So we’re looking for aliens, right? Listening patiently for signals from aliens takes a long time, and we have to hope they’re out there, and broadcasting.
Some folks wonder if maybe we should be trying to talk to them*. We could aim our transmitters (radio telescopes or possibly optical lasers) at some potentially habitable stars, and fire away with our "Here we are!" message.
But the sky is really, really big. There are millions of stars to choose from, even after culling them down to find ones that look better than others. Even looking at stars just like the Sun, for example, means looking at about 200 million stars in the Milky Way. It’d be nice to figure out some way to narrow the playing field.
Well, one problem is that we don’t know if aliens are looking our way. It would suck to send a signal, only to have the aliens looking the other way.
The reverse is true as well: even if we only want to listen, the sky is a big place to be looking for a signal. What if the Vulcans are trying to talk to us, but we’re looking the other way? We’ll never meet Spock!
So maybe we need a way to up the odds, and send the signal to (or listen for ones from) stars where the aliens may already be looking our way. How do we do that?
A slight digression. The Earth orbits the Sun in an flat ellipse. If you draw such an ellipse on a piece of paper and look straight down on it, well, it looks like an ellipse. But from the side (holding the paper edge-on to your eye) it looks like a line, right? If the Sun were in the middle of the piece of paper, then every time the Earth got between you and the Sun you’d see it as a little black disk passing over the Sun’s bright disk. This event is called a transit, when a small object passes directly in front of a bigger one.
We know lots of stars have planets, maybe even a large fraction. Odds are good that we’re right in the orbital plane of some these planets, so we’d see transits. If we watch lots and lots of stars long enough, then we should see those transits, basically as a dip in the star’s sunlight by a fraction of percent. And we do! We know this technique works; many extrasolar planets have been detected this way, and our technology is getting good enough that in a few years we’ll be able to detect a planet the size of the Earth if it transits its parent star from our point of view.
So let’s change our perspective: imagine you’re an alien looking for planets. You do the same thing we are, and search for transiting planets. It’s a great way to find Earth-like worlds!
Now let’s combine these two concepts: if there are aliens out there, then the ones who are located such that they see the Earth’s orbit edge-on are more likely to be looking our way. We should try talking to and listening for them!
From our point of view, the stars that see us as edge-on lie along a circle on the sky (astronomers call this the ecliptic). So if we want a place to aim our transmitters or receivers, looking just along that circle significantly cuts down on the sky’s real estate.
This new idea has been put forth by astronomers Richard Henry from Johns Hopkins University, who has a team of folks (including my friend Seth Shostak at SETI) who are keen to try this. It’s a long shot, of course, and they seem very aware of that. You have to assume the aliens are out there, and want to find us.
But it makes sense to me. Mind you, there are no guarantees here, of course, and if some alien civilization is located way off the ecliptic they’re out of luck. But what Henry and his team are trying to do is make it statistically easier to look for aliens. The odds are already so low that anything we can do to improve our chances is probably a good idea to try, at least at first. And we’re still pretty new at this; the game has just started. I think this technique is worth a shot.
*Personally, I think we should keep quiet. But then, I just wrote a chapter in Death from the Skies! about aliens coming to eat us, so I’m biased. But still.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:56 am
What I don’t like in those SETI-like programs is that they fall in the range of faith, and in the faith that there are other civilizations exactly like our own doing the same thing we do. We discover radio transmitters, we BELIEVE that some other civilizations might have discovered them also so we randomly search for radio signals. So we come up with a nice technique for finding extrasolar planets, then we BELIEVE that the other smart guys must have come up with the same technique and therefore we look for them.
It’s based on a random, temporary supposition, not based on any evidence whatsoever. We know one planet that has evolved life and civilization and we cannot, scientifically make suppositions, this one case is not statically relevant. It’s like finding out that in one case, one herbal tea cured one case of one disease.
And worst, it’s a lottery. Either we find them, or we don’t. And meanwhile we spend thousands of scientist hours on this.
What I appreciate in other astrobiology experiments is that they test small theories that have a direct impact on our own life. Phoenix is not trying to answer “are there green man hiding under the surface of mars” it’s testing “what was the possibility of liquid water ever appearing on mars? what’s it’s geological history”
Science, when made like the big SETI did, only creates great headlines and fuel useless media discussions about UFOs, aliens visiting people in denver colorado and government hiding ets conspiracies.
Science, when made like phoenix, shows that science is about reachable experiments, and opens the question of what IS life anyway. Can “life” arise in a liquid methane environment? Can a cold planet with ice geisers have microbiological life? Can the constant patterns replicating seen in space dust be considered life?
If we believe life is only like our own, then it must probably have nuked itself already out.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Phil, you do an excellent job of summarizing those press conferences. Yours is an important role in keeping amateur and future-professional astronomers well informed. Thank you.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Great to hear it’s not a random search. Would our signal work like a pulsar?
Hey Phil, do you know if your book will be available in other languages? Mainly Spanish? I hate reading great scientific based books but I can’t share them with other people over here because they don’t do so well with English and over here, books from people like you are rarely printed by editorials.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:00 am
It’s a good idea, even if only as a place to start. We can’t search (or *shudder* broadcast to) everywhere at once, so start looking in the most likely places. A simple enough choice.
The other aliens will just have to wait. Line forms at the ecliptic, please, no shoving.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:05 am
I wrote a term paper back in college on communication with space aliens. One of the major points was that even if we had face-to-face contact (assuming they even have faces), the odds of them being able to understand us at all are, well, astronomical.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:20 am
It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure that it will greatly increase the odds of contact with ETIs. Assuming that we continue to improve our telescopes and techniques for detecting exoplanets on the pace we’re at now. How long before we’ll be able to survey every single Earth-sized planet within dozens of parsecs whether or not they are transiting their star from our vantage point. 100 years? 200 years? 500 years for sure.
500 years seems like a long time for us, but it is a mere blip in the history of our 10,000 year old civilization, and there is no reason to believe that an ETI civilization that can detect transiting exoplanets would not as quickly render transit detection techniques obsolete. If there are ETIs out there, it would be a remarkable coincidence that their civilization was technologically within a few hundred years of ours, either way.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Yeah, I talked to Dick about this idea at the reception Sunday night. It has promise. I’ve been aware that the technology is nearly in our grasp to identify planets with oxygen atmospheres, which is almost surely a sign of life. I didn’t turn it around the way he has. Of course, given a few decades we may have identified a sample of such Earth-like planets and then the targeted search would be much more obvious. We find planets like this, we’ll be turning every telescope we have toward them, I expect, SETI in mind or not.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:30 am
This reasoning holds for passive SETI too, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t ET’s target their transmissions at transiting planetary systems, just as this proposal does?
June 4th, 2008 at 10:35 am
alexandre, just because SETI has a low probability of success and is fodder for pseudoscientics does not make it bad science or an unworthy scientific endeavor. If that was true, then we might as well abandon all discussion of how and why the Big Bang happened or which of the competing string theories (if any) is correct. They are just as likely never to yield fruitful results (and could be unknowable), and have you read all the nonsense pseudoscientists write about those subjects (and that’s no even counting religion)?
SETI is a long shot, sure, but contact with or even detection of an ETI would be a profound event in the history of humankind, and is entirely worth the effort.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Oh , It is agreat task for us to find the aliens in the GALAXY.I am 100% sure that life is exist in the galaxy.We must find him nearly or some hundred years after.I have read the flying pan book, it gives a brife description about aliens , oh it is very interesting book, it is also give me some knowledge about the galaxy life.Life is must be exist in the galaxy.If we will find the life out of earth it will become so intresting and a new era will be started after that.I think cosmic power will be help us.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Well, I;ve got back news to you. Earth is, right now, broadcasting the fact that there is a technological civilization living on it to anyone who decides to look our way, and it’s not some feeble, fleeting radio signal either.
And what is betraying our presence? Pollution — air pollution and light pollution — unavoidable (currently) side effects of our technology.
We’re barely a decade into our search for exoplanets and we have already “sniffed” the atmosphere of a couple of them (detecting things like presence of water and other gases). Within a few decades we’ll likely be able to routinely obtain reflected spectra from those planets and directly image many of them. Any ETI that has the ability to do us harm (i.e. travel across light years of space) will undoubtedly be able to detect which planets within reach are home to intelligent life, no radio signals are required.
So if you are fearful of sending signals into space that could be detected by aliens, then you might as well give up all hope now. It’s already way too late. The only way to lessen the odds of detection would be for the whole planet to go green (and even then trace emissions might still be enough to be detected) and institute a continuous, worldwide blackout.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:49 am
“back news?” Ugh! I mean’t “bad news”, of course.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:55 am
I don’t think that proposal completely makes sense. I think at that point you’re artificially restricting your search area a bit TOO much, at least in the long run. I think to maximize your potential options, you need to look at and talk to any systems you can identify planets for, even if they’re out of your ecliptic plane. Long winded reasoning follows:
If we assume that all other aliens are operating with the same strategy and only broadcasting and listening to planets on their own ecliptic, then the only way two systems will end up talking is if they both lie in each other’s ecliptic plane. You’d have to see the aliens transiting their sun, and they’d have to see you transiting yours. So if you assume that aliens were using the same strategy as you, then you’d only actually have to listen to systems that were both in your ecliptic and in which you can see transiting planets, which is going to be a much smaller number than the total number of systems in your ecliptic plane.
But these aren’t the only systems you’re likely to be receiving transmissions from. I’m not an astronomer, but I assume that we’ve identified planets orbiting systems that aren’t in our ecliptic plane. So if everyone’s transmitting in their ecliptic, then we’d be receiving broadcasts from all systems in which we see transiting planets, not just those in our ecliptic. So it would obviously be a good idea to listen and broadcast to any system in which we see transiting planets, since they’re likely to be looking in their ecliptic as well. And we’d obviously hope the aliens followed this logic as well so we don’t end up wasting our time looking at any old random star in our ecliptic that we can see a planet transiting.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:56 am
The last thing I heard (and Phil would know where the info is better than me) is that all of our “emissions” that go out into space don’t travel as far as we think. Just because we’ve been sending out EM stuff for nearly a century doesn’t mean that anyone 100 LY away is going to pick it up. There is a lot of signal degradation going on out there.
I possibly saw this in an episode of “The Universe.”
June 4th, 2008 at 11:03 am
While it may be rewarding to listen for evidence of alien civilizations, it’s pretty pointless to try to attempt to start a conversation, isn’t it? We can’t transmit anything faster than light, and with the distances involved, Earth may be consumed by the Sun (or at least pounded back into a dead cinder by another meteor) before anyone even hears us, much less tries to respond.
June 4th, 2008 at 11:15 am
tacitus,
The problem with SETI isn’t that it’s a longshot. It’s that (to my knowledge) there are no criteria established for deciding when we’ve looked enough and it becomes a wasted investment to continue. (Same problem with the community of string theorists.)
Just because we want to know doesn’t mean it’s worth plugging away at it *forever*. Take Fermilab. The Tevatron is scheduled to be decommissioned next year. Why? Because it’s reached the point of diminishing returns. There are quantifiable criteria which say that the machine is no longer a worthwhile investment. Some of the early neutrino proton decay experiments (using large vats of dry cleaning chemicals) also had finite lifetimes for the same reasons, diminishing returns.
So what are the criteria for deciding when SETI stops being a strategic gamble and starts being a call to the faithful?
June 4th, 2008 at 11:35 am
alexandre van de sande: I wouldn’t call it faith as much as supposition. Finding the answer as to whether or not there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe will have a huge societal impact. There are very few people out there who have never looked up at the stars and wondered. This is fundamental human question that they are trying to answer, and I don’t see how that could be a waste. Your right, we only guessing at what an alien society might do, but what better starting point is there. Not looking would be less in the realm of science and more arena a faith and/or fear. While I am sure there is percentage of people out there simply apathetic, most people don’t want to look because they are either frighten of what they may find or are convinced there is nothing to be found. I tend to categorize those who say there is no possibility of intelligent life in the universe in the say pile as creationists. I like your example of herbal tea but I think it is a little off. Assuming that an herbal tea cured a disease because one person got better is bad science. But I would say it would be more analogous to realizing someone got better after drinking that tea (or in the case that intelligent life did evolve here) and applying the scientific method to see if it was a just a random fluke or something more. I understand your desire to maximize resources, but you need to look at the whole. Things that make headlines and excite can also drive funding. Not that SETI is particularly well funded, but think of how many scientists went into because the looked up an wondered. As for the nuke idea, we managed to send signals out into space without having blown ourselves out of existence, like you herbal tea, it understandable that we would want to see if you was a fluke.
June 4th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Mark Martin: What better reason is there for plugging away then wanting to know?
June 4th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Another SETI strategy attacks the issue of getting ET to listen. It’s pretty easy. Imagine that ET has astronomers too. They’re interested in interesting events, like supernovae. So, a supernova goes off, we immediately send a signal in the opposite direction. That way, when a downstream ET sees the supernova, they have a good chance of seeing our signal too. If we send out, not a tight beam, but one say five degrees wide, then more systems will be in our beam. I haven’t done the power and distance calculations. And there are details concerning what frequencies ET will be paying attention to, etc., but nothing difficult.
It’s kinda the same way we recently discovered the xray pulse from a supernova. We were watching another supernova in the same galaxy. Only, instead of a chance 2nd supernova, we’d do it deliberately.
As for ET understanding us, that depends on what we send them. Current research suggests that our computers can learn natural languages stochastically. That means that if we send enough noise at them, they can figure it out. One suggestion was to send the entire internet, unfiltered. Their version of Deep Thought can wolf it down.
June 4th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Kevin,
Pardon the comment from a non-expert; but………. Aliens 100 LY away aren’t likely to pick up individual broadcasts. What they would ’see’ is a “brightening of the radio spectrum” for old Sol in certain wavelengths. That would be an indication of an emerging technological civilization.
It’s probably just as well they won’t pick up individual broadcasts. If they see ‘American Imbecile’ or Rush Limburger, they’re going to conclude their really isn’t any intelligent life on Earth! Then again, they’ll miss Star Trek and Dr. Who.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
@Alexandre,
The supposition is that an alien civilisation might have radio tech.
We know for a fact that it is possible.
And until recently radio was the only thing at our disposal with any hope of detecting any ETI.
A long shot, but the only shot we could take.
@Tacitus,
A civilisation close enough to detect our commercial and military broadcasts would need to be quite close.
And a lot closer to detect air or light pollution.
They’d find us eventually, give it a century.
@Benudhar,
‘Flying pan’
June 4th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Ah, Stephen, you beat me to the supernova “flag” idea. Darn.
Is SETI good science, or a religion… humm… you know, if someone were to come up with a viable theory that God may be detectable, and had an experiment that might yeild results, I’d probably be in favor of it.
Especially if the experiment didn’t cost much, and had the side effect of discovering all sorts of things about our universe that we didn’t know before. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t pulsars first discovered by Frank Drake and the guys in Ozma?)
The last decade has fostered some really interesting debate about the possibility of ETI. The “Rare Earth” controversy, the discovery of extremeophiles, the possible fading of signal strength, the discovery that extra solar planets are about as common as grass on a golf course. We keep shifting the parameters of the Drake Equasion around, but so far, nothing much has changed the statistical probablility that there are others out there.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Corey, you didn’t get my meaning. Wanting to know isn’t the same as there being much chance of knowing. It’s like playing slots at Vegas. There’s a point at which it’s more costly to keep playing than to just stop. It’d be awfully nice to win the big cash payoff, but eventually the payoff will be less than what it costs to play long enough to “win”. Even human lives aren’t infinitely valuable. Take for instance the occasional case of a boat lost at sea. The Navy is ordered to dispatch a task force to scour an area for signs of survivors. But that can’t be maintained indefinitely; after a point it becomes too unlikely that it’ll payoff. The lost are defined to be beyond recovery.
Without establishing when it’s time to give up and concede that the strategy isn’t working, it becomes only just another religion. We do, after all, have other scientific goals to take care of, not just SETI.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
This SETI proposal is rubbish.
Any civilization advanced enough to detect “us” by our Earth transits would
also be capable of detecting us by direct imaging – as we will be able to do soon with the proposed TPF space telescope. Thus there will be no advantage in being in the plane of our Ecliptic.
Thus pointing the ATA telescope at stars in the Ecliptic, as Henry et al. propose, will not increase the chance of hitting a civilization.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Mark Martin, when you play the slots you know the odds. With scientific discovery you don’t, or you wouldn’t need to discover it. We don’t know enough to know what the odds are or even what impact a positive discovery would have on humanity, there is not simple equation or cost analysis. I think as long as you have scientists wanting to study and a public wanting to know, you keep going until you find an answer or a technology that lets you ask a different question.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
It would absolutely increase the chances of us ‘hearing’ a civilization aligned along the ecliptic that is attempting to transmit to us.
The argument of where there is merit in their proposal because of plans for future space based telescopes or is irrelevant. They are attempting to propose changes in the existing SETI program which increase the chances of detecting ETI within the current program framework.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Mark, I get what you’re saying, and the question is complicated by the fact that our ability to search for and detect signals is likely to improve at an ever increasing rate for many years to come. But I’m not sure about the use of the Tevatron as an analogy. After all, there is the Large Hadron Collider coming on line at around the same time the Tevatron is being decommissioned. I am sure that SETI installations like the Allen Array will be superseded in time too.
As with most things, it usually comes down to economics. If the 5 billion dollar LHC yields no results, then the odds of funding the VLHC will go down. And some people have recently questioned the wisdom of a 500 million dollar space million to detect gravity waves — an iffy prospect at best. If the mission were to cost $50 million, I doubt there would be many objections.
SETI is largely funded by private contributions at a fraction of the cost of most areas of astronomy research, so that’s not really much of an issue. Economics is not going to be a factor.
So when will it be time to call it a day with SETI? Well I guess the answer is when we’ve searched the whole galaxy for all possible means of communication. Yeah, that’s a bit of a useless answer in the short term, but unlike questions of religion and faith, a definite end point does exist, even if it’s beyond our reach for the next few hundred years.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Corey,
ALL well-designed scientific research is done strategically. All of it. No skilled scientist will go into a project with no way to gauge progress. Even if you want to know if ET exists, you still must measure progress. When a particular strategy outlives its usefulness, you must find another. If you just mindlessly keep listening, then you’ve entered the domain of insanity.
I must also take specific exception the notion that extraterrestrial life is the single most important thing we can discover. How can that possibly be? To me that problem is but one among many which are interesting. I think it’s incredibly juvenile to go about repeating the ET mantra. There’s an entire universe full of things worthy of my interest. Aren’t you interested in, for example, finding a better way to understand gravitation? It does, after all, affect pretty much everything, living or non. Finding exobiology would be quite interesting & valuable. It could place empirical constraints on what’s possible. But it’s nowhere near being the only thing worth knowing.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Aaron: No, this proposal will not ‘increase the chances of detecting ETI within the current program framework’.
This proposal asks ‘which civilizations will know about us and thus beam a powerful radio signal at us?’ and answers ‘those in the plane of our Ecliptic who can detect us by our effect on the atmosphere of our planet as the Earth transits in front of the Sun as seen by that civilization’. It then says ‘we should thus look at such stars’.
But, as I said, civilizations which are not in the plane of our Ecliptic will be able to detect us as easily, by direct imaging with their own space telescopes. So you are just as likely to see a radio signal coming from a civilization not in our Ecliptic as you are from one in our Ecliptic.
The proposal thus does not increase the chance of success.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
But the odds are that if a technological society reaches the point where SETI is possible, then assuming no catastrophic happens, the phase in which SETI needs to be limited to a small amount of the sky is likely only going to be a couple of hundred years or possibly even half that.
So once a space-age civilization has been around for several thousand years (and the odds are good that if they exist, they’ve had technology lot longer than we have had so far) then they’re not likely to think that using this type of strategy — i.e. one that may only be employed for a few decades — is worth bothering about.
June 4th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
I never meant to imply that the question of extraterrestrial life is THE fundamental question; however I certainly stand my assertion that is A fundamental human question. As for the issue of progress, this is a yes or know questions. And as I said, if people want to know and study and discover, who is anyone to tell them they are wasting there efforts.
June 4th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
What other scientific discoveries could have as much impact on as many aspects of society as the knowledge that we are not the only intelligent species in the galaxy? There are some, sure, like “curing” old-age, or solving global warming, food shortages or clean energy, or even discovering that there is life after death (as opposed to just having faith it exists) but from a purely scientific standpoint (as opposed to new technologies coming to market) finding ETI is right up there.
Solving gravitation would be cool, but will likely have little practical use or be of much interest to the vast majority of people. Discovering microbial life of Mars would be headline news, but most people would forget it after it fades from the news in a few days. But the discovery of ETI will likely have much more widespread impact. One can imagine every religious leader around the world being barraged with questions on what it means to their religion and there would be endless debate and speculation on who they are, what they are like, and what we could learn from them. New cults would undoubtedly form, and perhaps even a new major religion or two.
Then, assuming we get more than a bleep or two, there is the prospect of being given a short-cut to all kinds of science and technology we can only dream of right now. There’s no guarantee that it will happen that way, if it happens at all, but I there is no doubt that if it does, the impact will be profound.
June 4th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
It’s all about statistics.
A 1% increase in the odds is 101% of what we have now.
And since recourses are limited, that 1% might just do the job.
@Mark Martin,
It is not an either-or proposition.
We can do both.
And SETI is privately funded.
June 4th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Halcyon Dayz: If your comment is about whether the proposal might increase our chances by 1% – it wont.
Any civilization advanced enough to devote the large resources needed to beam a strong radio signal at us – which is the type of civilization the proposal is considering – will be as easily able to detect us if they are in our Ecliptic or not.
To demonstrate this, consider ourselves. We will be able soon to detect non-transiting earth-like planets with oxygen atmospheres as easily by direct imaging as by transits. It will take much longer for us to become rich enough to devote the substantial resources to beam a radio signal at such planets on the off-chance that in centuries any intelligent life on such planets will hear us.
June 4th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Because there are many Regional Celestials of many different sect associated with this planet… many traveling of their own Designs of celestial FLOATS, meaning Flyers Levitating Of Advanced Technology …. And because of the many Foreign-Celestials which travel from abroad through distance dark space who are unrelated to the many sect already associated with this planet …. The UK should now be forth-coming … the UK should now be called if nothing more , the New UECK … United Earth and Celestial Kingdoms …
It is now becoming common knowledge that Regional Celestials have been secretly apart of this planet’s activities since early surface evolution … Ancient Celestials were as nurturing and mothering care-takers hidden behind Earth’s original frequency Veil … and now because of failing unorthodox power Facilities of another specific Foreign Civilization who once traveled from distance space …. And who through trickery and deceit, gained control over US Government eons ago …. A great number of things hidden and kept secret from earthen population will at first gradually come into view as many Regional Celestials struggle uselessly to reestablish cloaking abilities …
Many power facilities once elevated in secrecy as to further establish linkage of colonized relay stations stretching up through dark space reaching the highest point of this particular group of Foreign Celestial who invaded Earth Moon long ago, Will indeed fall from place ….
The effects of this spill-over as elevated worlds fall from their once held high position, has been referred to as the opening of Seven Seals.
And those many original celestial facilities which were already associated with this planet, who adapted their power facilities to draw from the Foreign Invader’s ‘Unorthodox Satellite Transmitter’ as to sustain or acquire greater power abilities to their own individual power sources, these Will gradually become visible both in upper an inner skies of this planet and …
But there are also the countless Extra-Celestials who hold residence up and outside this the Seventh Universal Plane of endless darkness ….
I’m just an Old Soul passing through, given something important to say …
I write so that Walkers of the Good Faith will not be left uninformed in such celestial matters as the new UFO era now approaches …Nothing to sell … Nothing to Buy … just answers to the many ’WHYs?’.
… evelynseedofdavid@gmail.com
June 4th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Detecting oxygen rich planets is one thing, detecting intelligent life is another… Additionally, is it not plausable that such a civilization might not have the technology to physically traverse the distance between us and instead reach out simply to communicate?
June 4th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
ummmmmmmm……what?
Seriously, what?
or as the good Doctor would say:
What what what!!!!
June 4th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
“if there are aliens out there, then the ones who are located such that they see the Earth’s orbit edge-on are more likely to be looking our way.”
Huh? Why does that follow? Why would the fact that the Earth transits in front of the sun be any more exciting to ET than if the plane of the Earth’s orbit was perpendicular to the line of sight? Perhaps ET’s telescopes are so good that they can detect remote planets in any orientation out to a distance of several thousand light-years. Perhaps ET has accurately computed Earth’s orbital characteristics thousands of years ago, in which case whether or not Earth transits the sun is all old hat and there would be no particular reason for ET to be interested in observing the Earth.
There is only one scenario which is guaranteed to produce a detection (assuming both civilizations survive long enough) and that is this:
1.) Transmitting civilization transmits a powerful beacon signal isotropically (in all directions) – this will probably have to be a Kardashev Type II civilization to be detectable anywhere in the galaxy. The beacon signal is always on and always going out in all directions (pulsing out prime numbers as an example)
2.) Receiving civilization mounts a full-sky survey. If the beacon is always on then the receiving civilization should find it during the first pass over all the sky.
This is leaving out considerations of frequency, modulation, etc. All other search scenarios have a detection probability of less than 1. This scenario has a detection probability of 1 assuming the beacon signal is powerful enough and the receiver is sensitive enough.
June 4th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
“Science, when made like the big SETI did, only creates great headlines and fuel useless media discussions about UFOs, aliens visiting people in denver colorado and government hiding ets conspiracies.
Science, when made like phoenix, shows that science is about reachable experiments, and opens the question of what IS life anyway.”
Let’s compare the BIG SETI project to the little phoenix project.
Project Phoenix
NASA budget: $420 million
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2007-07-10-mars-phoenix-mission_N.htm
SETI
Current NASA budget: $0
http://openseti.org/Budget.html
SETI
Maximum NASA budget: $13 million in 1991
Current SETI Institute budget (private): $4 million
Oh yeah, the Phoenix project has the limited goal of studying the history of water on Mars. The SETI project could revolutionize our culture if it succeeds. People who complain about SETI remind me of people who complain when they get free stuff in the mail. It’s never good enough for them even though they aren’t paying one dime.
June 4th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
“No skilled scientist will go into a project with no way to gauge progress. Even if you want to know if ET exists, you still must measure progress. When a particular strategy outlives its usefulness, you must find another. If you just mindlessly keep listening, then you’ve entered the domain of insanity.”
You’re assumption that SETI has no means of gauging progress is incorrect. With each improved search the coverage of the entire sky that has been scanned down to some particular sensitivity and some frequency band is known. The equipment has been improving, the software to search through the data has been improving, the search strategies have been changing, etc., etc. This is all progress that can be measured.
June 4th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
The whole ecliptic-checking thing makes perfect sense for a targeted search designed to raise the odds of detection. Perhaps, though, we should look along the plane of Jupiter’s ecliptic. Easier observable transit from a distance after all.
Think of it in reverse. When we find an edge-on system with a planet, we add it to the extra-solar planet catalog. We’ve only been able to make that claim for less than 2 decades. In that time, we’ve gone from zero to 297 and counting and those are just the ones we’ve been able to detect by using multiple methods contrived within the last few centuries.
We look for the most obvious indications of a planet’s existence. We check for large masses causing a star to wobble and changes in brightness as massive objects occlude the parent star. Since those are our two best methods, it stands to reason that those primitive methods of detection might be used by civilizations of equal or greater technological achievement.
In other words, if we want to say or hear “hello” from someone we might be able to understand, we should start by using what we’ve learned thus far. Who knows? Maybe the first translated message will be something like:
“SHUT UP! THEY’RE LISTENING!”
I’m all for searching our ecliptic.
It also makes sense to search any system we discover that might be duplicating our efforts.
As for a multidirectional beacon; eeeehhh, you don’t walk into a newly discovered neighborhood at night and yell for strangers to offer candy.
Discretion as a rule.
Hey! Maybe that’s why the universe is being so coy with us. We’re still just a bunch of little kids.
It’s reasonable to imagine that a civilization roughly similar to our primitive level of technology will puzzle out the problem of long distance communication in like fashion.
One thing we can do with this approach
June 4th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Woops! My kid like what I said and hit “submit” for me.
Guess that means I’m done
June 4th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Why sniff along the ecliptic when everybody is looking at SN2008D ?
June 4th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
I don’t buy any of these financial cost/benefit arguments.
Does it really matter what the odds of success are, or what the benefits may or may not be? The only relevant questions are a) Do we want to know? and if yes to a, then b) How much are we willing to spend to satisfy that desire?
Human societies have always generated surplus resources, and have always spent some of those surpluses on satisfying desires that have no practical benefit. If we are willing to spend of things like art galleries or football stadiums because we derive enjoyment from them, then why not a few peanuts on SETI to satisfy our curiosity?
And make no mistake, SETI currently costs peanuts, and it’s all private funds too, so even the peanuts are currently costing taxpayers nothing at all.
June 4th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
And just what are we supposed to do when the aliens’ favorite book turns out to be something called To Serve Man?
June 4th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Halcyon Dayz said:
“It’s all about statistics.
A 1% increase in the odds is 101% of what we have now.
And since recourses are limited, that 1% might just do the job.
@Mark Martin,
It is not an either-or proposition.
We can do both.
And SETI is privately funded.”
I’m the first person in line to say that a wealthy civilization can do both. But if you’d care to exercise some reading comprehension, I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about how to determine if the search itself is worth continuing.
Tom Marking mentions improvements in the hardware. That also isn’t what I’m talking about. You can cite advances in hardware all day long, but that doesn’t mean we’re any closer to detecting a signal from ETI. If it so happens that there is *no* ETI sending signals of any kind, then our technical prowess is beside the point.
You can say something vague about statistics (which you did). But with absolutely NO knowledge of either the existence of ET life, or even a predictive theory of how life emerges AT ALL, then it’s worthless to insist that an extra 1% chance is worth it. One percent of WHAT? How are you computing that number? Where does it come from? Show me the algorithm you’ve used to generate that expectation. What are the data you plugged into it?
To my knowledge, SETI management have established guidelines for disbursing the detection of a signal. I consider it foolish, even scientifically dishonest, not to also have some guidelines for deciding when to hang up.
June 4th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
A quick correction Phil: if you draw the orbit of the Earth with its proper eccentricity it would not look like an ellipse, but would be almost indistinguishable from a circle. This is a concept we teach in Reasons for the Seasons to direct the students to the understanding seasons are caused by Sun angle and not distance.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Just to show what it is I’m talking about, here’s a question from the FAQ at seti.org.
________________________________________________
Q:
What happens if you don’t detect a signal?
A:
We are just scratching the surface of what a modern search can do. Failure to find a signal wouldn’t prove that we’re the only thinking beings in the Galaxy. After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The SETI Institute intends to press the search. Needless to say, the march of technology and new scientific discoveries will influence future SETI strategies. But giving up is not in the cards. Christopher Columbus did not turn around simply because he failed to find any new lands during his first few days at sea.
________________________________________________
See? This doesn’t even address the question posed. In fact, it evades the question. Absence of evidence may not be evidence of absence, but neither is it evidence of presence. SETI has given no thought to the contingency that there may be no communicable beings there to be heard. There’s no provision at all. For all they care, they’ll just keep on listening, forever. What a bunch of fools.
And they’re even willing to use non-sequitur as a lame rationalization. Columbus didn’t give up within his first few days at sea. So? He also wasn’t utterly clueless. He had some data to plug into the problem. He had some estimate of Earth’s circumference. He also knew perfectly well ahead of time that his destination, the Indies, existed. His project was not to prove that the Indies were real, but rather to find a better way to get there. Let’s also not forget that he eventually did find something: North America. If the expedition had wandered long enough, rest assured that his crew would have mutinied and turned back, and rightly so.
So you see, the SETI as it stands now is a religion. As it says in its own words, giving up is not in the cards. They want to believe.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
“You can cite advances in hardware all day long, but that doesn’t mean we’re any closer to detecting a signal from ETI. If it so happens that there is *no* ETI sending signals of any kind, then our technical prowess is beside the point.”
SETI is an experiment and an experiment always produces some result. So far the result of the experiment has been negative for the existence of ET. But even that result is valuable by giving us some indication of our uniqueness in the universe. Even if SETI never detects any extraterrestrial signal at all I still think it is worth every penny by serving as a calibration of humanity’s place in the cosmos. And if it turns out that we are unique in the galaxy or perhaps in the entire universe, shouldn’t that fact highten our awareness of what a tragedy it would be if we do ourselves in via nuclear war, overpopulation, environmental damage, etc? Shouldn’t that fact cause us to strive harder to prevent these calamities from occurring?
June 4th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
“So you see, the SETI as it stands now is a religion. As it says in its own words, giving up is not in the cards. They want to believe.”
Hmmm, I think you can use that argument for the Large Hadron Collider. When they built LHC no one said how long they would search for the Higgs boson before giving up and turning the machine off. Without such an explicit definition on how long to run the apparatus that makes the endeavor a religion according to you. LOL.
What are you expecting, some declaration from SETI like the following:
“We shall search until the year 2020 CE. If no signal is found then we shall declare that Homo sapiens is the only intelligent species in the universe.”
For all we know in the year 2021 we will discover pulsed neutrino signals from aliens in other galaxies and it will turn out that ET never ever considered using electromagnetic radiation to communicate.
Using your argument let’s give all of science until the year 2100 to answer all of the outstanding questions, things like what is the nature of human consciousness?, is time travel possible?, what is the ultimate fate of the universe?. If it cannot answer these questions by 2100 then it’s time to pull the plug on the whole affair since continuing on would constitute a religion.
June 4th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Tom, I’m not saying it’s worthless from the get-go. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying there must come a point at which it’s no longer worth getting just more null results. I’m also not saying that this point has been reached as of today. Is this really so very hard to understand?
June 4th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
The LHC is not the same thing at all. Did you read my earlier post, about the Tevatron being scheduled for shutdown? We’re not talking about blindly firing up the ol’ accelerator and hoping for the best. Quantum field theory makes very exact predictions about what to expect of the distribution of particle productions from collisions within some interval of energies. Assuming the reliability of QFT, it can be estimated how long to search before calling it quits.
The Tevatron is being decommissioned because for this exact reason. It can generate collisions of a certain maximum energy with a very reliable relative frequency. QFT says that after enough such events, it’s almost certain that every possible particle pair which can be created will have been created. The data are in the can. Running it longer will only generate more of the same. When the LHC has done likewise, it’ll be shut down. If it had begun producing events of a totally unexpected, anomalous character, it might have gotten a reprieve.
Please note, the LHC now occupies the tunnel which had enclosed an earlier accelerator, the LEP (Large Electron Positron) collider. That machine reached the point of diminishing returns, and now no longer exists. It made way for another scientifically promising instrument.
And I should also make clear that though I’m interested in what discoveries can be made with ever larger, more energetic particle colliders, I’m not willing to grant them a blank check. You could build larger and larger colliders for decades, but there must come a point at which it can no longer be entertained.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
And, Tom, proposing the year 2100 as a cutoff date would be just as meaningless as proposing no cutoff date. That’s just a number you pulled out of a hat, with no intrinsic constraints attached to it at all. You really aren’t paying attention to the question. How long should we listen to the sky for aliens? You say we should listen forever? Then how long should we leave a brain-dead patient hooked up to life support? After all, according to you, that patient *might* be in there thinking, and *might* wake up any minute. To you, that body’s total lack of measurable brain activity is beside the point. We must allow for ALL CONCEIVABLE contingencies. According to you, everything we can imagine is equally likely to be real. Well, there might be angels living in my basement. I must never cease expecting one to reveal itself. Ever.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
I’ve always found it humorous how in fictional stories about extraterrestrial contact, that if it’s us who detects them, we detect a very explicit and deliberate signal like the prime numbers or the Fibonacci sequence, but if it’s them who detects us, they detect Amos ‘n Andy.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
I agree in that we should keep quite. It might be too late, but that wasn’t something we had any real control over. Actively sending stuff out like “Hey, here is where we live. This is what our genetic structure looks like, here’s our atmospheric makeup, and this is what we look like.” is a bad idea. We don’t know who is out there.
Hawking said it best I think, this is what he had to say about aliens in an interview with National Geographic.
“I think it would be a disaster. The extraterrestrials would probably be far in advance of us. The history of advanced races meeting more primitive people on this planet is not very happy, and they were the same species. I think we should keep our heads low.”
June 4th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Of course aliens are looking our way! Why, just last week some guy caught one on video peeking into his living room window.
June 4th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
It will be a lot easier to find us once we fire up the Large Hadron Collider and get the Van Allen Belts out of the way.
June 5th, 2008 at 12:48 am
Hmmm, I find people just a little too paranoid.
If I ever get the chance, I’ll yell to the universe
“WE’RE OVER HERE!!!”
Hey, maybe there are big scary tigers outside our cave, who knows? Let’s just stay in here and never leave.
Take some risk!!!
June 5th, 2008 at 3:19 am
Mark Martin: How long do you think we should carry with SETI?
June 5th, 2008 at 3:20 am
Eating us is probably not the worst outcome. If they’ve been monitoring our TV signals, then what they’ve seen so far is the Berlin Olympics followed by an apparent 60-year long war.
Maybe they’re hurrying to bring us the “blessings of regime change.” On the other hand, if they are, evidence here on Earth suggests they’ll be pretty easy to fight off!
June 5th, 2008 at 3:20 am
Meh. That should be ‘carry ON with SETI’
June 5th, 2008 at 6:42 am
Oh great, now Xur and the Kodan Armada will be able to find us easier.
June 5th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Jim G, Yes, the long axis of earth’s orbital ellipse is a mere 0.014% wider than the axis perpendicular. However, the sun is not at the center of the ellipse and the earth is 3.4% further away at its most distant point than at its closest point. This has an effect on seasons but tilt is the dominant factor.
June 5th, 2008 at 6:59 am
“________________________________________________
Q:
What happens if you don’t detect a signal?
A:
We are just scratching the surface of what a modern search can do. Failure to find a signal wouldn’t prove that we’re the only thinking beings in the Galaxy. After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The SETI Institute intends to press the search. Needless to say, the march of technology and new scientific discoveries will influence future SETI strategies. But giving up is not in the cards. Christopher Columbus did not turn around simply because he failed to find any new lands during his first few days at sea.
________________________________________________
See? This doesn’t even address the question posed. In fact, it evades the question.”
I don’t see that as dodging the question at all. SETI’s mission is right in its name, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. Right there in their FAQ they address that they intend to continue searching until they find something. If they don’t find anything today, they’ll look tomorrow. Since they’re privately funded, anyone who believes in looking for ETI will send them some money to look, and as long as people do, they’ll keep looking.
I really don’t see where the problem is with this, or why they should self-impose some kind of artificial time limit. Personally I don’t think SETI stands much of a chance of finding anything, considering the size of the universe, but it doesn’t bother me that someone else wants to look.
LOL at SoD, another one of these “Teh govt is secretly run by lizards in human suits!!!!11!one!bilbobaggins”
Where do these people come from? Then again, as far as religions go, at least there isn’t any “invisible man who uses a ghost to have sex with a human and give birth to another magic man – who is actually the same man, and the ghost was the same man too! but also different! So worship all of them or yet another invisible man who might be half goat will torture you!!”
June 5th, 2008 at 7:47 am
All of this talk of “how long should we carry on” is somewhat funny, considering that the “we” are private investors who are making the personal choice to fund the project. Anyone not among them has no say in the matter.
Besides, a wise man once said “you cannot hear if you choose not to listen.”
June 5th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Please re-read everything I’ve said. I have not called for the draconian dismantling of SETI. I have not said the Institute should not be perfectly free to carry on. I tolerate many religions. I am also critical of them, as I should be. Civilization without criticism is like the President with emergency war powers.
And, this is NOT all about SETI. People are also free to eagerly open every envelope of junk mail which instructs that they may already have won ten million dollars. They’re perfectly at liberty to indulge every garage tinkerer’s latest device for generating enormous amounts of free energy from water or magnets. They’re free to continue waging war in Iraq. They’re free to keep waiting for the 2nd Coming. They’re free to await the arrival of Nibiru. They’re all free. But what makes you think freedom equates with wisdom? SETI (for example) employs many very talented people. They surely can do better than to devote themselves to the Church of Null Results.
Incidentally, it is possible to rationally determine, from empirically valid principles, when to call it quits with SETI. It’s not all that hard.
June 5th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Some thoughts on SETI:
Communications with extraterrestrials may not be as difficult as we think. If you observe animals across species, you can observe examples of communications. The cat and dog who are friends is one example, but they are both mammals. Interactions between a bird and dog, or humans (hummingbirds can communicate quite well when they want us humans to refill their feeder).
While it’s merely anecdotal, I once observed a cat comfort a human over the death of another cat. The cat was aware of what had happened but was, well, a cat, and didn’t display grief like a human – if it felt any grief at all. However, it knew very well how its humans would react to the death, and did things like stay in close contact (going so far as to rest a paw on the person) and in general try to comfort the human. At the time it struck me just how well the cat understood humans and was able not only to communicate in a limited way but to anticipate what to it was an alien response to the death.
I have a gut feeling that technology requires things like societies and cooperation, things that are in common with ourselves, and that would mean some form of communication is possible. We may even be able to wrap our heads around alien concepts even though we don’t experience them ourselves.
On technology: The SETI response cited here about what happens if we don’t detect a signal makes perfect sense when you realize that wireless electromagnetic communication is just a tad over a century old. Communications continue to evolve. The inability to detect a signal now does not mean no signals exists. What if aliens settled on spread spectrum technology? And what if the signals are too faint to be detected with our current equipment? There’s a lot of variables.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:06 am
KC said:
“On technology: The SETI response cited here about what happens if we don’t detect a signal makes perfect sense when you realize that wireless electromagnetic communication is just a tad over a century old. Communications continue to evolve. The inability to detect a signal now does not mean no signals exists. What if aliens settled on spread spectrum technology? And what if the signals are too faint to be detected with our current equipment? There’s a lot of variables.”
Since when did my argument hinge solely on the limits of radio technology? When did I say that we must only look in the easiest places, and then hold up our hands in abandonment?
The answer is that I never said anything to that effect. Ever. I never even hinted that once one promising avenue has been exhausted, another must not be tackled. I said that there should be some way of deciding when enough time has been invested in the project. It is possible to put well-defined limits on it. Think.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Mark Martin, I understand what you’re saying, and it’s a valid point.
I respectfully request that we stop referring to our species as the only intelligent life in the universe. Elephants and dolphins are remarkably intelligent beings, who bury their dead, plan ahead and problem solve, have self-actualization, language…etc. They just had the misfortune of having bodies that did not evolve the capability to build things.
In fact, there are SETI researchers who have started to focus on studying dolphins more, something I find to be a better usage of time and money, because we KNOW they exist.
The more we learn about their levels of intelligence, the more obvious it becomes how rare intelligent, technologically advanced life is in the universe; it’s not just a matter of brain power, you also need a body that can deftly manipulate things. Think of all the species on this planet — really, it *had* to be the primates that became technologically advanced.
I honestly think we care less about studying and communicating with other intelligent species as we do about finding cool space men.
June 5th, 2008 at 9:58 am
“I’m saying there must come a point at which it’s no longer worth getting just more null results. I’m also not saying that this point has been reached as of today.”
O.K. Mark, please be specific. Give us the year in which if SETI still has negative results it is pointless to continue. Also, a derivation of your number would be much appreciated. You should be able to give us the exact year since you say:
“It is possible to put well-defined limits on it. Think.”
June 5th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Tom, I’m asking you and others to please THINK. It’s not that hard to start laying down some parameters. And it doesn’t necessarily spell out a specific year. It could mean a specific phase, which could come sooner or later, depending on funding, changes in technology, etc.
June 5th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Mark Martin, I think what you are seeing is that the people involved feel like that SETI is still in infancy. They feel like that with the resources being devoted, they are not anywhere near doing anything like the kind of comprehensive search that would reach the point of diminishing returns.
Kind of like looking in the Grand Canyon to find your buddy. If you stand on the north rim and peer down with the naked eye, do you see him? No? Is it time to conclude he isn’t there? Or do you need a more thorough search, say walking down the trail you agreed upon, or getting a helicopter, or alerting the rangers.
The scientists involved don’t think they are wasting their time. They think it is a project that may take several lifetimes to accomplish. With that kind of expectation, it is no wonder they haven’t written “when do we give up” down.
Since you want to define parameters to characterize when an exhaustive search has been completed, why don’t you tell us what you think?
To me, when we can monitor the full sky in the full EM spectrum 100% of the time for an extended period (a century) and not detect anything, when we can see every Earthlike planet within the Milky Way and don’t detect anything, then maybe it is time to consider that they aren’t out there.
June 5th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Perhaps Mark Martin is correct. Perhaps searching for signs of intelligent life in the universe is tantamount to a religion. But then, religions are there to help people relate themselves to the universe. (The root latin word, relios, means “in relation to.”) Most religions are there to relate ourselves to some imagined God or Gods…
SETI, it seems, is a religion based around a single, scientifically based question: Are we the only ones?
As others have noted, SETI is privately funded, and privately operated. For decades, they have been making use of discarded systems and passive “piggyback” signal searches. (I run SETI@home on my machines at home and work myself.)
It seems to me that what we have in SETI is a huge mystery. A problem that anyone can sit back, think about, and add their $0.02 to the debate, and possibly even catch the imagination of the scientific community that dabbles in it. It’s not so much a religion, then, as the biggest puzzle of “Where’s Waldo?” possible.
Yes, it requires a tiny bit of imagination backed up with statistical probability, to become a SETI supporter. And maybe just a tiny bit of faith too. Other intelligent civilizations in the universe are something I can believe in far more easily than I can God. Their existence, at least, is no more improbable than our own.
Even if we search for 1000 years, and never find so much as a single *beep*, the search will have been worth it. Because if we don’t find evidence of anyone/anything else out there… then that tells us something about the rarity of creatures like ourselves.
June 5th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Arguments plus and minus on SETI aside – us finding them seems cool but I’m not sure about them finding us.
It would really suck if the response to our signals is a massive intergalactic armada – or worse a Vogon construction fleet!
June 5th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I expect it will be time to give up the search when we’re no longer human, for searching is one of the hallmarks of humanity.
Gary 7
June 6th, 2008 at 12:11 am
Mark -
You *believe* it is easy to set some criteria for when it would be time to give up on SETI, but you haven’t proposed any such criteria. Instead, you demand that the rest of us do so. Sounds like religion to me.
Why don’t you propose something, and the rest of us can shoot it down?
June 6th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
I believe Neil deGrasse Tyson said it best (when describing the difficulty of sending a signal deep into space in the hopes it will be picked up somewhere) when he said it was like throwing a dart into space and trying to hit the bulls-eye on a target many light years away. Kind of put it into perspective for a layman such as myself.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
[...] out what Phil has said about SETI and about [...]
February 10th, 2009 at 3:29 am
It doesn’t really matter whether they find us or whether we find them it could really go either way. Space is so big that it doesn’t bear thinking about. When you look at dark energy and dark matter you just realise that we don’t know anything at all about what’s out there, perhaps any signals sent are sped up by something or other. You must admit that all we have done is look at the universe and we haven’t touched it beyond the solar system so we really should do the best we can even if it’s just so that we can say that we are!