PERHAPS WE ARE ALONE

Day 184 of the Lower Puna Eruption.

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Something happened 13.8 billion years ago, generally referred to as the Big Bang.  Then, perhaps 10 billion years later, a miracle, life began on Planet Earth.  Here is a new term for you:  abiogenesis, the term for the origin of life.  Thus, from 3.8 billion BC to 0.0003 billion BC, or 300,000 years ago, came the first stage of Homo sapiens, us.

The odds of the Big Bang occurring are so small that it is not worthy of mentioning.  But here is an attempt.  We are here, though, so there has got to be a number.

Then, what are the chances for intelligent life?  Ants and chimpanzees don't send their kind to the Moon.  Evolution is said to have produced World War II and smartphones.  Again, though, the chances are so small, but people have tried to come with answers.

So, now we're here.  How many more advanced civilizations are there in the Universe?  Frank Drake of Cornell tossed out an equation to estimate the number of communicative extraterrestrial societies just in our Milky Way.  He calculated a range:  1000 to 100,000,000.  More recent estimates provide anywhere from nearly zero to 15,600,000 civilizations in our galaxy.  Of course, there are another 200 billion or so galaxies in our Universe.

I came into this discussion nearly half a century ago when the NASA Ames Research Center selected 20 faculty members from across the nation to spend a summer with them to design a telescope capable of detecting extrasolar planets, for the key question in the early 70's was:  Are we the only planets in the Universe?  While most of them combined to develop an interferometer, I was allowed to pursue whatever I wanted to do.

Nobel Laureate Charles Townes had just come to Cal Berkeley from MIT, and had published a paper speculating that planetary atmospheres lased, meaning that there could well be monochromatic bursts of light that could be tracked around a planet around another star.  These beams would be so discrete that an instrument could be built to differentiate the movement of the planet, and also then provide the atmospheric composition.  I felt comfortable with this concept because I had very recently obtained my PhD where I built a tunable laser (before one could be bought) to affect the DNA/RNA bonds of E. coli in a micro reactor. 

While our proposal could have detected extrasolar planets at less than one percent the cost a decade or two earlier than the plan being advanced by NASA experts then, we were denied, possibly because we were not in line with the space politics and strategy of those days:

• They had chosen microwave as the spectrum to observe.  This made scientific sense, for you could see further out into space.   Ours was in the visible.
• NASA selected star wobbles and direct transit as their foci.

• The aerospace industry, which was pretty much telling NASA what to do from Project Apollo, could see no value to our "cheap" solution.  They wanted large equipment in space, with the Hubble Telescope only a few years away (remember, this was the mid-1970's and Hubble did not fly out until 1990), with the recently retired Kepler to come later (it was launched in 2009 and detected 2,662 exoplanets), to be followed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS--which was sent out this year and is expected to measure 20,000 new exoplanets), and, way in the future just being conceptualized was what became the James Webb Space Telescope.  This space telescope was estimated to cost $200 million, with an expected launch date in 2007.  Today, the price has ballooned to $10 billion with operation maybe in 2021.  The shame is that they all pretty much were designed to look at the diminution of light from a planet passing across a star. 
• The whole point, however, is that finding just one extrasolar planet proved that ours was not the only solar system, and you wonder how important is it to find another million of them?

So astrophysicists now agree that there, indeed, are extrasolar planets.  Probably hundreds of billions.  Sure, the current mantra is to find more earth-sized ones in the Goldilocks zone, for this is where future observations will target the search for life.   

So my second gripe with NASA is to stop most of that nonsense and instead actually Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI).  Sure, our U.S. Congress passed legislation to prevent NASA from doing so in 1993, but that had more to do with political expediency.  Surely enough, earlier this year Congress encouraged NASA to talk about this potential.

I've long imagined something on the order of the current Encyclopedia Galactica streaming in from an advanced civilization, or Things to Come, like the answer for world peace, cure for cancer and strategy to reverse global warming.  I just saw that H.G. Wells film, where Rotten Tomatoes reviewers gave a 92% rating, and you too can, the whole movie, just by clicking on it.

All we need to do is enhance the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array.  Paul Allen recently passed away, but another contributor is Nathan Myhrvold, also with Microsoft connections.  As much of this effort can be accomplished from Planet Earth, they will need to gain the support of the military industrial complex.  I have a simple solution for that, which will become a future posting.

Depressingly, however, there is the Fermi Paradox, mouthed nearly 70 years ago.  If intelligent life could have begun to form not all that long after the Big Bang 14 billion years ago...Where is everybody?

This summer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute reported on a paper from the University of Oxford addressing the Fermi Paradox.  They, too used the Drake equation, and said there's at least a 53% chance that we're alone in the Milky Way and at least 40% chance that we're alone in the visible universe.  In other words, the trend seems to be in the direction of we, perhaps, being alone.

Here is a Huffington Post treatment of the Fermi Paradox.  First:

Let’s imagine that after billions of years in existence, 1 percent of Earth-like planets develop life (if that’s true, every grain of sand would represent one planet with life on it). And imagine that on 1 percent of those planets, the life advances to an intelligent level like it did here on Earth. That would mean there were 10 quadrillion, or 10 million billion intelligent civilizations in the observable universe.

But then, the article goes on to explain why Fermi might well be right.  It's possible we could well be the only civilization ever.  Worse, there is something called The Great Filter, and if we're the only intelligent life form ever, we might still yet disappear, leaving no life in our Universe, for we have a few more filters to overcome.

The older I get, the more I'm convincing myself that we might well be the only intelligent life in the Universe.  We were the first and only hope to someday populate our Universe.  But will we be intelligent enough to survive that Great Filter?   Then again, maybe Calvin might be right:

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