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.

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.

Dream of the Open Channel by Paul Carr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.