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.

The Fermi Paradox - Part 1

This post is intended for those unfamiliar with the Fermi paradox. If you've already read a thing or two about it, I invite you to skip this one and wait until Part 2.

This is a companion post to Episode 2 of the Wow! Signal Podcast.  You can go over there and get the audio version with cool music.

For the purpose of this post, we are going to take as a given the null hypothesis about alien visitors to Earth - that this has never happened.  This is what the controversial astrophysicist Michael Hart called Fact A.

It turns out that accepting Fact A presents an interesting dilemma; first recognized by the distinguished physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950.  The unsolved problem is, that we would expect alien visitors on our planet, given a set of very reasonable assumptions. It’s really not such an extraordinary claim, after all. Assuming Fact A, this presents us with a puzzle. Either one or more assumptions have to go, or something really weird is going on.

Douglas Adams once famously wrote:

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

But space is also hugely old The entire history of Homo Sapiens is only about one twenty-thousandth the age of the Earth, and the age of the Earth is less than a third the age of the universe. What would seem to be likely is that at least local to our galaxy, time eventually overwhelms space with respect to galactic colonization.

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?

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.

What Life on Mars Could Mean

I am optimistic that some time in the coming 30 years we will discover strong evidence that life once existed on Mars, or even exists now.  If you ask Gilbert Levin, he'll tell you we already have that evidence from the Viking lander's Labeled Release experiment.

This is nothing new to those who follow the discussion on Mars life,  but if we do find Martian life, past or present, it could have any of four possible implications for the origin of life, in ascending order of fascination:

1. Life originated on Earth and migrated to Mars on Meteorites.
2. Life originated on Mars, and migrated to Earth on Meteorites
3. Life originated somewhere else (probably Venus), and migrated to both Earth and Mars.
4. Life originated independently on both Earth and Mars.

Number 4 is by far the most interesting of the four possibilities.  It implies that the origin of life is not a rare event.

If not Mars, then we hope to reach this conclusion by studying Enceladus, Titan or Europa.  The odds of cross-contamination there are much reduced.  Is it possible, that whenever you have a sufficiently diverse mix of ingredients in sufficient amounts, and a stable flux of energy through a system for a long time, that the chemistry progressively gets more complex and eventually some of it becomes self replicating?

If so, then probably then entire universe is teeming with life, and some of it is looking at us and wondering; who's there?

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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