The Case for the Wow! Signal

I recommend Robert Gray's book The Elusive Wow! if you want detailed background on the Wow! event of August 15th 1977. The book also describes the author's efforts to replicate the signal. To date, no one has reported a reliable second detection of the Wow! Signal, although efforts to find it have not been persistent.

The Wow! Signal was a single 72 second event detected by the Big Ear radio telescope operated by Ohio State University, which was sweeping past the constellation Sagittarius at the time. This telescope was designed to conduct a survey of the radio sky, not to study individual sources in detail. The survey was successful and a number of new radio sources were discovered. After that, some of the science team thought that a SETI search would be a good use of the telescope.

I think the case against the Wow! Signal as an ET beacon is well known.

We are all well aware of the fallacy of the argument from ignorance. Just because the Wow! Signal has not been proven to be from a known source doesn't mean it's from ET. It's possible that the Wow! Signal was some sort of strange problem with the Big Ear's receiver that only occurred once, or that it was an extraordinarily elaborate and strenuous hoax. For these reasons, you would need to see independent confirmation, and we haven't; Robert Gray's single-handed and largely self-funded efforts to do so have been far from comprehensive.

Since the Wow! Signal was discovered after the fact, when Jerry Ehman went through a stack of printouts, it was too late to get another radio telescope to break off what it was doing, swing over and confirm the signal.  The signal was never confirmed, and no similar signal has been found in that region of space.

The are multiple reasons we think that the Wow! Signal may have been an ET beacon.

Where I am on the Drake Equation at the end of 2013

I'm sure you are all familiar with the Drake Equation. It's straightforward: SETI scientist Frank Drake devised it as a way to estimate the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy that we might be able to detect. It's only intended to be a rough guide, and has survived the last 50 odd years because it serves as a good way to divvy up the questions we will need to resolve to answer the bigger question, "Are we alone"?

There are many fine explanations of the terms of the Drake Equation easily available to you, so I won't repeat them. Here are few:

• Seth Shostak's book Confessions of an Alien Hunter, Chapter 3, explaining each term in detail.
• This page from the SETI Institute
• This video by Carl Sagan

This is how the equation is usually written:

N = R* • f_p • n_e • f_l • f_i • f_c • L

As we move from left to right across the equation, the terms become less and less well known and harder to estimate, even when we know more. The only thing we're sure of with some of the terms is that none of them are zero, since we are here.

In the last few years, there has been progress. We have gone from knowing just the first term with any kind of accuracy ( a factor of 2 or so), to having solid estimates of the first three terms, and we can now begin to conceive of a research program that would give us an estimate of the fourth term.

Remember, we are only interested in rough numbers here: we just want to know, is N a lot or a little?

So, for 2013, I think we are here:

Why Search?

In an earlier post, I argued that the current SETI program is not a silly waste of time if we want to search for ET and answer the question of whether we are alone, and I stand by that.  At the time I wrote that post, I didn't think that anyone would be interested in the why question. Of course we want to search, the only question is how, isn't it?  Maybe not for everyone.

All you have to do is to look at people like Frank Drake, Jill Tarter and Seth Shostak, who have

SETI Pioneer Frank Drake

devoted most of the careers to this topic, and you will realize that is is emotionally involving at a personal level, and not just "scientifically interesting".  It isn't purely a matter of scientific curiosity, and certainly not of ambitious scientific careering. 

Well, of course, the small number of people who study a topic are interested in it, and probably find it fascinating in some way.  What about everyone else?

So here is a question to ask yourself: if it was announced tomorrow that science knew for certain that there was another intelligent civilization in this galaxy, what would change for you?  Most adults are highly accomplished at keeping their own little worlds unperturbed.  Would the announcement of a distant ET civilization affect any major decisions you might make about your own life - your job, relationships, where you live, how many children you have, or any religious beliefs you might have?  Probably not you, but the younger generation, yes, because adolescents have left behind the comforts of childhood, and have yet to build their little worlds.  They don't mind being perturbed, and will often volunteer do some perturbing.  With announcement that we know about ET, their worlds just got much, much bigger.

Now it's not just Earthlings alone in the vast, cold universe anymore.  There are the others, possibly many others.  The universe no longer belongs solely to the astronomers, but is now alive, and belongs to everyone.

The Jaws of Darkness

"Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth;
And ere a man hath power to say "Behold!"
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion."
--Lysander from Act 1, scene 1, 141–149, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" 

This is that talk we need to have on the last term in the Drake Equation, mostly commonly denoted as "L". I'd like it to be more of a conversation than a soliloquy, so please share your thoughts here, or come on over to the G+ Community and let me have an earful. Better yet, let's talk in real time, and record our conversation for the Wow! Signal Podcast.

I would also like to point out that Seth Shostak has written thoughtfully about "L" in this document (go to page 399), and covers many of the key points well. Perhaps you should read that first. I'll wait.

Advanced Civilizations in Decline - part 1

If something can't go on forever, it won't.  Simple, right?  And yet, the notion that things will always continue to trend as they are is a common fallacy, and leads to real estate bubbles and the collapse of monetary systems.

Moore's Law

In our times, we tend to think of technological progress as something that only accelerates forward.  First we master materials, then energy (thanks to our improved materials), then information (thanks to cheap, abundant, widely distributed energy), and then, possibly something beyond information. We now casually toss around references to Moore's Law, which isn't a law at all, but simply an observation of how our technology continues to improve by some fairly simple metrics: the number of transistors on a chip, the cost of a gigabyte of data storage, and so on. We expect these trends to continue until we have reached a point beyond which no prediction is even theoretically possible.

However, this is a relatively recent trend, and we forget how many ancient civilizations had sophisticated capabilities that have been lost to us, or that we have had to recreate from scratch. They rose, they fell, they lost the recipe. Historians continue to analyze why the great civilizations declined, but once large, complex internal structures form, they begin to differentiate into interest groups that no longer have it as their principal goal to perform their greater function, but rather to maintain or grow their share of the resources flowing through the machinery. When a system fails this way, we call this "collapsing under its own weight."

Searching for Bracewell Probes - part 1

Ronald Bracewell

Bracewell Probes were first discussed by Ronald Bracewell in a 1960 Nature paper. The basic idea is send robotic probes to solar systems that seemed promising, and these probes would sit and wait for millenia looking for signs of intelligent life in those systems, and should those intelligent creatures ever reach a certain measure of sophistication, then either radio home for instructions, or simply provide a library of advanced knowledge that would help these lowly beings achieve a kind of galactic citizenship.
that the "Superior Communities" would

Bracewell Probes still seem like a sensible way for superior communities to reach out in their galactic neighborhoods, whether their intentions are benign or defensive. Rather than guessing when to send probes to check out a suspect solar system, they simply strike out for all of them in the neighborhood, and then wait. Would their purpose be, as Bracewell conjectured, to enlighten us, or simply to alert the rest of the superior community that here there be uppity apes?

Review of "An Eerie Silence" by Paul Davies

I want my book reviews to be useful to you, the reader, who may not have read the book in question and are trying decide whether to spend your money and time to do so.  So, my purpose will not be to show you how cleverly I grok the text, but rather to lay out for you what your are likely to find interesting or helpful in the book and how much of your time will be invested.

For non-fiction books, you don't need to read every chapter, so I will break down the content of the book and try to help you decide if these are topics you are interested in.  Of course, I will only review a book I have read in its entirety.

I will also include interesting nuggets or quotes that struck me as particularly interesting.

The Synopsis

The Eerie Silence by Paul Davies

Paul Davies is a physicist and author who has been associated with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) much of his career.  He wrote this book inspired by a 2008 workshop he hosted to look for innovative ways to improve this search.

 

Who Should Read it?

Anyone interested in a scientific approach to the problems of searching for alien life in the cosmos. Only a general layperson's background in the sciences is required, although the background explanations in the book maybe too sketchy for some readers. If you want a more in-depth introduction to the science, I suggest reading David Grinspoon's "Lonely Planets", which takes the reader gently through basic science topics needed to understand the questions of alien intelligence.
Science Fiction writers should find a bounty of story premises here, as well.

 

Time investment

Modest. The book is not difficult and is reasonably well organized and written. Only 242 pages, which includes bibliography, end notes and index, and is divided into 10 chapters and an appendix.

 

Is it Worth Reading?

For me, the most interesting Chapters were 3, which discusses the fascinating concept of a shadow biosphere, and Chapters 5-8, which discuss recent thinking about how SETI can be improved and expanded, and the kinds of highly exotic phenomena we might encounter from highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations if we search well enough and long enough. These chapters are rich in recent, provocative ideas.
Readers unfamiliar with SETI and astrobiology will find the entire book informative, although there are a number of other books and articles on the topic that would serve equally well or better.

 

Interesting Nuggets

Davies knew famed UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek, and even visited him at this home.
Davies is a member of the committee formulating what Earth's response "should" be (if any), should an alien signal be detected.

 

A Few Quotes

"Clearly, there could be a large number of alien probes in the solar system, and we would be completely unaware of them unless they signaled us."