Last night, I started getting emails and tweets asking about a possible detection of a radio signal coming from two of the newly-discovered planets orbiting other stars.
Cutting to the chase: yes, a signal has been seen, but no, it’s not coming from some alien civilization. It’s almost certainly something much closer, like a satellite interfering with the observation.
So what’s the deal?
You talkin’ to me?
The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a privately-funded group of scientists and engineers who are trying* an ongoing effort to figure out ways to detect signals from space that could be coming from other intelligences: aliens. They focus (haha) mostly on radio signals, since it’s very easy to send radio waves across the vast light years separating stars, it’s easy to detect radio waves (so primitive life like us can pick up the call), and it’s easy to encode information that way. Heck, we’ve been broadcasting coded radio waves for over a century now!
Currently, no unambiguous alien "Hello there!" has been detected. The sky is big, there are a lot of stars out there, and the radio spectrum is really wide, too. Think of how many radio stations there are on a typical radio dial from top to bottom; now divide that up into a billion tiny slices and try to find the one that’s playing the song you want to hear. It’s something of a painstaking process.
Recently, astronomers came up with a clever idea: the Kepler space mission is finding tons of planets orbiting other stars. It may find an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star at just the right distance to allow life to evolve, though no such planet has been found just yet. Still, why look all over the sky when we know where there are lots of planets?
Can’t stop the signal
So a search targeting those stars with planets has been set up. And that’s where our story picks up: using the ginormous 100 meter Green Bank Telescope, astronomers from UC Berkeley found what look like artificial signals when observing two different stars. The stars are called Kepler Object of Interest 812 and 817 (or just KOI 812 and 817 for short). Here’s an example of a signal they found from KOI 817: (more…)
Colorado has some weird stuff in the elections tomorrow.
For one thing, Denver resident Jeff Peckman — the same guy who thought a really badly done video of a Peeping Tom alien was real — went around to other Denverites and got enough signatures to get an initiative on the ballot to create an alien affairs bureau.
I wish I were kidding. I wrote about this last year, hoping it wouldn’t come to pass, but he got enough signatures (though many were apparently faked) to get it on the Denver ballot.
Yay. Or, I guess, "yay?" Over at the JREF’s Swift blog, Karen Stollznow has the takedown of this ridiculous situation. It’s tempting to laugh it off, except that 1) it’s already cost real money to even get this on the ballot, and b) this election cycle is so crazy that something like this might have a real chance. We’ll see.
It’s too bad I’m not eligible to vote on that. But there are lots of other issues in this election I’m watching, some of which are very serious (like Colorado Proposition 62, which would give a fertilized human egg the status of a person under the law. Yes, seriously. What’s next: giving zygotes the vote? Sponsoring the Blastula Non-Discrimination Act, and Take Your Morula To Work Day?).
I voted early because I’ll be out of town on November 2. But I looked over the list of initiatives very carefully, and I’ll be checking my news feeds come Tuesday. I know people of all stripes, beliefs, and ideas read this blog. I urge people to think carefully and logically about the issues in this election, and then to go out and vote. There’s a whole lot of nonsense out there this election cycle, far more even than usual. It is quite literally up to us to make sure that reality sees the light of day.
Are we under the threat of alien attack? Is Hollywood right? Could monsters from another world already be on their way here to steal our water and enslave or eat us?*
Find out in the thrilling second episode of "Phil Plait’s Bad Universe", airing on the Discovery Channel on Wednesday, October 6 at 10:00 p.m. EDT, right after MythBusters!
I would’ve changed one single line: "Fortunately the aliens landed somewhere very remote which is also a well-known top secret Army base," adding "… where we also happen to be doing high-altitude atomic bomb detection research using weather balloons that, when crashed, look very much like flying saucers."
But then, I’m a humorless skeptic striving all the time to bury the truth.
I disagree with him. I think in fact it’s more likely that an aggressive alien race would create self-replicating robot probes that will disperse through the galaxy and destroy all life that way.
But more likely still doesn’t equate to likely. I’ve been thinking about this on and off for a few days, in fact, and I suspect a likely answer to Fermi’s Paradox — "Where are they?" — is simply that intelligent life that is capable of interstellar flight doesn’t last long enough to colonize other stars. That would neatly explain why, if stars with planets are common (which we know is almost certainly true), and the conditions for life to arise are relatively common (again, that seems very likely), the galaxy isn’t overrun with life. It should be by now; it’s had billions of years to have space-faring races evolve and colonize the whole shebang.
So in reality, Hawking’s idea and the one I go over in my book are probably wrong. But I’m an optimist, and I can hope that the reason the galaxy isn’t softly humming with life (that’s Carl Sagan’s poetic phrase) is that we’re the first, or at least the first in a while. That would mean we still get our chance. It’s a big responsibility, really.
And to be clear, that’s not snark, even if this post started out a bit snarky. I’m serious. We may be utterly, entirely alone in a galaxy filled with planets that outnumber people on our own planet 50 to 1. That idea gives me the creeps more than the idea of hostile aliens bent on sterilizing each of those planets. But at least it gives us a good chance to spread and see the place a bit. I’d like to think that in a hundred generations, this arm of the Milky Way will boast a thousand human planets. It’s a nice thought.
[Note added after I wrote this: I see Sean at Cosmic Variance has weighed in on this as well. But I heard it first from that man about town Josh Cagan.]
*A movie I liked and about which I am unapologetic.
Don’t believe me? Then gaze upon this picture, O Foolish Human:
BABloggee Jeremy Theriot sent this picture to me. It looks innocent, doesn’t it? Ah, certainly, until you see it from a different angle…
J’accuse! Obviously, they walk among us! Or, more accurately, they are rooted among us. If prickly pear cacti have roots. I think they do. Yeah, let’s assume they do.
So maybe they’re not a major threat, but have you ever seen one up close? I’m positive I don’t want one probing me, I assure you. There’s a reason they’re prickly…
P.S. This one provides even more evidence that they photosynthesize among us.
"An official announcement by the Obama administration disclosing the reality of extraterrestrial life is imminent", indeed. What does imminent mean? A year? 10? I’m guessing never. But as long as the antiscience advocates can use words like soon, imminent, and impending, they can keep their believers on the hook.
And why am I not surprised to see Richard Hoagland’s name in that article?
Every now and again I have to do that comical rapid-shaking-of-the-head accompanied by that wugga wugga wugga sound when I think that people actually buy into this, um, stuff. Wow.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?" -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters
"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating." -- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
Last night, I started getting emails and tweets asking about a possible detection of a radio signal coming from two of the newly-discovered planets orbiting other stars. 
Colorado has some weird stuff in the elections tomorrow.
