Room for exploration

I've discussed the Fermi Paradox here at Skeptophilia before -- and the cheerful idea of the Great Filter as the reason why we haven't heard from alien life.  As I explained in a post last month, the explanation boils down to three possibilities, nicknamed the "Three Fs."

We're first, we're fortunate, or we're fucked.

Being an aficionado of all things extraterrestrial, that has never sat well with me.  The idea that we might be all alone in the universe -- for any of the three Fs -- is just not a happy answer.  Yes, I know, I always say that the universe is under no obligation to act in such a way as to make me happy.

But still.  C'mon... Vulcans?  Time Lords?  Ewoks?  G'gugvuntts and Vl'hurgs?  There's got to be something cool out there.  With luck, lots of cool things.  The Dentrassi, Quantum Weather Butterflies, Andorians, the Vashta Nerada...

Okay, maybe not the Vashta Nerada.  But my point stands.

The Andromeda Galaxy [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Adam Evans, Andromeda Galaxy (with h-alpha), CC BY 2.0]

So I was considerably cheered yesterday when I ran into a study out of Pennsylvania State University that attempted to estimate what fraction of the universe we actually have surveyed in any kind of thorough fashion.  The authors, Jason Wright, Shubham Kanodia, and Emily G. Lubar, write:

Many articulations of the Fermi Paradox have as a premise, implicitly or explicitly, that humanity has searched for signs of extraterrestrial radio transmissions and concluded that there are few or no obvious ones to be found.  Tarter et al. (2010) and others have argued strongly to the contrary: bright and obvious radio beacons might be quite common in the sky, but we would not know it yet because our search completeness to date is so low, akin to having searched a drinking glass's worth of seawater for evidence of fish in all of Earth's oceans.  Here, we develop the metaphor of the multidimensional "Cosmic Haystack" through which SETI hunts for alien "needles" into a quantitative, eight-dimensional model and perform an analytic integral to compute the fraction of this haystack that several large radio SETI programs have collectively examined.  Although this model haystack has many qualitative differences from the Tarter et al. (2010) haystack, we conclude that the fraction of it searched to date is also very small: similar to the ratio of the volume of a large hot tub or small swimming pool to that of the Earth's oceans.  With this article we provide a Python script to calculate haystack volumes for future searches and for similar haystacks with different boundaries.  We hope this formalism will aid in the development of a common parameter space for the computation of upper limits and completeness fractions of search programs for radio and other technosignatures.

The actual analogy Wright and his colleagues used is that saying our current surveys show there's no intelligent life in the universe (except for here, which itself seems debatable some days) is comparable to surveying 7,700 liters of seawater out of the total 1.335 billion trillion liters in the world's oceans.

So basing a firm conclusion on this amount of data is kind of ridiculous.  There could be intelligent alien species out there yelling, "Hey!  Earthlings!  Over here!  We're over here!", and all we would have to do is have our radio telescopes pointed a couple of degrees off, or tuned to a different wavelength, and we'd never know it.

Which is pretty cool.  Given the fact that my all-time favorite movie is Contact, I'm hoping like hell that people don't read Wright et al.'s paper and conclude we should give up SETI because it's hopeless to make a thorough survey.  When I think about what poor Ellie Arroway went through trying to convince her fellow scientists that her research was valid and deserved funding... yecch.  And if anything, the current attitudes of the government toward pure research are, if anything, worse than those depicted in the movie.

But despite all that, it's awe-inspiring to know we've got so much room to explore.  Basically... the entire universe.  So my dream when I was a kid, sitting out in my parents' yard with my little telescope, that as I looked at the stars there was some little alien boy in his parents' yard looking back at me through his telescope, may one day prove to be within hailing distance of reality.

********************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Hugh Ross Williamson's Historical Enigmas.  Williamson takes some of the most baffling unsolved mysteries from British history -- the Princes in the Tower, the identity of Perkin Warbeck, the Man in the Iron Mask, the murder of Amy Robsart -- and applies the tools of logic and scholarship to an analysis of the primary documents, without descending into empty speculation.  The result is an engaging read about some of the most perplexing events that England ever saw.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Wow failure

I love science, but I really wish it would stop crushing my hopes and dreams.

I say this because it has long been my dream to live long enough to see unequivocal proof of the existence of intelligent life on other planets.  I got my start, alien-obsession-wise, when I was about seven and became addicted to the abysmal 1960s television series Lost in Space.  The aliens were pretty low-budget, judging by the fact that most of them were...

... well, human.  Like the alien cowboy, the alien pirate (complete with a mechanical parrot), the alien motorcycle gang, the alien teenage hippies, the alien Wild West gunslinger, and Brunhilde.  I'm not making this last one up.  In this not-to-be-missed cinematic tour de force, Brunhilde appears out of nowhere, wearing a helmet with wings, yo-to-hoing like mad while seated on the back of an enormous plastic horse.  In that episode, we also meet Thor, who thinks he has lost his strength and has gone all weepy, and Will Robinson has to give him a heartwarming pep talk to convince him that true strength comes from within.

If you can watch that episode without pissing your pants laughing, you have a stronger constitution than I have.

Things took a step up (well, okay, that was pretty much the only direction available) with the original Star Trek series, where they at least got rubber noses and colorful makeup for the aliens, and induced some of them to speak in cheesy faux-Russian accents to make it clear which ones were the bad guys.  But then came Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Trek: First Contact and Cocoon and Starman and the best of 'em all, Contact -- which remains one of my top favorite movies ever -- and I was completely and permanently hooked on the idea that there might be extraterrestrial intelligence.

The problem is, the evidence for life on other planets, much less intelligent life, is kind of nonexistent.  There have been radio telescopes scanning the sky for decades, and so far there's been nothing to answer to Enrico Fermi's famous quip, "Where is everybody?"

There was one possibility, however.  It's called the "Wow Signal" -- a 72-second burst of radio waves captured in 1977 by Ohio State University's "Big Ear" Radio Telescope.  It was such an anomaly that astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote "Wow!" next to the computer printout that contained the signal, thus giving the phenomenon its name.

The spot in the sky where the burst originated -- near the star Chi Sagittarii in the constellation Sagittarius -- has been repeatedly scanned, but the signal has never been repeated.

So what was it?  The hopeful amongst us (which included me) thought it might be a radio transmission from intelligent life.  The more dubious figured there had to be some kind of more prosaic explanation -- but what that explanation might be, no one knew.  So I held on to the Wow Signal as being a real possibility for the realization of my dream.

Until today.

Antonio Paris, of the Center for Planetary Science at the Washington Academy of Sciences, shot down the extraterrestrial intelligence hypothesis this week with a neat, and completely plausible, explanation of the Wow Signal as the emission from the hydrogen-rich comet 266/P Christensen -- which was in that exact location when the signal was detected.

Paris writes:

In 2016, we proposed a hypothesis arguing that a comet and/or its hydrogen cloud was a strong candidate for the source of the “Wow!” Signal.  From 27 November 2016 to 24 February 2017, we conducted 200 observations in the radio spectrum to validate the hypothesis.  This investigation discovered that comets 266/P Christensen, P/2013 EW90 (Tenagra), P/2016 J1-A (PANSTARRS), and 237P/LINEAR emitted radio waves at 1420 MHz.  In addition, the data collected during this investigation demonstrated there is a well-defined distinction between radio signals emitted from known celestial sources and comets, including comet 266/P Christensen...  To dismiss the source of the radio signal as emission from comet 266/P Christensen, we repositioned the telescope away from the comet and conducted clear sky observations when the comet was not near the coordinates of the “Wow!” Signal.  During these clear sky observations, we detected no significant radio signal at 1420 MHz.  This investigation, therefore, has concluded that cometary spectra are observable at 1420 MHz and that the 1977 “Wow!” Signal was a natural phenomenon from a Solar System body.

To Dr. Paris, I have the following to say: "Nicely done!  Outstanding research!  I hate you!"  *grinds teeth*

So for us alien aficionados, it's one more dashed hope.  I mean, I'm supportive of science, and I appreciate the hard work and rigor, but really.  Leave me something to cling to, okay?  Because at the moment, all I'm left with is Brunhilde, and the yo-to-hoing is getting really annoying.