How about intelligence? When Hollywood aliens manage to visit Earth, one might expect them to be remarkably smart. But I know of some that should have been embarrassed by their stupidity. Surfing the FM dial during a car trip from Boston to New York City some years ago, I came upon a radio play in progress that, as best as I could determine, was about evil aliens that were terrorizing earthlings. Apparently, they needed hydrogen atoms to survive, so they kept swooping down to Earth to suck up its oceans and extract the hydrogen from all the H2O molecules. Now those were some dumb aliens. They must not have been looking at other planets en route to Earth, because Jupiter, for example, contains more than two hundred times the entire mass of Earth in pure hydrogen. I guess nobody told them that more than 90 percent of all atoms in the universe are hydrogen.
And what about aliens that manage to traverse thousands of light-years through interstellar space yet bungle their arrival by crash-landing on Earth?
Then there are the aliens in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, who, in advance of their arrival, beam to Earth a mysterious sequence of numbers that is eventually decoded by earthlings to be the latitude and longitude of their upcoming landing site. But Earth’s longitude has a completely arbitrary starting point—the prime meridian—which passes through Greenwich, England, by international agreement. And both longitude and latitude are measured in unnatural units we call degrees, 360 of which are in a circle. It seems to me that, armed with this much knowledge of human culture, the aliens could have just learned English and beamed the message “We’re going to land a little bit to the side of Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming. And because we’re arriving in a flying saucer, we won’t need runway lights.”
Space Tweet #5
Why do aliens always disembark via ramp? Do they have problems with stairs? Or are flying saucers just handicap-accessible?
Aug 21, 2010 12:00 PM
The award for dumbest movie alien of all time must go to the entity that called itself V’ger, from the 1983 film Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An ancient mechanical space probe, V’ger had been rescued by a civilization of mechanical aliens and reconfigured so that it could accomplish its mission of discovery across the entire cosmos. The thing grew and grew, acquiring all knowledge of the universe and eventually achieving consciousness. In the film, the crew of the starship Enterprise come upon this now-immense heap of cosmic information and artifacts at a time when V’ger has been searching for its creator. Clued in by the badly tarnished letters “oya” on the original probe, Captain Kirk realizes that V’ger is actually Voyager 6, launched by earthlings in the late twentieth century. Okay. What irks me is how V’ger acquired total knowledge of the cosmos yet remained clueless that its real name was Voyager.
And don’t get me started on the 1996 blockbuster Independence Day. Actually, I find nothing particularly offensive about evil aliens. There would be no science-fiction film industry without them. The aliens in Independence Day are definitely evil. They look like a genetic cross between a Portuguese man-of-war, a hammerhead shark, and a human being. But while they’re more creatively conceived than most Hollywood aliens, why are their flying saucers equipped with upholstered high-back chairs with armrests?
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), thus disarming its protective force field. I don’t know about you, but back in 1996 I had trouble just uploading files to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems were 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.
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that humans are the only species on Earth to have evolved high-level intelligence. (I mean no disrespect to other big-brained mammals. While most of them cannot do astrophysics, 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 ten billion species in the history of life on Earth. It follows that, among all extraterrestrial life-forms, we might expect no better than about one in ten 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.
Space Tweet #6
Worms dont know that humans who pass by are intelligent, so no reason to think humans would know if alien super-race did same
Jun 3, 2010 9:18 PM
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 we humans have had command of the electromagnetic spectrum for less than a century. To put that more depressingly: had aliens been trying to send radio signals to earthlings for most of human history, we would have been incapable of receiving them. For all we know, the aliens may have tried to get in touch centuries ago and have concluded that there is no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility is that aliens did become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, and drew the same conclusion.
Our Copernican perspective regarding life on Earth, intelligent or otherwise, requires us to presume that liquid water is a prerequisite to life elsewhere. To support life, a planet cannot orbit its host star too closely, or else the temperature would be too high and the planet’s water content would vaporize. Also, the orbit should not be too far away, 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°F range of liquid water. As in the three-bowls-of-food scene in “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” the temperature has to be just right. (Once when I was interviewed about this subject 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 planet is an important factor for the existence of life as we know it, a planet’s ability to trap stellar radiation matters too. Venus is a textbook example of this “greenhouse” phenomenon. Any 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°F, which is much hotter than we would expect, given Venus’s distance from the Sun. At that temperature, lead would swiftly become molten.
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 beneath the dried riverbeds of Mars (where there may be fossil evidence of life that thrived when waters formerly flowed) and the subsurface oceans that are theorized to exist under the frozen ice layers of Jupiter’s moon Europa, whose interior is kept warm by gravitational stresses from the Jovian system. Once again, the promise of liquid water leads our search.
Other common 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 make up more than half of all stars in the galaxy, 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 sufficient time for evolution to run its course. High-mass stars are so short-lived (a few million years) that life on Earthlike planets in orbit around them would never have a chance to evolve.
The set of
conditions needed to support life as we know it is loosely quantified through what’s known as the Drake equation, named for the American astronomer Frank Drake. The Drake equation is more accurately viewed as a fertile idea rather than 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 suitable cosmic conditions. 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—your estimate may range from at least one (ours) up to millions of civilizations in the Milky Way alone.
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 to keep alert for signals sent by others, because it is far more expensive to send than to receive. 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 do the sending.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (affectionately known by its acronym, SETI) has taken many forms. Long-established efforts have relied on monitoring billions of radio channels in search of a radio or microwave signal that might rise above the cosmic noise. The SETI@home screensaver—downloaded by millions of people around the world—enabled a home computer to analyze small chunks of the huge quantities of data collected by the radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico. This gigantic “distributed computing” project (the largest in the world) actively tapped the computing power of Internet-connected PCs that would otherwise have been doing nothing while their owners went to the bathroom. More recently, improvements in laser technology have made it worthwhile to search the optical part of the electromagnetic spectrum for pulses of laser light a few nanoseconds in duration. During those nanoseconds, an intense, directed beam of visible light can outshine the light of nearby stars, allowing it to be detected from afar. Another new approach, inspired by the optical version of SETI, is to keep a lookout across the galaxy, not for sustained signals, but for brief blasts of microwaves, which would be relatively cost-efficient to produce on the other end.
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 sending, and we would collectively conclude there is no other intelligent life in the universe.
Even if we don’t soon find life, we will surely keep looking, because we are intellectual nomads—curious beings who derive almost as much fulfillment from the search as we do from the discovery.
• • • CHAPTER FOUR
EVIL ALIENS*
Interview with Sanjay Gupta, CNN
Sanjay Gupta: Here’s a question: Do you believe in UFOs? If so, you’re in some pretty impressive company. British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, arguably one of the smartest people on the planet, thinks there’s a good chance that alien life exists—and not exactly the friendly ET kind. In fact, Hawking envisions a far darker possibility, more along the lines of the movie War of the Worlds. In a documentary for the Discovery Channel, Hawking says the aliens will be big, bad, and very busy conquering planet after planet. He says they might live in massive ships, and he calls them nomads who travel the universe conquering others and collecting energy through mirrors. Mirrors; massive ships; giant, mean aliens: is it all possible? Let’s go up close with Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and, like Hawking, an astrophysicist.
I’ve been fascinated by this since I was a kid, given the fact that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, with hundreds of millions of stars in each galaxy.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Hundreds of billions in each galaxy.
SG: Hundreds of billions of stars—even more. And that probably means there’s life out there somewhere.
NDT: Indeed.
SG: But this idea that aliens will be evil—Hawking paints a picture that is far less ET and far more Independence Day—is this speculation?
NDT: Yes, but it’s not blind speculation. It says more about what we fear about ourselves than any real expectations of what an alien would be like. In other words, I think our biggest fear is that the aliens who visit us would treat us the way we treat each other here on Earth. So, in a way, Hawking’s apocalyptic fear stories are a mirror held back up to us.
SG: That’s a very different perspective than what Carl Sagan put out there. He was literally giving away Earth’s location.
NDT: Exactly. Sagan provided the return address on a plaque on the Voyager spacecraft. He wanted to say, “Here’s where we are!”
SG: So why would aliens do what Hawking proposes they’ll do? Some sort of vengeance?
NDT: Like I said, no one knows how aliens will behave. They will have different chemistry, different motives, different intentions. How can we extrapolate from ourselves to them? Any suspicion that they will be evil is more a reflection of our fear about how we would treat an alien species if we found them than any actual knowledge about how an alien species would treat us.
Space Tweet #7
How to shield sneezes in space, you ask? Helmet blocks all 40,000 spewed mucous droplets. So Aliens are safe
Jan 15, 2011 2:57 PM
SG: We’re listening for them right now. My understanding is that we’ve been listening for a long time—for anything—and we haven’t heard a peep from out there. Do you think they’re listening to us right now?
NDT: Possibly. The big fear, it seems to me, is that we announce our presence and then the aliens come and enslave us or put us in a zoo. Some entertaining science-fiction stories have captured just those themes.
SG: I never thought to imagine us as living in an alien zoo.
NDT: That’s the fear factor. But what are we doing? We’re mostly listening. We have giant radio telescopes pointing in different directions, with highly sophisticated circuitry that listens to billions of radio frequencies simultaneously to see if anybody is whispering on any one of them anyplace in the universe. That’s different from sending signals out. We’re not sending signals out on purpose; we’re sending them out accidentally. The expanding edge of our radio bubble is about seventy light-years away right now, and on that frontier you’ll find broadcast television shows like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners—the first emissaries of human culture that the aliens would decode. Not much reason there for aliens to fear us, but plenty of reason for them to question our intelligence. And, rumors to the contrary, we have not yet heard from aliens, even accidentally. So we’re confronting a vacuum, ready to be filled with the many fears we harbor.
• • • CHAPTER FIVE
KILLER ASTEROIDS*
The chances that your tombstone will read “KILLED BY ASTEROID” are about the same as they’d be for “KILLED IN AIRPLANE CRASH.” Only about two dozen people have been killed by falling asteroids in the past four hundred years, while thousands have died in crashes during the relatively brief history of passenger air travel. So how can this comparative statistic be true? Simple.
The impact record shows that by the end of ten million years, when the sum of all airplane crashes has killed a billion people (assuming a death-by-airplane rate of a hundred per year), an asteroid large enough to kill the same number of people will have hit Earth. The difference is that while airplanes are continually killing people a few at a time, that asteroid might not kill anybody for millions of years. But when it does hit, it will take out a billion people: some instantaneously, and the rest in the wake of global climatic upheaval.
The combined impact rate for asteroids
and comets in the early solar system was frighteningly high. Theories of planet formation show that chemically rich gas cooled and condensed to form molecules, then particles of dust, then rocks and ice. Thereafter, it was a shooting gallery. Collisions served as a means for chemical and gravitational forces to bind smaller objects into larger ones. Those objects that, by chance, had accreted slightly more mass than average had slightly higher gravity, attracting other objects even more. As accretion continued, gravity eventually shaped blobs into spheres, and planets were born. The most massive planets had sufficient gravity to retain the gaseous envelope we call an atmosphere.
Every planet continues to accrete, every day of its life, although at a significantly lower rate than when it first formed. Even today, interplanetary dust rains down on Earth in vast quantities—typically a hundred tons of it a day—though only a small fraction reaches Earth’s surface. The rest harmlessly vaporizes in Earth’s atmosphere as shooting stars. More hazardous are the billions, likely trillions, of leftover rocks—comets and asteroids—that have been orbiting the Sun since the early years of our solar system but haven’t yet managed to join up with a larger object.
Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier Page 5