Possibility of alien intelligence recedes

A few months ago I wrote about the possibility of discovering alien intelligence, and the whole SETI project. New research suggests that the planets close enough for us to investigate have environments that would be extremely inhospitable to life – at least to life as we know it.

Sophie Borland writes about Howard Smith’s recent findings.

Still waiting for little green men to make contact? Don’t hold your breath. A leading astronomer has concluded there probably aren’t any aliens out there – meaning we are entirely alone in the universe.

Even though there may be tens of thousands of other distant planets similar in size to Earth, the conditions on them are likely to be too hostile to support life-forms such as ET.

Dr Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist at Harvard University, believes there is very little hope of discovering aliens and, even if we did, it would be almost impossible to make contact.

So far astronomers have discovered a total of 500 planets in distant solar systems – known as extrasolar systems – although they believe billions of others exist. But Dr Smith points out that many of these planets are either too close to their sun or too far away, meaning their surface temperatures are so extreme they could not support life.

Others have unusual orbits which cause vast temperature variations making it impossible for water to exist as a liquid – an essential element for life. Dr Smith said: ‘We have found that most other planets and solar systems are wildly different from our own. They are very hostile to life as we know it.’

‘The new information we are getting suggests we could effectively be alone in the universe. There are very few solar systems or planets like ours. It means it is highly unlikely there are any planets with intelligent life close enough for us to make contact.’

Not everyone agrees.

Only last month Professor Stephen Hawking said the fact that there are billions of galaxies out there made it perfectly rational to assume there were other life-forms in the universe.

Researchers from the University of London have recently suggested that aliens could be living on as many as 40,000 other planets.

But Dr Smith suggests that such estimates are optimistic.

He said: ‘Any hope of contact has to be limited to a relatively tiny bubble of space around the Earth, reaching maybe 1,250 light years out from our planet, where aliens might be able to pick up our signals or send us their own. But communicating would still take decades or centuries.’

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Papal astronomer would baptise aliens

I’ve been saving this up for a quiet weekend post. These are throwaway comments in the context of a journalistic interview, but there are some serious questions in the background.

Alok Jah reports:

Guy Consolmagno, who is one of the pope’s astronomers, said he would be “delighted” if intelligent life was found among the stars. “But the odds of us finding it, of it being intelligent and us being able to communicate with it – when you add them up it’s probably not a practical question.”

He said that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. “Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul.” Would he baptise an alien? “Only if they asked.”

Meeting intelligent extra-terrestrial life-forms would open up a lot of theological issues. Do they have a spiritual soul? What is our relationship with them? How do they fit into God’s plan of salvation? If they asked me to baptise them my main question would be: Do they need baptism? Any thoughts in the comment boxes please.

Alien baptism was not the focus of the interview. Consolmagno spent much more time talking about the positive relationship that is possible between science and faith.

Consolmagno, who became interested in science through reading science fiction, said that the Vatican was well aware of the latest goings-on in scientific research. “You’d be surprised,” he said.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, of which Stephen Hawking is a member, keeps the senior cardinals and the pope up-to-date with the latest scientific developments. Responding to Hawking’s recent comments that the laws of physics removed the need for God, Consolmagno said: “Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist and when it comes to theology I can say he’s a brilliant physicist.”

Consolmagno curates the pope’s meteorite collection and is a trained astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican’s observatory. He dismissed the ideas of intelligent design – a pseudoscientific version of creationism. “The word has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn’t originally mean at all. It’s another form of the God of the gaps. It’s bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning.”

Consolmagno’s comments came as the pope made his own remarks about science at St Mary’s University College in Twickenham. Speaking to pupils, he encouraged them to look at the bigger picture, over and above the subjects they studied. “The world needs good scientists, but a scientific outlook becomes dangerously narrow if it ignores the religious or ethical dimension of life, just as religion becomes narrow if it rejects the legitimate contribution of science to our understanding of the world,” he said. “We need good historians and philosophers and economists, but if the account they give of human life within their particular field is too narrowly focused, they can lead us seriously astray.”

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The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence

I’m dying to read Paul Davies’s new book The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe? I know it’s a bit cheeky just pasting the the blurb from Amazon here for a book I haven’t read, but it does summarise the fascination of the whole SETI project:

On April 8, 1960, a young American astronomer, Frank Drake, turned a radio telescope toward the star Tau Ceti and listened for several hours to see if he could detect any artificial radio signals. With this modest start began a worldwide project of potentially momentous significance. Known as SETI — Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — it is an amalgam of science, technology, adventure, curiosity and a bold vision of humanity’s destiny. Drake has said that SETI is really a search for ourselves — who we are and what our place might be in the grand cosmic scheme of things. Yet with one tantalizing exception, SETI has produced only negative results. After millions of hours spent eavesdropping on the cosmos astronomers have detected only the eerie sound of silence. What does that mean? Are we in fact alone in the vastness of the universe? Is ET out there, but not sending any messages our way? Might we be surrounded by messages we simply don’t recognize? Is SETI a waste of time and money, or should we press ahead with new and more sensitive antennas? Or look somewhere else? And if a signal were to be received, what then? How would we — or even should we — respond?

Bryan Appleyard had an article in the Times recently about Jill Tarter, who is the scientist on whom Jodie Foster’s character in Contact was based. He writes about Drake’s work:

He came up with the Drake Equation, a way of calculating the number of intelligent civilisations in the Milky Way, our galaxy. To solve the equation most of the terms have to be guessed. But making, he says, reasonable assumptions, Drake reckons there are 10,000 alien civilisations in our galaxy.

“I’m not being super-pessimistic or super-optimistic when I say that.”

Unfortunately, 50 years on and in spite of the odd wow moment, Seti has found none of them.

In the institute the equation is everywhere — on T-shirts, posters and even on a plaque at reception. It ties together everything they do, which means not just scanning the skies but investigating Mars and meteors, planets and protozoa.

Only a small proportion of this place is actually devoted to Seti proper, the rest is a specialist science operation. But everything feeds into the equation. And all the other projects bring in money in the form of research grants, primarily from the nearby Nasa Ames Research Center.

The equation seems to say life is out there, probably in abundance, that the Milky Way is more like a cocktail party than a desert. So where the hell are they all?

The scientist Enrico Fermi once said that if we hadn’t heard from the aliens, they weren’t there. The universe is so old — 13.7 billion years — that a single intelligence would have had time to colonise the galaxy. At the institute they step round this. Nobody here doubts there is life out there. “I bet everybody a couple of Starbucks that we’ll find ET within a couple of dozen years,” says the gleeful and buoyant Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the institute.

“I cannot imagine a scenario in which life on Earth is unique,” says Mark Showalter, expert on planetary rings and discoverer of three new moons and three new rings, principal investigator.

All say the real miracle would not be ET but the complete absence of intelligent life. “If there are aliens out there,” says Shostak, “that’s miraculous; if there aren’t, that’s a miracle.”

No aliens would mean that in our entire galaxy — 100,000 light years across (for perspective, the moon is 1.3 light seconds from Earth), 1,000 light years thick, 100 billion stars, countless planets — and in the entire universe, 170 billion galaxies, 14 billion years old, humans were a one-off. Would that make us feel special or lonely? It should certainly make us feel weird.

For me, the alien questions go hand-in-hand with the early hominid questions – hence my fascination with them both. Is there something unique about human intelligence, imagination, creativity and freedom? Were we ‘alone/unique’ even in the time of the Neandertals (and the two other possible contemporaneous hominids: more posts to follow)? Are we alone now?

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