Given all the developments discussed in this chapter, it seems likely that life could have developed on many planets around other stars. Even if that life is microbial, we saw that we may soon have ways to search for chemical biosignatures. This search is of fundamental importance for understanding biology, but it does not answer the question, “Are we alone?” that we raised at the beginning of this chapter. When we ask this question, many people think of other intelligent creatures, perhaps beings that have developed technology similar to our own. If any intelligent, technical civilizations have arisen, as has happened on Earth in the most recent blink of cosmic time, how could we make contact with them?

This problem is similar to making contact with people who live in a remote part of Earth. If students in the United States want to converse with students in Australia, for example, they have two choices. Either one group gets on an airplane and travels to meet the other, or they communicate by sending a message remotely. Given how expensive airline tickets are, most students would probably select the message route.

In the same way, if we want to get in touch with intelligent life around other stars, we can travel, or we can try to exchange messages. Because of the great distances involved, interstellar space travel would be very slow and prohibitively expensive. The fastest spacecraft the human species has built so far would take almost 80,000 years to get to the nearest star. While we could certainly design a faster craft, the more quickly we require it to travel, the greater the energy cost involved. To reach neighboring stars in less than a human life span, we would have to travel close to the speed of light. In that case, however, the expense would become truly astronomical.

Interstellar Travel

Bernard Oliver, an engineer with an abiding interest in life elsewhere, made a revealing calculation about the costs of rapid interstellar space travel. Since we do not know what sort of technology we (or other civilizations) might someday develop, Oliver considered a trip to the nearest star (and back again) in a spaceship with a “perfect engine”—one that would convert its fuel into energy with 100% efficiency. Even with a perfect engine, the energy cost of a single round-trip journey at 70% the speed of light turns out to be equivalent to several hundred thousand years’ worth of total U.S. electrical energy consumption. The cost of such travel is literally out of this world.

This is one reason astronomers are so skeptical about claims that UFOs are spaceships from extraterrestrial civilizations. Given the distance and energy expense involved, it seems unlikely that the dozens of UFOs (and even UFO abductions) claimed each year could be visitors from other stars so fascinated by Earth civilization that they are willing to expend fantastically large amounts of energy or time to reach us. Nor does it seem credible that these visitors have made this long and expensive journey and then systematically avoided contacting our governments or political and intellectual leaders.

Not every UFO report has been explained (in many cases, the observations are sketchy or contradictory). But investigation almost always converts them to IFOs (identified flying objects) or NFOs (not-at-all flying objects). While some are hoaxes, others are natural phenomena, such as bright planets, ball lightning, fireballs (bright meteors), or even flocks of birds that landed in an oil slick to make their bellies reflective. Still others are human craft, such as private planes with some lights missing, or secret military aircraft. It is also interesting that the group of people who most avidly look at the night sky, the amateur astronomers, have never reported UFO sightings. Further, not a single UFO has ever left behind any physical evidence that can be tested in a laboratory and shown to be of nonterrestrial origin.

Another common aspect of belief that aliens are visiting Earth comes from people who have difficulty accepting human accomplishments. There are many books and TV shows, for example, that assert that humans could not have built the great pyramids of Egypt, and therefore they must have been built by aliens. The huge statues (called Moai) on Easter Island are also sometimes claimed to have been built by aliens. Some people even think that the accomplishments of space exploration today are based on alien technology.

However, the evidence from archaeology and history is clear: ancient monuments were built by ancient people, whose brains and ingenuity were every bit as capable as ours are today, even if they didn’t have electronic textbooks like you do.

Messages on Spacecraft

While space travel by living creatures seems very difficult, robot probes can travel over long distances and over long periods of time. Five spacecraft—two Pioneers, two Voyagers, and New Horizons—are now leaving the solar system. At their coasting speeds, they will take hundreds of thousands or millions of years to get anywhere close to another star. On the other hand, they were the first products of human technology to go beyond our home system, so we wanted to put messages on board to show where they came from.

Each Pioneer carries a plaque with a pictorial message engraved on a gold-anodized aluminum plate (Figure 30.18). The Voyagers, launched in 1977, have audio and video records attached, which allowed the inclusion of over 100 photographs and a selection of music from around the world. Given the enormous space between stars in our section of the Galaxy, it is very unlikely that these messages will ever be received by anyone. They are more like a note in a bottle thrown into the sea by a shipwrecked sailor, with no realistic expectation of its being found soon but a slim hope that perhaps someday, somehow, someone will know of the sender’s fate.

Communicating with the Stars

If direct visits among stars are unlikely, we must turn to the alternative for making contact: exchanging messages. Here the news is a lot better. We already use a messenger—light or, more generally, electromagnetic waves—that moves through space at the fastest speed in the universe. Traveling at 300,000 kilometers per second, light reaches the nearest star in only 4 years and does so at a tiny fraction of the cost of sending material objects. These advantages are so clear and obvious that we assume they will occur to any other species of intelligent beings that develop technology.

However, we have access to a wide spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, ranging from the longest-wavelength radio waves to the shortest-wavelength gamma rays. Which would be the best for interstellar communication? It would not be smart to select a wavelength that is easily absorbed by interstellar gas and dust, or one that is unlikely to penetrate the atmosphere of a planet like ours. Nor would we want to pick a wavelength that has lots of competition for attention in our neighborhood.

One final criterion makes the selection easier: we want the radiation to be inexpensive enough to produce in large quantities. When we consider all these requirements, radio waves turn out to be the best answer. Being the lowest-frequency (and lowest-energy) band of the spectrum, they are not very expensive to produce, and we already use them extensively for communications on Earth. They are not significantly absorbed by interstellar dust and gas. With some exceptions, they easily pass through Earth’s atmosphere and through the atmospheres of the other planets we are acquainted with.

The Cosmic Haystack

Having made the decision that radio is the most likely means of communication among intelligent civilizations, we still have many questions and a daunting task ahead of us. Shall we send a message, or try to receive one? Obviously, if every civilization decides to receive only, then no one will be sending, and everyone will be disappointed. On the other hand, it may be appropriate for us to begin by listening, since we are likely to be among the most primitive civilizations in the Galaxy who are interested in exchanging messages.

We do not make this statement to insult the human species (which, with certain exceptions, we are rather fond of). Instead, we base it on the fact that humans have had the ability to receive (or send) a radio message across interstellar distances for only a few decades. Compared to the ages of the stars and the Galaxy, this is a mere instant. If there are civilizations out there that are ahead of us in development by even a short time (in the cosmic sense), they are likely to have a technology head start of many, many years.

In other words, we, who have just started, may well be the “youngest” species in the Galaxy with this capability (see the discussion in Example 30.1). Just as the youngest members of a community are often told to be quiet and listen to their elders for a while before they say something foolish, so may we want to begin our exercise in extraterrestrial communication by listening.

Even restricting our activities to listening, however, leaves us with an array of challenging questions. For example, if an extraterrestrial civilization’s signal is too weak to be detected by our present-day radio telescopes, we will not detect them. In addition, it would be very expensive for an extraterrestrial civilization to broadcast on a huge number of channels. Most likely, they select one or a few channels for their particular message. Communicating on a narrow band of channels also helps distinguish an artificial message from the radio static that comes from natural cosmic processes. But the radio band contains an astronomically large number of possible channels. How can we know in advance which one they have selected, and how they have coded their message into the signal?

Table 30.1 summarizes these and other factors that scientists must grapple with when trying to tune in to radio messages from distant civilizations. Because their success depends on either guessing right about so many factors or searching through all the possibilities for each factor, some scientists have compared their quest to looking for a needle in a haystack. Thus, they like to say that the list of factors in Table 30.1 defines the cosmic haystack problem.

The Cosmic Haystack Problem: Some Questions about an Extraterrestrial Message
Factors
From which direction (which star) is the message coming?
On what channels (or frequencies) is the message being broadcast?
How wide in frequency is the channel?
How strong is the signal (can our radio telescopes detect it)?
Is the signal continuous, or does it shut off at times (as, for example, a lighthouse beam does when it turns away from us)?
Does the signal drift (change) in frequency because of the changing relative motion of the source and the receiver?
How is the message encoded in the signal (how do we decipher it)?
Can we even recognize a message from a completely alien species? Might it take a form we don’t at all expect?

Table 30.1

Radio Searches

Although the cosmic haystack problem seems daunting, many other research problems in astronomy also require a large investment of time, equipment, and patient effort. And, of course, if we don’t search, we’re sure not to find anything.

The very first search was conducted by astronomer Frank Drake in 1960, using the 85-foot antenna at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (Figure 30.19). Called Project Ozma, after the queen of the exotic Land of Oz in the children’s stories of L. Frank Baum, his experiment involved looking at about 7200 channels and two nearby stars over a period of 200 hours. Although he found nothing, Drake demonstrated that we had the technology to do such a search, and set the stage for the more sophisticated projects that followed.

Receivers are constantly improving, and the sensitivity of SETI programs—SETI stands for the search for extraterrestrial life—is advancing rapidly. Equally important, modern electronics and software allow simultaneous searches on millions of frequencies (channels). If we can thus cover a broad frequency range, the cosmic haystack problem of guessing the right frequency largely goes away. One powerful telescope array (funded with an initial contribution from Microsoft founder Paul Allen) that is built for SETI searches is the Allen Telescope in Northern California. Other radio telescopes being used for such searches include the giant Arecibo radio dish in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, which is the largest steerable radio telescope in the world.

What kind of signals do we hope to pick up? We on Earth are inadvertently sending out a flood of radio signals, dominated by military radar systems. This is a kind of leakage signal, similar to the wasted light energy that is beamed upward by poorly designed streetlights and advertising signs. Could we detect a similar leakage of radio signals from another civilization? The answer is just barely, but only for the nearest stars. For the most part, therefore, current radio SETI searches are looking for beacons, assuming that civilizations might be intentionally drawing attention to themselves or perhaps sending a message to another world or outpost that lies in our direction. Our prospects for success depend on how often civilizations arise, how long they last, and how patient they are about broadcasting their locations to the cosmos.