SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE: Part One

Scientist today are still not sure if any virus is actually alive.  Bacteria, yes, and so too humans.  All living forms are mostly water, from 60% in us to more than 90% in some plants.

You might have thought that life needs oxygen, and most of us on Earth do.  However, some bacteria, such as E. coli, can survive on pure hydrogen.  This is crucial, for there is only 0.1% oxygen in the universe, but 92% hydrogen.  Thriving life has been found at a temperature above the boiling point of water.

In 1877 Giovanni Schiaperelli of Italy mapped Mars, showing oceans and canals.  Somehow this nomenclature was mistakenly interpreted by some as evidence of life.  Percival Lowell of the U.S. in 1894, from observation he made, suggested that those canals were created by intelligent Martians to move water from ice caps.  H.G. Wells in 1898 then published War of the Worlds, launching a new genre of science fiction.  Then along came Orson Welles with his radio adaption in 1938 that panicked listeners.

Then came an influx of films on invasion from Mars.  So many that there is a top ten.  #1?  Mars Attacks in 1996.  Rotten Tomatoes scores of 55/53.  But what a cast:  Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Pam Grier, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny Devito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Tom Jones, Natalie Portman, Jim Brown, Jack Black and more...

Enough of that.  More realistically:

• We are trying to find life on Mars, and will send probes to Venus.  But these will almost surely fail.  
• We can expand the search to extrasolar systems, but can you imagine the cost and time involved?  
• Proxima Centauri is the closest, and a spacecraft the speed of light would take more than four years just to get there.  

• 
  The Parker Solar Probe was the fastest ever at 330,000 miles per hour.  At that speed, it would take almost 9000 years to get to Proxima Centauri.  9,000 years ago humanity was just transitioning from hunter-gatherer to farmer.  

• 
  In any case, the best potential exoplanet is something like one of the Glieses or Tau Cetis at 12 light years.  
• Then you can try our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, and your trip will be 2.5 million light years long...at the speed of light.

So what is the conclusion?  Give up on space travel until someone finds a way to use a worm hole or some other exotic concept.

So what do we do about finding life?  Forget microorganisms, hope that intelligent life is trying to contact us.

This is where Frank Drakes' equation enters the discussion.  60 years ago, as a Cornell astronomer, he tossed together some possible factors to predict the number of advanced civilizations just in our Milky Way galaxy:

You need to guess what the number is for each, so that when you do the calculations, you end up between one thousand and a hundred million civilizations.  

Carl Sagan joined Drake at Cornell, and established the genre called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  I joined these dreamers in 1976 on Project Orion at NASA's Ames Research Center, lived on the Stanford Campus adjacent to my freshman dormitory, and with Charles Townes, who was at Cal-Berkeley, designed a direct method to detect extrasolar planets.

In those days no one had seen a planet outside our solar system.  We could have done it in a couple years, but didn't because NASA decided to only look in the microwave portion of the spectrum and chose indirect methods and transit to find them.  It took another 16 years in 1992 when the first was confirmed.  Thirty years later we are now approaching 5,000 extrasolar planets.

We can now practically stop spending money on trying to find those exoplanets that show promise for harboring life, for it makes more sense to just detect possible signals coming from intelligent civilizations.  This what Project Cyclops attempted, run by Jack Billingham and Bernie Oliver, who became friends when I spent time at Ames.

I later in the late '70's helped Carl Sagan gain initial funding for SETI when I worked in the U.S. Senate.  In 1997 came the movie Contact.  Rotten Tomatoes reviewers thought it was mediocre, rating it at 66, but audiences though better, with a 78.  Remains as one my favorites.

In 1996 there was a blip of excitement when a so-called fragment of Mars was found in the Antarctic to harbor what looked like the remnant of a life form.  But Mars on Antarctica and wildly circumstantial evidence?  Come on.  Still actually controversial today.  More recently, phosphine was found in the atmosphere of Venus, which could only be there because of life.  However later measurements showed otherwise.

Tomorrow, Part Two.

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