Death By Black Hole & Other Cosmic Quandaries

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

  The award for dumbest creature of all time must go to the alien from the original 1979 film Star Trek, The Motion Picture. V-ger, as it called itself (pronounced vee-jer) was an ancient mechanical space probe that was on a mission to explore and discover and report back its findings. The probe was “rescued” from the depths of space by a civilization of mechanical aliens and reconfigured so that it could actually accomplish this mission for the entire universe. Eventually, the probe did acquire all knowledge and, in so doing, achieved consciousness. The Enterprise stumbles upon this now-sprawling monstrous collection of cosmic information at a time when the alien was searching for its original creator and the meaning of life. The stenciled letters on the side of the original probe revealed the characters V and ger. Shortly thereafter, Captain Kirk discovers that the probe was Voyager 6, which had been launched by humans on Earth in the late twentieth century. Apparently, the oya that fits between the V and the ger had been badly tarnished and was unreadable. Okay. But I have always wondered how V-ger could have acquired all knowledge of the universe and achieved consciousness yet not have known that its real name was Voyager.

  And don’t get me started on the 1996 summer blockbuster Independence Day. I find nothing particularly offensive about evil aliens. There would be no science-fiction film industry without them. The aliens in Independence Day were definitely evil. They looked like a genetic cross between a Portuguese Man of War jellyfish, a hammerhead shark, and a human being. While more creatively conceived than most Hollywood aliens, their flying saucers were equipped with upholstered high-back chairs and arm rests.

  I’m glad that, in the end, the humans win. We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon) to disarm its protective force field. I don’t know about you, but I have trouble just uploading files to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems are different. There is only one solution. The entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer’s system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus.

  Thank you for indulging me. I had to get all that off my chest.

  LET US ASSUME, for the sake of argument, that humans are the only species in the history of life on Earth to evolve high-level intelligence. (I mean no disrespect to other big-brained mammals. While most of them cannot do astrophysics, or write poetry, my conclusions are not substantially altered if you wish to include them.) If life on Earth offers any measure of life elsewhere in the universe, then intelligence must be rare. By some estimates, there have been more than 10 billion species in the history of life on Earth. It follows that among all extraterrestrial life-forms we might expect no better than about 1 in 10 billion to be as intelligent as we are, not to mention the odds against the intelligent life having an advanced technology and a desire to communicate through the vast distances of interstellar space.

  On the chance that such a civilization exists, radio waves would be the communication band of choice because of their ability to traverse the galaxy unimpeded by interstellar gas and dust clouds. But humans on Earth have only understood the electromagnetic spectrum for less than a century. More depressingly put, for most of human history, had aliens tried to send radio signals to Earthlings we would have been incapable of receiving them. For all we know, the aliens have already done this and unwittingly concluded that there was no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility would be if aliens had become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, yet they had drawn the same conclusion.

  Our life-on-Earth bias, intelligent or otherwise, requires us to hold the existence of liquid water as a prerequisite to life elsewhere. As already discussed, a planet’s orbit should not be too close to its host star, otherwise the temperature would be too high and the planet’s water content would vaporize. The orbit should not be too far away either, or else the temperature would be too low and the planet’s water content would freeze. In other words, conditions on the planet must allow the temperature to stay within the 180 degree (Fahrenheit) range of liquid water. As in the three-bowls-of-food scene in the fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the temperature has to be just right. When I was interviewed about this subject recently on a syndicated radio talk show, the host commented, “Clearly, what you should be looking for is a planet made of porridge!”

  While distance from the host star is an important factor for the existence of life as we know it, other factors matter too, such as a planet’s ability to trap stellar radiation. Venus is a textbook example of this “greenhouse” phenomenon. Visible sunlight that manages to pass through its thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide gets absorbed by Venus’s surface and then reradiated in the infrared part of the spectrum. The infrared, in turn, gets trapped by the atmosphere. The unpleasant consequence is an air temperature that hovers at about 900 degrees Fahrenheit, which is much hotter than we would expect knowing Venus’s distance to the Sun. At this temperature, lead swiftly liquefies.

  The discovery of simple, unintelligent life-forms elsewhere in the universe (or evidence that they once existed) would be far more likely and, for me, only slightly less exciting than the discovery of intelligent life. Two excellent nearby places to look are the dried riverbeds of Mars, were there may be fossil evidence of life from when waters once flowed, and the subsurface oceans that are theorized to exist under the frozen ice layers of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Once again, the promise of liquid water defines our targets of search.

  Other commonly invoked prerequisites for the evolution of life in the universe involve a planet in a stable, nearly circular orbit around a single star. With binary and multiple star systems, which comprise about half of all “stars” in the galaxy, planet orbits tend to be strongly elongated and chaotic, which induces extreme temperature swings that would undermine the evolution of stable life-forms. We also require that there be sufficient time for evolution to run its course. High-mass stars are so short-lived (a few million years) that life on an Earthlike planet in orbit around them would never have a chance to evolve.

  As we have already seen, the set of conditions to support life as we know it is loosely quantified through what is known as the Drake equation, named for the American astronomer Frank Drake. The Drake equation is more accurately viewed as a fertile idea than as a rigorous statement of how the physical universe works. It separates the overall probability of finding life in the galaxy into a set of simpler probabilities that correspond to our preconceived notions of the cosmic conditions that are suitable for life. In the end, after you argue with your colleagues about the value of each probability term in the equation, you are left with an estimate for the total number of intelligent, technologically proficient civilizations in the galaxy. Depending on your bias level, and your knowledge of biology, chemistry, celestial mechanics, and astrophysics, you may use it to estimate from at least one (we humans) up to millions of civilizations in the Milky Way.

  IF WE CONSIDER the possibility that we may rank as primitive among the universe’s technologically competent life-forms—however rare they may be—then the best we can do is keep alert for signals sent by others because it is far more expensive to send than to receive them. Presumably, an advanced civilization would have easy access to an abundant source of energy such as its host star. These are the civilizations that would be more likely to send rather than to receive. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (affectionately known by its acronym “SETI”) has taken many forms. The most advanced efforts today use a cleverly designed electronic detector that monitors, in its latest version, billions of radio channels in search of a signal that might rise above the cosmic noise.

  The discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, if and when it happens, will impart a change in human self-perception that may be impossible to anticipate. My only hope is that every
other civilization isn’t doing exactly what we are doing because then everybody would be listening, nobody would be receiving, and we would collectively conclude that there is no other intelligent life in the universe.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  OUR RADIO BUBBLE

  For the opening scene to the 1997 film Contact, a virtual camera executes a controlled, three-minute zoom from Earth to the outer reaches of the universe. For this journey, you happen to be equipped with receivers that enable you to decode Earth-based television and radio broadcasts that have escaped into space. Initially, you hear a cacophonous mixture of loud rock music, news broadcasts, and noisy static as though you were listening to dozens of radio stations simultaneously. As the journey progresses out into space, and as you overtake earlier broadcasts that have traveled farther, the signals become less cacophonous and distinctly older as they report historical events that span the broadcast era of modern civilization. Amid the noise, you hear sound bytes in reverse sequence that include: the Challenger shuttle disaster of January 1986; the Moon landing of July 20, 1969; Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered in August 28, 1963; President Kennedy’s January 20, 1961, inaugural address; President Roosevelt’s December 8, 1941, address to Congress, where he asked for a declaration of war; and a 1936 address by Adolf Hitler during his rise to power in Nazi Germany. Eventually, the human contribution to the signal disappears entirely, leaving a din of radio noise emanating from the cosmos itself.

  Poignant. But this scroll of acoustic landmarks would not unfurl exactly as shown. If you somehow managed to violate several laws of physics and travel fast enough to overtake a radio wave, then few words would be intelligible because you’d hear everything replayed backward. Furthermore, we hear King’s famous speech as we pass the planet Jupiter, implying Jupiter is as far as the broadcast has traveled. In fact, King’s speech passed Jupiter 39 minutes after he delivered it.

  Ignoring these facts that would render the zoom impossible, Contact’s opening scene was poetic and powerful, as it indelibly marked the extent to which we have presented our civilized selves to the rest of the Milky Way galaxy. This radio bubble, as it has come to be called, centers on Earth and continues to expand at the speed of light in every direction, while getting its center continuously refilled by modern broadcasts. Our bubble now extends nearly 100 light-years into space, with a leading edge that corresponds to the first artificial radio signals ever generated by Earthlings. The bubble’s volume now contains about a thousand stars, including Alpha Centauri (4.3 light-years away), the nearest star system to the Sun; Sirius (10 light-years away), the brightest star in the nighttime sky; and every star around which a planet has thus far been discovered.

  NOT ALL RADIO signals escape our atmosphere. The plasma properties of the ionosphere, more than 50 miles up, enable it to reflect back to Earth all radio-wave frequencies less than 20 megahertz, allowing some forms of radio communication, such as the well-known “short wave” frequencies of HAM radio operators, to reach thousands of miles beyond your horizon. All the broadcast frequencies of AM radio are also reflected back to Earth, accounting for the extended range that these stations enjoy.

  If you broadcast at a frequency that does not correspond to those reflected by Earth’s ionosphere, or if Earth had no ionosphere, your radio signals would reach only those receivers that fell in its line of “sight.” Tall buildings give significant advantage to radio transmitters mounted on their roofs. While the horizon for a 5'8" person is just 3 miles away, the horizon seen by King Kong, while climbing atop New York City’s Empire State Building, is more than 50. After the filming of that 1933 classic, a broadcast antenna was installed. An equally tall receiving antenna could, in principle, be located 50 miles farther still, enabling the signal to cross their mutual 50-mile horizon, thereby extending the signal’s reach to 100 miles.

  The ionosphere reflects neither FM radio nor broadcast television, itself a subset of the radio spectrum. As prescribed, they each travel no farther on Earth than the farthest receiver they can see, which allows cities that are relatively near each other to broadcast their own television programs. For this reason, television’s local broadcasts and FM radio cannot possibly be as influential as AM radio, which may account for its preponderance of politically acerbic talk shows. But the real influence of FM and TV may not be terrestrial. While most of the signal’s strength is purposefully broadcast horizontal to the ground, some of it leaks straight up, crossing the ionosphere and traveling through the depths of space. For them, the sky is not the limit. And unlike some other bands in the electromagnetic spectrum, radio waves have excellent penetration through the gas and dust clouds of interstellar space, so the stars are not the limit either.

  If you add up all factors that contribute to the strength of Earth’s radio signature, such as the total number of stations, the distribution of stations across Earth’s surface, the energy output of each station, and the bandwidth over which the energy is broadcast, you find that television accounts for the largest sustained flux of radio signals detectable from Earth. The anatomy of a broadcast signal displays a skinny and a wide part. The skinny, narrow-band part is the video carrier signal, through which more than half the total energy is broadcast. At a mere .10 hertz wide in frequency, it establishes the station’s location on the dial (the familiar channels 2 through 13) as well as the existence of the signal in the first place. A low-intensity, broadband signal, 5 million hertz wide, surrounds the carrier at higher and lower frequencies and is imbued with modulations that contain all the program information.

  AS YOU MIGHT guess, the United States is the most significant contributor among all nations to Earth’s global television profile. An eavesdropping alien civilization would first detect our strong carrier signals. If it continued to pay attention, it would notice periodic Doppler shifts in these signals (alternating from lower frequency to higher frequency) every 24 hours. It would then notice the signal get stronger and weaker over the same time interval. The aliens might first conclude that a mysterious, although naturally occurring, radio loud spot was rotating into and out of view. But if the aliens managed to decode the modulations within the surrounding broadband signal they would gain immediate access to elements of our culture.

  Electromagnetic waves, including visible-light as well as radio waves, do not require a medium though which to travel. Indeed, they are happiest moving through the vacuum of space. So the time-honored flashing red sign in broadcast studios that says “On the Air” could justifiably read “Through Space,” a phrase that applies especially to the escaping TV and FM frequencies.

  As the signals move out into space they get weaker and weaker, becoming diluted by the growing volume of space through which it travels. Eventually, the signals get hopelessly buried by the ambient radio noise of the universe, generated by radio-emitting galaxies, the microwave background, radio-rich regions of star formation in the Milky Way, and cosmic rays. These factors, above all, will limit the likelihood of a distant civilization decoding our way of life.

  At current broadcast strengths from Earth, aliens 100 light-years away would require a radio receiver that was fifteen times the collecting area of the 300-meter Arecibo telescope (the world’s largest) to detect a television station’s carrier signal. If they want to decode our programming information and hence our culture, they will need to compensate for the Doppler shifts caused by Earth’s rotation on its axis and by its revolution around the Sun (enabling them to lock onto a particular TV station) and they must increase their detection capacity by another factor of 10,000 above that which would detect the carrier signal. In radio telescope terms, this amounts to a dish about four hundred times Arecibo’s diameter, or about 20 miles across.

  If technologically proficient aliens are indeed intercepting our signals (with a suitably large and sensitive telescope), and if they are managing to decode the modulations, then the basics of our culture would surely befuddle alien anthropologists. As they watch us
become a radio-transmitting planet, their attention might first be flagged by early episodes of the Howdy Doody show. Once they knew to listen, they would then learn how typical human males and females interact with each other from episodes of Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooners and from Lucy and Ricky in I Love Lucy. They might then assess our intelligence from episodes of Gomer Pyle, The Beverly Hillbillies, and then, perhaps, from Hee Haw. If the aliens didn’t just give up at this point, and if they chose to wait a few more years, they would learn a little more about human interactions from Archie Bunker in All in the Family, then from George Jefferson in The Jeffersons. After a few more years of study, their knowledge would be further enriched from the odd characters in Seinfeld and, of course, the prime-time cartoon The Simpsons. (They would be spared the wisdom of the hit show Beavis and Butthead because it existed only as a nonbroadcast cable program on MTV.) These were among the most popular shows of our times, each sustaining cross-generational exposure in the form of reruns.

  Mixed in among our cherished sitcoms is the extensive, decade-long news footage of bloodshed during the Vietnam war, the Gulf wars, and other military hot spots around the planet. After 50 years of television, there’s no other conclusion the aliens could draw, but that most humans are neurotic, death-hungry, dysfunctional idiots.