Aliens, Perhaps, but Not the Aliens of the Gaps

Update (8 August 2016): Audio Interview with Ben Montet.

With the publication of Montet and Simon's arresting new preprint showing even more anomalous dimming behavior by Tabby's Star,  a lot of reasonable people are asking whether it's time to declare this stellar weirdness the work of an ET civilization, or whether it may be soon. While I am emotionally inclined to go this way, and intuitively sense that this may be the ultimate conclusion reached, I am not a believer. There is a fundamental error we still must avoid.

Light curve for KIC 8462852 from Montet and Simon

It is not crazy or deluded to think that this could be the work of ET. Not at all. We know that technological civilizations exist in our galaxy, we just don't know how many. It is easy to get into pointless arguments about whether there is just one, or the universe is swarming with creatures in some ways analogous to dexterous, talking monkeys like ourselves. These arguments are usually based upon probability guesses with very weak, or even non existent empirical support.

The truth is that nobody really knows how common ET civilizations are, or how long they flourish, and the so far null result of our (so far) very poorly funded SETI enterprise isn't much help in resolving it one way or the other, as has been argued by such persons as Jill Tarter for many years now.

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.

A couple of key interviews

Just a short note please check out a couple of key interviews relevant to this blog: Geoffrey Landis and David Grinspoon. 

Also, if you are interested in SETI (of course you are), please read this.

Is SETI Silly?

No, I don't think it's silly.  It remains entirely possible that simply by carefully studying the photons flying at Planet Earth from all directions, we will find clear evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization.  However, as I have taken pains to point out, we really don't know what we're talking about when we use that phrase, so we're going to have quite a long (and I think, healthy) debate about that the evidence should be, and how best to find it.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a loose affiliation of scientific institutions funded by private donations, trying to find a way to search for other technological species in our galaxy.  It's just one galaxy - doesn't sound too ambitious - but where to start?

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."

Speculation - Hot Jupiters as Expended Batteries

Hot Jupiters are large planets – about the size of Jupiter or larger - that orbit very close to their star.  They comprise the upper left corner of this plot.   A year on one of these planets is only a few days, or even less. These planets are relatively easy to discover because of their large and short-period effect on their star's motion and a much higher probability of transit, so the statistics we have on extrasolar planets are skewed a bit toward this type of planet.  Nevertheless, they appear to be fairly common, though are no longer in the majority of the 843 2030 exoplanets catalogued to date.

Exoplanet Orbital period vs. age of host star

Hot Jupiters were a surprise to astronomers when first discovered, although Otto Struve had speculated on their existence in 1952, arguing that they were the only planets detectable by ground based telescopes. Hot Jupiters were not a real paradigm-buster, but were unexpected, because they can't form that close to the star -  it's like trying to get steam to condense on a hot soldering iron. Hot Jupiters have to form much further out from their star, and then migrate inward. There are plausible models for how this could happen fairly quickly as a result of complex tidal interaction with a disk of dust still surrounding the star shortly after it forms.  Such a natural migration may take only a few million years, but it has to happen early or there won't be enough of a disk to interact with.  What astronomers would really like to do is catch one of these planets in the act of migrating, but that will require a bit of luck and probably better telescopes.

Homework from Professor Shostak

Seth Shostak may be right about UFOs,or he could be wildly wrong, but it is difficult to ignore his critiques of the the notion that UFOs are spacecraft from other planets. The SETI astronomer and podcast host recently appeared on Martin Willis' Podcast UFO to explain his views, which are also laid out in Chapter 4 of his book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter.

The so-called Extraterrestrial Hypothesis

Dr. Susan Blackmore is a little weird and more that a little smart.  She received the first ever British PhD in parapsychology, and believed in Tarot reading, out of body experiences, and psychic powers.  She was sure she could prove the existence of psychic abilities to even the most die-hard skeptics by amassing methodologically bulletproof evidence from a wide variety of experiments in clairvoyance and precognition, i.e. psi.   At the time, the whole field of parapsychology felt they were on the verge of breaking through to mainstream acceptance.

After a grueling series of consistently negative results, Blackmore began to be troubled by the definition of psi.  Psi was defined as whatever is causing psi experimental results to deviate from pure chance.  That is what psi isn't, but what is it?  Strengthening the methodologies made the signal drop down into the noise.  After repeated failures and not being able to define what to really test for, Blackmore soured on the very concept of psi and turned her research focus on to other things.

When it comes to UFOs, there is a shopworn old meme lying around frequently known as the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH for short).  It still attracts both derision and True Belief.  The ETH can be summed up simply as: some fraction (usually quoted at around 10%) of UFO reports are the result of something intelligently controlled that is not from Earth.

Do you see the problem?  It's analogous to the negative definition of psi.  By asserting that some UFOs - the otherwise hard to explain ones - are craft from outer space, we are really just stating what they are not - they are not ours.  But what ARE they?  A good hypothesis tells us where to look, and what information we can use to test the hypothesis.  The so-called ETH does not do that.  It's not a hypothesis!

Since aliens are very likely queerer than we can imagine, an alien spacecraft could be anything, and we would very likely not be able to perceive or describe it completely or accurately.  I won't address here the problem of the sparse, uneven quality of UFO data, or the thorny question of what phenomena to include, but even if we had terrifically good data, we still have no bonafide hypothesis to test it against.  "Not from here" doesn't fit the bill, and at this point, we don't know where to turn.  What happens in practice is that each of us invents our own private mental model of a single human-like alien race and wonder why UFOs don't behave that way.

Is there hope for the old ETH?  Not as such, but I believe it will have better successors. I do hope for really high quality hypotheses about the nature and behavior of alien intelligent life that we can really use.  The study of alien life, especially intelligent life, is pre-paradigmatic right now and starved of hard data.  We're going to need lots more information, and not much of it will be about UFOs (although I hope I am wrong).  The new emerging science of astrobiology will probably tell us much more about the constraints on development of intelligent species than any of our deeply flawed perceptions and memories of things we are unlikely to understand at all.

Nearly all hypotheses we develop about alien intelligences are likely to be wrong. Wrong, but the work of proving them wrong will lead us places we can't see at all right now.


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The Natural Philosophy of Queerer and Queerer

A man's got to know his limitations.

--- Harry Callahan in Magnum Force 

A bit about Haldane's Law, and what it means about the search for other minds in the cosmos.

Haldane

You might recall that in our first post, there was a quote from the great Enlightenment thinker David Hume.  To paraphrase, all we can understand is what we have felt - either internally or externally.  The essential point is that when faced with something unfamiliar we interpret it in terms of the familiar.  We discover the universe in small steps.  Big conceptual leaps are rare, and even they depend strongly on what the "internal sense" has long known.

J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) was a distinguished evolutionary biologist and geneticist.  His Law is most often stated as:

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.

A lifelong study of the evolution and diversity of life on Earth alone could easily have guided Haldane to that conclusion. We are still making sense of the biosphere that is right here in front of us, with the textbooks scrapped and rewritten on a regular basis.

Let's say Haldane was right. We believe we anticipate strangeness, but even the strangeness is strange. What could be stranger than a non-human intelligence, particularly a sophisticated one? Haldane says we can't meaningfully speculate about how strange they could become, and in ways we can't imagine. An alien being isn't just going to offer you a cup of coffee and then tell you about Seven Habits of Highly Effective Cosmic Guardians. Or it might, and then eat you.
Now that's discouraging. If Haldane was right, how can we know what to look for if we are in search of other minds in the universe? We might be looking straight at them and seeing nothing.

In fact, I would bet that we are doing just that. In his excellent book, The Eerie Silence, Paul Davies offers a different slant on the critique of UFO reality - that the UFO mythos taken as a whole isn't strange enough. Davies would fully expect something much weirder, not a phenomenon that falls right in line with millennia of folklore. There are those who would argue that UFOs are in fact plenty strange, but I think Davies has a point. If what is going on is something we can understand or even clearly define, then it's probably not aliens.
And yet when we talk about our first encounter with a non-human intelligences, we often think in terms of Hollywood fantasies like The Day the Earth Stood Still. Klaatu is a mythical man very much of Earthly making, and his landing on the Washington Mall only makes far too much sense to us. Why haven't they landed on the White House lawn? They already did - in our imaginations, which is likely as close as "they" will get. We are going to have to get way beyond that sort of scenario

So, if we are to form any hypotheses, or even conjectures, so we know what to look for when go in search of Other Minds, what hope do we have in light of Haldane's law? I don't have a clear answer, but perhaps we can formulate it in terms of our own limitations, and look for the silence behind our blind spots. What can't we see, and why?  

I am hopeful. Experience shows that we humans can eventually, over generations, get our arms around some pretty strange ideas, primarily using our talent for abstraction. For example, the very odd idea of a black hole was fished out of the mathematics of Einstein's equations decades before the first solid observational evidence that such things existed. By the time astronomers were ready to go looking for black holes, the theorists already had a fair idea of what to search for. Now there is evidence for many billions of black holes all over the universe and they are well incorporated into the astronomical paradigm.

The other bit of hope is that maybe Haldane's law is limited, and doesn't really hold for alien intelligences. Perhaps the constraints on the evolution of sentient life are so tight that we all end up resembling each other in important ways. Perhaps. But don't bet on it.

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