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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Friday, March 12, 2010

Is there anyone there? Probably not.

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An edition of the BBC astronomy programme The Sky at Night** this week rounded up some current thinking on the likelihood of ever detecting extra-terrestrial intelligent life. One contributor entertainingly described SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) as “making looking for fairies at the bottom of your garden seem like a serious scientific endeavour”.
One interesting thought came from a contributor who was imagining the reverse situation; an outside observer trying to detect we humans by means of radio. He proposed that the most detectable signals would likely be television; we began to use terrestrial transmitters in the megawatt-ERP class in the 1940s and 50s: but we are already beginning to switch them off in favour of 20-W satellite broadcasts and fibre-to-the-home. So, this scientist suggested, the “window” in which you might spot life-on-Earth might be less than 100 years.
There’s a few flaws in that argument – to start with, there are some other distinctive signals that have gone out from Earth in the last 60 years, not least a couple of thousand (or thereabouts) EMP events from nuclear explosions. And then there’s multi-megawatt over-the-horizon radars, and tropospheric-scatter radio systems, both sending all their power, effectively, right out into space. And if you’re listening at the other end of the dial it might be worth asking if any of the massive power put out in ELF submarine communications systems radiates off the planet. But all those systems, too, are in decline. What will be left to detect in the RF leaving our planet? It’s a good thing the signals from a billion mobile phones don’t add arithmetically or anyone pointing a dish this way would be deafened – fortunately, from a few light years away the content of those bands will just look like some slightly puzzling noise.

Surprisingly, this general line of thinking can be big business; in London early in 2010 there was a conference of (allegedly) serious scientists discussing First Contact. All the usual sub-sci-fi topics; Why is SETI a flop? Should we send out “Hello Universe” signals ourselves? Will they be kind to us when they get here? Or will they be just as nasty as the human race and take our lovely planet for themselves?
At this point the cynic takes over; what should we make of a pointless conference, in a nice London location, in January…. Using up some left-overs of last year’s research budget, by any chance, folks?
Science doesn’t do absolutes. Everything is always open to challenge and revision. But (to the best of my understanding) as far as we’re sure of anything at all, one of the fixed facts is that the speed of light is an absolute limit. Sorry Captain Picard, but there ain’t no warp drive. Even if you get anywhere near the speed of light that darned dilation thing makes the trip seriously unattractive. And the energy cost of getting any appreciable mass to anywhere near c is … well, astronomical.
As everyone who attended that conference knows very well, ET’s not coming. Not in person, anyway. If there are any Klingons out there, a more feasible (if protracted) option would be an exchange of information, but as noted above, they have to spot us first: and the duration of the conversation would be somewhat tiresome for organic life forms.
It might provide a more realistic vehicle for alien invasion, though. On our present performance you could well argue that emergent civilisations must inevitably destroy the biospheres that spawn them, and that any long-lasting intelligence would be machine-based. So maybe we ought to be on the lookout for interstellar software viruses, trojans and assorted malware.

**watch it here until 16th March

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