Recently
a new 10-year, $100 million dollar initiative was announced: a
project called Breakthrough Listen. The project will use two of the
world's largest radio telescopes in an attempt to look for radio
signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. It's a new jolt of
cash to SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and has
largely been funded by a Russian billionaire named Yuri Milner.
We
can be sure that this money will be spent in very conventional ways.
Virtually all of it will go for listening to radio signals using big radio
telescopes like the one shown below.
Our
scientists seem to be fixated on big machines. It is as if they are thinking: the way to make a big discovery is to use a big, big
machine. But I can imagine some
ways in which you could conduct a search for extraterrestrial life
without using big machines. Some of these ways would involve searches
very different from looking for radio signals from distant planets.
One
method would be to investigate all the evidence suggesting that we
may be visited regularly by one or more extraterrestrial
civilizations. Currently the analysis of UFO sightings is done only
by poorly funded organizations and private individuals. Just think of
what might be found if, say, 1 percent of that 100 million dollars was
devoted to investigating this topic. We might find very good evidence
of extraterrestrial life, which is the very thing SETI is supposed to
be looking for.
Another
method would be to look at the human genome for evidence of the
non-natural. We might find some evidence that someone tinkered with
human DNA, and such tinkering might have been done by
extraterrestrial visitors that came here and modified our DNA. Or we
might actually find some message left behind by extraterrestrials who
came here long ago and modified our DNA to leave some message inside
it. This is a fascinating idea that was charmingly presented in an
episode of the television series Star Trek: The Next
Generation. DNA contains
nucleotide “letters” that could be used to spell out any
imaginable message. Such a message could be included in the
“noncoding” part of DNA that has no known purpose.
Another
way in which we could search for extraterrestrial intelligence
without using big machines is to investigate crop circles. These
mysterious things have so far only been investigated by poorly funded
private researchers. But what might we learn if a million dollars or
two were spent investigating these anomalies? We might get some proof
that these mysterious things are of extraterrestrial origin.
Another
way in which we could search for extraterrestrial intelligence
without using big machines is to systematically investigate photos
taken in our solar system of Mars and other bodies, looking
specifically for traces that may have been left behind by
extraterrestrial visitors. Currently the only people who do this are
poorly funded individuals, but with even minimal funding some very
interesting photos have been found. We can only wonder what might
turn up if a million dollars or two was devoted to such an
investigation.
Still
another way we could search for extraterrestrial intelligence is to
investigate fully the photographic anomaly of orbs. These strange
anomalies are showing up repeatedly in photos, often as objects that
look too big to be dust, too bright to be dust, too fast to be dust,
and too colorful to be dust. These anomalies cannot be generally
explained as dust particles, because (as explained here) the blockage fraction of dust
particles in ordinary air are too small (a particle of dust in typical outdoor air
blocks only about 1/15000 of the area right in front of a camera).
Could it be that orbs represent some strange extraterrestrial life
form that has come to our planet? We might find out by spending
perhaps a thousandth of the 100 million dollars recently allocated to
SETI.
Still
another way we could search for extraterrestrial intelligence is to
try making use of clairvoyance or ESP. If extraterrestrial
civilizations are millions of years more advanced than ours, the
minds in such civilizations may have psychic abilities that dwarf any
that a human being has. There may therefore be some chance of
leveraging such a possibility. We can imagine a program that could
search for humans with relatively strong ESP or clairvoyance, and
then use them in an attempt to receive telepathic messages from
extraterrestrials (or at least some indication of which corner of the sky they live). Such an impression might be received if there are
extraterrestrial superminds out there with something like super-telepathy. Such an
approach could be carried out at relatively tiny expense, so it might
be worth trying, even if it is highly unlikely to succeed.
These
are all interesting and inexpensive alternative ways in which we
could search for extraterrestrial intelligence without spending much
money, and without using big machines. But I think it unlikely that
any of them will be undertaken by the new SETI initiative. Instead,
almost certainly that initiative will follow the conventional
mainstream wisdom regarding the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence: the principle that when looking for aliens, we must put
all of our eggs in one basket.
Part
of the reason is a kind of “big iron” fixation that dominates the
minds of scientists. The thinking is kind of like this: the bigger
the machine you use, the better your chance of success. So scientists
build incredibly expensive machines that often produce modest
results, when the same funding (used to fund a hundred little
projects) would probably produce much greater results.
But
the main reason why SETI has been so narrowly focused may be perhaps
that scientists want to find something consistent with their
worldview, but don't want to find things inconsistent with their
worldview. So they don't want to follow approaches that may lead them
to what they are looking for, but also may lead them to other things
they don't want to believe in. By getting involved in edgy SETI
approaches, scientists might find the extraterrestrial civilizations
they are looking for. But they might get evidence for things they don't
want to believe in, and have declared taboo: things such as psychic
phenomena, undiscovered spiritual realities, or some design in the
origin of humanity.
So
SETI is burdened by a kind of methodological timidity. The typical
SETI researcher's attitude is like this:
People
who think there might be evidence we are now being visited by aliens
are a bunch of kooks and crackpots. It's all too obvious that if
aliens were here now, they would have a giant spaceship that everyone
would see in the sky. Ignore anything strange happening in our skies
when looking for evidence of extraterrestrials. The only sensible way
to look for aliens is to keep trying to listen for radio signals (the
same way we've been trying for 50 years without success).
The
wisdom of this attitude is by no means obvious. One problem is its
fallacy of assuming that we can presume to infer what it would be like
if extraterrestrials had arrived on our planet. Since
extraterrestrials might have arisen many millions or billions of
years ago, we have no idea whether they would still be using anything
we could recognize as technology. For all we know, they could have
evolved long ago into beings of pure energy that are now floating
around in our skies. The other problem with this attitude is the
insistence that the only viable search option should be to keep trying a
technique that has not proven successful after 50 years.
Imagine
you had a very sick little daughter, and you knew that if you found out
more about some medical treatment, you might save her. You would
leave no stone unturned in your search for that knowledge. That is
the approach that a good SETI program should take: damn the taboos,
and leave no stone unturned in searching for extraterrestrials. But
instead SETI programs seem to limit themselves to turning only one
type of stone (the “radio signal” type of stone). While it still may make sense to use the lion's share of SETI funding on radio searches, a decent fraction of the budget (perhaps 10%) might be better spent on alternative SETI approaches.
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