. One thing that science has demonstrated is that conditions around our universe are quite uniform. The laws of physics and biology that reign locally are probably similar across the cosmos. But that might just be another ignorant assumption.

Yet there's nothing to suggest that alien intelligent life (if it exists—which seems increasingly likely, though probably extremely rare) at all matches our technological skill level. After all, those ancient earthly humans had no hint of the nature and vastness of the universe, let alone what a flying craft might be. Moreover, we can't begin to imagine the technologies of earthly humans, even a couple of hundred years from now. (If we don't manage to create our own extinction in the meantime, due to our current technological foolishness.)

So life “out there” could currently be at the stage it was, say, three billion years ago on Earth: single-cell, microscopic critters. Or it could be three billion years further evolved than we are. In either case, we’d probably not be able to even recognize it, let alone receive its radio signals.

This last possibility I've described (life elsewhere as primitive or unimaginably advanced) may well be the most likely one. If so, and if the distances are so vast that interstellar travel requires tens or thousands (maybe millions!) of years, what's an intelligent species to do, if it wishes to explore the cosmos? Rather than send out spacecraft containing living beings, it's more reasonable that they'd launch spacecraft containing machines—robots that could easily go into stasis for the interminable length of the trip. Robots in suspended animation require no food, create no waste, and need no entertainment.

I have wandered here through time and space, as I address the fascinating subjects of UFOs, space travel, and life elsewhere. As of this date we have far more questions than answers. When might we get those answers? Will we ever? The enigmas of our universe—viewed from the tiny speck that we inhabit—are boundless. How many of them will we ever fathom?

SETI Reset—Part 3: Simulation Hypothesis (11/19/19)

There is yet another possibility that might explain why our SETI searches have so far been unsuccessful. The lack of contact could be the result of what’s been dubbed the Simulation Hypothesis, which has been proposed in recent decades. It results from our spectacular advances in computer technology. The basic idea is that our technological innovation seems to be leading towards a point in time when we will be able to create, not only artificial intelligence (AI), but artificial life as well!

This is a bizarre thought that I will attempt to sketch out here, in a simplified form. There is a concept called Moore's Law—which was proposed some 50 years ago by Gordon Moore, a computer geek. It suggests that computer power doubles every couple of years—yielding smaller and smaller computer chips using less and less electrical power. Over recent decades Moore's Law has held. If it continues to hold, we may reach a point, in something like 50-60 years, where our computers will be complex and fast enough that we'll be able to simulate the human brain in the digital world. We already have created deep-learning software programs that have badly beaten the world's human geniuses in chess, Jeopardy!, and Go. The next leap is to mimic the capabilities of the human brain. It's only a matter of time. 

The huge advantage of creating artificial life is that we'd be able to produce and employ an entity as smart—or smarter—than our brain, at a tiny fraction of the required energy. This is due to a byproduct of Moore's Law: as we continue to multiply computing power, it comes at decreasing needs for energy. To keep a human being going requires a lot of energy. We need calories to fuel our big bodies and our brain is an energy hog. If we could develop the equivalent amount of brain power at a tiny fraction of the energy cost, how could we refuse such a bargain?

Our haste to expand computing power also posits an alternative, though much less desirable outcome of our technological race into the future: the strong likelihood that we'll destroy ourselves, before we reach the technological maturity of being able to simulate life. Many philosophers and scientists think that in our headlong rush to develop our technological prowess, we may well make ourselves go extinct. We seem to insist on playing with dangerous machines, with minimal ability to rein ourselves in. We've already perched at the edge of nuclear annihilation, several times.

Thus the Simulation Hypothesis brings up the possibility—if we survive—that we may someday be able to create a non-biological world that will mimic intelligence. It will be contained wholly within the confines of a digital simulation. In fact, what we are convinced is our real biological existence may simply be that we've been living in such a simulated world all along. Those advanced civilizations that SETI is looking for may have arrived long ago and programmed us. We may be nothing more than artificial entities in some highly-intelligent superbeing's game. The movie “The Matrix” suggests such a possibility.

This thought of our living out some kind of virtual digital life seems preposterous to us. Do we not know that we are flesh-and-blood critters? But how do we know that? Some of the sharpest scientific minds have suggested the virtual possibility. Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing pondered it. Plato suggested something similar in his “allegory of the cave,” 2,500 years ago. Nick Bostrom of Oxford University formally presented the Simulation Hypothesis, nearly two decades ago.

Here’s yet another question: If we are not an electronic simulation, but real, flesh-and-blood beings as we think we are, could our current biological existence be just a step on the way to a post-biological type of digital life? That possibility may become proven or denied in just a few decades. Whatever we learn, our current SETI communication attempts may continue to go unanswered, until a deeper understanding arrives. We are yet infants in the advanced technological world. We have a lot to learn and a lot of control to develop, if we wish to stick around to see.

SETI Reset—Part 2

In the last post I began to describe a few possible reasons why our Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has as yet not found any signals arriving from outer space. Here are a few more suggestions I offer.

(2) Other alien civilizations may not have chosen to pursue a similar technological path as we have. Our technology too often has led to weapons that harm living beings. I can conceive of a civilization deciding to have taken a more sensible and peaceful approach and thus avoided technology’s harmful side effects, by avoiding much of our problematic technical inventions, such as the many types of weapons we’ve created. Would it not have been possible for Earth’s humans to have decided to put its energies into a spiritual society, rather than a high-tech and dangerous existence?

(3) Life may indeed be common out there, but the chances of it progressing beyond a single-celled state to a multi-cellular, more complex phase, may be quite low. Life on this planet stayed at a microbial state for about three billion years, before favorable conditions evolved to allow it to grow large enough to build things like cars and computers. Those propitious conditions were not inevitable. Life on Earth could still today easily be simple, single-celled critters, waiting patiently to grow more complex. 

(4) It took 4.5 billion years for “intelligent” life to evolve on Earth, so there's a low probability that life elsewhere (at the present) is at a similar stage of technological development to us. They may not reach that stage for a few billion years yet, or have long ago passed through it. I say “pass through it,” because an argument can be made that if life is to survive in the long term, it may have to get past dabbling with hazardous technological toys.

And finally, (5) Life anywhere in the universe may be doomed to evolve into a technological stage, after which it inevitably extinguishes itself. We on Earth seem to be headed towards what is often called an “omega point”—a time where we dramatically transform from civilization’s chaotic and exponential path, towards a sustainable way. It may be that that omega point could be the arrival of a completely different kind of intelligent life on Earth… if we survive to that time.

So the search for SETI will go on. We are curious creatures, and we want to know if there are others like us out there. It appears increasingly likely that extraterrestrial life might well exist, given our recent discoveries of extrasolar planets and Earth-bound extremophile-kinds of life. If the discovery of life in the vastness of the universe comes about, it would be an incredible discovery.

We cannot yet travel to the many distant worlds and directly observe life there... and maybe we never will—given the immense distances. So we continue look out there, building receivers to apprehend any EM signals flying through our region of space; which could prove that we are not alone. But is the presence of an “intelligent” species out there really going to be detected only by our reception of a technological signal they emit? Could there be other kinds of contact that we’ve not yet imagined? We'd best keep our minds open.

Next time I will describe yet another, rather weird possibility, for reconsidering the SETI issue… that we may already have been contacted and absorbed into a super intelligent civilization’s domain.

SETI Reset—Part 1

I have been taking an online course on astrobiology from the University of Arizona—where robust astronomical research has been the norm. I have taken a couple of previous courses from the university's astronomy team and appreciate their teaching abilities. This course blends their preeminence in astronomy with some of the latest discoveries of thousands of Earth-like planets around other stars and the potential for these planets to harbor life in some form; maybe similar to Earth.

Here is a question that has repeatedly arisen in the human mind: Is planet Earth alone in the universe at harboring life, or might there be other life-sustaining worlds? Is life common, rare, or nonexistent elsewhere in this cosmos? Does intelligent life exist out there—say, critters as smart as we think we are?

We are getting closer and closer to finding answers to these questions. As I have posted here several times, our search is being aided and abetted by the recent discovery of thousands of planets circling local stars. Without planets, you can't have life elsewhere.

A consistent search process for extraterrestrial life was begun a few decades ago—dubbed SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Its premise is that intelligent civilizations “out there” would have reached a technological capability at some point—as we have—and would have transmitted electromagnetic signals (EM) into space; signals that could eventually arrive at Earth. If so, might we receive them and verify that we're not alone? After all, we've been inadvertently transmitting EM signals from our planet for decades. Old TV episodes of “I Love Lucy” are currently flying through interstellar space, just waiting to be captured by some alien technology; maybe to the amusement of otherworldly beings.

So SETI was established decades ago—having been designed to receive some of those alien civilizations' equivalent TV programs, or, hopefully (and more likely) signals consciously sent out to inform beings like us that we're not alone. Yet my online course professor made the point that, although we're searching for outer space life, SETI is not really designed to locate outer-space intelligent life, but to discover extraterrestrial technology that is similar to ours.

We haven’t yet detected a signal, let alone determined the presence of either intelligence or the existence of life elsewhere. At best we currently can register the presence of EM signals that would indicate some sort of advanced technological civilization. One issue in our search for ET that possibly is being dealt with inappropriately is, Would intelligence “out there” display itself anything like what on Earth has evolved?

Furthermore, there is another key question that was posed many decades ago, by a prominent physicist/astronomer: If there are other advanced civilizations in outer space, where are they? Why haven't we already heard from them? This is a troubling question for many cosmologists. Again, we're not yet able to determine if there is or is not intelligence out there—we're asking if they have evolved technologies like ours, and, if so, where are the signals?

I can imagine several reasons why we've yet to capture a signal that we can confidently say came from outer space (and maybe never will): (1) The distances are simply too vast; signals from even the closest stars take many years to reach us; so, were we to detect a more distant signal, it may have been transmitted thousands of years ago. Any signal we might receive could be from a distant past, from a civilization that is no longer even existing. Where might our technology be, in another thousand years? Would our current primitive way of interstellar communication even be useful then? 

Other possibilities next time…

No Phone Home—Part 1

One of humankind's enduring questions is whether or not Earth is alone in the universe in harboring life. Are we the only—and therefore exceedingly special—example of animation in the vast cosmos, or might there be others out there? This very question has evolved as our understanding of the universe has grown. The ancients may have wondered about life existing on the other shore of the sea, and people a couple of hundred years ago speculated on beings living on the Moon and Mars.

Today, however, we know much more about the vastness of the universe (even though we may not be able to wrap our heads around how truly vast it is), so now our imaginations extend way beyond our solar system, even our own galaxy, to the billions of galaxies out there. Yet the same question still poses itself, but the potential territory has gotten immensely greater, and thus the possible answers far more manifold.

We also now know much more about how life may have arisen on Earth and the extreme forms that it can assume here. We know that the presence of humans, along with all the other planet's creatures is the result of a long and torturous path that could have taken countless other directions. Some of those other alternatives could easily have resulted in the final termination of life on Earth (it could have come to a dead end and may still), or brought about life forms quite alien to what we know today.

So back to that perennial question: Is there life out there? What chance is there that it bears any resemblance to Earth's critters? Would we even recognize it as life, if we were to encounter it? More to the point, are the distances so vast that we'd ever encounter it? Movies like “ET” offer us fascinating and bizarre creatures who come to visit, and then “phone home,” to return to their world. But any kind of life out there may be simply too far away for us ever to come in contact with, or simply be unable to phone home, because of the tremendous distances.

And the distances are what matters. Humanity has for a few decades been engaged in space communication efforts, in which various researchers have scanned deep space, looking for electromagnetic (EM) signals that distant civilizations may have broadcast to the universe—signals that announce their existence. These projects are labeled Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The premise is that distant technological civilizations (if they exist) would likely emit EM transmissions, in an attempt to notify other civilizations of their presence. 
 
But is this assumption justified? The SETI project surmises that distant technological species would choose to send out some kind of “I am here” signal, but is this true? Stephen Hawking wrote that this can be a risky process for Earthlings, if we engage in this game, because some life forms that may be far superior to us could thereby discover we are here and subsequently launch space ships to come and dominate Earth.

Another point to consider is that our SETI projects have evolved dramatically, in the last few decades. As our technology has advanced, we come up with progressively better methods of searching. But the civilizations we hope to contact may be centuries or millennia ahead or behind us. They may have developed communication schemes that we either once rejected or have yet to discover. We may be way out of temporal sync with these creatures and miss connecting, simply because our technologies do not match. It could be analogous to Europeans in the 19^th century looking for radio wave emissions from Tierra del Fuego, when the inhabitants there preferred smoke signals.

More on extraterrestrial life next time...