ETs

I went and watched Jill Tarter's acceptance speech for her TED Prize earlier this month. I've been aware of Jill's work for a long while now, and have been a (somewhat silent fan). But I was unaware of the TED prize until it came up in xkcd.com. (Kudos to xkcd for that!) I really liked the grand view she takes of the universe and our place in it. She eloquently points out the fact that swirls of gas and dust have collapsed and developed into a form which is aware of itself and wonders where it comes from, and whether it's alone. When you think about it like that, it's a little unnerving. It really is hard to imagine a more profound discovery than to definitively prove that there is sentient life elsewhere in the universe, perhaps relatively close to our little spot in the suburbs of the Milky Way. Science fiction has for decades explored the many possibilities of the forms that such life might take. Movies and TV have focused mostly on the humanoid forms since the costumes are easy. One might make arguments about the typical strength of materials relative to the gravity of habitable planets, etc., and about convergent evolution. But to me it seems exceedingly unlikely that intelligent life elsewhere has two legs, two arms, or even a head like ours. It would seem to me to be a long shot that they are RNA/DNA based, or even based on amino acids and proteins. It could be they they are tiny, and have a hive-like culture. Or they could be vast stadium-sized creatures who live for millennia and float in their densely gaseous outer planetary layers. The possibilities are endless. The chance that they are anything like us, though, seems truly remote. But here are a few things we can say relatively confidently about intelligent/sentient/technical beings elsewhere that we may some day detect: 1. They are made out of the same kinds of atoms and molecules that we find here, possibly including iron/cobalt/nickel, other metals, and lighter atoms like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, silicon, and on and on. These atoms came from the explosions of the first stars in their final death throes, and that's what's out there to make life from. 2. They need energy to survive, and may have learned how (as we have) to access alternative sources of energy to drive their technology. Some of these sources may be entirely unknown to us (yet - that's one reason why we need to keep pushing the high energy frontier) but available all around us if we just knew what to do. 3. They almost certainly use ordinary electromagnetism and the nuclear forces in their technology, which is based on the ordinary matter from #1. Clearly light, and all the other forms of electromagnetic radiation are so ubiquitous it is hard to imagine they've overlooked it. Similarly for the nuclear forces. This is our doorway into ordinary matter at reasonable temperatures. (This having been said, humans on earth only recently started to learn how to control these forces. And, given #2, maybe the aliens have moved on to better things.) Their electromagnetic emanations, anyway, are just about our only hope of detecting them. 4. They are almost certainly either far older, and more developed than we are, or far younger and more primitive. Humanity has only been truly self aware, and headed toward advanced technology, in the very recent past, perhaps the last few hundred thousand years. Compared with billions of years, this is a tiny slice of time. 5. They are very, very far away and it would take an excessively long time for them to cross the vast distances between stars. (I view faster-than-light travel or communication as a non-possibility, practically speaking, for even the most advanced life forms. I know this is not going to make me popular with the alien fans out there, but outer space is really, really big.) It takes light many thousands of years to cross the vast stretches of space. You have to really want to go interstellar if that's what you're about, and you have to abandon the rest of your society and all the support you get from it once you leave. For me the bottom line is that even if we found aliens by peering out into space with our detectors, we may realize they are out there, but they are probably not coming here. Somehow that makes me feel more lonely, not less. And if they did come here their technology is so advanced that they would hardly regard us as worth of any sort of interest or notice. Our planet might have some interest for them in terms of resources to exploit, but that is probably about it. We'd just be in the way, at best. We can forget about communicating with them...let's just hope they don't want our protein. Anyway, give Jill a listen she is very eloquent on the subject.