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.

No Phone Home—Part 2

Some SETI researchers have asked an intriguing question: If there are civilizations out there, why haven't we received a message by now? In other words, where are they? Well, a mismatch in technology could well be one reason. How do we get in touch with a civilization that may be thousands of years behind or ahead of us? What chance would intelligent creatures on Mars 2500 years ago have had of talking to the ancient Greeks by EM signals from that planet?

I believe that the lack of contact may be explained in a different way, however: simply due to the vast distances involved. I have written a couple of times on this blog about the enormous distances of stellar space. (As a reminder, one of my analogies was to collapse our solar system into something the size of a basketball. On this scale, the nearest star would be five miles away and the nearest galaxy—Andromeda-- would be 360,000 miles away!) It is a huge challenge for us to fathom the actual interstellar distances. 

For example, Andromeda is 1.5 million light years away. To send and receive an EM signal from any creatures in that closest galaxy would require three million years round trip! That's just too long a time span to “phone home” and wait for an answer.

Thus, there may indeed by “life out there”, but it could likely be just too far away for us ever to discover—let alone communicate with. We indeed may not be alone in the universe, but we may never find that out. The universe is simply too big. Would an ant in my back yard have any chance of finding out about similar critters in the rain forests of Brazil?

Let's face it: Earth and its life forms are but the tiniest blip in the universe—in both time and space. We do not amount to much in the grand scheme of things. We are not the center of the cosmos. We are a flash in the pan that will most likely soon be gone.

I think the more relevant question is: Does it matter whether or not there's life out there? We would love to know, but we may well remain ignorant. It matters to some people, because if we were to discover some kind of civilization beyond Earth, it would surely rattle some cages—especially those which contain anthropocentric people, or people tightly attached to religious beliefs that would have us at the center of it all. It's a fascinating question to ponder, but don't hold your breath for an answer any time soon. Maybe in three million years.

Alien Intelligence

The search is fully on for signs of intelligent life on planets other than Earth. Humans have long pondered whether or not life arose elsewhere—and in particular, if it could be intelligent life. Up until the last couple of decades, this conjecture was little more than idle speculation. But now we have telescopes that have discovered thousands of planets circling nearby stars—some of those planets might harbor life. Additionally, our definition of the extreme conditions under which life can survive has greatly expanded, so we can now expect to see life surviving under fierce conditions that we once thought were impossible. More and more, it seems that the discovery of extraterrestrial life is more a matter of “when,” not “if.”

Very recently there's been yet another finding in this arena—right here on Earth—of a new type of intelligence that was under our noses, but was never before recognized. This finding is very similar to recent discoveries of terrestrial lifeforms—dubbed “extremophiles”—that thrive in conditions we once considered to be too hostile to allow life. The new discovery is a species of ocean critters called ctenophores (pronounced ten-o-fors) that are intelligent creatures who evolved their brains and nervous systems in a very different manner from the rest of Earth's species. They are some kind of alien.

From the earliest understood forms of Earth life, all the way up to us humans, the progression of nervous systems from primitive cells to the human brain have followed what we came to believe was a singular path. All life's nervous systems (so we have believed) genetically evolved to employ common neural messengers, such as serotonin, dopamine, and nitric oxide. This mechanism is the same, from nematodes to ants to humans. We've all evolved our nervous systems in the same fashion.

A Russian scientist (Leonid Moroz) who emigrated from his native land to the US two decades ago, insisted upon looking more deeply into the qualities of ctenophores. These critters had been identified and cataloged for a long time—and were considered to be a close cousin of jellyfish. When Moroz captured a few of these critters and began examining them, however, he found that, although they had evolved muscles and a nervous system like other creatures, they took an entirely different route from all other life forms.

Ctenophores are a very ancient life-form. They display an example of what is called convergence: life evolving into similar-looking critters, but doing so by following a different evolutionary path. For example, eyes have independently evolved many times, following parallel but quite different evolutionary paths. Porpoises and sharks are very similar creatures, but evolved through completely different paths. One is a mammal, the other is a fish. In the case of the porpoise and shark, we find very different critters which arrived at the same solution, because—although they started at different beginning points—they each had to solve the same problems: swimming.

What is fascinating about ctenophores is that, had their singular evolutionary route been favored by nature, life-forms on Earth today would be very different. Life would likely have eventually still evolved nervous systems and sophisticated brains, but they'd be housed in quite different kinds of animals. There would be no humans, as we know them.

This discovery has relevance to our search for extraterrestrial life. Just as the existence of extremophiles has caused us to open our minds to other kinds of life elsewhere, ctenophores seem to be advising us to open our minds even more, to understanding that intelligence may have evolved in alien ways that we have yet to understand, and to be on the lookout for some strange possibilities. We can learn from aliens right here on Earth.

Anybody Out There?—Part 2

Getting back to intelligent life out there, civilizations on other worlds could be billions of years older than ours, or have yet to develop. If humans have come so incredibly far in a few thousand years, what may have happened on planets where life originated several billion years earlier? If life evolved there anywhere like it did here, we can't begin to imagine how advanced they've become.

And those questions (or speculations, because we yet do not have any evidence that intelligent life has arisen elsewhere) lead yet to another fascinating and significant question: If intelligent life is far ahead of us someplace out there, why have we not yet had it knocking on our earthly door? Where is it? Humans have played with the concept of space travel for at least a couple of hundred years. We've even begun taking baby steps to the Moon and Mars. “Star Trek” and other science fiction tales describe interstellar and intergalactic space travel, but is such travel really possible?

Distances across vasts spans of space are difficult to wrap our heads around. Even at the speed of light—which we may never approach—the length of time required to negotiate these distances is daunting. “Star Trek” engineers could shift the Enterprise into “warp” speeds: faster than light, but those speeds may forever remain fiction.

That said, how about considering an intelligent species on the other side of the galaxy that is a mere million years ahead of us? Couldn't they have reached cosmic speeds and brought transit times down to within maybe hundreds of thousands of years? Or where might we be in space a million years from now? Such transit times are incredibly long, but not beyond the reach of a civilization that may have been around for a few million years.

So where are these intelligent, advanced space travelers? Why haven't we heard by now, if they're so much more developed than we are? Couldn't a super-advanced civilization have spanned the universe by now—or at least the galaxy? Once again there may be no answer to these questions... they may even be the wrong ones to be asking. I'm sure that in another decade or so (a cosmic instant) we'll come up with a better set of questions. Until then, these are the ones we ask.

Some people suggest that the absence of any contact can be explained by the fact that there are no intelligent civilizations out there. Maybe so, but that is no reason to stop looking. What's more, humans were once inclined to believe that we were special, that Earth was the only source of life in the universe. As more and more planets and life possibilities are found, our specialness may not be true.

One rather disturbing answer brought up by some researchers as to why we're still unaware of other intelligent civilizations (if they're out there) is that there might be a limit as to how long a technological civilization can endure. The dinosaurs lasted something like 150 million years. We humans have been around only a couple of hundred thousand years. We have a long way to go, before we demonstrate our longevity. There are many informed prognosticators who raise the possibility that we may not last that much longer. Our technology races forward, with little thought to its dangers, virtually out of control. We tend to do things that we later regret—such as create an atomic bomb or pesticides that are subsequently shown to cause human birth defects and diseases. So far, most of the dumb things we have done have been small and on a local scale, but we are now playing with fire on a planetary scale, via global warming, habitat degradation, nuclear arms, etc. If we keep up our pace, we could render Homo sapiens extinct.

Our extinction is a real possibility. If so, it would terminate Earth's current experiment of evolving “intelligent” life. Of course, not all life forms on our planet would be eradicated—many of them are far tougher and resilient than we are. (Think of ants.) The evolutionary clock for the development of intelligent life on planet Earth would simply be reset. There's at east another billion years or two for the experiment to be rerun, before our sun expands and cooks all life on the planet.

So many questions. So many possibilities. Most are beyond the imagination of our minds. It's an exciting—as well as a sobering—time in our evolution. We are yet infants in the cosmos. We have time to correct our dangerous ways and see where evolution may take us in the far future. It'd be nice if we do, and are able to join other forms of intelligent life in universal kinship.

Addendum

Here's a neat way to get a feeling for the extraordinary length of time the Earth has been around and how short a time we've been here. (The following simile comes from an online course I'm currently taking: “Astronomy: Exploring Time and Space,” from Arizona Sate University, offered by Professor Chris Impey.)

Let a 1,000 page book represent the age of the Earth; thus each page of this massive tome represents 45 million years. Here are a few fascinating facts about this hypothetical book:

• For the first 10-20 pages of the book, no life is present on Earth. It's a barren planet.
• Fish first appear on page 500; half way through the book.
• The dinosaurs become extinct on page 985. (Only 15 more pages to reach to today!)
• Our ape-like ancestors appear halfway down page 1,000.
• Modern humans enter the scene on the book's very last line.
• Everything we humans pride ourselves on, everything from 40,000 year old cave paintings to the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, is contained within that last word on page 1,000.

All of modern humanity's accomplishments are enclosed within the very last word of a 1,000 page book! We humans may consider ourselves the “last word,” but we sure are the Johnny-come-latelies on the planet! I hope that our story does not end there. I hope that we find a way to put out a new edition some day that far exceeds 1,000 pages.

Anybody Out There?—Part 1

One of the most intriguing questions that has increasingly become the subject of scientific investigations, as well as popular media speculation, is the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Are we alone in the universe? I have played with this question in several past postings of this blog. I recently read an article on the subject that raised another fascinating aspect to the question. Here's the essence of it.

Science has edged relentlessly closer to the hypothesis that, indeed, there may well be life out there, for several reasons. (1) We now know that there are billions of planets just in our galaxy alone—something for which we had no evidence just a few years ago. (2) Researchers are getting better at understanding the conditions under which life may have spontaneously originated; if so, it could have done so in many locations throughout the universe. (3) Our space probes have discovered complex organic molecules on other bodies in space, such as comets; which were present at the beginning of our solar system, 4.5 billion years ago. There is a strong possibility that these molecules may be able to initiate life, when conditions allow. (4) Science has widened the conditions under which life can survive, if not thrive—conditions we only recently thought would be too hostile, until we discovered life thriving there, right here on Earth. (5) We also now know that some forms of life can survive the incredibly harsh environment of space, which potentially makes it possible for life to travel (as hardy microorganisms) from one planet to another.

Clearly extraterrestrial life has not yet been found, but we seem to be much closer to discovering it, if it's out there. Recent findings by the Mars rovers have directed our attention to that planet—giving us greater expectation that life may be found there. Scientists are excited by the prospect of this age-old question soon being answered. Thus many of them are turning their attention to what we may discover, if we do find life out there. We'd best prepare so that we are not taken by unpleasant surprises.

Suppose we do come across life elsewhere. It may come in a form that is utterly different from what we expect. Will we even recognize it as life? And the big question: Will it be intelligent—whatever that means? If so, will its intelligence resemble our own? We tend to regard our high-tech smart phones as evidence of our acumen. The guy who invented velcro was very smart; so was the team that discovered the Higgs boson last year. Ants are dumb, by human standards, but they've been around for over 100 million years. Is that not an example of a kind of intelligence? So if there is intelligent life elsewhere, its type of intelligence may be completely unexpected by us. We'd best keep our minds open.

There's another fascinating aspect about discovering intelligent life out there: technologically speaking it may be millions (or even billions) of years ahead of us, or just getting started. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old and life appears to have begun on our planet less than a billion years after it formed. So life has been here for maybe as long as four billion years. Think about that: it took some four billion years for humans to attain the advanced technological state we now find ourselves in. And our highly developed civilization is only a few hundred years old. Where might we be in another 100 years? Or 1,000 years? We can't begin to guess. Any of our predictions in the past have been far wide of the mark. And science fiction is of little help; their scenarios are usually quite naive.

More on life out there, next time...