The man who listened to the sky

Arno Allan Penzias was born on the 26th of April, 1933, in Munich, Germany.  It was a fractious time for Germany, and downright dangerous for anyone of Jewish descent, which Penzias was; his grandparents had come from Poland and were prominent members of the Reichenbachstrasse Synagogue.  Fortunately for the family, his parents saw which way the wind was blowing and evacuated Arno and his brother Gunther to Britain as part of the Kindertransport Rescue Operation.  Their father and mother, Karl and Justine (Eisenreich) Penzias, were also able to get out before the borders closed, eventually making their way (as so many Jewish refugees did) to New York City, where they settled in the Garment District.

The younger Penzias had shown a fascination and aptitude for science at a young age, so his choice of a major was never really in doubt.  He went to City College of New York, graduating with a degree in physics in 1954 and ranking near the top of his class.  For a time after graduating he worked as a radar officer in the U. S. Army Signal Corps, but the pull of research drew him back into academia.  In 1962, he earned a Ph.D. in microwave physics from Columbia University, studying with the inventor of the maser, Charles Townes.

Penzias then got a job with Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, where he worked on developing receivers for the (then) brand-new field of microwave astronomy.  He teamed up with Robert Wilson, an American astronomer, to develop a six-meter-diameter horn reflector antenna with a seven-centimeter ultra-noise receiver, at that point by far the most sensitive microwave detector in the world.

And while using that antenna in 1964, he and Wilson discovered something extremely odd.

At a wavelength of 7.35 centimeters, corresponding to a temperature of around three degrees Kelvin, there was a strong microwave signal -- coming from everywhere.  It seemed to be absolutely uniform in intensity, and was present in the input no matter which direction they aimed the antenna.  It was so perplexing that Penzias and Wilson thought it was an artifact of some purely terrestrial cause -- at first, they thought it might be from pigeon poo on the antenna.  Even after ruling out whatever they could think of (and cleaning up after the pigeons), the signal was still there, a monotonous hiss coming from every spot in the sky.

Before publishing their findings, they started looking for possible explanations, and they found a profound one.  Almost twenty years earlier, physicists Ralph Alpher, Robert Herman, and Robert Dicke had predicted the presence of cosmic microwave background radiation, the relic left behind by the Big Bang.  If the Big Bang model was correct, the unimaginably intense electromagnetic radiation generated by the beginning of the universe would have, in the 13.8-odd billion years since, been "stretched out" by the expansion of the fabric of spacetime, increasing its wavelength and dropping into the microwave region of the spectrum.  Alpher, Herman, and Dicke had predicted that the relic radiation should be under twenty centimeters in wavelength, and should be isotropic -- coming from everywhere in space at a uniform intensity.

That's just what Penzias and Wilson had observed.

In July of 1965, they published their results in the Astrophysical Journal, and suddenly Penzias and Wilson found themselves famous.

Penzias and Wilson at the Holmdel Horn Antenna in June of 1962 [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

At the time, there were two competing theories in cosmology -- the Big Bang model and the Steady-State model.  The latter theorized that the universe was expanding (that much had been undeniable since the discovery of red shift and Hubble's Law) but that as space expanded, matter was continuously being created, so the universe had no fixed start point.  Steady-State was championed by some big names in cosmological research -- Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle amongst them -- and trying to figure out a way to discern which was correct had become something of a battle royale in astronomical circles.

But now Penzias and Wilson had made an accidental discovery, coupled it with a pair of (at the time) obscure papers making predictions about the temperature and wavelength of background radiation, and in one fell swoop blew the Steady-State model out of the water.

In 1978 Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for research that changed the way we see the universe.

Since then, the cosmic microwave background radiation has been studied in phenomenal detail, and we've learned a great deal more about it -- starting with the fact that it isn't perfectly isotropic.  There are tiny but significant irregularities in the temperature of the radiation, something that has yet to be fully explained.  But the majority of the implications of the discovery have stood firm for nearly seventy years; 13.8 billion years ago, spacetime started to expand, and everything we see around us -- all the matter and energy in the universe -- condensed out of that colossally powerful event.  And coming from everywhere in the sky, like a ghostly afterimage of an explosion, is the radiation left behind, stretched out so much that it is outside of the range of human vision, and can only be detected by a telescope tuned to the microwave region of the spectrum.

On Monday, the 22nd of January, 2024, Arno Penzias died at the venerable age of ninety.  The world has lost a brilliant and innovative thinker whose contributions to science are so profound they're hard even to estimate.  The boy who escaped Nazi Germany with his family in the nick of time grew up to be a man who listened to the sky, and in doing so forever altered our understanding of how the universe began.

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Water worlds

Water is one of those things that seems ordinary until you start looking into it.

The subject always puts me in mind of the deeply poignant Doctor Who episode "The Waters of Mars," which has to be in my top five favorite episodes ever.  (If you haven't seen it, you definitely need to, even if you're not a fanatical Whovian like I am -- but be ready for the three-boxes-of-kleenex ending.)  Without giving you any spoilers, let's just say that the Mars colonists shouldn't have decided to use thawed water from glaciers for their drinking supply.

Once things start going sideways, the Doctor warns the captain of the mission, Adelaide Brooke, that trying to fight what's happening is a losing battle, and says it in a truly shiver-inducing way: "Water is patient, Adelaide.  Water just waits.  Wears down the cliff tops, the mountains.  The whole of the world.  Water always wins."

Even beyond science fiction, water has some bizarre properties.  It's one of the only substances that gets less dense when you freeze it -- if water was like 99% of the compounds in the world, ice would sink, and lakes and oceans would freeze from the bottom up.  Compared to most other liquids, it has a sky-high specific heat (ability to absorb heat energy without much increase in temperature) and heat of vaporization (the heat energy required for it to evaporate), both of which act not only to allow our body temperature easier to regulate, it makes climates near bodies of water warmer in winter and cooler in summer than they otherwise would be.  It's cohesive, which is the key to how water can be transported a hundred meters up the trunk of a redwood tree, and is also why a bellyflop hurts like a mofo.  It's highly polar -- the molecules have a negatively-charged side and a positively-charged side -- making it an outstanding solvent for other polar compounds (and indirectly leading to several of the other properties I've mentioned).

And those are the characteristics water has at ordinary temperatures and pressures.  If you start changing either or both of these, things get weirder still.  In fact, the whole reason the topic comes up is because of a paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters called "Irradiated Ocean Planets Bridge Super-Earth and Sub-Neptune Populations," by astrophysicist Olivier Mousis of Aix-Marseille University, about a very strange class of planets where water is in a bizarre state where it's not quite a liquid and not quite a gas.

This state is called being supercritical -- where a fluid can seep through solids like a gas but dissolve materials like a liquid.  For water, the critical point is about 340 C and a pressure 217 times the average atmospheric pressure at sea level, so nothing you'll run into under ordinary circumstances.  This weird fluid has a density about a third that of liquid water at room temperature -- way more dense than your typical gas and way less than your typical liquid.

Mousis et al. have found that some of the "sub-Neptune" exoplanets that have been discovered recently are close enough to their parent stars to have a rocky core surrounded by supercritical water and a steam-bath upper atmosphere -- truly a strange new kind of world even the science fiction writers don't seem to have anticipated.  One of these exoplanets -- K2 18b, which orbits a red dwarf star about 110 light years from Earth -- fits the bill perfectly, and in fact mass and diameter measurements suggest it could be made up of as much as 37% water.

So there you are -- some strange features of a substance we all think we know.  Odd stuff, water, however familiar it is.  Even if you don't count the extraterrestrial contaminants that Captain Brooke and her crew had to contend with.

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Never seen it before

Ever heard of the opposite of déjà vu -- jamais vu?

This may sound like it's the setup for some sort of abstruse bilingual joke, but it's not.  Déjà vu ("already seen" in French) is, as you undoubtedly know, the sensation that something you're experiencing has happened exactly that way before even though you're certain it can't have (a phenomenon, by the way, which is still yet to be fully explained, although there was a suggestive study out of Colorado State University five years ago that gave us some interesting clues about it).  Jamais vu ("never seen") is indeed the opposite; the eerie sense that something completely familiar is unfamiliar, uncertain, or simply incorrect.

One of the most common forms of jamais vu is an experience a lot of us have had; looking at a word and convincing ourselves that it's misspelled.  It can happen even with simple and ridiculously common words.  I remember being a teenager and working on a school assignment, and staring at the word "were" for what seemed like ages because suddenly it looked wrong.  The same thing can happen with music -- skilled musicians can reach a point in a piece they've practiced over and over, and suddenly it feels unfamiliar.  Less common, but even more unsettling, are reports where people look at faces of family and friends, and have the overwhelming sensation that they have never seen them before.

The emphasis here is on "looks" and "feels" and "sensation."  This seems not to be a cognitive issue but a sensory-emotional one; when I've had jamais vu over the spellings or definitions of words, and I look the word in question up, almost always what I'd been writing turned out to be correct even though it felt wrong.  The people who had the sense that their loved ones' faces were somehow unfamiliar still knew their names and relationships, so their cognitive understanding of who those people were was undiminished; it was the "gut feeling" that was all wrong.

[Image courtesy of creator © Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons Brain memory, CC0 1.0]

The reason the subject comes up is that a team led by Chris J. A. Moulin of the Université Grenoble Alpes has done a preliminary look into the strange phenomenon of jamais vu, and their results were the subject of a paper in the journal Memory.  Their research started with a simple question: can jamais vu be induced?  The answer was yes, and by a simple protocol -- repeat something often enough, and it starts to look strange.

The researchers took familiar words like "door" and less familiar ones like "sward," and asked volunteers to write them repeatedly until they wanted to stop.  They were told they could stop for whatever reason they wanted -- tired hand, bored, feeling peculiar, whatever -- but to be aware of why they stopped.  It turned out that by far the most common reason for stopping was "feeling strange," which was cited as the cause by seventy percent of the volunteers.  The effect was more pronounced with common words than uncommon ones, as if we kind of expect to see uncommon words as odd, so it doesn't strike us as off.

It even happened with the most common word in the English language -- "the."  It only took 27 repetitions, on average, for people to halt.  One volunteer said, "[Words] lose their meaning the more you look at them."  Another, even more interestingly, said, "It doesn't seem right.  It almost looks like it's not really a word, but someone's tricked me into thinking it is."

The researchers believe that jamais vu isn't just some kind of psychological fluke.  It may serve a purpose in jolting us when our cognitive processes are going onto autopilot -- as they can, when we're asked to do a repetitive task too many times.  That feeling of strangeness brings us back to a state of high alertness, where we're paying attention to what we're doing, even if the downside is that it makes us think we've made mistakes when we haven't.

"Jamais vu is a signal to you that something has become too automatic, too fluent, too repetitive," the authors write.  "It helps us 'snap out' of our current processing, and the feeling of unreality is in fact a reality check.  It makes sense that this has to happen.  Our cognitive systems must stay flexible, allowing us to direct our attention to wherever is needed rather than getting lost in repetitive tasks for too long."

So a sense of peculiarity when we're doing ordinary stuff might actually have an adaptive benefit.  Good to know, because it's really unsettling when it happens.

But for what it's worth, I still don't think "were" should be spelled like that.

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Bear with us

A paper appeared last week in the Journal of Zoology that has elicited a good bit of self-satisfied chortling amongst the people who think cryptids are abject nonsense.  It was written by a data scientist named Floe Foxon, and is entitled, "Bigfoot: If It's There, Could It Be a Bear?"

Foxon's conclusion was, "Yeah, it probably is."  Foxon writes:

Previous analyses have identified a correlation between ‘Sasquatch’ or ‘Bigfoot’ sightings and black bear populations in the Pacific Northwest using ecological niche models and simple models of expected animal sightings.  The present study expands the analysis to the entire US and Canada by modeling Sasquatch sightings and bear populations in each state/province while adjusting for human population and forest area in a generalized linear model.  Sasquatch sightings were statistically significantly associated with bear populations such that, on the average, every 1000 bear increase in the bear population is associated with a 4% increase in Sasquatch sightings.  Thus, as black bear populations increase, Sasquatch sightings are expected to increase.  On average, across all states and provinces in 2006, after controlling for human population and forest area, there were approximately 5000 bears per Sasquatch sighting.  Based on statistical considerations, it is likely that many supposed Sasquatch are really misidentified known forms.  If Bigfoot is there, it could be a bear.

While this certainly is a suggestive correlation, it's not the slam-dunk the scoffers would like it to be.  There are no known black bear populations in Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, but all of those states have had significant numbers of Bigfoot sightings; Illinois, in fact, is fifth in the nation for the number of sightings (exceeded only by Washington, California, Florida, and Ohio).

This may seem like an odd stance for a self-styled skeptic to take, and don't interpret this as saying more than it does.  My point is that it is a significant jump (and Foxon himself is clear on this point) from saying "many, perhaps most, Sasquatch sightings are actually black bears" to saying "all Sasquatch sightings are actually black bears," which is the reaction I'm mostly seeing.  My issue is with not with Foxon and his analysis, which is excellent, but with the doubters who are saying, "Ha-ha, we toldja so" and thinking this settles the question.

It's precisely the same reason I agreed with controversial physicist Michio Kaku when he said that even if only one in a hundred credible UFO sightings are unexplainable as natural phenomena, that one percent is still worth looking into.  For myself, both Kaku and most Bigfoot aficionados go a lot further into the True Believer column than I'm willing to; but in my mind, an abject statement of disbelief is no better than an abject statement of belief given that in both cases there are plenty of data left to explain.

So the whole thing leaves me pretty much where I was.  We don't have any convincing hard evidence either of Bigfoot or of alien visitation, so my opinion is they're both unlikely to be real phenomenon.  But "unlikely" doesn't mean "certain," and my opinion is just my opinion.  In neither case should we stop looking, nor close our minds to the possibility that we doubters could be wrong.

The burden of proof, of course, still rests on the ones making the claim.  You can't prove a negative, Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence, and all that sorta stuff.  So Foxon's paper gives us a good reason to be cautious about accepting Bigfoot sightings as conclusive -- but then, we really should be cautious about accepting damn near anything without due consideration of alternative explanations.

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The empty galaxy

A couple of weeks ago, I began a post with a quote from physicist Albert Michelson in which he confidently claimed that everything in physics was pretty well settled -- in 1894.  Right before the discovery of the relativity and quantum mechanics would shake science to its foundations.

I read yet another paper just yesterday highlighting the inadvertent irony of Michelson's statement, and which once again shows us that we are very far from understanding everything there is to understand.  This one was about the accidental discovery of a galaxy that has an extremely odd characteristic.

It appears to have no stars whatsoever.

The object, dubbed J0613+52, is about ten times less massive than the Milky Way -- so smaller than your typical galaxy, but still pretty damn huge, weighing in at about two billion solar masses.  But the entire thing is made up of diffuse gas and dust -- no stars at all.

Because of this, it has an extremely low luminosity.  It was only discovered because of a mistake -- the astronomers at the Green Bank Observatory were trying to aim it elsewhere, but had mistyped the coordinates -- but when the telescope focused on the spot, they saw a blip of hydrogen spectral emission lines in what appeared to be an empty region of space.  More detailed study of the spot found that the emission lines were coming from a huge but faint dust cloud that was on the scale of galaxies mass-wise but seemed to have undergone no star formation.

"It’s likely there is a decent amount of dark matter present as well," said Karen O’Neil, senior scientist at Green Bank, who led the research.  "But lingering uncertainties about the dark galaxy’s exact physical size make associated dark-matter estimates hazy at best...  J0613+52 is completely isolated, with no neighboring galaxy closer than 330 million light-years or so; our own Milky Way, in fact, appears to be the object’s closest-known companion.  In these void areas of the universe, gas should be too diffuse to form any galaxy-like object.  Clearly that’s not quite true."

Robert Minchin, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico, heard O'Neil present the findings at last week's meeting of the American Astronomy Society, and was obviously impressed.  "I think it’s definitely a real detection," Minchin said.  "It does look like a primordial object.  It’s a bit like discovering a living dinosaur and having it there to study."

Artist's depiction of J0163+52 [Image credit: STScI POSS-II (starfield); additional illustration by NSF/GBO/P.Vosteen]

What puzzles me is that J0613+52 is only ("only") 330 million light years away, so not even close to being the farthest galaxy we've seen.  The universe as a whole is forty times older than the light we're seeing from this bizarre empty galaxy, so you'd think it'd have had plenty of time to form stars from all that hydrogen gas.  Instead, it seems to be a relatively homogeneous dust cloud.  You have to wonder, what's keeping it that way?  Gravity is relentless and inexorable -- the current models indicate that even tiny anisotropies (unevenness) in the mass distribution will result in the denser regions gaining mass at the expense of the less dense regions, resulting in clumps of matter that eventually coalesce into stars.

For a dust cloud that massive to last over twelve billion years without forming stars is somewhere beyond peculiar.

It may be that I'm missing something, here.  (Okay, given that I'm not an astrophysicist, it's certain that I'm missing something.)  But even with my no-more-than-basic understanding of astronomy, this object seems really peculiar.

As is the fact that it was discovered accidentally because one of the astronomers had entered a typo in the coordinates.

I'm sure the astronomers are going to be busy looking at the empty galaxy and trying to figure out what it is, and also looking for others.  Given its extremely low luminosity, and the fact that we found it by basically aiming a big telescope at a random spot in the sky, you have to wonder how many other similar structures there are.

I'll end with the words spoken by Hamlet, which have been quoted many times before but seem apposite: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

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The enduring mystery of Kaspar Hauser

On the 26th of May, 1828, a strange teenage boy showed up on the streets of Nuremberg, Germany.  He was dirty and wore tattered clothing, and appeared terrified, refusing to speak to anyone when approached.  After a time he was coaxed into revealing that he carried a letter addressed to a Captain von Wessenig of the Fourth Squadron of the Sixth Bavarian Cavalry.

The heading of the letter read:

Von der Bäierischen Gränz
daß Orte ist unbenant
1828

[From the Bavarian border
The place is unnamed
1828]

The letter, which was unsigned, said that the boy was named Kaspar Hauser, and had been given to the letter's author as an infant on 7 October 1812.  It went on to state that Kaspar was born on 30 April 1812, and that Kaspar's father was a member of the Sixth Cavalry, but had died, so the anonymous author of the letter said he had instructed the boy in reading, writing, and the Christian religion, but had "never allowed him to take a step outside the house."  Now -- for no apparent reason -- Kaspar had been set free.

"Either make him a cavalryman, as his father was," the letter read, "or else hang him."

At first, all Kaspar would say was "I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was" and "Horse, horse!"  Pressure to say more, or to give an account of himself, resulted in tears.  After several months of being shuttled from one place to another -- including a stint locked up in Luginsland Tower in Nuremberg Castle for being a vagabond -- he went to live with Friedrich Daumer, a schoolteacher, who helped him to learn to speak.  At this point, a strange story emerged.

Kaspar told Daumer he'd spent his entire life in solitary confinement in a tiny darkened cell, two meters by one meter, and one-and-a-half meters tall.  All he had was a straw mattress to sleep on and a couple of toys including a dog carved out of wood.  His food and water were provided by a man who wore a mask, never revealing his face.  Sometimes the water tasted bitter; afterward he slept soundly -- and woke up to find the straw had been changed, and his hair and nails trimmed.

This, of course, initiated a firestorm of inquiry into who could have imprisoned a child in this fashion, but none of the leads turned up anything solid.  Kaspar himself couldn't give directions for retracing his steps back to where he'd lived.  Once every avenue had been investigated, the authorities more or less gave up, and the controversy seemed to settle down.

Then, on 17 October 1829, Kaspar was attacked by a man who uttered the words, "You will have to die before you leave Nuremberg," and gashed him on the forehead with a knife.  The man's voice, he said, was identical to that of his former captor.  Oddly, though, the blood trail led first to Kaspar's bedroom -- then, instead of toward the quarters where Daumer slept, it led downstairs and through a trap door into the cellar.

When asked why he'd done that, Kaspar said he didn't know.

Concerns for his safety after the incident led the police to transfer him to the home of Johann Biberbach, a municipal authority.  But that didn't last long; on 3 April 1830, there was a gunshot in Kaspar's bedroom, and Biberbach rushed in to find him bleeding from a superficial head wound.  Kaspar explained that he'd been standing on a chair to reach for some books, lost his balance, and struck a pistol that was mounted to the wall, causing it to go off.

A painting of Kaspar Hauser by Carl Kreul, from late 1830.  Note the scar on his forehead from the knife wound the previous year.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

This far-fetched story got him transferred first to the house of a Baron von Tucher, then to another schoolteacher named Johann Georg Meyer, and finally to a printmaker named Anselm von Feuerbach.  All three men quickly found Kaspar to be a sneaky, unreliable habitual liar.  Von Feuerbach was especially blunt, writing in a letter, "Caspar [sic] Hauser is a smart scheming codger, a rogue, a good-for-nothing that ought to be killed."

It seems like someone agreed with that assessment.  On 14 December 1833, Kaspar came home after a walk with a deep stab wound in the left side of his chest.  He'd been lured to the Ansbach Court Garden, he said, and then assaulted by a man with a knife who had handed him a small cloth bag and then stabbed him.  Kaspar said he'd dropped the bag, but a policeman searching the garden the following day found it.  It contained the following note: "Hauser will be able to tell you quite precisely how I look and from where I am. To save Hauser the effort, I want to tell you myself from where I come [unreadable].  I come from from [unreadable] the Bavarian border [unreadable].  On the river [unreadable].  I will even tell you the name: M. L. Ö."

Kaspar Hauser died three days later without ever explaining further.

So we're left with a perplexing question: who was Kaspar Hauser?

Explanations, as you might imagine, are kind of all over the map.  The first, and simplest, is that he was lying about his entire backstory.  It's possible he'd been raised in an abusive family and had run away, but the story of solitary confinement by a masked man wasn't true.  The letters were written by Kaspar himself and the wounds, including the one that ultimately killed him, were self-inflicted.  In this case, Kaspar Hauser suffered from Munchausen syndrome -- a psychological condition in which an individual claims illness or injury, sometimes even injuring him/herself deliberately, in order to garner attention and sympathy.  This is certainly consistent with the opinion of people who knew him personally, such as von Feuerbach.

Another possibility is that the confinement story was substantially true, and he was driven mad by the neglect and abuse he'd suffered.  Proponents of this explanation differ as to how much of his later story was true.  Some believe the wounds were self-inflicted; others that his captor feared being caught, and so hunted Kaspar down and killed him.  "M. L. Ö," as you might guess, has never been identified.

The last, and wildest, possibility is that Kaspar Hauser had been hidden away because he was the hereditary prince of Baden.  His parents, Charles, Grand Duke of Baden and Stéphanie de Beauharnais, had feared for the boy's life -- the birth of a male heir would have bumped Charles's successor, his uncle Louis -- so they switched him with the dying infant of a servant, claiming their own baby had died, then spirited the boy away to be raised in safety.

Mitochondrial DNA samples from Kaspar Hauser's hair and clothing were compared to that of a female-line descendant of Stéphanie de Beauharnais, and they weren't identical -- but were close enough that the theory "could not be ruled out."

It's profoundly frustrating, but the fact is we'll probably never know the truth.  This is summed up by the inscription on his tombstone, in the city of Ansbach: "Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time.  His birth was unknown, his death mysterious."

It's an evocative story, though, and has made its way into many works of fiction (in fact, the tale of Kaspar Hauser inspired my novella Adam's Fall, which also starts out with someone finding a strange, mute, ragged teenage boy -- but the two stories diverge completely thereafter).  

But as far as the mysterious German boy goes, as good skeptics we have to leave it there.  It's unlikely that any other evidence will surface -- so we have to be content to let the enduring mystery of Kaspar Hauser remain that way, probably forever.

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ET, call Lexington

If you needed more evidence that we're living in surreal times, some scientists have collaborated with the Tourism Board of Lexington, Kentucky to send a message to aliens inviting them to come to the city for a visit.

The message was sent via infrared laser toward TRAPPIST-1, a multi-planet system about forty light years from Earth.  Astonishingly, they actually got permission from the Federal Aviation Administration -- not a government office known either for its flexibility or its sense of humor -- to beam the message out.  The message, in coded bitmap form, contained information regarding the intent of the transmission, some photographs of the Lexington area, and an audio recording of blues musician Tee Dee Young.

"The bitmap image is the key to it all," said Andrew Byrd, a linguistics expert at the University of Kentucky, who was one of the scholars involved in the project.  "We included imagery representing the elements of life, our iconic Lexington rolling hills, and the molecular structure for water, bourbon, and even dopamine because Lexington is fun."

It also contained the message, "Come to Lexington!  We have horses and bourbon.  Just don't eat us."

I feel obliged to interject here that I'm not making any of this up.

The Lexington Tourism Board's promo art for the project, which I also did not make up

Regular readers of Skeptophilia know that the possibility of alien life -- perhaps intelligent life -- is a near-obsession with me, but I'm not sure this is really the way to go about trying to contact it.  While TRAPPIST-1 isn't a bad choice given the fact that it's fairly close and we know it has seven planets, there's no indication any of them host life.  Four of the planets appear to orbit within the star's "Goldilocks Zone," where the temperatures are "just right" for water to exist in liquid form, but that doesn't mean the planets have liquid water, or even atmospheres.  The fact that the planets have such tight orbits -- the farthest one only has an orbital radius six percent of Earth's, and orbits its star in nineteen days -- suggests they're probably tidally locked, meaning the same side of the planet always faces the star.  (I wrote about the difficulty of life evolving on a tidally-locked planet a year ago, if you're curious to read more about it.)

Then there's the problem of waving hello at aliens who might be vastly more powerful than we are and would respond by squashing us.  Stephen Hawking addressed this in stark terms back in 2010, saying, "We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans.  If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced.  A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us.  If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria."

Of course, if there are intelligent aliens out there, they probably already know about us.  At least the ones under 104 light years away do, because there's an expanding bubble of radio and television transmissions sweeping outward from us at the speed of light that began with the first commercial radio broadcast in 1920.  Assuming any aliens on the receiving end are at least as smart and technologically capable as we are, they're probably already decoding those transmissions and listening to Fibber McGee and Molly and watching Lost in Space, after which they will definitely think we're no more valuable than bacteria.

The last issue -- and this may be the good news, here, if you buy what Hawking said -- is that because TRAPPIST-1 is forty light years away, any aliens who might live there won't receive the message until 2064, and the earliest we could get a response is 2104.  Even if they have some kind of superluminal means of travel and jumped into their spaceships as soon as they got the message, it wouldn't be until the 2060s that they could even potentially get here.  

At least the Lexington Tourism Board has a good window of time to get their hotels ready for the influx of alien tourists.  And if they turn out to be hostile, at that point (if I'm still alive) I'll be over a hundred years old, and I figure that an alien laser pistol blast to the face is about as dramatic a way to check out as I could ask for, so I suspect I'll be fine with the Earth being invaded regardless which way it goes.

So the Lexington Tourism Board's efforts fall squarely into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  And I guess the more time people spend focusing on this sort of thing, the less they'll spend dreaming up new and different ways to be awful to each other.  So as far as that goes, I'm all for sending messages to the stars.

Even if the best things you can think of to talk about are horses, bourbon, and dopamine.

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