Tonight I was interviewed by a couple of young women from the local high school, for a project for their French Immersion program. I don’t really speak french. But they asked a lot of interesting questions, both in writing and through facetime. I thought it was interesting, so I’m publishing the written portion. Maybe it will be entertaining for you.
Do you think it’s productive to devote time and resources to space exploration and extraterrestrials rather than to exploring our own planet?
Yes, I do think it is productive. I think that the general pursuit of knowledge is valuable, and that we can learn a lot about our own planet, by studying other worlds and the universe beyond.
2. Would it be more or less reassuring to know for certain that complex life exists beyond our solar system?
I’m not sure. There’s something called the Drake Equation. Basically, someone did the math, and calculated that the Universe should be brimming with life, and that it should be all over the place. Even more, they calculated that someone should have already populated the entire universe, several times over.
But where are they? That’s the Fermi Paradox. The Universe should be full of life, particularly intelligent life – so where is it. There are a lot of theories, but no answers.
The consensus is that maybe there is some kind of ”great filter.” Something that prevents life from emerging, or intelligent life from emerging, makes sure it dies off. The question for humanity is are we past the great filter, in which case smooth sailing. Or does it lie ahead of us.
3. If life exists beyond our solar system, do you think it would have evolved similarly to life on Earth?
Depends on how you define similarly.
Looking at life on Earth, similar forms keep showing up. Eyes have been independently developed several times. So its likely aliens would develop eyes and a visual sense. Camera lense eyes like ours developed twice – cephalopods and vertebrates. But other kinds of eyes developed – compound eyes like inseces.
Same body forms show up – Fish, Sharks, Itschysaurs have the same basic body plan.
There’s a phenomena in biology called Carcerization, which is the tendency for life forms to evolve to look like crabs.
Flight has evolved four times – Insects, birds, bats and Pterosaurs. Bats and Pterosaurs had very similar wing structures. Insects on the other hand came up with something very different.
Saber tooth cats evolved, and in South America a saber tooth catlike Marsupial evolved.
We saw lemurs evolve into something very like sloths in Madagascar.
So similar situations produce similar solutions. Life on other worlds would probably develop eyes, it would probably develop rigid hinged structures like bones or exoskeletons to support weight, limbs might develop, even wings.
Evolution can find very very different solutions. Humans and Octopus don’t look much alike.
4. What do you think the consequences would be of trying to gain recognition from extraterrestrials?
Honestly – I think the Universe is so incredibly vast, and distances and time is so immense, that we’ll probably never have a real relationship. We might get a signal from someone out there, from a star system hundreds of light years away. It will arrive hundreds of years after it was sent. If we send a reply, it will take more hundreds of years. Our global civilization is less than 500 years old, industrial civilization less than 150, we’ve had radio for only 100, a meaningful space program for 50,
I can’t imagine us carrying on a conversation that runs over thousands of years, centuries for each reply and comment.
I don’t know of any way we can communicate faster than light. Maybe that can happen. But right now, I’m not sure physics allows for it.
So the likelihood is that any civilization that we make contact with might be gone by the time we hear from it, and anyone out there to hear our message… we might be gone by the time they receive it..
I don’t think there’s danger as others have described. I don’t think the Dark Forest theory is real.
5. Why, in your opinion, do the media almost always portray extraterrestrials as human-like creatures (bipedal, two eyes, four legs, etc.)?
Two reasons: (1) That’s what we’ve got to perform the roles. Humans. Robots until recently, haven’t been good enough, and even then, it would cost an incredible amount to come up with a robot or CGI creature that is fully non-human.
(2) That’s what we’re used to, and what we relate to. The less like us it is, the less recognizable, the less we are able to relate to it.
Evolution does tend to produce the same sorts of shapes in similar circumstances. But look how different mammals have been from dinosaurs.
It’s not impossible that they’d be humanlike. For instance, if you’re going to have eyes, two is an optimum number – two gives you binocular vision and an ability to measure distances. One doesn’t give you that. Three doesn’t give you anythng extra, four… five… not much advantage. So the thinking is, likely aliens would have the same kind of math consideration – insects, crabs and squids have two eyes, and that’s independent of each other.
On the other hand, other animals, spiders, have multiple eyes, but then again, they don’t do much.
An alien has to move about – so likely at least two legs, but could be four, or six or ten. On the other hand, physics and biology says there’s a cost to more and more legs, so there’s a tendency to have as few as you can get away with… So four, or better two.
It makes sense that all its sense organs are clustered together. And also that they be located close to the feeding part. So probably a head.
Moving about on land – you need a rigid structure with hinges.
A sophisticated intelligent animal would probably need something to manipulate its environment with. Arms, or equivalent, and hands or claws capable of fine dexteriaty.
I guess it depends on how close you want to come. Personally, if it has two eyes, a recognizable head, mouth parts, limbs with hinged joints, and manipulator limbs, I’d say that’s pretty close to human looking. Of course, that description would apply to a lobster.
It would also apply to a dinosaur – head, eyes, two legs, upper limbs used for handling things.
I don’t think they’d look exactly like us, definitely not like on Star Trek, maybe not even Star Wars. But I think they’d look like something we could understand.
6. Do you think the claims of those who say they’ve had encounters with extraterrestrials or who claim that the government is covering up evidence of UFOs deserve attention?
People have had experiences that they believe are contacts with aliens. In previous eras they’d call these contacts with fairies, or angels or demons. They’re sincere. I don’t know what they’re encountering.
Now, having said that – if these are genuine extra-terrestrials, they’re the biggest jerks in the universe. Their actions are completely inconsistent and make no sense. Their attributes are inconsistent – their ships crash at Roswell, but they also outperform modern fighter jets. They show themselves to some people, but appear to avoid contact with states. The reports don’t line up. Maybe some of the reports are false and hallucinations, but which ones do you choose, and which ones do you reject.
We’ve been looking at this for over seventy-years, and no closer to a solution.
But there’s something else… We’ve gotten better at looking, and we’re still not seeing anything. Think about this – we have imaged the entire surface of the moon and mars to the level where a pixel represents a three by three square. If there was a buffalo roaming around the moon or mars, we would have seen it. We’ve never seen an alien base, or a provably artificial structure out there.
We’ve logged thousands of asteroids and comets, we’ve never found one that didn’t move in natural orbits. Even Oummaama behaved like a comet, and while it showed some peculiar traits nothing went so far beyond the normal that we had to say it definitely artificial.
Yet in the 1950s, these things were dogfighting with fighter jets, falling out of the sky at Roswell and possibly other locations, they showed up on Radar, they appeared in front of crowds. They were definitely being seen, and had to be aware. But… nothing.
If they are out there, so far the only real course of action is to continue acting as if they aren’t.
7. What do you think of scientific theories such as the “Drake” equation and its accuracy in predicting the probability and proximity of extraterrestrial life beyond our solar system?
I think that the Drake Equation was probably too conservative in some respects. Mostly it was guesswork. When they first came up with the Drake Equation, the only hard information anyone had was how many stars there were, and what kinds of stars there were, and loosely, what the proportional make up of stars – approximately what percentages of which kinds.
That’s all they had to go on.
We guessed that maybe one sun in ten had planets, or one in a hundred. It seems now that we’re finding them, planets are incredibly common and likely every star has them. We’ve only been finding exoplanets in the last fifteen or twenty years.
We guessed that maybe one planet in ten, or a hundred, had conditions for life. We still have no way to assess whether we are close or far. We’re still at the stage of throwing darts while blindfolded.
Actually, that’s one of the reasons why we study other worlds in the Solar system.
We can’t even guess how common life is, or how it develops. Earth appears to have developed bacterial life shortly after it cooled. Literally, the moment conditions allowed for life to happen, we developed life. Does this mean that once conditions allow, life is inevitable, or just a fluke.
If Mars has, or had life… Then that maybe helps. If Mars, or Europa, or Ganymede, developed organic life independently, then that suggests life is an ‘easy ask.’ Right conditions, it’ll sprout, because we’ve seen it sprout in two places. (Unless life originated on Mars or Earth, and spread to the other planet, which is a possible theory) If every place in the Solar System is sterile, then maybe we were just a fluke and life isn’t that easy to develop.
Or how about this – all life on Earth seems derived from a single ancestor. Maybe life is hard to form, and it was a fluke. If it was easy, then maybe there should belineages of life traceable to different original ancestors? Or maybe there was, but there was only one winner. Or maybe there was, but we haven’t found it yet?
Or think about this – We’ve had life on the planet for between 4.3 and 3.7 billion years. But for most of that time, nothing much – it was just unicellular – bacteria, slime molds, floating in the oceal. Complex life took two billion years to form, and it wasn’t very complicated for a long time. Most of the history of life on Earth has been bacteria and microscopic creatures.
Land animals didn’t show up until 300 million years ago. Really smart animals (us) maybe two million years ago, and for most of our history we didn’t do much of anything. We didn’t have civilizationof any kind until 10,000 years ago – the last ten thousand of two million years, of three hundred million years. And we’ve only been really high tech in the last 75 years. It’s only in the last 15 years we’ve really been finding explanets.
So we have 15 years of being serious, in a span of 3.7 billion years.
If the rest of the universe is like that, then maybe high tech civilizations are just these tiny blips in a vast universe. The Universe may be full of bactiera and slime molds, algae and microbial mats, and every once in a while it throws up a jellyfish. But something like us – that’s not even one in a hundred for life bearing planets, it might be one in billions.
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8. Why haven’t humanity’s efforts to discover life beyond our planet yielded very good results if, according to scientists, life should be abundant given the vastness of the universe?
I think we’ve really only begun to look. It’s a big universe. And our detection so far isn’t very good.
9. How could future generations improve technologies to make contact and establish connections with extraterrestrial life?
Like I said, the Universe is so vast, I don’t think we’ll ever have a real dialogue or connection.
Unless they’re right on our doorstep, within say 25 light years, I don’t think we’ll manage meaningful ongoing communication.
Imagine sending a hello, and waiting fifty years for them to receive it, a few more years for them to decide how to respond, and then waiting another fifty years to get the answer.
Even the closest stars – Alpha Centauri is about 4.5 light years. If there was a civilization there, and we were in commuication, each exchange would be 9 years round trip. Any kind of real converstion would take a century.
But if we do contact or detect, here’s how I think it will happen.
We won’t go to them, and they won’t go to us, the distances are too insane.
But we have Telescopes. Even the relatively tiny space telescopes starting with the Hubble have been revolutionary in being able to see the universe in detail.
Imagine if you will, hundreds of space telescopes, stretching across millions of miles, all of them computer networked together, so that they can build a composite image the way a fly’s compound eye does. You would essentially have a composite telescope a million miles across. Hell, even a thousand miles across would give you incredible detail.
With a telescope that powerful, you could literally examine the surfaces of planets in the same detail we’ve examining Mars and the Moon. We could literally chart oceans and continents, pick out alien roads and cities, even discern alien buildings. We could watch their vehicles drive by. We could piece together their radio and television transmissions, and see what their version of Hazbin Hotel is like.
Of course the light may be centuries old, we maybe watching their deep past. Odds are we’d just be watching their dinosaurs, or their mammals, maybe spotting a clever little monkey creature that might make something of itself with a few million years to work with.
But that’s how I see it. A universe of watchers, all silently observing, wishing they could say hello, and mostly not bothering.
Maybe right now, 5000 light years away, there’s someone watching us, and they’re watching farmers baking bricks to build a zigurrat in Sumer, the world’s first city. They’re watching that farmer, and they’re rooting for us. They’re hoping beyond hope that farmer will succeed, and that maybe in thousands of years, we’ll be something that can watch them back. And maybe they hope they’ll last long enough that we’ll see them and know they were out there.