Authors: Jack Hitt
This rhetorical tactic of attempting to awaken the somnolent masses by trashing revered ideals is an old one. Marcus Aurelius, who helped establish the philosophical school of the Stoics, was fond of dismissing a good meal as nothing more than “dead fish.” Aurelius’s definition of sex was “the rubbing together of pieces of gut, followed by the spasmodic secretion of a little bit of slime.” (Sadly, Mrs. Aurelius’s meditations did not survive.) Another skeptic snarked that Christianity is the belief that a “cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically flash and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so that you can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.”
There’s something kick-ass in these tweaks, but there’s also a smarty-pants quality to all this, one that perhaps culminated in a 2003 op-ed piece by Daniel Dennett. He proposed that modern educated skeptics should begin to refer to themselves as “brights.” Thankfully, for everyone, that movement died before it was born. On a radio broadcast, I heard the skeptic and scientist PZ Myers refer to the Bible as little more than “poetry.” I don’t disagree with him. It was the withering contempt for “poetry” that made me realize once again how feeble a grasp some skeptics have of how to communicate
outside the amen choruses at academic conferences and Ted Talks. One misses the point—and it’s a really big point—by calling religion, as one skeptic recently did, a “a spandrel piggybacking on adaptations such as the orgasm.”
A spandrel is the nonfunctional space above a weight-bearing arch. But it’s also the place where, say, Michelangelo did most of his work in the Sistine Chapel. That is the problem with this point of view. It scorns the part of life most people care about: the poetry, the spandrels, the baroque cultures we shape—the stories we tell.
If Stephen Hawking visited Notre Dame Cathedral tomorrow and declared that what he saw was nothing more than “a stone-based structure whose horizontal distribution of off-vault compression directed lines of pressure-thrust to load-bearing piers,” I am not sure most people would consider him a genius. They’d think he was a putz.
Funny, because as so many, like Dobson, scour the ancient tales looking for a story that might resonate today, the elements of a grand science narrative—new discoveries—arrive daily. Hang out long enough with amateur astronomers and eventually the conversation steers toward exoplanets and extraterrestrial life. It’s no secret among the Russ Genet enthusiasts that one of the goals of the one-meter telescope crowd is to find new exoplanets and perhaps figure out which has life on it and how to communicate with that life. It’s only a matter of very little time before one of these earth-sized exoplanets is theorized to contain some kind of life and, in being so theorized, refocuses the thoughts of our cosmogony in a way not seen since Galileo moved us all to the solar suburbs.
The discovery of intelligent life in space, of course, would change everything, rewrite all of our assumptions and create not just a new story about the cosmos but a proliferation of them. We don’t have the slightest idea how that story will get told or the manifold ways it will rewrite our world, but we are anxious for it. Every day more and more exoplanets are added to the great list of known places where life might exist. A number of different NASA-launched space telescopes are downloading petabytes of unexamined data. Algorithms have already been developed to sift this growing mountain of data into piles that amateurs will be invited to poke through in hopes of finding gems of possibility. Eventually, some hope to spot the exoplanet whose light signature implies a slight elevation in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor—indicating possibly that something there is breathing.
Only a few years ago, the obsession of the mainstream media was asteroids and NEOs that might strike earth. Those are still sources of excitement, but the shift in pop culture toward fascination with exoplanets is under way, although the topic remains to go mega-public. That may be because exoplanets don’t blow anything up or because Will Smith hasn’t made a movie about them yet.
Among professional astronomers, there may well be more intellectual interest in, say, the questions of dark matter, and possibly some quiet resentment that the exoplanet types so easily garner widespread pop culture coverage anytime there is a hint that a newly discovered planet might have some kind of life on it. (Plus, the kind of people who get overexcited by such discussions also include crackpots, oddball theorists, and those who swim in oceans of woo.)
To go to a Stellafane gathering and just listen to the telescope hounds discuss the variety and complexity of theories is to get the sense of what it must have been like at the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella after Columbus returned and the discussions grappled with the notion of a possible New World. There exists a kind of orthodoxy about these delicate issues—represented by the official organization
SETI—run by high-profile, mainstream astronomers and partly funded by the digital generation’s most out-there philanthropist Paul Allen. (The digital revolution has provided our age with new Medicis and Borgias—the software billionaires devoting their treasure to building a space elevator, or downloading the brain into a computer program, or promoting immortality via the lecture circuit of Ray Kurzweil.)
When I first started contacting amateur astronomers, I kept hearing about this one guy who had a unique system for contacting aliens. Russ Genet had mentioned him, and a telescope manufacturer in Utah had told me about him too.
There are numerous methods already employed to try to scour the universe for broadcast signals from outer space aliens. The systematic way we’ve done this has been to sweep the sky looking for patterned signals among radio waves. Jim Edwards, a radar developer who often works with the Pentagon, has been involved in the signal corps and he’s brought to this issue the start-from-the-beginning thinking so indicative of the amateur’s faith.
His theory is reminiscent of the mid-nineteenth-century search for the Northwest Passage. The ships would sail far north of the Hudson Bay to the Barrow Strait, where there was no regular human traffic. In the vast expanses of shore, the sea captains would look for conspicuous spits of land that were noticeable from a distance. There on the flat shore, they would pile rocks into an unnatural—i.e., obviously man-made—cairn, and in the rocks they might put a note saying little more than “We were here” and the date. In the accounts of nineteenth-century voyages, the captains describe how they’d hug the coast, looking for noticeable land features, hoping to see the unnatural rock pile, inside of which would often be a bottle with a note, maybe a small flag. In the famous search for the lost explorer John Franklin, Lieutenant William Hobson sailed along the northwestern coast of King William Island to a place named Victory Point, where he spotted a pile of rocks. In it he found a note written on an old
bureaucratic admiralty form that read simply, “All well,” and the date “May 28, 1847.” Many of these cairns became landmarks. Sailors would know where they were and would check them in their passages through a strait to see if any other traffic had sailed by recently.
Over a beer in a local hamburger joint in Redondo Beach, Edwards said he started by assuming that alien life forms far more advanced than us don’t exist. “If anybody out there were vastly ahead of us,” he said, “we’d pick them up on our car radio.” So Edwards presumes that any alien life that is intelligent and is trying to communicate with us is probably as advanced as we are, more or less. To think like them means we only have to think like us.
Or like an Antarctic explorer. If you enter a massive bay, and you are looking for a message from a previous explorer, where to look? Well, first, as you scan the horizon, look for the unusual, eye-catching land formation.
For Edwards, the “odd spit of land” in space appears the moment when a giant like Jupiter passes in front of a sun. From our perspective it is a very noticeable event. It turns out many solar systems have gas giants like Jupiter (whether they have habitable planets or hot Venus-like planets is another question). But it appears that the natural history of planetary formation often resembles our own—with small hot planets in tight orbit, then habitable planets in what astronomers call the Goldilocks zone, and finally the big outer planets like Neptune, Jupiter, and Saturn.
The existence of these gas giants is how we know that exoplanets exist. They are the easiest for us to see because when they pass in front of their star (from our perspective), they block some light, causing the star to dim—and to dim on a fixed schedule—i.e., planetary orbit.
Both professional and amateur astronomers focus on a star, and if they notice a periodic dip in the light’s intensity, then they know there is a high likelihood that something is moving in front of that sun to block the light. This was one of the main methods used to detect many of the nearly six-hundred-plus exoplanets discovered to date.
For now we can’t photograph these exoplanets (at least not well; some very fuzzy dots have been produced by NASA). The way astronomers find them is to set a telescope to monitor a star’s light and plot the data of the light’s intensity on a graph. It looks mostly like a flat line running from left to right. But when the big planet moves in front of the sun, that line (moving from left to right) dips down, plateaus at the bottom of a trough, runs flat for a while (as the planet continues to pass in front of the sun), and then rises back up to its original intensity when the exoplanet moves on with the rest of its orbit. It forms a shape like a cup on a graph with a very flat bottom. For amateur astronomers, confirming the existence of an exoplanet with their own telescopes spitting out a flat-cup graph is a big thrill. Discovering it in the first place and adding an exoplanet to the great list of them is the dream.
Edwards’s assumption is that if intelligent life elsewhere is roughly as intelligent as us, then they will see that moment of transit, that dip in the graph as an unusual place (the jutting spit of land, the sheer seaside cliff wall) on which to build an interstellar cairn and hoist a flag. So let’s assume there’s a star that’s one hundred light-years away and has intelligent life on an orbiting planet. If those aliens can see our sun, they can figure out when their gas giant transits in front of their sun from our perspective. That’s a brief moment—it differs for each exoplanet—but let’s say it’s five hours long and it happens, oh, once every two years. Edwards argues a life as intelligent as ourselves might pulse a laser flash in an artificial pattern during the transit as a kind of beacon. And he explains how our most intelligent astronomers and theirs would most likely use an H-alpha filter, like “super dark welder’s goggles,” to screen out competing light and reveal the intelligently designed optical signal.
Those aliens would only fire off their flare when their massive Jupiter-like planet was dimming their star from our perspective. Similarly, if we were trying to signal our location here, we would fire off our laser when our Jupiter was dimming our sun in relation to that
one star system. Instead of looking for signals from all stars at all times, we could dramatically limit the search to just these few hours per star.
“So we have this sweet spot where both parties know not only where to look but when to look,” Edwards said. “I think that’s cool.” If a host of amateurs built Russ Genet–like light buckets, then amateurs could crowd-source the search for beacons the way the Peas Corps scoured millions of galaxies and plucked out certain peculiar examples.
Professionals “can’t do things that take a long time or risk taking a chance not getting a good payback on their time with the scope,” Edwards said. Often they must be employed on tasks with a high likelihood of success—the kind of projects that win grant proposals. “Amateur astronomers do these kinds of experiments all the time,” Edwards said. “This is their stock in trade: They get to do all the things that the professionals don’t get to do.”
So far, the SETI program has come up with nothing. The truth is, our increasingly familiar thirteen-billion-light-century-wide backyard is still a very large place. And yet, the SETI folks are said to keep a bottle of champagne in constant refrigeration. Anticipation has already led to the formation of a rather presumptuously titled committee—the “SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup.”
Their mission? To “prepare, reflect on, manage, advise, and consult in preparation for and upon the discovery of a putative signal of extraterrestrial intelligent (ETI) origin.” They have already written the Declaration of Principles Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
The general thinking is that such a finding would radically reorient human civilization. Sure. And there is something silly in the SETI protocols, but reading them, one gets the sense that the tone is practically a placeholder for the kind of world-changing effect such a discovery would have. The atheist/theist squabble of today would shift dramatically. The discovery of other life would not end organized
religion. Probably nothing could. But the weight of authority would shift dramatically closer to the scientists. Their work, however seemingly fatuous now (Google the “Drake equation”), would be seen as far more predictive than the millennia of clergy who flattered us with claims that we are God’s unique creation.
That is why the amateurs have gathered, tellingly, at the edges of astronomy. From the massive arguments about atheism, to the technical debates about how to craft a hula hoop–sized mirror, to Edwards’s late-night thoughts on transgalactic communication—the amateurs have come. From our earliest stirrings, we have always thought that maybe some of those blinking stars were distant beings trying to send us a signal, and now it turns out that that piece of scriptural conjecture might have been instinctively correct.
When Jim Edwards contemplates the night sky, he sees in his mind a bowl of stars whose transit hours are blinking on and off continuously throughout the night—a heaven filled with Gatsby lights, beckoning us for a closer look. Physical contact with others—what are called third-kind encounters—might be only the stuff of movies for now. And even second-kind encounters—back and forth communications—are still far off. But for now Edwards is longing only for an encounter of the first kind, the simple beacon. “Basically, each star is a blinking light and the only thing that you are communicating is that you are there,” he said. “All you are saying is, I am here.”