For 50 years now humans have been scanning the skies in hopes of answering the question: Are we alone in the universe?
That mystery will be the topic of discussion during this weekend’s SETIcon, a convention for scientists, sci-fi writers, celebrities and fans to discuss every aspect of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
SPACE.com caught up with Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research (and the basis for the main character Ellie Arroway portrayed by Jodie Foster in the film “Contact” based on the book by astronomer-author Carl Sagan), to discuss the last 50 years since the first effort to listen for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe, and the outlook for the future:
After 50 years, what’s the status of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?
It is interesting that at age 50, what we’re doing is reinventing ourselves. I think that’s a good sign. We’re not going to stop doing what we’ve done — radio searching still makes a lot of sense. But optical searching also makes a lot of sense.
We’re going to try to get away from doing it all ourselves, and ask the world to join in. The world has shown an interest over the past decade in participating.
We haven’t really succeeded in getting people involved internationally. You’re skimming only the technological top of the global population. I’m actually hoping that the enormous prevalence of cell phones and social networking will finally allow us to.
Has the journey of SETI over the last 50 years played out like you thought it would?
I don’t think any of us were smart enough 50 years ago to anticipate how rapidly the capability of our searches was going to improve. Fifty years ago was pretty much pre-digital revolution. I can count almost 15 orders of magnitude improvement in the tools of radio observing.
Fifty years ago optical search was out of the question. We couldn’t count photons fast enough. When that technology got there, wow, we just jumped on it.
Fifty years ago nobody thought you could or should build an array of 50 small telescopes. Now the right thing to do is use inexpensive antennas and inexpensive electronics and combine them together. You get your value that way.
Back then, what got you interested in looking for life out there in the universe?
The thing that got me hooked on SETI about 40 years ago was the fact that we suddenly had some tools. These tools called radio telescopes could allow us to do an experiment to explore, rather than ask philosophers what we should believe. It’s all about replacing the [idea] of what should we believe, with ‘let’s explore.’
What do you say to people who think there’s no hope of finding extraterrestrials and that searching is a waste?
We appear to be the results of the laws of physics and chemistry. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether elsewhere, the same sorts of processes led to other intelligence and technologies.
Fifty years is a very small time in the lifetime of a galaxy which is 12 billion years old. We’re a very young technology in a very old galaxy. We kind of shouldn’t be surprised we haven’t found them yet. It’s a big search. We don’t go to bed disappointed, we wake up in the morning excited.
How do you think you’d feel if we did discover evidence of alien life?
The feeling would be phenomenal. To have posed a question and gotten an answer that no one else has been able to come up with. That would tell us something about the universe that we didn’t already know. Just a proof of existence; that would be amazing for me.
If extraterrestrials do exist, what do you imagine they might be like?
Who knows? Extraterrestrial psychology is one notch above where I’m prepared to go. I will say it’s statistically overwhelmingly likely that they are much older than we are. If they were younger than we are, then there isn’t any technology of theirs we could detect.
If we detect a signal we’ll know it’s possible for us to have a long future.
What do you predict the next 50 years might hold for SETI?
I’m pretty darn sure that long before 50 years from now Kepler or some other mission will have detected earth-size planets in the habitable zones of their stars and we will have been able to look remotely for biosignatures.
We may have understood whether or not there’s some sort of life on the planet. We may not be able to tell the difference between microbes and mathematicians, but at least we’ll have places to study from afar.
Thousands of people lined up to see a capsule from a space probe that landed on an asteroid.
Thousands of people flocked to an exhibition in Japan on Sunday to see a capsule from the Hayabusa space probe which was hoped to have brought asteroid dust to Earth.
Some 1,800 people were queuing in Tokyo to see the heat-proof pod, which had travelled in space with the unmanned craft for seven years, even before the exhibition opened in the morning, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spokesman said.
More than 7,000 had visited the first public showing of the capsule by early evening, he said, adding that the space agency expects as many as 50,000 people during the five-day exhibition.
The capsule, which journeyed billions of kilometres (miles), was fired back to Earth in June.
Technical problems had plagued the Hayabusa, which at one stage spun out of control and lost contact with JAXA for seven weeks, delaying the mission for three years until the asteroid and Earth re-aligned.
When it finally latched onto the potato-shaped Itokawa asteroid, a pellet-firing system designed to stir up dust malfunctioned, leaving it unclear how much material the probe was able to gather.
Scientists hope any dust samples from the ancient asteroid in the capsule could help reveal secrets about the origins of the solar system.
The space agency has said it found “minute particles” of what it hopes is asteroid dust in the capsule, but it is expected to take months to get the final results of the analysis.
The Hayabusa project has generated great excitement in Japan.
“I was so impressed that such a small thing came back to Japan after a seven-year space journey,” said one of the visitors. “It is just amazing.”
A mysterious light forces an airport closure and is photographed by many residents.
On July 7, something unusual happened near the Xiaoshan Airport in Hangzhou, China. An oddly shaped bright light appeared, forcing the airport to close down and delay 18 flights. Things are now back to normal, but people are wondering, what was that “thing”?
An ABC News article on the mysterious sighting explains that some who witnessed the light are calling it a UFO. But, keep in mind, a UFO doesn’t necessarily mean little, green men.
There is plenty of speculation on whether or not the object was some sort of military aircraft or missile. The ABC article explains that a day following the sighting, “an anonymous source told China Daily that authorities already discovered the identity of the UFO after an investigation but could not publically disclose the information because ‘there was a military connection.’”
Authorities are continuing to look into the incident, but no public conclusions have yet been made. Despite, or perhaps because of the mystery, Web searches on “china ufo” quickly soared 576%. Related queries on “china ufo video 2010,” “china ufo sightings,” and “hangzou china ufo” also posted triple digit gains. Even now, a week after the sighting, online lookups remain high.
Truth be told, there’s not much left to be said. Something weird happened. Nobody knows what it was. And if they do, they aren’t saying.
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In the earliest times astronomers were required to warn rulers and people of impending onslaughts of the wrath of Heaven. It was their responsibility to anticipate any unusual behavior in the celestial signposts of space and time: a colored ring around the Moon; a new star with a tail; an eclipse of the Sun. People care d not for the cause; only for the consequence. A comet’s tail streaking over half the sky seemed to threaten every living soul. The exact nature of the threat was not so important either. The chief problem was to placate the gods. Therefore the people and their ruler had to be ready in time to do public penance, to pray and sacrifice.
“When an eclipse of the Sun takes place,” an old Chinese account tells us, “the Emperor takes no full repast, and has the drums beaten at the altar. All officials lay aside their ceremonial robes; the princes sacrifice pieces of silk; the historian delivers a speech, until the eclipse is over.”
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Babylonian astrology became a second celestial religion; but it was quite unlike the first, that of ancient China. In China the stars became gods; in Babylon the gods became stars. To the Chinese the mysteries of the cosmos were so sublime that they degraded their traditional popular divinities to demons and created a cult of the stars without priests, myths, or dogmas. The Babylonians, on the other hand, placed their native divinities one after another in the heavens, and transferred the mythic traits of these divinities to the stars. Here was an amazing evolution: for the first and only time a civilized religion rendered the divine beings visible and calculable by identifying them with the seven wandering stars.
The cuneiform script itself expressed that impulse, for its sign of divinity was a star. An age-old Babylonian legend related that the lord of the Earth, Bel, appointed the three gods Shamash, Sin, and Ishtar guardians of the firmament, which they thereafter patrolled as the Sun, the Moon, and Venus. When four more wandering stars were found in the firmament, the Babylonians made bold to repeat the act of Bel. The city-god of Babylon, Marduk, became the planet Jupiter; the god of death, Nergal, became the planet Mars; the god of war, Ninurta, became Saturn; and the god of knowledge, Nabu, became Mercury. Mars was called Star of Judgment upon the De ad. The Tower of Babel, which was simultaneously a sanctuary and observatory, was called tersely the Temple of the Seven Transmitters of Commands from Heaven to Earth.
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The universe (like all Gaul) is divided into three parts–matter, space and time. Chemistry deals with matter; geometry calculates space; but time appears to be neglected. We are so accustomed to our watches and calendars that we take for granted all the mechanism behind them. Only our poets and lovers look to the sky for practical inspiration; and not one science in all the heterogeneous group is devoted simply to the study of time.
Strictly speaking, of course, chronology should take the matter in hand, but chronology has belied its name, and gone off at a tangent of names and dates–very important to be sure–but hardly comparable with the basis of time itself. Philosophy, in a theoretical fashion, has done its duty well; but the chief practical progress in the study of time has been left to the astronomers.
Yet, in spite of this apparent neglect, time was the first of the sciences and the most important. We have divorced ourselves from its foundations now. Because it was the first, it is now the best; its mechanisms are the most perfect; and we are the least conscious of them. Only in our leisure moments do we find occasion to lie on our backs and look up at the heavens in aesthetic contemplation.
We forget that there was a time when “watching the skies” constituted the most important and the most practical of man’s activities. The contrast is so complete today that we speak of “star-gazing” as of a child’s pastime, doubtless charming, but hardly a part of the business world. We are not even vaguely aware of the vast effort which mankind made, before astronomers could catch time from the stars and reflect it back by means of calendars and watches into the smooth course of our daily lives.
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With the invention of writing, a great change came over primitive man. First with pictures, later with simple writing, he could leave for his children a record that was not entirely dependent upon memory. As we shall show, many of these earliest records were astronomical. The Babylonian “boundary stones” were decorated with pictures representing the constellations; and many Egyptian temples were oriented to the Sun. Most religions have some astronomy hidden in their roots; for early peoples looked to the Sun for their greatest benefits; and to the stars for the Sun’s path.
The religions were suited to the regions of their origin. But all worship is based on tradition, and a migrating tribe was apt to take its religion in the old form, when it started off for farther, greener fields. The tribes whom it encountered en route would worship the same gods in a different manner; and, as from any conflict of thought, developments finally spring–so from the wars of these migrating tribes, religion, philosophy and science received fresh impetus.
Some system of measurement was the first necessity for even simple calculations of time. We may say today that time is that which is measured by a watch or a calendar; but in that definition we already imply a knowledge of duration and the difference between minutes and hours, days and weeks, months and years. A watch is the short-scale measure of a calendar.
Together they give us all that is necessary for our ordinary purposes; but neither alone is sufficient. An engineer of today is accustomed to gauge the flow of air through a tunnel by an anemometer which measures the velocity of wind. If the air is unduly sluggish he must find some other device such as a flare set at a point in the tunnel, and a man with a stop watch a hundred feet away. The watch is started when he sees the light and stopped when he smells the smoke. For most tunnels the scheme works perfectly, but one engineer who advised such an experiment received a note from his desperate foreman: “Enclosed find stop watch. It was useless for the purpose. Kindly send me a calendar.”
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The first great division of time is marked by day and night. The Earth rotates on its axis like an orange strung on a wire before a steady light and the glow falls first on one side then on the other. Were we situated on a distant star, we should see in this motion the most perfect regularity known to nature. The period is so even that astronomers are doubtful whether there has been any change in its pace since the beginning of historical time. From our prejudiced viewpoint on the surface of the rotating planet, this perfect regularity seems upset by another, quite different motion–the motion which causes the seasons–the revolution of the Earth around the Sun. There is nothing even about this second movement, and its unevenness seems, to our prejudiced eyes, to upset the regularity of day and night.
Consequently the standard observatories make their readings from the time when one star crosses the meridian to the time when the same star recrosses, rather than by the crossings of the Sun. By this means they manage to pretend that they are watching our planet from the distant star itself, and their viewpoint becomes impartial. Yet the reckonings, whether made by an amateur taking time by the Sun or a professional gauging it by a distant star, are both made to agree with the Earth’s motion on its own axis; and by that the twenty-four hours are set.
Equally important for us is the revolution of the Earth around the Sun, and on this revolution our calendars are based. All our “anniversaries” (from their very name), our festivals, the seasons which mark the planting and reaping of crops, and, in specific cases, the overflowing of rivers, are dependent upon this revolution. The period of the year is very nearly constant, but the half-year periods are variable. In our time the Sun prefers its northern residence, and lingers there three and a half days overtime, so that summer in the northern hemisphere is longer than summer in the antipodes.
These three celestial clocks, the rotation of the Earth on its axis, the revolution of the Earth around the Sun, and the revolution of the Moon around the Earth, have formed the bases of time in our practical, everyday lives.
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Alas for permanency! The ancient Egyptians forgot in their calculations that the rising and setting points of heavenly bodies are likewise dependent upon the Earth. The stars do not rise now, where they rose in ancient times. The poles of the Earth are not remaining in one place while the Earth spins around. They too have a motion and every little movement has a meaning all its own. They are wobbling as the points of a top wobble when the top is slowing down.
It is hard to buy an old-fashioned top today; but allow us to recommend one to you, if you wish to understand Precession. Wind the top up with a cord, give it a good swift start on a flat surface; then watch it carefully. Do you notice that the tip end has a little motion of its own? Even while the spin is still so fast that the rotation is indistinguishable, the end where you wound the cord is describing a much slower circle, apparently all on its own?
In much the same way our Earth behaves. The spin, like the spin of the top, makes its day and night; but the wobble of the poles, makes precession, and this little circular movement is so slow that 25,800 years are required before the precessional hand on our grandfather’s clock will have returned once to its starting point.
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Saint Augustine was, of course, quite correct. The celestial bodies measure time for us; they do not tell us its nature. Like all too common words, “time” has developed a multitude of meanings. We use it in one sense if we say, “The time has come,” and with a slightly different meaning if we speak of “time and tide,”–to give only two examples out of thousands; therefore philosophers have sought to define the nature of time, and differentiate its meanings. From Aristotle and Saint Augustine to the superb treatment offered by Thomas Mann in the Magic Mountain philosophers have tried to solve their own problem; and from Thales to Herschel the astronomers have been content to measure this aspect of the universe and scorn its nature.
Not until our generation have the two problems touched each other; but recent scientific theories indicate a close bond between the two. When Einstein announced to the world his fourth dimension, the philosophers looked up with startled eyes. Einstein was a physicist and a mathematician. They had not expected to find in him so close an ally. “But that is what we have been trying to say for two thousand years,” the philosophers announced, rather modestly to be sure, for philosophers like astronomers have fallen on evil days. “We have not stated it as well, and we could not point to mathematical proof behind us; but surely we have told something of the sort. Don’t you remember that in the Republic, Plato said that the studies of three dimensions would not, by themselves, completely explain the world. Surely you remember that?” No one answered; no one remembered. “This fourth dimension,” said the world, “is a new idea, and because it is new we must investigate it.”
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