SETI's new direction / UFO's and new assumptions

I find the following paper to be highly relevant to the SETI / UFO topic. It's by Dr.'s Abraham Loeb and Edwin L. Turner, one a Harvard astrophysicist, the other from Princeton. It talks about SETI, a possible next phase of the search, and even discusses the possibility that *intelligent* ET life could potentially reside elsewhere in our own solar system. (Specifically, on a Kuiper Belt Object, or "KBO".)

"Detection Technique for Artificially-Illuminated Objects in the Outer Solar System and Beyond"


It's especially interesting because there was a recent long thread here entitled "Turning The Tables: What On Earth Makes People Think Aliens Are Not Here?". The OP received a lot of flack, since some perceived him to be improperly shifting the scientific burden onto the skeptics. That burden shift would indeed be improper. I think that the gist of his message, however, was merely that the *assumptions* underlying how we view the likelihood of "real UFO's" are quickly changing. And that is an important and absolutely valid point.

Are we not in fact close to the time when the new default stance should be "Why WOULDN'T they be here?", instead of the tired old "What's more likely, that those witnesses just mistook a natural phenomenon, or [while snickering] that it was ALIENS FROM OUTER-SPACE?!"... ?

In my opinion, it has become impossible to label the notion of ET UFO's as "absurd," and nearly impossible to label it even "highly unlikely." Why? There's just too much we don't know, and too much *corroborated* UFO evidence. And although our science here on Earth is a mere hundreds of years old (which is 'no time'), already...
- our NASA Kepler mission is spotting tons of new extra-solar planets, with hints that many more habitable planets may be on the way.
- astro-biologists speak of ways to pinpoint intelligent ET life through use of something as simple as their planet's light spectra. (So why couldn't ET have done that to us long ago?)
- news in recent weeks has mainstream, legitimate science questioning the speed-of-light barrier.
- viral youtube vids show real scientific progress with invisibility cloaking (using carbon nanotubes), quantum-levitating or "locking" (Meissner Effect) demonstrations, and other similarly strange possibilities.
- news articles on biological "hibernation" or "suspended animation" seem almost routine.
... and so on it goes.

And NOW, add to all of that this paper. (Here's the link again; PDF is at top right.) In this paper, we've got two respected astrophysicists, from two of the most prestigious U.S. universities, discussing with a straight face the possibility that intelligent extraterrestrial life may be living in our own solar system, basically no farther away than Pluto.

That's progress! These guys would've been called nuts not all that long ago.

And it's a great read, so do take a look, but I'll put the basics of the paper here in this post.
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First, near the introduction, they acknowledge what many of us have believed for ages: that searching for ET's radio waves, as Shostack et al. keep insisting, may not be the best way to go.

"The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been conducted mainly in the radio band.... As technology evolves on Earth, expectations for plausible extraterrestrial signals change. For example, the radio power emission of the Earth has been declining dramatically in recent decades due to the use of cables, optical fibers and other advances in communication technology, indicating that eavesdropping on distant advanced civilizations might be more difficult than previously thought."

The authors' main conclusions are basically that, with current technology, we could detect a Tokyo-sized city on something about 40 AU's away:

"Thus, existing optical astronomy facilities are capable of detecting artificial illumination at the levels currently employed on Earth for putative extraterrestrial constructs on the scale of a large terrestrial city or greater out to the edge of the Solar System...."

and...

"Thus, the survey we propose can identify KBO (or asteroid) candidates for intensive follow-up with no investment of additional observational resources."

In other words, SETI's next phase should perhaps involve the direct observation of extra-solar planets and analysis of their reflected light. (Artificial light and natural light are mathematically different, as explained near the paper's beginning. And yes, next-gen telescopes could do this.) It IS possible, they say.


And here's a neat part, from the discussion near the end:

"Artificially-lit KBOs might have originated from civilizations near other stars. In particular, some small bodies may have traveled to the Kuiper belt through interstellar space after being ejected dynamically from other planetary systems (Moro-Martin et al., 2009). These objects can be recognized by their hyperbolic orbits. A more hypothetical origin for artificially-lit KBOs involves objects composed of rock and water/ice (asteroids or low-mass planets) that were originally in the habitable zone of the Sun, developed intelligent life, and were later ejected through gravitational scattering with other planets (such as the Earth or Jupiter) into highly eccentric orbits. Such orbits spend most of their time at their farthest (turnaround) distance, Dmax. If this distance is in the Kuiper belt, then the last time these objects came close to Earth was more than ∼ 500 ( [ D-max / (10^2 AU)^1.5 ] ) years ago, before the modern age of science and technology began on Earth."

To me, that's all worthy of a great big "wow"....

So, to the skeptics, continue to be skeptical, absolutely ... (and believers, you too!) ... but maybe it really is time for us all to take stock of our underlying assumptions, and upgrade them if necessary?

Are "real UFOs" really as unlikely as some on here seem to think? Nah...

Anyway, this is definitely neat stuff, and we're lucky to live in such amazing times.

Good to see this field progressing beyond the automatic giggling and ridicule it has suffered against for decades.

Properly done studies without the infantile attitudes that prevented them happening years ago is just what needs to happen.

Assuming anything is never a scientifically sound policy. Especially with unexplained phenomenon.

I agree with the point, "why wouldn't they be here.." If the Universe is teeming with life, why wouldn't they be here?

For example, if the Universe is overpopulated, don't you think we would have ET visitors?

Excellent thread OP!
You should think of Earth as a tourist attraction of galactic proportions.
What a great place to study a species becoming technologically advanced,but so stupid as to destroy their own planet.

reply to post by TeaAndStrumpets

Pluto is a Kupier belt object, so they are basically suggesting we look for life on Pluto and its neighbors? I always thought it might be kind of cold on Pluto?

If they are running artificial lights where do they get the power from? The sun looks like a speck in the sky from Pluto, so Pluto only gets a teeny tiny fraction of the sunlight that the earth gets.

I'm not going to try to stop them from looking, if that's what they really want to do, they can feel free to go for it. But it's not a place I'd expect to find intelligent life so it would be one of the last places I'd look for it. How much intelligent life lives at the south Pole? Not much, and Pluto is a lot colder than that, in fact the south pole would seem like a heat wave compared to temperatures on Pluto and its neighbors.

For one thing, how intelligent can they be if they voluntarily choose to live on an iceball instead of someplace balmier? You'd think they could at least move to Mars and set up a base there where they can get a little sunlight. Mars is still cold, but not nearly as cold as Pluto. And they'd be able to get a lot more power from the sunlight on Mars. Pluto just doesn't get much sunlight.

Here's a view of the sun from the 8 planets:


And Pluto is even further away from the sun than the most distant view shown there (most of the time)! So hopefully you get an idea from that video you can't get much in the way of solar power at that distance from the sun.

And it's not like you'd have much in the way of fossil fuels way out there either. What are you going to power the lights with? Burning ice?

Sorry, it seems pretty far-fetched to me.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


1) Neat video, but I do think you're overplaying the proximity-to-sun issue. (That actually sorta exemplifies my main point. See below.) We now know that there are other ways such distant bodies might generate heat. Read about Europa, Titan, Enceladus, etc... And that doesn't even address the possibility that intelligent life might not have evolved on this hypothetical KBO, but instead moved there later, with heat-energy generation being truly trivial for them....

2) Still, I would not expect and I don't think even the authors EXPECT to find intelligent ET life on a KBO. The point is more... that's what we can reliably see now, there IS a small possibility of it, so let's test these techniques and be ready to use them on extra-solar planets once the telescope tech catches up in the coming years.

3) The most important point, in my mind, is that here we have two highly respected astrophysicists from two premier universities talking realistically about the possibility that *intelligent* extraterrestrials very well COULD be residing in our own solar system... even if not likely. And such a discussion would've been unthinkable not very long ago. Dr. Geoff Marcy routinely points out that it wasn't even 20 years ago that he was still being laughed out of rooms by skeptical colleagues whenever he brought up the idea of finding extra-solar planets... and it was only a few years later, to everyone's shock, that he actually started finding them. And there are, what, about 700 official now, with thousands more soon on the way via Kepler?

So the bottom line is that what is and isn't "acceptable" for respectable scientists to discuss is changing very quickly these days, especially in the fields most relevant to this forum. Which is why we should ALL check and perhaps update our assumptions?

And sorry to say it, but your "too far from the sun" argument is the perfect example. You seem to have not been aware of tidal heating, or other possible types, and that liquid oceans exist in places in this solar system where they should not exist (and according to scientists only a few years ago, COULD NOT exist!)? And yet there they are, liquid oceans, so far from the sun. Not being aware of that is totally fine, and totally understandable, precisely because what's acceptable as scientific "truth" is now evolving so rapidly. That's the point.

Originally posted by TeaAndStrumpets
reply to post by Arbitrageur

 

1) Neat video, but I do think you're overplaying the proximity-to-sun issue. (That actually sorta exemplifies my main point. See below.) We now know that there are other ways such distant bodies might generate heat. Read about Europa, Titan, Enceladus, etc... And that doesn't even address the possibility that intelligent life might not have evolved on this hypothetical KBO, but instead moved there later, with heat-energy generation being truly trivial for them....

2) Still, I would not expect and I don't think even the authors EXPECT to find intelligent ET life on a KBO. The point is more... that's what we can reliably see now, there IS a small possibility of it, so let's test these techniques and be ready to use them on extra-solar planets once the telescope tech catches up in the coming years.

3) The most important point, in my mind, is that here we have two highly respected astrophysicists from two premier universities talking realistically about the possibility that *intelligent* extraterrestrials very well COULD be residing in our own solar system... even if not likely. And such a discussion would've been unthinkable not very long ago. Dr. Geoff Marcy routinely points out that it wasn't even 20 years ago that he was still being laughed out of rooms by skeptical colleagues whenever he brought up the idea of finding extra-solar planets... and it was only a few years later, to everyone's shock, that he actually started finding them. And there are, what, about 700 official now, with thousands more soon on the way via Kepler?

So the bottom line is that what is and isn't "acceptable" for respectable scientists to discuss is changing very quickly these days, especially in the fields most relevant to this forum. Which is why we should ALL check and perhaps update our assumptions?

And sorry to say it, but your "too far from the sun" argument is the perfect example. You seem to have not been aware of tidal heating, or other possible types, and that liquid oceans exist in places in this solar system where they should not exist (and according to scientists only a few years ago, COULD NOT exist!)? And yet there they are, liquid oceans, so far from the sun. Not being aware of that is totally fine, and totally understandable, precisely because what's acceptable as scientific "truth" is now evolving so rapidly. That's the point.

Hey Tea, you should try threatening them that if they don't come clean on a conspiracy to hide the truth, you'll release this image of an extraterrestrial woman inside a space ship to every news media on the planet and destroy their reputation.



After all, they either expose themselves or the aliens will. Their choice, but as a human I rather not have my job taken from me and replaced by an ET, since they acted to make themselves visible when I didn't.

Originally posted by TeaAndStrumpets
1) Neat video, but I do think you're overplaying the proximity-to-sun issue. (That actually sorta exemplifies my main point. See below.) We now know that there are other ways such distant bodies might generate heat. Read about Europa, Titan, Enceladus, etc...

Such as? Those aren't kupier belt objects. I don't have a problem with one of Jupiter's moons generating heat from tidal forces. But I don't see how that applies to Kupier belt objects.

2) Still, I would not expect and I don't think even the authors EXPECT to find intelligent ET life on a KBO. The point is more... that's what we can reliably see now, there IS a small possibility of it, so let's test these techniques and be ready to use them on extra-solar planets once the telescope tech catches up in the coming years.

No argument there, I said they should go for it if they want to look.

3) The most important point, in my mind, is that here we have two highly respected astrophysicists from two premier universities talking realistically about the possibility that *intelligent* extraterrestrials very well COULD be residing in our own solar system... even if not likely. And such a discussion would've been unthinkable not very long ago. Dr. Geoff Marcy routinely points out that it wasn't even 20 years ago that he was still being laughed out of rooms by skeptical colleagues whenever he brought up the idea of finding extra-solar planets...

I will never understand that. You could have asked me 20 years ago and I would have cited a centuries old principle called the Copernican principle, meaning there's nothing special about our place in the universe. And a corollary to that means if we are on a planet around a star then there are likely to be other planets around other stars. It really didn't think Einstein to think of that and I find it hard to believe that the 3% of the world's smartest people (Scientists) weren't also smart enough to think of it.

Here are some very old quotes from the 1960s:

www.public.asu.edu...

with the number of galaxies and the number of stars contained within each of the galaxies, the probability of another solar system existing is excellent. The speculation based on probabilities is not new. Two very important books on the search for extraterrestrial life, written in the 1960's attest to this thesis.

"With 10 to the 11th stars in our galaxy and 10 to the 9th other galaxies, there are at least 10 to the 20th stars in the universe. Most of them may be accompanied by solar systems. If there are 10 to the 20th solar systems in the universe, and the universe is 10 to the 10th years old -- and if, further, solar systems have formed roughly uniformly in time -- then one solar system is formed every 10 to the negative 10 yr = 3 x 10 to the negative 3 seconds. On the average, a million solar systems are formed in the universe each hour." (3)

"The implication is that solar systems are common, but the argument will be greatly strengthened if there is real agreement on how our solar system came about. The space exploration of the next decade should enable us to narrow down the theories to a great extent. We will have samples of the Moon and direct knowledge as to the nature of its interior. We will learn the precise compositions of other planets and their atmospheres to compare with those of our Earth. However, study of our own solar system is not the only way to learn if it is unique. Another approach is to search for clues among the other stars of our galaxy. Such observations, carried out originally without reference to the question of whether or not there are planets elsewhere, led to surprising discoveries..." (4)

The first of these quotes can be found in a monograph co-authored by Carl Sagan who needs no introduction, while the second was quoted by Walter Sullivan, who at that time was Science Editor of The New York Times .

He certainly wasn't getting laughed out of the room by those guys 20 years ago and Sagan was very popular so his opinions were widely known.

So if he's trying to paint a picture that nobody believed in extrasolar planets 20 years ago, frankly, I don't believe him.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Arbitrageur, it seems like you're purposefully re-framing the points, and nipping at far edges without addressing the core ideas. That's fine I guess. But perhaps some of your arguments are really with the astrophysicists who authored the paper?

And you know very well that Marcy was not ridiculed for discussing the *theoretical* existence of extra-solar planets. (So, are you then saying that he's lying when he tells of being laughed at, viewed as second class, etc.?) Theoretical discussions of other planets around other stars were indeed nothing new. But it's that leap, when theory becomes the new reality, that's often the problem. That's when people's comfort zones are prodded. Even scientist's. And that's when the laughter, being looked down upon by one's more "respectable" colleagues, etc., creeps into the picture. As it did with extra-solar planet scientists... at first. As it did with SETI scientists... at first.

The concept of UFO's, or intelligent ET's in our solar system, REALLY encroaches on some comfort zones, more than radio SETI or extra-solar planet discovery ever did. Most everyone wants there to be intelligent ET life, right? And nowadays I think most educated people assume that 'they' are out there. But, for many people, it's only fun when it's all speculation and textbooks and theory, and doesn't have to actually be dealt with right here and right now. Any science regarding intelligent ET life had better keep that life sufficiently distant, says the old default view, or else we as a species have to start confronting some things we may not wish to confront....

And this paper doesn't embrace that old view. It doesn't coddle those who must keep a greater intelligence so many light years away. And I suspect that's a little jarring for some, because it's one more bit of "official" acknowledgment that ET really could be here by now.

reply to post by TeaAndStrumpets
I think it's an interesting paper that offers a companion approach to the SETI radio search. SETI has detractors questioning the probabilities of our catching a snapshot period in an ET world's technological progress - they might be pre-radio or post-radio transmission when Arecibo sweeps by. This alternative approach could conceivably (it has some problems) identify those signs of technology that aren't radio-related and would still (in theory) be visible to our telescopes.

A present-day major terrestrial city, Tokyo for example,6 has an absolute r-band magnitude of 47.9 with ap- parent r-magnitudes of 16.2 at a distance of 1 AU, 23.7 at 30 AU, 26.3 at 100 AU and 31.3 (about as faint as the faintest detected objects in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field) at 103 AU.

I couldn't find the relevant magnitude for, say, New York or London in the 1940s. It'd be good to see a projection of their visibility to be able to imagine the scale of sites smaller and less bright than Tokyo. I don't think the authors are particularly suggesting that we *should* look to KBOs, but are using them to illustrate the ways in which their techniques would work.

A more hypothetical origin for artificially-lit KBOs involves objects composed of rock and water/ice (asteroids or low-mass planets) that were originally in the habitable zone of the Sun, developed intelligent life, and were later ejected through gravitational scattering with other planets (such as the Earth or Jupiter) into highly eccentric orbits. Such orbits spend most of their time at their farthest (turnaround) distance, Dmax.

I'm not sure that 'more hypothetical' really does this idea justice! Flat out sci-fi fantasy seems more accurate. It isn't so much the idea of a planet, or object, being ejected from our infant Solar System ( Nesvorney makes a strong case ), but the idea that intelligent life had time to evolve beforehand and continue to survive an eccentric orbit. One can only imagine the tidal forces that would be at work on a wandering planet or even the surface temperatures?

Anyway, it is pretty good that this thinking gets to be aired out and discussed in public. I've collected dozens of speculative, scientific papers along similar lines that range from the 1970s to this month. People like Michael D. Papagiannis, Robert Freitas, Mario Livio and Glen David Brin have wondered if it *could* be possible that ETI exists in our neighbourhood.

Unfortunately the lunatic fringe, and fears that this approach is ufology in disguise, have marginalised the reasonable approach taken in some of the papers.

Incidentally, I've noticed several of your posts recently and you handle yourself well.