SETI and Other Failures in Extraterrestrial Communication

In our previous post, I explored DMT entities and a few of the potential problems with communicating with truly alien life.  This second installment will have a lot less drugs and a lot more science—if you’re into that sort of thing.

In typical Brainsturbator fashion, I’m using the term “failure” less than half seriously (but I’m not kidding, either).  Human failure has been the most fruitful source of human invention and innovation—the whole source of human power is our ability to learn from mistakes, after all.  From repeated error we deduce universal principles, and thus we stumble towards something resembling progress.  For anyone unfamiliar with the program, SETI is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and the history of this program is a valuable study.  Is it just a big mistake, or is it a case of failure by design?  Is either option nescessarily a bad thing? 

I don’t have an answer either way, but let’s take a walk further down this weird road just the same.

One Last Dose of McKenna

“For instance, the question of contact with extraterrestrials is a kind of red herring premised upon a number of assumptions that a moment’s reflection will show are completely false. To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant. And yet, this has been chosen as the avenue by which it is assumed contact is likely to occur. Meanwhile, there are people all over the world - psychics, shamans, mystics, schizophrenics - whose heads are filled with information, but it has been ruled a priori irrelevant, incoherent, or mad. Only that which is validated through consensus via certain sanctioned instrumentalities will be accepted as a signal. The problem is that we are so inundated by these signals - these other dimensions - that there is a great deal of noise in the circuit.”

--from McKenna’s classic talk “Tryptamine Hallucenagens and Consciousness”

Today’s Word: “Anthropocentric”

In 2007, everyone knows what aliens look like.  Back in less enlightened times, people would talk about “little green men,” but nowadays even little kids know about The Greys.  This is largely thanks to the work of Whitley Streiber and Stephen Spielberg.

It cannot be pointed out often enough—especially as UFOlogy gets degraded from scientific frontier into paranoid religion—that the biggest problem with the Greys is that they are not alien enough.  (It’s also a huge problem that they resemble a “demon” Aliester Crowley summoned and chatted with at the turn of the century, but that’s been covered before.  Not familiar?  Start here.)

The human form has not just been sculpted by our DNA—it’s also a response to the very specific environmental constraints of the Planet Earth: the gravitational pull, the levels of solar radiation, the contents of our atmosphere.  As Jacques Vallee notes in his essential essay Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects:

The vast majority of reported “aliens” have a humanoid shape that is characterized by two legs, two arms, and a head supporting the same organs of perception we have, in the same number and general appearance.  Their speech used the same frequency as ours, and their eyes are attuned to the same general segment of the electromagnetic spectrum.  This indicates a genetic formulation that does not appear to differ from the human genome by more than a few percent.

It should be kept in mind that the human shape has evolved in response to an extremely narrow set of constraints. For example, it would not exist as it does today if the earth had started out with twice its present mass, giving a surface gravity of 1.38 times earth normal.  Such an environment would have forced the development of a stronger skeleton, and might have excluded the development of bipeds altogether. Similarly, a planet with half its present mass and surface gravity would have radically altered our shape.  As pointed out by Stephen Dole, if the inclination of the equator had been 60 degrees instead of 23.5 degrees, seasonal weather changes would have been intolerable to us: life would have great difficulty in getting started, and humans would have evolved in very different ways.  If the day was 100 hours long instead of 24 hours, mankind as we know it would not have evolved or survived at all.

Three Open Questions:

Is it reasonable to assume that language is a nescessary component of civilization—or even intelligence? 

Is it reasonable to assume that a civilization that has advanced millions of years beyond humanity’s current level would have any interest in “dumbing down” enough to communicate with us?

Is it reasonable to assume an advanced civilization would be benevolent or “enlightened?”

SETI: Four Decades of Total Failure

SETI is a shape-shifting, unkillable dream.  The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has used nearly every telescope on Earth at one time or another, and has wandered in and out of NASA’s control over the past few decades.  Arguably, the father of SETI was Frank Drake, author of the now-infamous Drake Equation, a rough guideline for determining the probability of ET intelligence existing.  (Not to ruin the mystery, but that probability is pretty damn high in a galaxy with over 100 billion planets, at least 10,000 are capable of supporting life.)

For anyone interested in a rigorous and brainsturbating examination of the Drake Equation, I would (again) recommend Brin’s essay The Great Silence.

In our previous examination of DMT aliens, the Rodruigez paper suggests using the factorization of prime numbers as a means of communicating with DMT entities and testing whether they represent a subjective hallucination or an objective reality.  He borrowed this concept from Frank Drake, who also suggested, decades earlier, that mathematics was the most probable common ground with ET civilization.  (A detailed examination is available right here.)

From the SETI website:

In 1974, the most powerful broadcast ever deliberately beamed into space was made from Puerto Rico. The broadcast formed part of the ceremonies held to mark a major upgrade to the Arecibo Radio Telescope. The transmission consisted of a simple, pictorial message, aimed at our putative cosmic companions in the globular star cluster M13. This cluster is roughly 21,000 light-years from us, near the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, and contains approximately a third of a million stars.

The message consists of 1679 bits, arranged into 73 lines of 23 characters per line (these are both prime numbers, and may help the aliens decode the message). The “ones” and “zeroes” were transmitted by frequency shifting at the rate of 10 bits per second. The total broadcast was less than three minutes. A graphic showing the message is reproduced here. It consists, among other things, of the Arecibo telescope, our solar system, DNA, a stick figure of a human, and some of the biochemicals of earthly life. Although it’s unlikely that this short inquiry will ever prompt a reply, the experiment was useful in getting us to think a bit about the difficulties of communicating across space, time, and a presumably wide culture gap.

The Arecibo signal was a huge PR coup for SETI, but in the long run it has actually backfired to a large extent—it crystallized a simplistic idea in the public mind, which has made getting funding for further SETI research, which is quite complex and operates on many levels, very difficult in recent years.  For a detailed discussion of how and why Arecibo had negative side effects, check this essay out.

August 15th, 1977: Jerry Ehman was putting in some volunteer hours for SETI.  He was at the Big Ear radio observatory on Ohio State University campus, which has since become sacred ground and SETI legend.  The signal recorded to the left was very powerful and very narrow—precisely 1420.456 MHz—and there has never been another flash quite like it.  According to measurement, the origin of the signal was the Sagittarius constellation.  For a comprehensive explanation of what this exactly means, you should read Jerry Ehman’s own account.

Although there is no consensus—or even theory, really—as to what that signal means, it is remarkable and unique.

In 1993, Richard Bryan, a Senator from Nevada, decided that one of the biggest problems America was facing was the fact that SETI was getting taxpayer funding.  This was, after all, a waste of resources that would be better spent on weapons and teaching Creationism and Abstinence. 

“The Great Martian Chase may finally come to an end. As of today millions have been spent and we have yet to bag a single little green fellow. Not a single Martian has said take me to your leader, and not a single flying saucer has applied for FAA approval.”

SETI has been a remarkably robust and persistent dream, though.  To this day, it thrives off the same energy that founded it: countless thousands of volunteer hours and the deep fascination that tech folks have with ET contact.  In recent years, the biggest sources of funding have been Silicon Valley millionaires like Microsoft bigwig Paul Allen, as well as William Hewlett and David Packard.

Flashlights in the Void

In the aftermath of the funding cuts, SETI personnel did a lot of soul-searching and also wrote a lot of articles defending their approach.  Particularly eloquent was the testimony of Dr. H. Paul Shuch:

“Why has SETI not yet succeeded? The fact is, we should not yet have achieved positive results. Consider that the Milky Way galaxy contains roughly 200 billion stars. Perhaps ten percent of these have lasted long enough to produce stable planetary systems. Frank Drake, father of the famous Drake Equation, now estimates that there are about 10,000 intelligent, communicative civilizations in our galaxy alone. But that makes every good candidate star we survey about a 20 million to one long-shot. The sum of all SETI programs to date has resulted in our surveying a few hundred stars, over a limited frequency range, for limited periods of time. [For a visual of the area covered by SETI to date, click here]

SETI is not the sort of science which produces immediate results.”

There’s also a pretty good chance that SETI is not the kind of science which produces any results.  Nobody is more poignantly aware of this fact than Seth Shostak himself.  He’s got a quite poetic little essay entitled “Is the Search Wishful Thinking or Hubris,” best summarized by the following passage:

“Karl Friedrich Gauss, whose name is familiar to anyone who has progressed beyond high school algebra, had plans to signal Moon dwellers 150 years ago. His schemes to gain the aliens attention with flashing mirrors or geometric patterns in the forest seem quaint to us now, but Gauss was not dumb (heck, his brain is in a jar at the University of Gottingen!)

So could it be that, 150 years from now, researchers will look upon our efforts as similarly naive? Every week I get e-mail from folks who ask me if were not being narrow-minded when we assume that sophisticated beings would communicate with radio waves or pulses of light. Of course, these well-meaning people dont offer any interesting alternatives (they do, however, offer plenty of uninteresting ones!) But, sure; maybe were barking up the wrong tree. It would be silly and short-sighted to arbitrarily rule that out.”

Naturally, Shostak concludes he’s on the right path—he has to conclude that, after all, just like old preachers have little room for doubt about Jesus or the Bible.  However, the average Brainsturbator reader is under 30 years old, so we can afford to change our minds as often as we possibly can.

If you would like to help SETI out or get involved, take a look at their distributed computing project. 

Dude, You Missed It

It’s worth considering that contact from an ET civilization has already happened.  This is a theme we explored in part three of our crop circles series, an examination of the infamous “Arecibo Response” glyph at the Chilbolton Radio Observatory.  Sadly, most other alleged Contacts are transparent hoaxes with none of the sophistication and weirdness of the Chilbolton glyph.

The biggest exception is so huge it’s mostly invisible—or at least hidden in plain sight.  When the first “pulsar” was discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Burnell and Antony Hewish, they thought they might have discovered an alien beacon.  In fact, they named the object LGM-1—“LGM” being an abbreviation for “Little Green Men”. 

Due to certain peculiarites—especially in the location and behavior of various pulsars—astronomer Paul LaViolette has resurrected Burnell and Hewish’s early theory that pulsars in fact represent ET artifacts, a “beacon” or “relay” system of a Type II civilization.  Of course there is no way at present to determine if said civilization is still around or long gone.  For an engaging introduction to LaVoilette’s thesis, I recommend this concise presentation by Gary Zeitlin.

As with most any “orthodox consensus”, mainstream pulsar theory is barely coherent, and honest scientists like Werner Becker freely admit it:

“The theory of how pulsars emit their radiation is still in its infancy, even after nearly forty years of work.”

Carl Sagan was also more than willing to consider the apparently psychotic notion that pulsars are some sort of ET communication device, and his cautions are very instructive as well:

“The very serious current energy problems both in quasar and in gravity wave physics can be ameliorated if we imagine these energy sources beamed in our direction. But preferential beaming in our direction makes little sense unless there is a message in these channels. A similar remark might apply to pulsars. There are a large number of other incompletely understood phenomena ... we must ask if the fine structure of some fluctuating X-ray sources is due to pulsed X-ray lasers for interstellar spaceflight. But Shklovsky’s principle of assuming such sources natural until proven otherwise, of course, holds. Extraterrestrial intelligence is the explanation of last resort, when all else fails.”

This theory will almost certainly re-appear in more detail in a future Brainsturbator post, especially considering I’ve just ordered LaViolette’s most recent book, Decoding the Message of the Pulsars.

Re-assessing Alien TV

The biggest problem with an electromagnetic signal is that it keeps on moving.  When you transmit a coherent message into the cosmos, once it passes by a planet, that’s it—there is no means of recovering the message if your intended recipient missed it.  This is true for the Aricebo signals and true for any given TV show in the history of mankind.  Given the scale of our galaxy, not to mention the decay of electromagnetic signals over time, the odds are vastly against any of our messages reaching their intended target.

This would appear to be utterly common sense stuff, but it’s important to point out that SETI’s own standards for success appear to ignore it:

You wouldn’t believe cold fusion unless researchers other than the discoverers could duplicate it in their labs. The same is true of extraterrestrial signals: they are credible only when they can be found more than once.

With this problem in mind, Christopher Rose and Gregory Wright recently published an excellent paper arguing that actual solid artifacts—or as they put it, “inscribed matter”—would be the most efficient method for an ET civilization to send out a signal.  It’s worth noting that Carl Sagan had this same insight decades earlier, when he designed the plaque that was attached to the Pioneer missions 10 and 11, and later the Voyager Golden Record.

The abstract of their paper—available in PDF here—sums their argument up perfectly, just like an abstract should:

We consider the energy requirements of information carriage using physical transport of inscribed matter and compare it to that using electromagnetic radiation when delivery delay beyond light transit time can be tolerated. Somewhat counter-intuitively, physical transport of inscribed matter is often more energy efficient than electromagnetic broadcast by many orders of magnitude over a wide range of scenarios—from chip-to-chip computer communications to interstellar signaling. In fact, the efficiencies are so enormous that it may even be more likely for initial contact by extraterrestrial civilizations to occur using physical artifacts—essentially messages in a bottle—than via electromagnetic communication.

In the previous post, I mentioned the Von Neumann Probe—self-replicating machines that would propel themselves into the cosmos, locate planets with abundant natural resources, then land and use those resources to build more of themselves. This process would keep repeating until—and long after—the machines located an alien civilization.  Since this concept was first proposed in the 50s, it has remained the most intelligent solution on the table for reaching out into Universe.

Especially signifigant is where this concept intersects with the dawning field of nanotechnology. 

(Side note: if you’re unfamiliar, or not as familiar as you’d like, with nanotech, I cannot recommend Nanotechnology: A Gentle Introduction to the Next Big Idea enough, especially since it’s a free download from me to you.)

Although it already appeared in our last installment, the quote is thought-provoking enough to bear repeating:

Paul Davies speculates that a space-faring civilization could use nanotechnology to build miniature probes to explore the galaxy, perhaps no bigger than your palm. Davies says, “The tiny probes I’m talking about will be so inconspicuous that it’s no surprise that we haven’t come across one. It’s not the sort of thing that you’re going to trip over in your back yard. So if that is the way technology develops, namely, smaller, faster, cheaper and if other civilizations have gone this route, then we could be surrounded by surveillance devices.”

The biggest innovations in SETI will not come from new technology, but from new concepts and new ways of thinking.  So next time you’re catastrophically stoned, please donate some time to the search, and brainstorm a couple new paradigms for us.