SETI

Illustration by Ryan Miller.

SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has fallen on hard times with current federal cutbacks to space science and research. The downside of these cutbacks is they come at a time when new detection strategies enable us to discover planetary bodies around stars to a distance of about a thousand light years. Planets that are detected by the wobble of the star imposed by planetary gravity. Planets found by comparing the light values from the transit of the planet over the face of the star. Starlight can be analyzed for planetary gas signatures, possibly even the pollutants of civilization. Darn precise stuff is this recent evolution of stargazing.

What we have in these revolutionary methods of finding planets includes “sweet spot” locations, the so-called Goldilocks Zone, neither too close nor too far from the solar parent for radiational comfort, better defined as liquid water. The means are available to identify the parent chemistry on the planet, whether or not it has water, which in our experience is the main arbiter of life systems. A planet we might hone in on for radio signals, and whether or not they have yet evolved to rock and roll and Elvis is another question. At this critical juncture is where SETI could be used to target specific rich system stars…and it’s having its funding reduced.

To a kid raised in a big farmhouse, those patent summer nights stirred with a dose of Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov, the possibilities of looking up into that grand pasture of star-systems with life-potent planets is irresistible. To imagine a life system like our own that with a modest century of advanced technology can now be detected a hundred light years out. What about a civilization that has an electromagnetic signature a thousand light years out, who have been radio-wave technological since the Norman Conquest? Imagine the chance to eavesdrop on them. Imagine a society of that degree of progress that somehow didn’t wipe out their home planet, didn’t war, didn’t eclipse their resources, a society a thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand years beyond where we are.

I do wonder if the non-interference ethic of the Starship Enterprise might be a natural code for such advanced technologies that they can’t or won’t communicate with far less advanced cultures for fear of contaminating them with technologies they can’t handle and might even hasten their demise. Societies that have already heard us and don’t want the contract. A kind of cosmos ethic then, about messing with lesser species, better to slow the evolution of junior societies from ideas and elements they can’t manage. After all, remember what happened over on Cygnus X?

If the numbers of planetary detections continue at the current pace, our Milky Way galaxy could hold hundreds of thousands of life-form planets. Just a few years ago this number was estimated to be on the order of ten thousand life-supporting planets in the galaxy. New astro-technologies have found a far more routine pattern of planet formation to include planets within climate parameters similar to ours. To imagine what a 50,000-year-old technical society might do with alternate resources?

The age of astronomy began with Galileo and moved on steadily, if occasionally disputed by religion, to an understanding of the solar system, the nature of stars, the age of stars, the discovery of galaxies, the dimension of the visible universe, the physics of star and planetary formation, the existence of black holes and more recently the mysterious issue of dark matter. With the Hubble we have the ability to see within 500 – 700 million years of the Big Bang. With the Webb telescope we might get a degree of magnitude closer, within 50 million years of the Big Bang.

Astronomy is now intrigued by the thought of a universe not merely expanding but accelerating with no known mechanism to halt that motion. To ask then how did the Big Bang begin in the first place if the universe doesn’t cycle back to its origin? What is the source of the mass stretching out our universe, ever accelerating, toward what? Add to this string theory and multiple dimensions can occupy the same space and time and remain undetectable to each other. Astronomy is now asking questions of the universe that were once reserved to our own galaxy: what’s out there, other island universes perhaps darkly attracting each other?

A dark star-filled night is inherently sci-fi stuff. What if our Earth is really a ho-hum norm rather than a rare oddity? Is it only a matter of time and technology before we discover other life forms and beyond, intelligent life forms? What happens to every assumption by which we have measured our values, our lives, our religions, when we at last make contact? Not being alone in this wide dark night changes the story of ourselves, it changes our special status with creation and creation’s god.

A sense exists in the realm of astronomy that we are on the verge of discovering elements that might so alter our perceptions of our place in creation as to be unnerving. To question then whether science should continue on this path or not – then again, we’ve been at this point in technology many times before.