What Listen heard

Regular readers of Skeptophilia -- and, heaven knows, my friends and family -- are well aware that one of my obsessions is the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and perhaps even extraterrestrial intelligence.

I grew up watching Lost in Space and The Invaders and the original Star Trek, and later The X Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation and Doctor Who.  But while those classic shows piqued my budding interest in exobiology, my training in actual biology taught me that whatever the aliens look like, they will almost certainly not be humans with odd facial protuberances and strange accents.  How evolution plays out on other planets is impossible to say, but it's likely to be vastly different from the pathways taken by life on Earth.  I still remember reading Stephen Jay Gould's essay "Replaying the Tape" from his excellent book on the Cambrian-age Burgess Shale fauna, Wonderful Life, and being blown away by the following passage:

You press the rewind button and, making sure you thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past -– say, to the seas of the Burgess Shale.  Then let the tape run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original.  If each replay strongly resembles life’s actual pathway, then we must conclude that what really happened pretty much had to occur.  But suppose that the experimental versions all yield sensible results strikingly different from the actual history of life?  What could we then say about the predictability of self-conscious intelligence? or of mammals?

His point was that a great deal of evolution is contingent -- dependent on events and occurrences that would be unlikely to repeat in exactly the same way.  And while there's no way to re-run the tape on the Earth, this has profound implications regarding what we're likely to find elsewhere in the universe.

If we do find intelligent aliens, chances are they won't be Klingons or Romulans or Andorians.  To be fair, the aforementioned shows did make some attempts to represent what truly different life might be like; the Horta from the original Star Trek and the Vashta Nerada and the Midnight Entity from Doctor Who come to mind.  Most likely, though, whatever we find out there will be -- to pilfer a phrase from J. B. S. Haldane -- "queerer than we can imagine."

All of this is just a preface to my telling you about an article I read today, that should have had me excited, but ended up leaving me looking like this:

The link I'm referring to was sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, and I've now seen the story in a number of different news sources.  This particular iteration has the title, "Huge Alien Announcement 'Could Happen Within Weeks' as Professor Says 'We've Found It'."  "It," in this case, is apparently definitive proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.  The guy claiming this is one Simon Holland; two different scientific teams, he says, are "in a race to publish the first confirmed evidence."

And not just evidence, but actual transmissions of some kind, bringing to mind the movie Contact and the breathtaking moment astronomer Ellie Arroway finds a radio signal from another planet.  Like the one in Contact, the signal Holland tells us about is some kind of narrow-band radio message, and was apparently discovered by Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Listen program.

"It’s a single point source, not just noise," he said.  "The signal, instead of being the giant buzz of everything in the universe that we hear through all radio telescopes, was a narrow electromagnetic spectrum."

Which sounds awesome, right?

But.

First, Simon Holland isn't a professor, he's a YouTuber and filmmaker.  He says he "taught at a major UK university" -- no name given -- and his nickname is "Prof."  And here are a few of his recent YouTube videos:

• "Cattle Mutilation -- a Horrible 'Big Picture'"
• "Nuclear Explosions Over the Atlantic"
• "The Science Film YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE"
• "Antigravity Machine Finished"
• "Faster Than Light: CIA and the UFO"

Not exactly a testimony to scientific rigor, right there.  So how would this guy know about some find at Breakthrough Listen, especially one that is being kept hush-hush so the scientific teams themselves don't get scooped?

The other thing, though, is that we've been down this road before.  Last year, we had all the hoopla over military whistleblower David Grusch, alleging that the United States had hard evidence not only of alien technology but of "biological material not of earthly origin" -- there were even extensive hearings in Congress over the matter.  And the whole thing came to nothing.  The upshot was, "Okay, yeah, if there are actual UFOs from another world zipping around on Earth, it would be a matter of national security," but when asked to present the actual evidence itself, all we got was a shoulder shrug.  

So forgive me for being dubious about Simon Holland's claims.  I'll say what I've said before; if there is proof of alien intelligence, stop acting coy and show us the goods.  Until then, I'm perhaps to be forgiven for being dubious.

I'll end, however, by saying that this is one case where I devoutly hope I'm wrong.  If in "a few weeks" we have publication of a paper in a peer-reviewed science journal about a radio transmission from an intelligent civilization on another planet, I will be beyond thrilled to eat my words.

But I'm not holding my breath.

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Crying wolf

There's a bias that's a bit like an inverted appeal to authority: anyone who repeatedly and stridently makes claims that prove to be unsubstantiated, far-fetched, or outright false eventually finds that people simply stop listening.  At that point, even if they did come up with something reasonable and insightful, it's doubtful that anyone would pay attention.

We've seen a number of people who've exhausted their credibility in that fashion here at Skeptophilia.  Some notable examples:

• Geneticist Melba Ketchum, who has claimed several times to have hard evidence of the existence of Bigfoot (including its DNA).  She wrote a paper about her findings that she finally was able to get published -- but only in a "scientific journal" she herself started for the purpose.  Worse still, it turned out that most of the citations in the paper were bogus, including one that says in the cited paper itself that it was written as an April Fool's joke.
• Author Richard C. Hoagland, who despite having (direct quote from the Wikipedia article about him) "no education beyond high school level... no advanced training, schooling, or degrees in any scientific field" has become famous for a variety of loony pseudoscientific ideas, my favorite one being that the hexagonal cloud patterns on Saturn are "produced by the same phenomenon that causes crop circles."
• Journalist Jaime Maussan, who says he has conclusive proof that some mummies found in Mexico aren't human -- i.e., are aliens.  Surprising absolutely no one -- well, no one rational, at least -- the mummies that have been DNA tested are one hundred percent Homo sapiens, and the ones Maussan is the most convinced are aliens show signs of recent tampering to make them look less human.
• Mark Taylor, a prominent evangelical inspirational speaker, who claims that having orchestral instruments tuned to A = 440 Hertz is a secret plot by the Freemasons to alter your DNA so that you will hate Donald Trump.  I'd like to be able to say that this is the most insane thing that Taylor has said, but that unfortunately would be a lie.

All four of these people have found that restoring your credibility once it's shot is about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube.  Although in the case of Taylor, I suspect he doesn't care -- part of his shtick is that he's a Lone Voice Crying In The Wilderness, so he probably falls back on the impeccable logic of "Many brilliant truth-tellers have been considered crazy -- people consider me crazy, so I must be a brilliant truth-teller!"

In any case, the latest in this Parade of Shame is Luis "Lue" Elizondo, who was a U. S. Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and worked for the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and now is a prominent member of the UFO/UAP Truthers community.  Lately we've seen lots of claims that the U. S. government has concrete proof of extraterrestrial intelligence; a year ago there was a big hearing in Congress where people like alleged whistleblower David Grusch said they'd not only seen, but participated in the recovery and testing of, "non-human biologicals" and the spacecraft that allowed them to get here.  My point then, as now, was: fine, you want us to believe you?  Let's see the goods.  Turn at least some of it over to independent unbiased scientists for study, under peer review, and then we can talk.  But of course instead we have additional claims of an X Files-style coverup because of issues of national security, and so far what we've seen is bupkis.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons MjolnirPants, Grey Aliens Drawing, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Now, Elizondo is publishing his memoirs, and you can bet they'll be replete with claims of UFO shenanigans.  The problem is, skeptic Jason Colavito got a hold of some advance excerpts, and besides the usual Cigarette Smoking Man antics you'd expect, Elizondo is making a whole bunch of other clams that make his UFO stuff look like Nobel Prize material.

One of the weirdest is that Elizondo says he's been haunted for decades by "glowing ghost bubbles."  There are green ones, clear ones, and blue ones -- the green and clear ones are harmless, he says, but the blue ones are "malevolent."  Then he launches into a bizarre passage about the veracity of the Book of Enoch -- one of the biblical Apocrypha, about which I wrote last year, and which (to put not too fine a point on it) is really fucking bizarre -- and in these excerpts he has a lot to say about our old friends the Nephilim:

Enoch's journey is filled with heavenly accounts, including descriptions of angelic and demonic hierarchy, God's throne, God's inner circle of guards, and even the language of the supernatural.  On paper, Enoch's travels don't sound that dissimilar to reported nonhuman encounters.  We also looked at the sixth chapter of Genesis.  That's the chapter that contains the story of Noah's ark.  Before we get to Noah, verses 1 through 4 of that chapter quickly share that otherworldly beings came to earth and mated with human women. Some translations call these offspring giants, while others refer to the visitors by the original Hebrew word, Nephilim, which some scholars say means something like fallen angels, or beings that cause others to fall.

At this point he seems to be aware that he's doing a synchronized skating routine with Erich von Däniken on very thin ice, because he goes on to say, "To be clear, I'm not advocating the ancient astronaut hypothesis that many today believe.  I'm simply drawing some interesting parallels."  Which is the woo-woo equivalent of making some loony claim and then excusing it by saying you're "just asking questions" (which a friend of mine calls "JAQing off").

The problem, of course, is that if Elizondo wanted anyone to take him seriously other than people who think Ancient Aliens is a scientific documentary, this kind of nonsense is not doing him any favors.  Admittedly, I haven't read the memoirs -- they're not available yet -- only the excerpts Colavito provided.  But honestly, given their respective track records, I'm much more likely to trust Colavito's perspective than Elizondo's.

And that's coming from someone who would dearly love to see hard evidence of extraterrestrial life.

So there you have it.  One more example of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  Like any other bias, it can lead you astray; the whole point of the fable is that eventually there was a wolf, no one believed the boy, and the boy got turned into a lupine hors-d'oeuvre.  But even if it's a bias, it's an understandable bias.  If Elizondo really does have good evidence of aliens but has blown his own credibility to the point that no one is listening any more, he has only himself to blame.

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Remnants of forgotten civilizations

As silly as it can get sometimes, I am a dedicated Doctor Who fanatic. I'm late to the game -- I only watched my first-ever episode of the long-running series about seven years ago -- but after that, I went at it with the enthusiasm you see only in the born-again.

The best of the series tackles some pretty deep stuff.  The ugly side of tribalism ("Midnight"), the acknowledgement that some tragedies are unavoidable ("The Fires of Pompeii"), the Butterfly Effect ("Turn Left"), the fact that you can't both "play God" and avoid responsibility ("The Waters of Mars"), the sad truth that you can sometimes give it your best game and still lose ("The Haunting of Villa Diodati"), the devastating fact that the ones orchestrating war are seldom the ones who suffer because of it ("The Zygon Inversion"), and the terrible necessity of personal self-sacrifice ("Silence in the Library").  Plus, the series invented what would be my choice for the single most terrifying, wet-your-pants-inducing alien species ever dreamed up, the Weeping Angels (several episodes, most notably "Blink").

So it shouldn't have been a surprise when Doctor Who got a mention an article in Scientific American, but it still kinda was.  It came up in a wonderful piece by Caleb Scharf called "The Galactic Archipelago," which was about the possibility of intelligent life in the universe (probably very high) and the odd question of why, if that's true, we haven't been visited (Fermi's paradox).  Here at Skeptophilia we've looked at one rather depressing answer to Fermi -- the "Great Filter," the idea that intelligent life is uncommon in the universe either because there are barriers to the formation of life on other worlds, or that once formed, it's likely to get wiped out completely at some point.

It's even more puzzling when you consider the fact that it would be unnecessary for the aliens themselves to visit.  Extraterrestrial life paying a house call to Earth is unlikely considering the vastness of space and the difficulties of fast travel, whatever the amazingly-coiffed Giorgio Tsoukalos (of Ancient Aliens fame) would have you believe.  But Scharf points out that it's much more likely that intelligent aliens would have instead sent out self-replicating robot drones, which not only had some level of intelligence themselves (in terms of avoiding dangers and seeking out raw materials to build new drones), but could take their time hopping from planet to planet and star system to star system.  And because they reproduce, all it would take is one or two civilizations to develop these drones, and given a few million years, you'd expect they'd spread pretty much everywhere in the galaxy.

But, of course, it doesn't seem like that has happened either.

Scharf tells us that there's another possibility than the dismal Great Filter concept, and that's something that's been nicknamed the "Silurian Hypothesis."  Here's where Doctor Who comes in, because as any good Whovian will tell you, the Silurians are a race of intelligent reptilians who were the dominant species on Earth for millions of years, but who long before humans appeared went (mostly) extinct except for a few scattered remnant populations in deep caverns.

The Silurian Madame Vastra in the episode "Deep Breath," played by the incomparable Neve McIntosh

A while back, astronomers Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank, of NASA and the University of Rochester (respectively), considered whether it was possible that an intelligent technological species like the Silurians had existed millions of years ago, and if so, what traces of it we might expect to find in the modern world.  And what Schmidt and Frank found was that if there had been a highly complex, city-building, technology-using species running the Earth, (say) fifty million years ago, what we'd find today as evidence of its existence is very likely to be...

... nothing.

Scharf writes:

[Astrophysicist Michael] Hart's original fact [was] that there is no evidence here on Earth today of extraterrestrial explorers...  Perhaps long, long ago aliens came and went.  A number of scientists have, over the years, discussed the possibility of looking for artifacts that might have been left behind after such visitations of our solar system.  The necessary scope of a complete search is hard to predict, but the situation on Earth alone turns out to be a bit more manageable.  In 2018 another of my colleagues, Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, together with Adam Frank, produced a critical assessment of whether we could even tell if there had been an earlier industrial civilization on our planet.

 
As fantastic as it may seem, Schmidt and Frank argue -- as do most planetary scientists -- that it is actually very easy for time to erase essentially all signs of technological life on Earth.  The only real evidence after a million or more years would boil down to isotopic or chemical stratigraphic anomalies -- odd features such as synthetic molecules, plastics, or radioactive fallout.  Fossil remains and other paleontological markers are so rare and so contingent on special conditions of formation that they might not tell us anything in this case.

 
Indeed, modern human urbanization covers only on order of about one percent of the planetary surface, providing a very small target area for any paleontologists in the distant future.  Schmidt and Frank also conclude that nobody has yet performed the necessary experiments to look exhaustively for such nonnatural signatures on Earth.  The bottom line is, if an industrial civilization on the scale of our own had existed a few million years ago, we might not know about it.  That absolutely does not mean one existed; it indicates only that the possibility cannot be rigorously eliminated.

(If you'd like to read Schmidt and Frank's paper, it appeared in the International Journal of Astrobiology and is available here.)

It's a little humbling, isn't it?  All of the massive edifices we've created, the far-more-than Seven Wonders of the World, will very likely be gone without a trace in only a few million years.  A little more cheering is that the same will be true of all the damage we're currently doing to the global ecosystem.  It's not so surprising if you know a little geology; the current arrangement of the continents is only the most recent, and won't be the last the Earth will see.  Because of erosion and natural disasters, not to mention the rather violent clashes that occur when the continents do shift position, it stands to reason that our puny little efforts to change things won't last very long.

Entropy always wins in the end.

The whole thing puts me in mind of one of the first poems I ever read that made a significant impact on me -- Percy Bysshe Shelley's devastating "Ozymandias," which I came across when I was a freshman in high school, and which is still a favorite.  It seems a fitting way to conclude this post.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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The aliens of Mexico

Because my reputation has apparently preceded me, I have now been sent a link five times to a news story about an alleged governmental meeting in Mexico which one-upped the recent U. S. congressional hearing on UAPs/UFOs by bringing out some bodies of mummified aliens.

The story (and the pictures) are now making the rounds of social media, but were supposedly part of a press release from Mexican governmental officials.  So without further ado, here's one of the aliens:

You can't see in this photo, but the alien bodies have three fingers on each hand and foot, and have necks "elongated along the back."  They are said to come from the town of Nazca, Peru, which immediately gave all the Ancient Aliens crowd multiple orgasms because this is also the site of the famous "Nazca Lines," designs drawn on the ground that (when viewed from the air) can be seen to be shaped like monkeys and birds and whatnot.  Alien visitation aficionados claim that the Nazca Lines are an ancient spaceship landing site, although I have no idea why the fuck aliens would build a landing strip shaped like a monkey.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Diego Delso, Líneas de Nazca, Nazca, Perú, 2015-07-29, DD 49, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Needless to say, I'm a little dubious, and my doubt spiked even higher when I read that one of the scientists involved, one Jaime Maussan, was "able to draw DNA data from radiocarbon dating."  This is patently ridiculous, given that DNA extraction/analysis and radiocarbon dating are two completely different techniques.  So Maussan's statement makes about as much sense as my saying "I'm going to bake a chocolate cake using a circular saw."

Maussan also said that his analysis showed that "thirty percent of the specimens' DNA is unknown" and the remains "had implants made of rare metals like osmium."

The problem is (well, amongst the many problems is) the fact that Maussan has pulled this kind of shit before.  Back in 2015 he went public with other Peruvian mummies, which upon (legitimate) analysis turned out to be the remains of ordinary human children.  Some of them looked a little odd because they had undergone skull elongation rituals -- something not uncommon from early Peruvian cultures -- but their DNA checked out as one hundred percent Homo sapiens.  Add to this the fact that Maussan has repeatedly teamed up with noted New Age wingnut Konstantin Korotkov, who claims to have invented a camera that can photograph the soul and specializes in "measuring the human aura," and we have yet another example of someone who has just about exhausted any credibility he ever had.

So while the people weighing in on TikTok and Reddit seem to be awestruck by the Alien Mummies, reputable scientists are less impressed.  There's no evidence these are anything but the remains of human infants, and there are credible allegations that some of them have been deliberately (and recently) altered to make them look more non-human.

I..e., it's a fraud.

If so, the whole thing really pisses me off, because it's hard enough making good determinations based on slim evidence without some yahoos faking an artifact (not to mention desecrating human burials from indigenous cultures) to get their fifteen minutes of fame.  Regarding the whole alien intelligence question, I've generally adopted a wait-and-see policy, but with this kind of bullshit it's really hard not to chuck the whole thing.  We skeptics have sometimes been accused of being such habitual scoffers that we wouldn't believe evidence if we had it right in front of our noses, and there might be a grain of truth there.

But if you really want to fix that, stop allowing the phonies, frauds, and cranks to dominate the discussion.  And that includes shows on the This Hasn't Actually Been History For Two Decades Channel.

Anyhow, I'm thinking the "alien bodies" will turn out to be just the latest in a very long line of evidence for little more than human gullibility and the capacity for deception, including self-deception.  A pity, really.  At this point, if aliens actually do arrive, I'm so fed up with how things are going down here that I'll probably ask if I can join the crew.

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Drawing the line

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a YouTube video for my facepalming pleasure a couple of days ago, and being a generous sort, I wanted to share the experience will all of you.  The video is called "Nazca Lines Finally Solved!  The Answer is Amazing!", and is well worth watching in its entirety.  But if you understandably don't want to spend seven minutes of your life watching the video that you will never, ever get back, I'll provide you with a capsule summary and some editorial commentary from Yours Truly.

The Nazca Lines, you probably know, are a series of geoglyphs in southern Peru, which are large enough that their overall shape really can't be discerned except from the air.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The relative impossibility of seeing the pattern except from above has led to wingnuts such as Erich von Däniken (of Chariots of the Gods fame) to propose that they were made to signal aliens visiting Earth from other planets.  Why aliens would be impressed by our drawing a giant monkey on the ground, I have no idea.  It also bears mention that Nazca is hardly the only place in the world that has geoglyphs, and none of them have much to do with flying saucers.  There's the Cerne Abbas Giant of Dorsetshire, England, for example, who is really really glad to see you:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons PeteHarlow, Cerne-abbas-giant-2001-cropped, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Be that as it may, the guy in the video, one Damon T. Berry, thinks the Nazca lines are trying to tell us something.  What?  Well, he starts out with a bang by saying that "the universal language is constellations."  Whatever the fuck that means.  Given that the constellations are random assemblages of stars that would look completely different from another vantage point in space, it's hard to imagine anything "universal" about them except that they're, by default, part of the universe.

What Berry tells us then is that each of the glyphs has a code that points at a particular destination.  He starts with the glyph shaped like a bird, and then talks about birds representing flight (okay, I'm with you so far), and some of the glyphs being runways for flying machines (why the hell you'd make a runway shaped like a monkey, I have no idea), and then goes into a long part about how it's significant that the bird has four toes on one foot and five on the other.

"It is a bird," Berry says.  "It appears to be a bird.  But think like an alien.  Look closer at its feet."

I'm not sure why thinking like an alien involves looking at feet.  Maybe the aliens have some kind of weird foot fetish.  I dunno.

Anyhow, what does the fact of its having nine toes mean?  It means, Berry says, that "this is not a bird.  This is a constellation."  In fact, it's the constellation Aquila, a grouping of stars in the northern hemisphere which evidently looked like an eagle to some ancient Greeks who had just polished off their second bottle of ouzo.  The nine toes correspond to the nine brightest stars in the constellation, he says.

Then he moves on to another bird glyph, this one of a hummingbird.  Berry tells us in astonished tones that this bird has the same number of toes on each foot, as if that was an unusual condition or something.  He then says, and this is a direct quote: "The clue lies elsewhere... in the wings.  And the elongated wings are meant to draw your attention... to the wings."

I had to pause the video at this point to give myself a chance to stop guffawing.

We're then directed to count the feathers, and he comes up with eleven.  He includes the tail, but I'm not going to quibble about that because otherwise we'll be here all day.  He says that the number eleven can only mean one thing: the glyph points to the "constellation Columbia."

For the record, the constellation is actually Columba, not Columbia.  Cf. my comment about not quibbling.

The fact that Columba "has eleven stars" means there's an obvious correspondence.  Well, I have two things to say about that.

1. Do you really think that there's nothing else in the universe that is made up of eleven parts?
2. There are way more than eleven stars in Columba, it's just that the shape of the constellation (identified as a dove by the aforementioned ouzo-soaked Greeks) is generally outlined using the brightest eleven stars, just as Aquila was with the nine brightest as earlier described.

He then goes on to analyze the monkey glyph, and once again makes a big deal about the number of fingers and toes, which add to fifteen.  This points to the "constellation of the monkey," which he draws for us.  It's fortunate that he does, because as I do not need to point out to any astronomy buffs out there, there is no constellation of the monkey.  As far as I can tell, he just took some random dots and connected them with straight lines to look vaguely like a monkey.

Whether ouzo was involved, I don't know.

He finishes up by basically saying that aliens are out there and will be coming to visit us from those constellations.  At this point, I started shouting at my computer, "You can't be 'from a constellation!'  The stars in a constellation have nothing to do with one another!"  This caused my dog, Rosie, to come into my office and give me the Canine Head Tilt of Puzzlement, meant to communicate the one concept she's capable of hosting in her brain ("What?").  I reassured her that I wasn't mad at her, that I was mad at the silly man on YouTube, and she accepted that and toddled off to interact with something on her intellectual level, like a dust bunny.

Anyhow.  At the end we're told we can learn more if we just watch his longer and more in-depth production, available on Amazon Prime, but I don't think I'm gonna.  I've heard enough.  Me, I'll go back to trying to figure things out through science instead of pulling random correspondences out of my ass.  Call me narrow-minded, but it seems in general like a better way to understand the universe, even if it doesn't involve counting an animal's toes and acting like it means something significant.

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Can you hear me?

Most of you have probably heard of SETI -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  SETI is an umbrella term that links dozens of different projects and approaches, but is most often connected to the SETI Institute, founded in 1984 specifically to address the question of whether extraterrestrial life exists, and if so, whether we could communicate with it.

Just detecting the evidence of an extraterrestrial intelligence (assuming there is any) is fraught with difficulties.  To begin with the most glaring problem, there are an estimated 250 billion stars in the Milky Way alone, which makes for a hell of a survey area.  And even if you start by looking only at the relatively nearby ones, there's still the question of what exactly you're looking for.  Radio wave signals are an obvious choice, and we have radio telescopes that do exactly that, but to start with, that's an awfully broad band of frequencies (between 300 and 3,000 kHz).  Even to pick it up would mean not only listening to the right region of space, but being tuned to the right frequency at the right time.

But there are other problems.  Suppose there is an intelligent civilization on a star 25 light years from us, and they're sending out a radio signal of some sort.  There are two possibilities, of which the first is that the signal comes from their own intraplanet communications, like the oft-discussed bubble of transmissions from our early radio and television, which is currently carrying snippets of I Love Lucy and Gilligan's Island that are sweeping past planets and stars seventy-odd light years away.  The second is that the signal is a deliberately-deployed beacon, an interstellar lighthouse specifically for communication with other civilizations.

Each of these presents its own problems.  In the first case, the bubble of radio transmissions gets fainter and fainter as it expands, according to the inverse-square law of intensity.  So as funny as it is to think of some extraterrestrials on the third planet of Vega judging humanity by The Beverly Hillbillies, my suspicion is that by the time it arrived the signal would be so faint that it would be nearly impossible to detect.  (And that's not even considering degradation of the signal from passing through interstellar dust and gas.)

The second sounds more promising, but it too has a difficulty.  If you're beaming a signal toward another star, you get an improvement in intensity because the logical way to do it is to collimate the beam as tightly as possible.  You're still subject to the inverse-square law, but a tightly-collimated beam has such a narrow cross-section and high intensity that it could retain its power for a great deal longer.  (Consider that even back in 1962, the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment successfully collimated a laser tightly enough that they were able to reflect it from the Moon, and detect the reflected pulse back here on Earth 2.6 seconds later.)  But the narrower your beam, the smaller the area of your potential target.  You would have to have a good reason to choose a particular star, or at least a region of space, or your signal would miss detection entirely.

So broad signal/low intensity, narrow signal/smaller sample size.  There doesn't seem to be any way around those equal-and-opposite problems.

There's also the difficulty of how exactly you could encode a message that would be understandable to a non-human intelligence.  Once the signal is received, how do you make sure the aliens can figure out what it's saying?  This question has most recently been tackled by a team led by Jonathan Jiang of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and this is in fact why the topic comes up.  Jiang has made a proposal to send out a message aimed toward the densest patch of stars in the night sky, in the direction of the galactic center in the constellation Sagittarius.  To be successful such message would have to contain enough information to (1) tell its recipients that it's not just an anomalous radio blip from a natural source, (2) give an indication of how to translate it, and (3) tell the extraterrestrials a little about where and who we are.

Jiang's proposal addresses all three.  It first contains an easily-deciphered binary code that links to our base-10 counting system, and lists off the first 24 prime numbers.  (Shades of the wonderful movie Contact, in which SETI researcher Ellie Arroway recognized that there is no naturally-occurring process that would produce blips in prime-number groups.)  Once that (hopefully) convinces the aliens that we're relatively intelligent, the message goes on to communicate our understanding of time (using a standard time interval -- the spin-flip transition of hydrogen -- that would hopefully be known to any technological species).  There would be information using this universal clock telling when the signal was sent, which would tell the recipient how far away we are.  Last, there would be a binary-encoded sketch of two humans, and some basic information about our biology and biochemistry, reminiscent of the gold plaques placed on Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 when they were launched in (respectively) 1972 and 1973.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

There's also the question, of course, of whether alerting the aliens to our presence (and giving them directions for how to get here, no less) would be a good thing.  Back in 2011, physicist Stephen Hawking warned us that first contact might not be quite as cheery as it was in Star Trek.  "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet," Hawking said.  "I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet.  Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.  If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans...  They could be billions of years ahead of us technologically.  If so, they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria."

Which is both humbling and scary.  The positive side of all this is that even if the aliens do turn out to be hostile, they're still very far away.  Let's say that there is intelligent life on a planet orbiting Gliese 581 (the home of the first Earth-like planet ever discovered).  Gliese 581 is 20.4 light years away, so it's in our general neighborhood.  If we sent a signal to them saying hello, they'd get it 20.4 years from now, and we'd receive their response in (minimally) 40.8 years.  If instead of just sending a radio response back they were offended by our sending them biochemistry and pictures of naked people, and launched an attack fleet, it'd be even longer before they arrived here.  So even if they're hostile, we're safe for some time.

That's assuming that they haven't found some way to overcome the light-speed barrier and get here at superluminal velocities.  In that case, we might well be fucked.

But, like Hawking, I still think we should do it.  Finding out we're not alone in the cosmos would be the most stupendous discovery humans have ever made.  Jiang and his team don't have a proposed date for beaming out our "Can you hear me?" message, but there's no reason why it couldn't be done soon.  And if it does reach an extraterrestrial intelligence, we'll just have to cross our fingers and hope it's not the Daleks, Stenza, Sontarans, or the Crystalline Entity.

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A signal from our neighborhood

I try to keep my rational brain engaged, but man, sometimes it's hard going.

Like when I read the story that popped up over at Scientific American last Friday.  My ears perked up at the very first line: "It's never aliens, until it is."

Written by Jonathan O'Callaghan and Lee Billings, it tells about a recent discovery made by "Breakthrough Listen," the search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence program launched by entrepreneur Yuri Milner in 2015.  Despite scanning the skies for five years looking for something that might be a sign of alien intelligence, Breakthrough Listen hasn't found anything that couldn't be explained using ordinary astrophysics...

... until now.

Maybe.  I hate to add that word, but... "rational brain engaged," and all.  There's a lot that's exciting about what they discovered, not least that the signal they found comes from Proxima Centauri -- the nearest star to the Sun, right in our own neighborhood at only 4.2 light years' distance.  (Okay, I probably shouldn't say "only."  4.2 light years is about 25,000,000,000,000 miles.  One of the fastest spacecraft ever made by humans, Voyager 2, would still take 73,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri -- if it were heading that way, which it's not.)

The proximity of the signal's source is hardly the only exciting thing about it.  After all, the universe has plenty of radio sources, and all the ones we've found so far have purely prosaic explanations.  The signal is weirdly compressed, occupying a narrow band of frequencies centering around 982 megahertz.  Interestingly, this is a frequency range that is usually fairly empty of transmissions, which is one of the reasons the signal stood out, and decreases the likelihood that it's some kind of human-made source being picked up accidentally.  "We don’t know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency,” said astrophysicist Andrew Siemion, who is on the team that analyzed the signal.  "Perhaps, some as-yet-unknown exotic quirk of plasma physics could be a natural explanation for the tantalizingly concentrated radio waves, but for the moment, the only source that we know of is technological."

The "tantalizing" part is that we know for sure that Proxima Centauri has at least one Earth-like planet -- Proxima b, which is 1.2 times the size of the Earth, and orbits its star in eleven days.  (If that doesn't sound very Earth-like, remember that Proxima Centauri, as a red dwarf, is a lot less massive than the Sun, so its "Goldilocks zone" -- the band of orbital distances that are "just right" for the temperatures to allow liquid water" -- is a lot closer in, and the planets in that region travel a lot faster.)  Red dwarf stars are prone to solar flares, so some of the more pessimistic astrophysicists have suggested that the radiation flux and general turbulence would destroy any nearby planets' atmosphere, or at least shower the surface with sufficient ionizing radiation to prevent the development of complex biochemistry, let alone life.

But it's important to realize that this, too, is a surmise.  Truthfully, we don't know what's down there on Proxima b -- just that it's got a rocky surface and a temperature range that would allow for liquid oceans, rivers, and lakes.

Just like here.

In short, finding a suspicious radio signal from the nearest star to our own is pretty amazing, even if I *wince* *grimace* keep my rational brain engaged.

The fact is, even the scientists -- normally the most cautious of individuals -- are sounding impressed by this.  "It’s the most exciting signal that we’ve found in the Breakthrough Listen project, because we haven’t had a signal jump through this many of our filters before," said Sofia Sheikh of Pennsylvania State University, who led the team that analyzed the signal and is the lead author on an paper describing it, scheduled for publication this spring.

Honestly forces me to add that there's one bit of information about the signal that points away from it being a technosignature: unlike the signal detected at the beginning of the movie Contact, it has no internal fine structure.  “BLC1 [Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1] is, for all intents and purposes, just a tone, just one note," Siemion says.  "It has absolutely no additional features that we can discern at this point."

But even the doubters are saying it's worthy of further study.  "If it’s an ETI it must eventually be replicable, because it’s unlikely it would be a one-off,” said Shami Chatterjee, a radio astronomer at Cornell University.  "If an independent team at an independent observatory can recover the same signal, then hell yes.  I would bet money that they won’t, but I would love to be wrong."

So would a lot of us, Dr. Chatterjee.  I know we've had other strange signals before, stretching all the way back to the beginnings of radio astronomy and the discovery of incredibly rapid-fire "blinking" of a radio source discovered at Jodrell Bank by astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967.  That one also elicited the comment of "we don't know a natural process that could generate such fast oscillation" -- and the source was actually nicknamed "LGM" (Little Green Men) until Burnell showed that the signal was coming from a pulsar, a rapidly-spinning neutron star.

So it was bizarre, perhaps, but not a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence.

In any case, I'll be eagerly awaiting replication and confirmation of the discovery.  Even if it doesn't turn out to be aliens *heavy sigh* it'll probably turn out to be something interesting.  But until then... well, I guess it's premature to request transport to the mother ship, but I can still keep hoping.

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Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Remnants of forgotten civilizations

As silly as it can get sometimes, I am a dedicated Doctor Who fanatic.  I'm late to the game -- I only watched my first-ever episode of the long-running series four years ago -- but after that, I went at it with the enthusiasm you only see in the born-again.

The best of the series tackles some pretty deep stuff.  The ugly side of tribalism ("Midnight"), the acknowledgement that some tragedies are unavoidable ("The Fires of Pompeii"), the Butterfly Effect ("Turn Left"), the fact that you can't both "play God" and avoid responsibility ("The Waters of Mars"), and the terrible necessity of personal self-sacrifice ("Silence in the Library").  Plus, the series invented what would be my choice for the single most terrifying, wet-your-pants-inducing alien species ever dreamed up, the Weeping Angels (several episodes, most notably "Blink").

So it shouldn't have been a surprise when Doctor Who got a mention in this month's Scientific American, but it still kinda was.  It came up in a wonderful article by Caleb Scharf called "The Galactic Archipelago," which was about the possibility of intelligent life in the universe (probably very high) and the odd question of why, if that's true, we haven't been visited (Fermi's paradox).  Here at Skeptophilia we've looked at one rather depressing answer to Fermi -- the "Great Filter," the idea that intelligent life is uncommon in the universe either because there are barriers to the formation of life on other worlds, or that once formed, it's likely to get wiped out completely at some point.

It's even more puzzling when you consider the fact that it would be unnecessary for the aliens themselves to visit.  Extraterrestrial life paying a house call to Earth is unlikely considering the vastness of space and the difficulties of fast travel, whatever the amazingly-coiffed Giorgio Tsoukalos (of Ancient Aliens fame) would have you believe.  But Scharf points out that it's much more likely that intelligent aliens would have instead sent out self-replicating robot drones, which not only had some level of intelligence themselves (in terms of avoiding dangers and seeking out raw materials to build new drones), but could take their time hopping from planet to planet and star system to star system.  And because they reproduce, all it would take is one or two civilizations to develop these drones, and given a few million years, you'd expect they'd spread pretty much everywhere in the galaxy.

But, of course, it doesn't seem like that has happened either.

Scharf tells us that there's another possibility than the dismal Great Filter concept, and that's something that's been nicknamed the "Silurian Hypothesis."  Here's where Doctor Who comes in, because as any good Whovian will tell you, the Silurians are a race of intelligent reptilians who were the dominant species on Earth for millions of years, but who long before humans appeared went (mostly) extinct except for a few scattered remnant populations in deep caverns.

Last year, astronomers Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank, of NASA and the University of Rochester (respectively), considered whether it was possible that an intelligent technological species like the Silurians had existed millions of years ago, and if so, what traces of it we might expect to find in the modern world.  And what Schmidt and Frank found was that if there had been a highly complex, city-building, technology-using species running the Earth, (say) fifty million years ago, what we'd find today as evidence of its existence is very likely to be...

... nothing.

Scharf writes:

[Astrophysicist Michael] Hart's original fact [was] that there is no evidence here on Earth today of extraterrestrial explorers...  Perhaps long, long ago aliens came and went.  A number of scientists have, over the years, discussed the possibility of looking for artifacts that might have been left behind after such visitations of our solar system.  The necessary scope of a complete search is hard to predict, but the situation on Earth alone turns out to be a bit more manageable.  In 2018 another of my colleagues, Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, together with Adam Frank, produced a critical assessment of whether we could even tell if there had been an earlier industrial civilization on our planet. 

As fantastic as it may seem, Schmidt and Frank argue -- as do most planetary scientists -- that it is actually very easy for time to erase essentially all signs of technological life on Earth.  The only real evidence after a million or more years would boil down to isotopic or chemical stratigraphic anomalies -- odd features such as synthetic molecules, plastics, or radioactive fallout.  Fossil remains and other paleontological markers are so rare and so contingent on special conditions of formation that they might not tell us anything in this case. 

Indeed, modern human urbanization covers only on order of about one percent of the planetary surface, providing a very small target area for any paleontologists in the distant future.  Schmidt and Frank also conclude that nobody has yet performed the necessary experiments to look exhaustively for such nonnatural signatures on Earth.  The bottom line is, if an industrial civilization on the scale of our own had existed a few million years ago, we might not know about it.  That absolutely does not mean one existed; it indicates only that the possibility cannot be rigorously eliminated.

(If you'd like to read Schmidt and Frank's paper, it appeared in the International Journal of Astrobiology and is available here.)

It's a little humbling, isn't it?  All of the massive edifices we've created, the far-more-than Seven Wonders of the World, will very likely be gone without a trace in only a few million years.  A little more cheering is that the same will be true of all the damage we're currently doing to the global ecosystem.  It's not so surprising if you know a little geology; the current arrangement of the continents is only the most recent, and won't be the last the Earth will see.  Because of erosion and natural disasters, not to mention the rather violent clashes that occur when the continents do shift position, it stands to reason that our puny little efforts to change things won't last very long.

Entropy always wins in the end.

The whole thing puts me in mind of one of the first poems I ever read that made a significant impact on me -- Percy Bysshe Shelley's devastating "Ozymandias," which I came across when I was a freshman in high school.  It seems a fitting way to conclude this post.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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As technology has improved, so has our ability to bring that technology to bear on scientific questions, sometimes in unexpected ways.

In the fascinating new book Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past, archaeologist Sarah Parcak gives a fascinating look at how satellite photography has revolutionized her field.  Using detailed photographs from space, including thousands of recently declassified military surveillance photos, Parcak and her colleagues have located hundreds of exciting new sites that before were completely unknown -- roads, burial sites, fortresses, palaces, tombs, even pyramids.

These advances are giving us a lens into our own distant past, and allowing investigation of inaccessible or dangerous sites from a safe distance -- and at a phenomenal level of detail.  This book is a must-read for any students of history -- or if you'd just like to find out how far we've come from the days of Heinrich Schliemann and the excavation of Troy.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

UFO report overhaul

New from the "Well, At Least They're Going About It The Right Way" department, we have: the US Navy's new guidelines for reporting UFOs.

Apparently, this rewrite was spurred by an uptick in reports of strange sightings, although the powers-that-be state in no uncertain terms that they're not saying any of these are alien spacecraft.   "There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years," the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO.  "For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.  As part of this effort, the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities.  A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."

While I do tend to agree with Neil DeGrasse Tyson's view that the eyewitness testimony of pilots, policemen, ships' captains, and other people wearing uniforms isn't inherently better than that of the rest of us -- "it's all bad," he says -- I do have some niggling doubts about including pilots on that list.  After all, Tyson goes on to say that the frequency of reports of UFOs from astronomers is lower than that of the rest of the population because -- another direct quote -- "We know what the hell we're looking at!", ignoring the fact that pilots spend a lot of time looking up, too.  My guess is that a seasoned pilot wouldn't be taken in by such uncommon but perfectly natural phenomena as noctilucent clouds, lenticular clouds, sun dogs, sprites, STEVE (strong thermal emission velocity enhancement), and fallstreak holes.

And honestly, much of what pilots have reported don't admit of easy explanation.  According to Chris Mellon, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, a large percentage of the sightings were of objects "flying in formation" and "exceeding the speed of the airplane."

I'm in agreement that those sightings deserve investigation, and there needs to be a lessening of the stigma of even making the report.  Mellon says that a lot of pilots who've seen UFOs have chosen not to report them because of fear of ridicule or of actually hurting their careers.

So far, so good.  But then Luis Elizondo, who runs the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, got involved, and took the new recommendations and leapt right into hyperspace.  "If I came to you and said, ‘There are these things that can fly over our country with impunity, defying the laws of physics, and within moments could deploy a nuclear device at will,’ that would be a matter of national security," Elizondo said.  "This type of activity is very alarming, and people are recognizing there are things in our aerospace that lie beyond our understanding."

Now just hang on a moment.

There's about a light year's distance between "I saw an unexplained light in the sky" and "this is a spacecraft that defies the laws of physics and is just waiting to deploy a nuclear device against us."  I mean, on the one hand, I think what Elizondo is saying is that by the time an alien spaceship did deploy a nuclear weapon, it'd be too late to do anything about it, which is true as far as it goes; but don't you think the first step would be to establish that what people have seen are alien spaceships before we go into collective freak-out mode?

And I am absolutely sick unto death of people claiming that these alleged aliens can "defy the laws of physics" and "are beyond our understanding."  Maybe I'm being a little cocky and defensive, here, but the laws of physics are pretty damn well established, and I'd be willing to bet cold hard cash that if there are aliens out there, they obey the same laws of physics we do.  I'd also be willing to wager that even if there is some hitherto-unknown bit of physics that is allowing the aliens to do their aerial gymnastics, it's not "beyond our understanding."  Physicists are by and large pretty smart women and men, and my guess is they would be perfectly capable of understanding it, if the aliens would just land their spaceships and sit down and discuss it with them.

So simultaneously mythologizing and catastrophizing these sightings isn't very productive, or even very realistic.  Yes, they should be investigated.  I'm also with Michio Kaku that if even one in a hundred credible UFO sightings are unexplainable as natural terrestrial phenomena, that 1% is worth looking into.  But we need to keep our heads on our shoulders and not assume that everything we haven't explained will turn out to be something we can't explain.

I think the US Navy has the right idea, though, in making it part of their policy to take UFO sightings by pilots seriously.  And hell, maybe one of the reports will turn out to be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.  Believe me, no one would be more thrilled than I am if this turned out to be the case.  But it's important to keep looking at these things skeptically, always questioning and looking for alternate (natural) explanations, especially if the more out-there explanation is something we'd very much like to be true.

Because everyone -- even pilots, astronomers, and people in the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program -- are subject to confirmation bias.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.