A Trojan Affair

by Michael Smorenburg

  “English is my second language,” the man said. “Don’t try your tricks to confuse me.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve no intention to trick you—I just don’t want to insult you either by being too simplistic and appearing condescending,” Al told him, gesturing a quasi-surrender with his hands. “I’ll conclude it simply, and then I must get back inside for the presentation.”

  People were filing back into the lecture room.

  “In the modern world, we’re at odds with ourselves. For five hundred thousand generations—not years but generations—we lived in small wandering groups. We’d rarely see a stranger and if they were friendly we’d trade or mix our genes with them. In principle, could you agree to that?”

  “Ja, possibly,” the man allowed very reluctantly, his eyes squinting with suspicion and expectation of a trap. “We might also fight,” the man drew his best alternative conclusion.

  “If they were hostile, I contend that people would rather move away. When there’s no hospital and combat is hand-to-hand, and when there’s no ownership of land or animals, and where there’s abundance of both, it’s better to retreat and live peacefully elsewhere.

  “As if you were there to see this,” the man laughed again.

  “It’s an archaeological fact, it’s what I study. Farming locked us down to a piece of land. It was an investment that paid dividends only if we could protect it from plunder. We’ve been farmers for five hundred generations, and…”

  John, the convenor, tapped Al on the shoulder and said, “Two minutes.”

  Al nodded and went on, “And our psychology and how we deal with one another developed for a thousand times longer in a completely different environment to the one that every one of us are now immersed in. Our psychology is poorly adapted to dealing with large crowds of strangers.”

  “And so what? What good is all this knowledge?”

  “How many people do you know who suffer or have died of stress? It results in stress, and stress kills.”

  As he said it, Al inwardly cringed. JJ was standing right there, listening and Al had all but described the circumstances of his father’s death.

  He looked at JJ and JJ smiled acknowledgment and encouragement, so Al went on.

  “Massive doses of cortisol… adrenaline… all of us are being bathed in it daily, and it’s not good for us. We spend our lives in conflict and mistrust and these manifest as racism and tensions far in excess of their logical necessity. And for what? For believing slightly different things to one another. Most beliefs that we hold are simply accidents of birth—where and when we’re born; hardly worth fighting over.”

  “Aaaaall this gedoente… all your loooong story, based on you believing in five hundred thousand generations.” He laughed out loud again. “The Bible clearly tells us that the planet is a few thousand years old… so you’re talking nonsense.”

  “That sir is not an issue of belief. The evidence supports what I just said.”

  The man didn’t hear Al’s response, he was stomping away through the doors and out to the parking lot.

  Al made his way back to the lectern.

  The portion of the crowd that had previously been forced to stand were now still standing while many empty seats stood vacant.

  John checked the corridor outside, it was deserted so he invited those standing to fill the vacated seats.

  “Was it something my wife said?” Al smiled as they took their new seats and the proportion of smiles returned to him suggested that the attendance loss was borne entirely by the thirty percent who’d shown their disdain earlier during Marsha’s presentation.

  The crowd settled and hushed.

  “So… ancient aliens and modern UFOs,” he chirped cheerily. “A riveting and, I suspect, potentially touchy topic.”

  His prognosis was validated by pockets of hardened glares.

  “In science-speak we call it the Fermi paradox… an apparent contradiction between high estimates for the existence of extra-terrestrials and humanity’s lack of evidence for these speculated civilizations.”

  Al saw that not only were cell phone cameras trained on him by the unsmiling, but a tripod supporting an old-style video camera in the second row was arranged to film between the heads in the row in front of it.

  He quickly thought the unsolicited filming through, weighing whether to request no filming that might jeopardize his agreements with publishers, but concluded that there would be nothing he’d say today that would approach a problem.

  “I’m going to deviate from my script, to start with an important aspect underpinning our endeavour here; a question triggered by a lovely gentleman I was chatting to in the lobby a moment ago. It’s a little off the rest of my topic and falls out of my area of expertise, but its relevance will become clear when I reach my original brief. If I do make an error, my esteemed colleague here,” he gestured toward Marsha, “will surely interject to rescue me from folly.”

  Marsha nodded her head in acknowledgement.

  “I was asked what radio astronomy is and why build the SKA here at Carnarvon? Well, optical light—the light we see—occupies only a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum that starts at gamma rays and goes down in frequency and energy through X-ray, ultraviolet, visible light, and infrared, which we experience as heat. The spectrum goes on to fall in frequency down to radio and microwave. We think of light as somehow special, but it isn’t. It is just that we have evolved organs—the eye—that can detect and focus it. When we say, ‘the eye’ it’s rather a misnomer since there are in excess of forty different types of separately evolved eyes, and eyes within those categories at different levels of evolvement that present across species.”

  The man training the tripod camera seemed to be having a lot of trouble focusing between the heads while remaining undetected and Al was amused, wandering why he was going to so much trouble to keep the very obvious contraption hidden.

  “So—how did eyes evolve? Our skin reacts to ultraviolet and it burns. My ancestors came from a very sunny place where vitamin D from the sun was plentiful, so I inherited high levels of melanin which shows as black. Many here come from northern latitudes where, over many generations, limited sunshine would have culled out those with high melanin, with black skins, leaving that population with melanin-poor skins—white skins. In those climes and for obvious reasons, your ancestors did not need the protection against harsh sunlight. This is how natural selection works. My skin in sunless climates would leave me with rickets and other vitamin D deficient ailments.”

  A hand was up from one of the non-smilers.

  “Yes?”

  “So how do blacks survive England and Europe?” the man challenged and looked around with pride, knowing he’d publicly stumped the scientist.

  “Great question. Diet,” Al responded. “Modern diets compensate for vitamin D deficiencies from a lack of sun; we’ve artificially overcome that aspect of what natural selection would normally do.”

  “And what has this to do with eyes and radio?” the man asked.

  “You’re right. It’s a minor sidetrack but it does have bearing. I’m making the point that although our eyes can’t see infrared, another organ—our skin—can ‘see’ infrared. It reacts to the sun, and that’s all vision is: cells that react to light, cells that trigger a minute electrical pulse along a nerve that runs to an analytical part of the brain called the Brodmann area and the visual cortex of the cerebral cortex at the back of the skull. So modern sunburn and the tan that follows is sort of an analogue for the very basis of the original evolution of the eye. Light travels in straight lines; light and shadow falling on an ancient ancestor gave a crude advantage to the animal that could detect the change. The animals that reacted, survived predators and found prey more easily. Over time, those patches of ordinary skin tended to build up in the offspring of those with reactive patches, and these patches eventually became what we now know as retina.”

  Heads shaking in protest to his thesis gave Al t
he impression that the original thirty percent was now closer to ten percent of the audience who were there for altercation.

  “The other side of the visible spectrum, infrared, we feel as heat and we react to it too, always keeping ourselves in an optimum zone between cooking and freezing. I’m sure you can appreciate why evolving heat detection mechanisms proved to be a good environmental predictor. But we don’t naturally detect gamma or X-rays. Why is this?”

  “Because they’re not plentiful in the environment?” a youngster ventured.

  “Excellent! Yes. You don’t evolve in a direction if there is no pressure to do so. And radio or microwave… why didn’t we evolve these?”

  “Same reason?” the same lad suggested.

  “No. Radio is quite plentiful, actually. But as a wave, radio is too low-energy and has too long a wavelength to be able to move electrons from one energy state to another as visible light does. It’s a mechanical issue… Good so far, Marsha?”

  “Gold star,” she smiled.

  “Good. I learned a lot from this lady,” and they exchanged a smile. “So, I’ve diverted my speech, but you’ll understand why in a second. Well, the Big Bang, the origins of the universe and the stars themselves broadcast not just in visible light, but all energy levels across the spectrum so that radio astronomy is just another way of looking at what is going on out there. And, because as Marsha’s lecture pointed out, you’re seeing the Sun as it was eight minutes ago, and Alpha Centauri as it was four years ago, we’re always looking back in time. Radio waves come through the walls of your house and light doesn’t. Radio astronomy tells us stories that the light can’t when it gets blocked by dust clouds in deep space. And because humans have developed the technology to create radio waves, our mobile phones and TV stations have flooded our urban environment with so much noise that we need a big quiet corner of the planet to listen to the cosmos.”

  “So why come here? Why not go to Australia? Why come bother us?” Heads turned to look at the challenger who evidently was taking the whole thing very personally.

  “That was a decision that I’m afraid is beyond me, sir.”

  “Well, for my money you can all fokoff,” he said and there were a few lonely claps.

  “I’m sorry that you feel that sir, we don’t mean to offend,” Al said. “We’re up to where I was going to begin. Radio and ancient aliens; what’s the connection? Well, the first connection is that if there are advanced civilizations in space, they’ll probably be making radio noise. If we listen, we may hear them and SETI, Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, is doing just that.”

  “Then why haven’t you found them yet?” came a challenge from the audience.

  Al pointed at the numbers Marsha had written on the board.

  “That’s the problem. Lots of potential out there but the distances and time make any signals fleeting and desperately far away. Turn the issue around. The Milky Way is a hundred thousand light years across. As a civilization, we have only been adding our radio broadcasts to the cosmos for a lot less than a hundred years, so that beyond a bubble around the Earth that’s at most a hundred light years in any direction—two hundred light years across—beyond that advancing edge, humanity is invisible… we don’t exist yet on the radio hit-parade. Our radio has not reached even fifty-thousandth of the stars in just our galaxy, and our galaxy is one in maybe a trillion like it. We can assume the same is true for their signals not having had time to reach us. And perhaps those who are a lot more advanced have moved away from radio to other methods of communication that we have not detected as of yet. Am I starting to hint at the problem?”

  There was a general murmur of agreement.

  “Perhaps they’d need to dig into their museums of ancient history to find a radio receiver to hear us… and that’s if they knew where in the sky to point it,” he suggested, gesturing, opening his upturned hands to an imaginary sky—then focusing to an imaginary point. “The same way that their host star, their sun is only a prick of light in our sky, our Sun and planet are only a pinprick of light to them. The only way to collect vanishingly weak signals that leak into the cosmos from us or them, is to use an antenna like the SKA, very precisely aimed at that pinprick in direction, and then try to pick out the target signal from the background radio noise that is everywhere. If that’s not a big enough task, there are billions of possible frequency ranges to listen for. To call it a monumental task, is to trivialize the challenge.”

  “It sounds like you’re describing a waste of time,” the same voice challenged again.

  “Surely, learning and discovery can never be a waste of time, sir. Almost every item you have in your convenient modern life is the result of an accident of discovery, looking for one thing and finding another that is useful.”

  “Professor,” came a friendly voice, and for the first time a female’s voice. “Can we move onto UFOs please.”

  “I’m a lowly doctor I’m afraid, not a professor. But yes, and forgive the sidetrack.”

  “It’s been very interesting, but I’m itching to know. Do you believe in UFOs?” she inquired.

  “Is there life out there? Let me start with that. And I’m not just talking aliens driving spacecraft; microbial life will do. Well. Latest estimates put the number of planets just in the Milky Way at six hundred billion.”

  He drew a line under Marsha’s numbers and added his own number to the board: 600,000,000,000—planets in Milky Way.

  “The Milky Way is one of perhaps four hundred billion galaxies, each probably containing that number of planets.”

  He pointed to the number he’d just written and wrote out the next number: >400,000,000,000—galaxies in the universe.

  “I don’t want to hurt your mind like Marsha did, but these are the facts. The probability of life arising and becoming technologically capable is tiny, but the opportunities for it are huge. I would say yes, in my opinion there is not just life but probably intelligent life in the universe. But saying ‘is’, is a long way from saying ‘is now’, because only now applies here. The now as we look at the Sun was in all reality eight minutes ago from the Sun’s perspective. It may have catastrophically exploded seven minutes ago, and we’d say it’s still there. In the case of Proxima, it was four years ago. Do you see the problem?”

  He took the chalk and dabbed a familiar pattern of dots, three in a row with some other prominent points around it, talking as he did so.

  “We look out at Orion’s Belt in the night sky and pick the middle star. The other two are at different distances from us and their apparent arrangement from our perspective is just an accident of alignment; they aren’t really in a line at all. Well, that middle star’s now was sixteen hundred years ago. What was going on in Earth’s history sixteen hundred years ago? The Viking Age hadn’t even begun, and the Roman Empire was just collapsing. So, Orion’s now occurred then; it’s all very mind boggling but inescapable. Are you following me?”

  The lady said she was.

  “So… UFOs. I’ll discuss speculations about UFOs in our history when I’m done with the present.” He thought a moment then began. “I’m going to paraphrase somebody some of you may have heard of, the astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson and I urge you to look him up. YouTube is full of his stuff. He was asked this same question, ‘Do you believe in UFOs?’ and he looked long and hard at the questioner and replied, ‘Remember what the “U” stands for in “UFO?” The “U” stands for “unidentified”.’ So that when you see a light in the sky and say, ‘I can’t identify it as anything I know, so it must be a UFO from another planet’, your speculation really ought to end there; at the point you declared that it is unidentified. To leap from declared uncertainty to the absolute certainty that ‘therefore it must be aliens visiting from another planet’, is not helpful.”

  “But I have seen strange lights,” she insisted.

  “There are just so many tricks that light can play, and our brains are just so very easily fooled—this is how conju
rers and street magicians make their living. Not by manipulating the laws of physics but by fooling your brain; it’s much easier to fool your brain than to manipulate or reverse physics. We need to get past this notion that our brains are perfect or even good data processors. They simply aren’t. This is why we have machines to do it, to take the human element out of perception.”

  “So, yes or no… UFOs visit Earth or not?” She insisted on a definitive answer.

  “It’s possible, but improbable. We just haven’t made enough noise in the galaxy to single ourselves out, out of the… what was it? Six hundred billion planets that also need to be investigated by aliens before they randomly find us. They may have come, but it’s unlikely. And given the problems of travel that Marsha covered earlier, the time and vast energies required to take a look, wouldn’t you expect unmanned probes first? Tiny probes the size of flies? Would you expect them to come bumbling in here and actually crash? Or would you expect them to obscure themselves and watch? I personally wouldn’t be impressed with the ones that crashed. You know, they’re the failures of the cosmos; to come across the galaxy and then fall out of the sky when they get here…”

  The audience applauded.

  “Friendly or hostile?” someone else asked.

  “Another interesting question. Our late Professor Stephen Hawking is on record thinking they’d be hostile, wanting our women and wine maybe. And he does have a point in that we’d expect to see predators become dominant civilizations.”

  “Why predators,” a voice in the midst queried.

  “It’s in the chemistry and biology. There are ratios of how much energy is available at different levels of a food chain. Plants have the lowest level of energy—that’s why plants aren’t all that active—and then energy accumulates as herbivores eat plants and predators eat herbivores. Lions lie all day in the shade and spend a relatively short period of time acquiring high-yield nutrition. Their prey spends all day eating to acquire and distil it. Herbivores simply don’t have enough spare time available from absorbing nutrition to become a technological species.”