Let me draw your attention to two interesting stories this morning, one harking back to the night in August of 1977 when the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University recorded the famous ‘Wow!’ signal. For those unfamiliar with it, the ‘Wow!’ signal gets its name from Big Ear volunteer Jerry Ehman’s annotation (several days later) on the signal’s printout. ‘Wow!’ seemed appropriate for a signal that was 30 times stronger in volume than the background noise and took up a single 10 kilohertz-wide band on the receiver, an enigmatic 70-second narrow-band burst at almost precisely 1420 megahertz, the emission frequency of hydrogen.
A message from an extraterrestrial civilization? ‘Wow!’ seemed to fit the bill, but it disappeared and despite more than 50 repeated searches by the Big Ear team, it never recurred. In this article for The Planetary Society, Amir Alexander calls the signal “…the single most intriguing result ever produced by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” one made all the more frustrating because of the lack of any follow-up signal. Alexander’s story alerted me to the fact that Bob Gray, a data analyst with a passion for radio astronomy, has just published a book on the ‘Wow!’ signal based on three decades of study and observation using a wide variety of equipment.
Image: A 70-second burst that came to be known as the ‘Wow!’ signal. Credit: Columbus Dispatch.
The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Chicago: Palmer Square Press, 2011) caught my eye not only because of ‘Wow!’ but also because of my love of travel books — Gray’s journeys in support of his SETI research have been globe-spanning. Having built a radio telescope of his own using a 12-foot dish and a steerable mount from a World War II radar installation, he began by operating his own SETI program for fifteen years, looking at the region of the spectrum and the specific coordinates where ‘Wow!’ had first appeared. Then he started expanding the hunt, traveling to the Oak Ridge Observatory near Harvard, Massachusetts.
Alexander’s article tells the tale and I won’t do anything more than hit the highlights here, but suffice it to say that Gray worked with Paul Horowitz at the observatory using a 25-meter radio telescope running META (Million Channel Extraterrestrial Array). He later went to the Very Large Array in New Mexico, whose 27 dishes mounted on rails were put at his disposal for a four hour stretch in September of 1995 (this followed a lengthy proposal submission process). Still later, he wound up in Tasmania at the Mount Pleasant Observatory, working with Simon Ellingsen.
The result: No trace of the ‘Wow!’ signal despite the presence of unknown (and presumably natural) radio sources close to where it had originated. ‘Wow!’ remains a mystery and Gray’s book will keep its tantalizing story alive as he continues his personal quest to nail it down. Alexander quotes him as calling ‘Wow!’ ” “…a pretty strong tug on the cosmic fishing line,” about as charming an image as can be imagined for this most intriguing of all SETI results to date. Gray’s book is in my reading stack and I’ll be offering my own review in the near future.
Money and Commitment at the ATA
The 42 radio telescopes of the Allen Telescope Array, located near Lassen Peak in Hat Creek, California, are one day to be joined by more than 300 more if the original plan is followed, but at the moment the installation’s financial problems are what occupies its supporters even as they continue their observations. New York Times science writer Dennis Overbye tells the tale in a late January story that looks at the ATA and its possibilities, examining what he calls “…a dream deferred by politics, a lack of money and the technological challenges of searching what astronomers call ‘the cosmic haystack’: 100 billion stars in the galaxy and 9 billion narrow-band radio channels on which aliens, if they exist, might be trying to hail us.”
Image: The Allen Telescope Array continues its work as funding issues are temporarily resolved. Credit: ATA.
Centauri Dreams readers will recall that the University of California’s own funding for the ATA ran out last spring, sending the telescopes into forced hibernation until a funding appeal sent out over the SETI Institute’s Web site brought in enough money to fund about two more months of operations. The US Air Force is also interested in the array’s possibilities in terms of tracking satellites and space debris, an agreement that is still being negotiated. The ATA is back in business (since December), but the financial shortfalls ahead are sizable for an installation that needs $1.5 million per year for operations and another $1 million for the staff of astronomers.
Microsoft founder Paul Allen ponied up $25 million to launch the original project, which would be owned by the University of California at Berkeley as well as the SETI Institute, but fleshing out the remaining 300 or so antennas will require a cool $55 million, making the ATA a site in search of philanthropists. As Overbye recounts, SETI has never been robustly funded and has been controversial from the start, particularly with alarming price estimates like the $10 billion a 1971 NASA workshop came up with for a giant telescope array that would have been called Cyclops. The infamous 1978 ‘Golden Fleece’ award from Wisconsin senator William Proxmire only added to the problems, leading to the cancellation (in 1993) of NASA’s SETI survey work.
Taking SETI private was the only option, but the tough-minded scientists who continue this work soldier on despite the challenges. Writes Overbye:
Astronomers now know that the galaxy is teeming with at least as many planets — the presumed sites of life — as stars. Advanced life and technology might be rare in the cosmos, said Geoffrey W. Marcy, the Watson and Marilyn Alberts in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “but surely they are out there, because the number of Earthlike planets in the Milky Way galaxy is simply too great.”
A simple “howdy,” a squeal or squawk, or an incomprehensible stream of numbers captured by one of the antennas here at the University of California’s Hat Creek Radio Observatory would be enough to end our cosmic loneliness and change history, not to mention science. It would answer one of the most profound questions humans ask: Are we alone in the universe?
I like the way Overbye frames this story, highlighting a band of astronomers depending on “…the stubborn strength of their own dreams,” a description which goes a long way toward explaining Bob Gray’s own persistent hunt for the ‘Wow!’ signal as well. It takes passion, and a hide as tough as a Texas longhorn’s, to fight through budget shortfalls, political maneuvering and the sheer intractability of the technical problems involved in pulling an intelligent signal out of the cosmos. But things are happening again at Hat Creek and have been since December, while the question of how long the site will stay operational hovers over SETI like an ominous cloud.
“..at almost precisely 1420 kilohertz, the emission frequency of hydrogen.”
1420 megahertz, not kilohertz.
m
Why don’t the astronomers at ATA ‘sell’ portions of the sky on the promise that any planet found to harbour intelligent life within that portion, would be named after the purchaser; until such time as the newly discovered inhabitants gave us its ‘true’ name!
Meaux writes:
Absolutely — thanks for catching that!
Question??? Does anyone know the area in the sky from where it orginated. As an amataur astronomer I would like to use one of my scopes to look, just for the fun of it.
Tom
Here is a Web site from the Big Ear Radio Observatory (about the only thing left from it after OSU sold the land the telescope was on in 1998 to be turned into condos and a golf course – oh yeah, there’s a marker plaque there too) with lot of links to some excellent articles and information on the Wow! signal of 1977:
http://www.bigear.org/wowmenu.htm
I have been told by several SETI folks that a signal detected from Australia in 1990 was even better than Wow! (tracked three times, as memory serves), but I cannot seem to find anything else about it and this sure hasn’t received the publicity the Wow! has. Does anyone know anything more on this? We may be missing out on something truly Wow! in SETI.
Here are images and text from The SETI League Web site on the dedication ceremony of the Big Ear historical marker in 1998, upon the tearing down of the large rectangular telescope after conducting one of the longest SETI programs in history, starting in 1973.
http://www.setileague.org/photos/bigear00.htm
Another answer to the Fermi Paradox/Drake Equation: Short-lived monetary preference over long-term scientific searching for key answers to existence.
Perhaps we already have the answer to the Great Question in the form of the Wow! signal. I’ve never been too confident with the idea that somebody would ever narrow-beam a dedicated message directly to us. Mainly because
attempting communication at light speed over interstellar distances just seems too impractical. But on the other hand how to second guess alien pyschology. So keep looking for messages too.
Still, I think it’s more likely we will detect (or blunder onto) some artificial signal produced by spill-over from some unknown technological process or industry at some unexpected wavelength. Perhaps that is what the Wow! signal was. The region the Wow! signal originated from could stand being examined by a large optical telescope and the ALMA radio telescopes. We hope we don’t waste observing time by looking during an alien equivalent of their weekend or holidays!
When the LSST and Pan-STARRS gets to work I wonder if they may detect an optical version of a Wow! signal from other regions of the sky. All very speculative but our increasing capabilities may surprise us yet.
“at almost precisely 1420 megahertz, the emission frequency of hydrogen. ”
Choosing one of the most common _natural_ frequencies for SETI/METI has always struck me as incredibly stupid. (Of course radio SETI in general is terrible bet, for reasons discussed in earlier threads, but that’s another discussion).
What you’d want is a very _artificial_ looking signal — one that would stick out like a sore thumb from the natural frequencies we observe. If for example you saw a very improbably bright spike in an emission spectrum unique to gold, or some other element not found naturally concentrated anywhere in the sky, accompanied by those of no other elements, you wouldn’t have to decode the message to know that it’s artificial. But there are all sorts of possible natural assemblages of hydrogen that might, on occasions rare or not so rare, emit large amounts of photons resulting in “wow” (really should be called “ho hum”) type signals.
@Tom,
From the Wikipedia page: “Converted into the J2000.0 equinox, the coordinates become RA= 19h25m31s ± 10s or 19h28m22s ± 10s and declination= ?26°57? ± 20?”
Tom Batty, sorry but I couldn’t resist the following comment.
Imagine a universe with where ETI was common but there was a cosmic law that prevented the sort of group effort that would allow startravel. In this universe vast numbers of amateur contact enthusiasts would accumulate, most of which would be in societies millions of years in advance of us. In such societies they could obviously look up charts that would tell them of the rare occasions that would allow gravitational lensing to either boost a signal sent, or allow optimal listening conditions so that less coordinated efforts may succeed at a given interesting target system.
To me this fantasy is your only hope, yet you have no chart, so your best option is to just point at the galactic centre. If you wish to claim priority, and point in an alternate direction to such armatures, pick a dense open cluster just off this line.
Two other ways to search for technological alien intelligences using our current abilities:
If an advanced ETI has colonized its solar system, they may use their sun as a dumping ground for things like radioactive materials. We should check the spectrums of likely candidate stars for the signatures of elements which are not the normal part of its makeup.
We should also be monitoring supernovae for any artificial signals. Not just because we might get something from a society that once lived on a world around that dying star, but also because since these stellar explosions are among the most noticeable objects in the Universe, an ETI wanting to get the attention of any capable beings in the observing path might conduct METI the opposite direction of the celestial blast.
The assumption is that the astronomers observing the supernova might catch the alien signal in the process. This also assumes said astronomers would recognize an artificial signal and be sophisticated enough to report it as such.
A reply to a post in the prior thread which is a better fit for this one:
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Nick – February 3, 2012 at 16:39
“We have petabytes of information about the cosmos, including on more than 100 billion galaxies at a variety of wavelengths, and in all that there is not a shred of evidence for a technological version of the Malthusian imperative at work anywhere in all this vast space besides our own planet. Life has invariably operated according to that imperative here on earth for more than 4 billion years. If a technological Malthusian imperative had been operating in any nearby galaxy for the hundreds of millions of years of average head start we’d expect, it would be blatantly obvious — nearly all the surfaces of the galaxy would look blatantly artificial — and we would have discovered it decades ago.
This vast body of data confirms our observations of life itself, particularly the astronomical complexity/improbability of the simplest known closed ecosystem. Both pieces of evidence, both involving vast amounts of data, tell us that life is astronomically rare — probably far less than one independent origin per galaxy.
Of course, astrobiologists, in order to make a living at their “science without a subject”, must argue otherwise.”
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@Nick
I agree that the lack of any astronomical evidence for Kardashev 2 or 3 civilizations is telling us something very important. But I could not disagree more with the interpretation. What we have found is NOT evidence that LIFE is rare. We are seeing evidence of the limitations of technology.
Biological life does NOT equal Kardashev level technology! Earth herself has hosted large metazoans for roughly 10% of her life. The very weak Kardashev 0 electronic signature of humans has been around for 0.00000002 of the age of the Earth.
The rapacious primates vain enough to call themselves “sapiens” have already consumed roughly half of the available fossil hydrocarbons in just a century of electronic civilization. In theory it is perhaps possible that they will find a way to transition to a more modest sustainable electronic civilization, but the probability of that becomes lower with every decade of foolish choices. It is more likely that 2300 will be technologically similar to 1700.
If human high energy use electronic civilization is half over (likely), and a one off in the history of our planet (also likely), then one would have to observe 50 million other Earths to catch another in the brief Kardashev 0 period of exuberant electronic civilization.
The flawed assumption is that “progress” makes advancement of biological life to higher Kardashev levels inevitable, and that the lack of observation of Kardashev 2 or 3 civilizations in the sky means that LIFE is rare. I strongly disagree. The physical laws of this universe probably do not permit Kardashev 2 or 3 civilizations. Damn those laws of thermodynamics! (grin)
A full accounting of all the costs (planetary capital: ores, biospheric resources consumed, energy inputs from all sources) would almost certainly show that sustainable generation of concentrated energy is impossible. In other words, with air, sunlight, soil, and rain, plants can self reproduce. There is no credible scenario in which fusion reactors or solar powered spacecraft could self reproduce. Everything we have built has been leveraged off the oxidation of old biomass.
I believe that the sky is full of life, that perhaps 10% of liquid water planets host large metazoans. If one could travel to these places, one would find things as wonderful and various as our elephants, tigers, redwood trees, dolphins, butterflies, giant squids, and eagles. There could even be large brained creatures with their own versions of art, music, philosophy, natural science, literature and poetry.
Each of these organisms would be pursuing their biological “Malthusian imperative” within the limits of their planetary ecosystems. What would not be found is places with technological civilizations enjoying sustained exponential growth in energy consumption, as they can not and do not exist. The “technological version of the Malthusian imperative” is a short lived and self defeating folly, a Ponzi scheme, and a suicide pact for our descendants.
H “sapiens” has already consumed more than 90% of the fish in the sea, 90% of the temperate zone old growth forests without creating a single self replicating solid state device or a working fusion power station. Now we are busy acidifying the oceans so the coral reefs will all be dead by the middle of this century. There is no reason to expect than any other species on any other world would have had a better result from pursuing their “technological version of the Malthusian imperative”.
Frank, I thank you for the location data, I have several star chart programs in my computer so I will input that info to find that region in the sky.
Rob: For certain I have no intention of conducting a private SETI search, with my amataur size scopes it would stupid for anyone to think of being able to find anything. I was simply being inquisitive, nothing more.
Ljk said “they may use their sun as a dumping ground for things like radioactive materials”.
This would make no sense with a dumping motive, since it is always cheaper to send waste out of your system entirely. Thus only a signalling others motive works here. We will only detect those who desperately want to be seen.
As I recall the major pity of the WOW signal was that no signal processor was online, so if the burst had coding we’ll never know.
Of course, the strategies we Benfords proposed mean looking back at the WOW site over a year span (the approx orbital period — with the day, the only common time interval we know roughly for terrestrial like planets near G & K stars). No one ever has.
That might make a reachable target agenda for a network of amateurs willing to run their own small dish receivers with signal processing. The chances of a discovery scale linearly with the number of amateurs, time observed and their distribution around the globe (to get the largest coverage over a day).
@ljk
“Another answer to the Fermi Paradox/Drake Equation: Short-lived monetary preference over long-term scientific searching for key answers to existence.”
Naw, all the money went to buying a football, basketball and soccer team.
I know Paul put down 25 million to build the array, but out of a 13 billion dollar portfolio just a million a year, someone could match that for the other million.
Hello,
We have made significant– frankly admirable progress– in the last generation or so despite exasperating fiscal limitations when it comes to narrowing down fp (the fraction of stars with planets), a very important figure in the Drake equation. Before 51 Pegasi and the pulsar planets the range of values for fp, according to our limited fund of knowledge, could have been have been anything between close to 0 or close to 1. In fact, I remember from when I was a young boy in the late 1980s reading about the theory positing that planets form only when stars bump into each other knocking material loose which then coalesces into planets. If the collision theory were true, then we could reasonably expect there to be no planetary systems anywhere close to our own given the rarity of stellar collisions– perhaps only a handful per galaxy. Luckily, a planet-barren Universe is not the one in which we dwell, as things are now at the point at which we can say that at the very least fp has to be 0.5 and accordingly the number of possible stages for life to get started, in our galaxy alone, is truly staggering.
Although we now know the Universe is not planet-barren, we are not sure whether the Universe is sterile–that is, barren in terms of life. We are now at the point at which we should be actively trying to get at the term fl (the fraction of planets on which life arises). Interestingly, things are now at the point as far as our range of estimates for fl that they were with our estimates of fp a generation or more ago. Yes, there are promising signs indicating a non-negligible fl– the ubiquity of planets, the abundance of water and organic molecules, and the immense time scales available for evolution. Even given the aforementioned reasons to be optimistic that life may be widespread, there are those who subscribe to a collision theory of planets level of unlikelihood for the likelihood of life. Given that ubiquitous life is more in line with the highly successful Copernican Principle, I am with those who say that we should expect some type of life to emerge wherever there is a planet with liquid water, organic matter, and an energy source.
The interesting question underlying many of our fascinating discussions here at Centauri Dreams is this: at what level does the Copernican Principle start to lose force? Clearly, the Universe cannot be brimming with super-advanced civilizations of the type we so often imagine e.g. those engaging in highly visible astro-engineering projects and galaxy-wide colonization. Sure, maybe it is hard for most civilizations to reach that level of sophistication and energy consumption, but if indeed civilizations are common, then at least one or a few should have done so. So, how do we reconcile the Copernican Principle with Fermi’s Paradox? What variable in the Drake equation becomes so small that it can explain our absence of evidence for ETI?
There are basically three possibilities regarding the origin of life.
1. It was a product of Divine intervention.
2. It was an incredible fluke whose probability approaches zero. It happened without divine intervention only once in the observable Universe: our fellow creatures, large and small, and ourselves are it.
3. Life arises naturally wherever certain conditions are met. The probability approaches 1 in the appropriate arenas.
In astrophysicist’s Fred Adams book “Our Living Multiverse” he mentions a persuasive counter-argument to those like the French biochemist Jacque Monod who believe that we are the product of an extremely low probability event or events. A calculation regarding the formation of stars leads one to the chance of a star forming from totally random collisions of interstellar hydrogen being something of the order of 1 in 10^1500!! We see stars everywhere, so clearly there must be something more than just a purely random process at work—the Universe is structured such that although there is no specific “star principle” we can expect stars to form due to general laws of nature and appropriate initial conditions. By the way, the 1 in 10^1500 chance of a single star forming is much smaller than the chance of a 51 amino acid chain forming via random collisions in the prebiotic soup (1 in 10^66, I think).
Parallel reasoning from the star example leads one to reasonably expect that there could be processes leading to the formation of complex self-replicating molecules. And, by the way, all it would take from the point of complex self-replicating molecules to microbial-like life and beyond is Evolution. A Monod defender could counter-argue that although we see stars everywhere we do not see life anywhere else other than on our own planet. To this I would reply that we have only begun to explore our Universe in a level of detail great enough to detect other life forms and, further, the searches for intelligent life have arguably been based a limited conception of what forms other reasoning creatures may take on. Also, quite obviously, stars operate on an energy level much higher than microbes and so it only makes sense that they would be considerably easier to detect.
Rob Henry said on February 3, 2012 at 20:24:
Ljk said “they may use their sun as a dumping ground for things like radioactive materials”.
“This would make no sense with a dumping motive, since it is always cheaper to send waste out of your system entirely. Thus only a signalling others motive works here. We will only detect those who desperately want to be seen.”
Now if people on this planet are worried about sending out deliberate signals in order to attract the attention of other intelligences, how do you think the galaxy at large – especially if there is an interstellar civilization out there – might feel about us or anyone dumping their trash – especially their toxic, radioactive trash – into the Milky Way.
Sure, it’s a big galaxy, but there may be rules about it just the same. I am willing to bet that while it may be easier via the laws of physics to send junk sailing into deep space rather than at a sun, someone or some organization may not allow illegal dumping in the event of a collision, wanton pollution, or just plain old NIMCBY, or not in my cosmic back yard.
Someone has to start thinking ahead to the future when we or someone gets off this planet and past Pluto permanently.
Perhaps the same goes for transmissions. Maybe we are in a transmission-free zone due to our lack of interstellar travel or some other measure of our not being a galactic culture (heck, we’re barely a Sol system culture if at all). The Wow! signal was an accidental slip which the transgressors shut off or aimed away from Earth the moment they caught the error. I bet they had to pay a pretty hefty fine, too.
To Joy/Nick:
You see the Cosmic Glass mostly empty when it comes to life. I see it as foaming with evidence that we are hardly alone in all sorts of ways. But we need to search to be certain one way or the other. It is obvious that centuries of debates on the subject have only gotten us so far.
Gregory Benford said on February 3, 2012 at 21:47:
“That might make a reachable target agenda for a network of amateurs willing to run their own small dish receivers with signal processing. The chances of a discovery scale linearly with the number of amateurs, time observed and their distribution around the globe (to get the largest coverage over a day).”
The SETI League has been trying to recruit amateur radio astronomers to conduct SETI since 1994. The initial goal was to have about five thousand such folks all over Earth looking for alien signals. Unfortunately that number has yet to be reached, but perhaps with today’s communications technology one does not need so many to perform a similar task?
http://setileague.org/
Joy: “The physical laws of this universe probably do not permit Kardashev 2 or 3 civilizations. Damn those laws of thermodynamics! (grin)…A full accounting of all the costs (planetary capital: ores, biospheric resources consumed, energy inputs from all sources) would almost certainly show that sustainable generation of concentrated energy is impossible. In other words, with air, sunlight, soil, and rain, plants can self reproduce. There is no credible scenario in which fusion reactors or solar powered spacecraft could self reproduce.”
This is an important and fascinating claim. But it needs more specifics. For instance, it’s not plausible that the limitation is merely a matter of energy, since our consumption of power is only a miniscule fraction of what our sun promiscuously squanders, even if we never succeed in controlling fusion power on a smaller scale. Nor does mere access to matter limit our ascent to the stars. We have barely scratched the surface of our own planet, and the propellant needed for a starship that could send a whole colony of a million people to a nearby star is only 10^-27 the mass of Ceres.
Just because we consume particular instances of more accessible resources in irreversible or difficult to reverse ways (guano islands, whale oil, possibly oil, possibly eventually other carbon fuels, probably the lunar polar volatiles, etc.) does not imply some hard limit on consuming all such resources will be always or even usually be reached on the home planet, long before reaching the limits of the galaxy itself.
The self-reproduction argument is important. It relates to a counter-argument that I myself have previously made — that a limit may be posed by the division of labor. Our high-tech economy relies on a very elaborate division of labor among billions of people. The idea that self-replicating robots will come along and industrialize space for us is a bit of economic fantasy, since a much easier technology (e.g. an ecosystem of thousands of different machines that collectively self-replicate but, due to gains from the division of labor, at a faster rate) would make everything we make expensively now but merely for the cost of the energy and matter involved. With hundreds of millions of people employed in manufacturing, a number still growing ever year on our planet, clearly we are still nowhere near having any such technology.
Nevertheless, the long-term productivity growth of manufacturing (several percent per year for the last thousand years), the lack of any obvious physical limits to this growth in the future (before reaching the limits of the entire galaxy), and the low costs in terms of mass and energy per person needed for starships (thus allowing very large economies, e.g. a million people, with the resulting high divisions of labor to be sent in a single trip) — as long as the colonists are patient, willing to spend entire lifetimes living within a self-sufficient economy — strongly suggest that, despite the improbability of the standalone self-replicating robot (an issue indeed very closely related to the improbability of the independent origin of life), nevertheless large self-sufficient economies, with manufacturing technologies far more productive and flexible than we have on earth today, can make the trips from star to star needed to fulfill the Malthusian imperative and fill up a galaxy. Economies can thus indeed self-replicate while harnessing the sun if they are a sufficient fraction of f the size of our current earthside economy (which clearly is both self-sufficient and able to harness solar power) combined with a sufficiently more productive manufacturing technology.
nick – you make good point about division of labor. No real organism i know of is truly self reproducing. Take for example an algae in the deep ocean. It is part of an ecological web. Most deep sea algae cannot be raised in culture without the entire consortium of bacteria and other comensual organisms. those that can survive in isolation typically require special conditions with organic compounds ( like biotin) as supplements, or require help collecting minerals like silicon or transition metals that are limiting in the environment. all organisms adsorb organic compounds from their environment and use them as building blocks. these compounds come form other organisms. Look at the diversity of life around a deep sea vent. I predict we will not ever find an environment with a single species of organism, unless it is sustained from an outside food source. The argument is that interaction systems are far more flexible in evolution and monocultures. By extension, self replicating machine systems will consist of many types of machines all of which need to reproduce or be built by other machines. They will swap materials, parts, repair, design, energy, communications, defense, etc. We can fit into such an ecology very easily -in fact we do. The prototype ecology is the internet (?) with both machines and humans cooperating in building the components.
Note that no earth ecological system is directed by a single intelligence, because it is not a robust system. Since machine cultures will evolve from biological ones, they will likely always contain biological components .
Hello spaceman, It seems that abiogenesis is currently in style.
The first of those three possibilities you gave should read “Its origin is not amenable to scientific investigation”. For example, in a steady state universe life could be of infinite age.
What I really liked is that you treated possibility 2 and 3 as mutually exclusive, and we humans often have difficulties with probabilities of other probabilities. And I fully concur that the probability that fl lies in territory between is itself extremely low since we are only talking a dozen or so orders of magnitude difference in the variable (fl/(1-fl)), over a total such space in which it hard to constrain it to within an few hundred orders of magnitude for a world perfectly amenable to abiogenesis (given current knowledge). This makes the search much easier, and the question answerable by more data from just within our Sol system.
My gripe is that your calculations take biology back to its pre-Darwinian stage. Any function that a living creature can have can just pop up by chance without any evolutionary process with far higher frequency than 10^1500, and we could postulate a special reason for each of them. Evolution gives us a generic reason for them all, but this answer dictates certain requirements that, if not met, lead to the *error catastrophe*. How we avoid this at the very beginning is a problem whose extent we can have a good grasp on – and it really is huge. Saying *self-replicating molecules* then *evolution* is just a parody of the problem.
Greg, Jim and Dominic Benford’s SETI papers are all on the arXiv and well worth a look.
Joy, think of human civilisation as a journey. Both you and your opponents see an endpoint. In your story it is in a few million years when, in those more typical of Centauri Dreams, it is in many billion. In your final chapter we congratulated ourselves on what good planetary custodians we were before that tragic meteorite impact or other tragedy stopped it all, but in ours what wonders we have seen and performed along the way to the eventual heat death of the universe.
Okay, that’s not the full story. For us to complete ours it has to be true that each stage in our development can be sustained until the next stage takes over, and the rest of us do not feel obliged to prove it true before we even begin the journey.
The only other problem outside this category that you bring up periodically is that our economic structure is that of a Ponzi scheme, such that it would collapse if growth plateaus. This really depends on the details of where those interest bearing loans are placed. In a dynamic economy there will always be boom in some sectors and bust in others. In an economy that is shrinking overall due to a temporary setback (say *peak oil*) wise investment will foreshorten the period of distress not exasperate it. Your problem is that unwise investment is even more dangerous in a small static economy that aims for a million year sustainability but miscalculates.
Another data point for economic self-sufficiency and self-reproduction are the ancient Polynesians who settled the Pacific. Unlike us they did not have a division of labor so elaborate that their technology depended on an industrial “ecosystem” of millions of diverse machines and workers. Although almost every Polynesian island did engage in some trade with some other islands, for many of the islands this was such a minimal/luxury good kind of trade that we can deem them effectively self-sufficient. They could basically develop self-sufficient agricultural economies as small as a hundred people.
This meant they were in low-tech and poverty in many ways (e.g. they didn’t refine or work metal: they couldn’t have built spaceships or space habitats, nor solar cells or fusion plants). However, their economy was very high-tech in at least one way — from trees and other plants they built marvelous, clever catamarans that traded across the Pacific and filled it up per the Malthusian imperative. Within a millenia after they built ships capable of navigating the Pacific, they had settled all islands capable of supporting a self-sufficient economy.
So I’d put Joy’s challenge this way — can an economy, sufficiently small to fit on a starship, yet have a sufficiently advanced technology to make solar cells or fusion plants? Or is their some physical (thermodynamic? informational complexity?) limit that everywhere prevents this from happening? I can’t think of what such a limit would be. We need more clarification of what such a limit might consist of.
While I believe self-replicating robots as commonly invoked in these kinds of discussions are a hand-waving fantasy, Eric Drexler did make one interesting point: that machines tend to end up doing things (e.g. flying, land locomotion, sonar etc.) with higher performance and efficiency than biology. If that applies to self-reproduction/self-sufficiency, then eventually an economy as small as a Polynesian island yet based primarily on high-tech machines rather than biology (and thus able to manufacture e.g. solar cells) should be possible. Unfortunately, the complexity of such machines will likely be beyond the ability of human minds to grasp — we can only create such an economy collectively through simplified protocols, e.g. as we do now via a market transactions, per Hayek’s division of knowledge. Perhaps computers can assist in tackling this complexity.
I’d love to hear more arguments from Joy and others on both sides of this issue.
@Nick
So I’d put Joy’s challenge this way — can an economy, sufficiently small to fit on a starship, yet have a sufficiently advanced technology to make solar cells or fusion plants? Or is their some physical (thermodynamic? informational complexity?) limit that everywhere prevents this from happening? I can’t think of what such a limit would be. We need more clarification of what such a limit might consist of.
Why connect “economy” with a starship at all? Can government systems and a free economy co-exist? Most of the people here assume that there will be (is) a disconnect from the economy and governments. To me the two cannot coexist. The present co-existance of the two leads to slower progress in the fields most people on here are interested in.
My very naive belief/hope is that we will out grow the limits of economy. Of course I don’t know how this will happen or what will replace it but here are some guesses:
1. Some sort of communist regime – Chinese model (I know it is not really but…)
2. Technocracy (Singapore)
3. Theocracy (Vatican, Iran sort of)
4. Star Trek (here’s hoping)
5. Republic (Plato’s version)
6. Industrial entities (company government)
7. Feudalism (sort of like in the US (Bush/Kennedy) and India (Ghandi) –
joking)
8. Democracy
All of these can exist in a blend and do so already. Right now the economy, which seems to have become a golden ox that all worship, rules by and large. The economy has to be a tool that is used to facilitate the workings of a system for the people and not the other way round.
tesh
One possible factor that might make interstellear flight impossible , is the genetic behaviour of a limited population in a many-generation starflight . It seems probable that the speed which starship can survive without being destroyed by interstellar dust and paricles , might be somewhat less than our best hopes… combine this with the economic necesity iof making a starship whic is also much smaller than our best dreams , and there you have it : a small population ( perhabs a hundred people) who will perpetuate themselves for several hundred years , and maybee not be quite as smart in the 12th generstion as were the well-chosen original crew..
‘Why connect “economy” with a starship at all?’
Wherever people are to exist there must be an economy. And for a starship it must be, like some of the ancient Polynesian islands, a self-sufficient economy. And yet our high-tech economy is radically different from the Polynesians’ — it is based on an extremely elaborated division of labor between billions of people. A mere ten thousand people with a mere million tonnes of equipment, isolated from the rest of civilization, could not build a starship, or even maintain one (including the manufacture of replacement parts). What is the minimum population of and mass of equipment needed in a starship with an economy high-tech enough to be able to replace (i.e. recycle and remanufacture) its own parts? How much can manufacturing productivity improve in the future to reduce this number by how much? Is there some physical limit to this process as Joy suggests? That’s the issue.
@Nick
You bring up an interesting comparison here. I would like to submit that 1) The improbability of the independent origin of life does not apply when intelligent design is at work, as it is for machines, and 2) that simple autotrophs such as a cyanobacteria shows us a relevant example of a self-replicating “robot” that is not nearly as complex as you would make us believe is necessary with your division of labor argument.
I would argue that the extent of division of labor in human economies is far greater than necessary for a self replicating system, and can not be cited as a limiting factor for such.
@jkittle:
I don’t think this is entirely true. Many cyanobacteria can be readily cultured in anorganic media. They are called autotrophs for a reason: They do NOT require other lifeforms to exist. Someone has to be at the bottom of the food chain.
Nick:
Only in the same sense that the blueprints for a Jumbo Jet, or the circuits of a microprocessor, or the source code for Windows 7 are beyond anyone’s ability to grasp. We do not have much trouble making and using plenty of those, regardless. Plus, we keep coming up with new and improved ones, somehow. Or, at least, more complex ones, in the case of Windows :-)
Consider the following: A typical installation of Windows 7 requires roughly the same amount of data as is contained in human DNA. In both cases, the majority of it is junk…
just for fun : do you think these super red galaxies are alien artifacts?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/245415/scientists_discover_strange_new_species_of_galaxy_unlike_any_ever_seen.html#tk.mod_stln
a group of galaxies filled with Dyson artifacts perhaps? If so, then dyson was not the first to imagine them!
jkittle:
You bring up an interesting point.
What if we’ve brushed off extra-galactic artificial signatures as natural occurrences? The red square nebula and blue stragglers come to mind.
jkittle, that’s an interesting link. The ETI theory seems unlikely for galaxies that we’re seeing as they existed 13 billion years ago — probably within 1 billion years of the Big Bang. More likely severe redshift or light being absorbed by dust and re-radiated, or a combination of both. Another possibility is that our model of stars in the early universe is wrong and we are seeing some previously unknown kind of stars that turn into red giants after a very short lifetime.
Eniac: “The improbability of the independent origin of life does not apply when intelligent design is at work,”
Greater complexity makes a structure both less probable to naturally form and harder to artificially design.
“A typical installation of Windows 7 requires roughly the same amount of data as is contained in human DNA. In both cases, the majority of it is junk…”
:-)
Ole, Nick, let us not forget that we can take frozen embryos to address any genetic concerns (this is possible now), and we can even freeze most or all of the colonists, to address societal and generational concerns during the voyage (likely possible in the future).
However, Nicks point remains valid, since any settlement must be self-sufficient. If there was a livable planet (unlikely), we could have the settlers circumvent the problem by living like Polynesians, at first. More likely, the need for life support systems will require continuing mastery of high technology, with all that that implies.
No, NGC 5907 is a better candidate for having Dyson Shells.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080619.html
http://www.gwern.net/docs/1999-bradbury-matrioshkabrains.pdf
And Freeman Dyson already said he got his idea from Olaf Stapledon.
Hello,
I cannot think of anything more exciting than receiving a message from another civilization somewhere out there in the depths of space. However, perhaps we are jumping the gun: our ability to detect an alien intelligence obviously depends on whether life has arisen elsewhere in the cosmos. In addition to speculating on the activity profile of hypothetical advanced civilizations in deep space, we should also be trying to flesh out the debate as to whether the emergence of life on Earth is a fluke so improbable that there is not so much as a single microorganism outside of our solar system within the confines of entire observable Universe, or, there are a variety of pathways at work on many planets giving rise to life as we speak.
In Davies’s recent book the “The Eerie Silence” (2010) he goes as far as to say that he would not be surprised if we are the only life in the entire observable Universe. He is not merely referring to intelligent life– he is referring to life period! According to Davies, very little progress has been made since the days when biochemist Jacque Monod famously proclaimed we are probably utterly alone in the Universe.
Davies points to the examples often cited by astrobiologists to strengthen the case for life’s ubiquity. One example is about the relatively recent discovery of amino acids and other chemical building blocks in deep space as being used to bolster the view that life should be common. The existence of mere ingredients sheds no new light on how they would come together in the prebiotic Earth to produce the first living cells no more than the existence of silicon explains the existence of laptop computers. Also, another example used by astrobiologists, extremophilic microorganisms, only shows that after life gets started it seems to quite facilely adapt to a far wider range of environmental conditions than we had previously supposed; however, extremophiles shed no new light on how life emerged from organic molecules very early on in Earth’s history.
So, I have important questions for Paul and the others.
1. Would you be surprised if there is no other life in our observable Universe expect perhaps somewhere else in our solar system as a result of intra-solar system panspermia? Why or why not?
2. Is Davies correct in his bold assertion that next to no progress has been made in the origin of life debate since the mid-20th century? Can anyone point to anything in the literature that either supports or weakens Davies’s assertion?
There was a great book by Frank Herbert, of Dune fame, called Destination Void. It sort of dealt with the motivation factor (amongst other things) that needed to be instilled into any crew that was about to set off for a trip to another star system. From what I remember, fear of failing and deceit were the primary drivers. It was set up so that it was certain death if they turned back so the only way to survive was to succeed. Not great and not something I’d like to see us go out into the great void on the back of, but it has ever been a great motivator.
With respect to minimal genetic requirement and the decay of the drive to get to the destination, there are loads of books out there that deal with this – you’ll know them better than I. A recent one was Ark by Stephen Baxter. I, unfortunately, found it quite realistic and though it left me a bit melancholic, it left me with a couple of things to consider:
1. The orignal goal of any endeavour is rarely/never fully fulfilled. Definitions are everything. If the goal was to get humans to the next habitable planet then goal achieved. If it was to get them there with the spirit in which the endeavour was undertaken, then no the goal was not achieved.
2. When are we likely to venture out into the void. Will it be in an “emergency” or a “grand” undertaking? To the former is the most likely and the later, less so. With both the windows will be perilously short due to the nature of the situations. “Emergency” will mean chaos is abound and “grand” will mean stability, general apathy and stagnation.
p.s. there have been many instances in the past where the gene pool has been hair raisingly small. Each wave of colonisation, Polynesian Islands for instance, have been achieved with very small gene pools. Persistence probably has been the key.
The essay below is reprinted from Richard Kulisz’s site:
http://richardkulisz.blogspot.com/2007/04/aliens-dont-exist.html
——-
seti is just a waste of time. If there were really aliens out there we will already found them.
The reason people keep bringing up ridiculous notions about aliens is their failure to grasp history on an astronomical scale. This is especially the problem of the SETI-type chanting yoyos who keep bringing up Drake’s equation to say that other civilizations must exist but be “improbable” so that we haven’t “contacted” them. In their ossified brains they’ve got some small notion of the many billions of stars which are in our galaxy, but not of the billions of years which lie in its past.
We will start with a very simple assumption. The galaxy as we see it is the most probable way for us to see it. And from this assumption we will recover that aliens (other advanced technological species) do not currently exist in our galaxy and will never exist.
To start off with, how long does it take for an intelligent species to rise and colonize the entire galaxy? It takes roughly 100,000 years. Because the galaxy is 100,000 light-years in diameter and civilization arose on Earth a mere 10,000 years ago. Even under the most pessimistic assumptions, within 100,000 years of its rise, an intelligent technological species will have colonized half of the galaxy.
How many opportunities have there been in our galaxy for an intelligent species to rise and colonize the galaxy? In the last 65 million years alone, since the extinction of the dinosaurs, there have been 650 chunks of 100,000 years during which a civilization could have arisen and colonized the galaxy. In the last 13 billion years, since the first generation of stars seeded the universe with heavy metals from which planets and living beings could form there have been 130,000 such chunks of 100,000 years.
What is the probability that an intelligent species will rise and colonize the galaxy? We will not derive this theoretically because we don’t have the necessary astronomical data to do so. We will rather derive this statistically using the observations that 1) we exist, and the assumption that 2) the galaxy as we see it is the most probable way for us to see it.
The fact that we exist means that a previous civilization has not colonized the galaxy. It simply isn’t to a civilization’s benefit to “preserve” a planet for hundreds of millions of years on the off-chance that a species might evolve to intelligence and technology. Far better to colonize the planet and use it productively. Since aliens have not done so, because we exist, it follows that aliens haven’t colonized our galaxy in the last 13 billion years.
So the probability of us seeing the galaxy as we do is ((1-X)^650)*X if we unreasonably assume that civilizations could only have arisen in the last 65 million years. And ((1-X)^130,000)*X) if we reasonably assume that such a civilization could have arisen at any time in the last 13 billion years. In both cases, X is the probability of a civilization arising and colonizing the galaxy within a specific chunk of 100,000 years. These two probability functions have maxima which correspond to the value of X that is most compatible with us seeing the galaxy as we actually see it.
So in the 65 million year case, the probability of a civilization arising in any given 100,000 year chunk is about 1.5 in 1000. And in the 13 billion year case, the same probability is about 7.7 in 100,000. This is the chance that we will meet aliens as we colonize our galaxy. So yes, SETI is a gigantic waste of time, effort and resources because the aliens really aren’t waiting for us. With greater than 99.8% certainty. If you are very, very optimistic.
spaceman said on February 6, 2012 at 4:01:
“In Davies’s recent book the “The Eerie Silence” (2010) he goes as far as to say that he would not be surprised if we are the only life in the entire observable Universe. He is not merely referring to intelligent life– he is referring to life period! According to Davies, very little progress has been made since the days when biochemist Jacque Monod famously proclaimed we are probably utterly alone in the Universe.”
I know there will be yelling and people citing the math, etc., but it is VERY premature for humanity to state that because no ETI have been found or has bothered to contact us yet (after just fifty years of mostly sporadic and token searches in just a few wavelengths) that no one else exists in the Milky Way galaxy or Universe.
People can throw out statistics and the current scientific evidence or lack thereof, but I get the strong feeling that a lot of this pull towards the side of a Cosmos devoid of any life beyond Earth is a wistful harking back to the simpler days when most everyone (except for a handful of annoying ancient Greek and Medieval natural philosophers) considered humanity and our planet (or should I say the big flat disk of dirt surrounded by water with a big dome overhead with pinpricks of light visible at night when the Sun actually set that were holes in the sky where Heaven was shining through) to be the Focus of Everything and God(s).
I note that this kind of negative let’s-go-back-to-the-cultural-womb kind of thinking arises in cycles, especially when things are rough such as our current economic situation. Not only are people naturally fearful for their lives, but governments and businesses tend to pull in and take important cultural and educational services with them, thus leaving people ignorant as well as afraid.
As for the idea of alien intelligences, the public either ignores the idea or only sees them as a threat in these less than optimistic times. There is already another SF film coming out this year titled Battleship about yet another invading ETI, which although the aliens appear to have more advanced technology and the literal high ground, they will probably find themselves thwarted by the plucky human race because we have heart or something like that, a rather strange optimism in amongst all that fear and pessimism about the rest of the Universe.
If all these aliens want are resources, we have plenty of unoccupied planetoids, comets, and moons for the taking. Plus with 400 billion star systems in the Milky Way, I bet there are plenty with lots of space rocks and no real intelligences to deal with.
As for a lack of progress in the biological front, while we do have more knowledge in that field, we still lack heavily in terms of actually searching for alien creatures in terms of space exploration. Only two missions have successfully made it to Mars where the focus was searching for native organisms, but due in part to a lack of understanding about conditions on the Red Planet, the results appeared ambiguous and were dismissed, leading to several decades of ignoring our celestial neighbor.
Maybe Curiousity will answer the big question about Mars come August, but I get the feeling we are going to need a lot more than one rover covering a matter of miles to really find out. How about sending a mission to examine those regions where methane is being released, for example?
As for the rest of the Sol system, we have only landed on the Moon, Venus, Titan, and one planetoid as of early 2012 after five decades of space exploration. Nothing was found on the Moon as we long suspected, no one was seriously looking for life on Venus, Huygens did not find anything on Titan as far as we can tell, and I doubt anything other than a few organics will be found on Itokawa from the paltry samples returned by Hayabusa. Flying robot probes by places like Europa and Enceladus, while having revealed them as definite places of exobiological interest, do not constitute an actual search for any creatures upon them.
So as I have said numerous times before in CD, when we have really scoured the Sol system for alien life, when our SETI programs – limited as they are – get more than table scraps for funding and telescope time, and we get serious about sending probes into the wider galaxy and come across nothing, then we can start saying seriously that there may few living beings in at least the Milky Way. Otherwise our meager statistics only seem to reinforce a level of general knowledge and prejudice that seems little removed from Medieval times.
All we need to do is prove that the Wow! signal really was from an ETI and all these claims of our being alone in the Universe go out the window.
tesh said on February 6, 2012 at 5:07:
“There was a great book by Frank Herbert, of Dune fame, called Destination Void. It sort of dealt with the motivation factor (amongst other things) that needed to be instilled into any crew that was about to set off for a trip to another star system. From what I remember, fear of failing and deceit were the primary drivers. It was set up so that it was certain death if they turned back so the only way to survive was to succeed. Not great and not something I’d like to see us go out into the great void on the back of, but it has ever been a great motivator.”
While unless something radically changes for humanity that it will probably take something drastic to get us to the literal stars, my feeling and concern is that the very things which may motivate us to move to Alpha Centauri and beyond may also may keep interstellar travel and colonization from ever happening.
Interstellar travel requires a stable society as well as one technologically advanced enough. If our civilization is collapsing or some cosmic or terrestrial force is going to wipe out humanity, there will probably be too many factors against us to escape Earth let alone reach another star system.
This is why I feel the time is NOW to make interstellar probes and Worldships happen if we ever want to see them become reality. We also need to make a much more serious effort to educate the general public and our politicians about these ideas so they are not dismissed as Gingrich’s lunar colony plans were by just about everyone outside the space community.
@henk
The essay is still a rehash of the Drake equation. Conflating intelligent civilizations arising with colonizing the galaxy is also a huge assumption. The galaxy might be littered with low tech, planet bound civilizations, and therefore be silent.
Is Davies correct in his bold assertion that next to no progress has been made in the origin of life debate since the mid-20th century?
I would say that the evidence for RNA world is one piece since Monod’s time.
There is a good review of theories and progress in Robert Hazen’s Genesis.
Henk :
“Even under the most pessimistic assumptions, within 100,000 years of its rise, an intelligent technological species will have colonized half of the galaxy.”
Well , if thats the most pessismistic scenario R.K. can imagine , then I would definitely want to get some of the same hapy-pills for my old sick mom !
Tesh :
True enough , many SF writers have delt with the cultural deteriation of a multigenerational starship , and some of their ideas have been inspiring . On the other hand nobody has been trying to think it out in a practical way , as if we were actually going tomorrow. To solve the human cultural-genetic problem might be just as critical as to develop a propulsion system , especielly if it turns out that the limitations to speed and cost /size of a starship are in the disaster-zone…in that case only the human factor has the chance of making starflight possible anyway , just as the polynesians overcame the greatest ocean on earth by their human spirit , more than by using some very advanced seamanship .
Nick:
Well, yes, but life formed spontaneously, while self-replicating machines will be designed. Those origins could not be any more different, and that it makes it difficult to argue that the chance of one says anything about the chance of the other.
Henk, my preference is to use a modified form of your argument. SETI is not so much interested in how many technological civilisations that there are in our galaxy, as it is in how many communicative ones are out there currently. This immediately limits the group of interest to those that have such a grand outward looking aspect as to spend the equivalent of several times as much power as is available to us today on attempted communication, and then have the patience to wait thousands of years for a reply.
Now this is exactly the sort that should be interested in interstellar travel also, and there would have to be currently at least 100 of the stay at home variety of these in our galaxy for us to have a reasonable chance that one will point its transmitting antenna at us within the next century.
From your above argument it is plain that such luck would be absurdly high, so we need some unexpected change in our galaxy that recently allowed higher life. We would need something extreme, and some have tried to make gamma ray bursters fit the bill. It doesn’t really work, so perhaps we can propose the otherwise absurd idea that, until recently, the Milky Way was a quasar. Unless Earth is privileged, we can‘t date the end of that event further back than the first advanced land based life here, that being about 400 million years ago.
Now mechanisms that can slow galactic colonisation become important, several have been tried, but it seems that about 100-200 million years is the slowest we can make our fastest colonisers go in these simulations. It seems that we must also hypothesise that the development of land based intelligent forms must always take around our timescale!
Another alternative is that we change our strategy, and admit that if they are there they are (or were) here. We then need to work out why evidence for them is hard to find.
jkittle
That was a very interesting article. At first approximation, those galaxies look like the signal one would see from a Kardeshev III civilization that has colonized its origin galaxy’s nearby neighbors. When you have an oddball galaxy type, they are generally scattered randomly an infrequently throughout the universe, not clumped together.
The galaxy’s age points against them being a civilizational artifact; however, if we do see a Kardeshev III galaxy, our first reports of it will be very like that in the article. We’ll spot something we can’t explain, and at first we will try a naturalistic explanation (which is the correct approach), then further examination over the years will make it harder and harder to exclude the possibility that what we are seeing is an artifact.
@LJK:
And I get the feeling I hear wistful harking back to the simpler days when most everyone thought there were people on the moon and canals on Mars. Until, that is, improved telescopes and space probes drove them away and they became aliens from other stars riding around in cloaked flying saucers and being kept prisoner in the New Mexico desert.
That sounds pretty wistful to me….
I get the thing about “we haven’t looked enough” and “aliens out there might not be interested in us”. What I do not get is why all the hypothetical spacefaring aliens are so lazy or sessile that they never once in 4 billion years decided to come here, our perfectly usable solar system. Well before we existed, or anything else worth being put in a zoo.
Statistically, even the most sluggish of random walks from star to star would have long since brought them here. Unless they actively avoided our system, with extraordinary efficiency. Why? Is there anything special about that soup of blue-green algae that was the Earth for most of its history? I thought we were not so special?
RK is not the most polite person around, but in this he is right: The vastness of time trumps the vastness of space. By far. If the aliens existed, in the vastness of time they would have made their way here. If they had been here, we would be their descendants. It is not a matter of finding them, or recognizing them: it is a matter of our very existence.