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| I had to think about it before adding this one to the stack. It's from Big Think, which is okay, and it's about searching for extraterrestrial life, which I might have talked about too much already. But the article propagates what I feel are misconceptions, so here I am, shaking my fist and yelling at the Cloud. David Kipping on how the search for alien life is gaining credibility  Big Think spoke with astronomer David Kipping about technosignatures, “extragalactic SETI,” and being a popular science communicator in the YouTube age. This is the first I've heard of this guy, and I watch YouTube videos about space from time to time. For whatever reason, the Unholy Algorithm hasn't pointed me in his direction. Probably a good thing, because if they're anything like this interview, I'd break my streak of "forever" of not writing comments on YouTube. Astronomer David Kipping has built a career not just at the cutting edge of exoplanet research but also at the forefront of science communication. Don't get me wrong, though, we need science communicators and I'm glad he's got a following. I first met Kipping at the famous 2018 NASA technosignature meeting in Houston, where the space agency first indicated they would be open to funding work on intelligent life in the Universe. Sigh. Could we please not call it "intelligent?" All that results in is a bunch of misanthropes making tired old jokes about not even being able to find intelligence on Earth. Which is a self-contradictory statement, because just being able to say (or type) it is an indication of what we're calling intelligence. At least at a very, very minimal level. Being able to broadcast the "joke" to most of the world at a speed close to that of light is definitely what we're talking about. Such a joke was funny exactly once, when Eric Idle made it in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Unlike other Monty Python quotes, it doesn't improve upon repetition. Ni! So every time the article says "intelligence" in some form, in your mind, substitute "technology." As with "technosignature" in that quote. The bulk of the article is in interview format. I think I was five or six when my parents gave me this massive book with a black cover and pictures of the planets... It felt different from my love of Star Trek. That was fiction, but this was real. I'm absolutely pleased that Star Trek has inspired many people. I love the show, in all its incarnations, through all its great and terrible episodes, and everything of in-between quality. But I fear that it has given us a false impression of what's actually out there. If you’re studying exoplanets, you’re not doing it just to know their rock composition. The ultimate question is: Does it have life? Could we communicate with it? And I want to be clear: that's an important field of study, and I think it's a good thing that it's finally gaining some credibility. But those questions, posed in that way, can be misleading. "Does it have life?" refers to, well, life. I feel like I'm shouting this into the void, but "life" doesn't imply technology. As for "could we communicate with it," we can barely communicate with our closest evolutionary relatives here on Earth, let alone fungi, trees, tardigrades, fish, or frogs—which, for the vast, vast majority of Earth's existence, made up the entirety of Earth's biosphere (alongside our own nontechnological ancestors). And it's only within the past 200 years or so, a mere blink of an eye compared to the 4.5 billion year existence of life on earth, that we produced any kind of technosignature. Things have shifted. NASA used to effectively ban the word “SETI” in proposals. Now there are grants funding it. Private money from people like Yuri Milner has energized the field. Students are excited to take risks and write SETI papers. That’s new and encouraging. And this is, in my view, a good thing. I'm all for looking for it, especially if we're also looking for signs of non-technological life—which, as other articles I've shared here have noted, we are. Thing is, though, it's hard to prove the absence of something. If we keep looking, and don't find any, that doesn't mean it's not out there, just that it's either farther away, or successfully hiding its signs. In an earlier entry, I compared this to the sea monsters and dragons in unexplored areas of old maps of Earth. But the field is still small and vulnerable. One flashy claim can dominate the conversation, and in the social media era, sensationalism is amplified. That worries me. One bad actor could undo years of careful progress. Like, for instance, Avi Loeb. Who is not only misleading the public with claims of technological origin for various objects passing through our solar system, but also destroying whatever's left of Harvard's reputation in the process. It frustrates me when colleagues say, “When we detect life…” That assumes the answer. As scientists, we need to stay agnostic. We don’t know yet. This, now. This, I agree with. I'm not a scientist, so I can say with some confidence that we will find signs of life, possibly even in the near future (provided we don't destroy ourselves or our own technological capabilities first). What I don't think we'll find anytime soon, if at all, though I wouldn't mind being proven wrong, is tech. That means we have to concede the possibility that we are alone. I’m not advocating for that view; I’m just trying to remain objective. People sometimes misinterpret that as me wanting us to be alone, or even link it to religion. But it’s nothing like that — it’s just intellectual honesty. Unfortunately, my idea that "we might be alone" does echo some religious views. But I don't approach the question from a religious point of view. I'd go so far as to argue that the assumption that we're not alone is also a religious view, because some people believe it with all the fervor of religion, without a single shred of meaningful evidence. Science, however, requires that kind of objectivity and evidence-seeking. The alien hypothesis is dangerously flexible — it can explain anything. That’s why we need extraordinary rigor. Carl Sagan said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but I’d add: The flexibility of the alien hypothesis makes it especially treacherous. I agree with this point, too. The hard facts are that Earth shows no evidence of outside tampering — we evolved naturally — and the Universe doesn’t appear engineered at cosmic scales. That suggests limits on how far technology tends to go. Or maybe it suggests there's nobody home. The rest of the article is about communication efforts—not with aliens, but with his human audience. It's interesting enough, but not really what I wanted to talk about. I'll just end with this little thought experiment: Imagine a solar system similar to ours. Similar sun, similar planets, one of them in the right place with the right composition to initiate and sustain life, like ours indisputably did. And one that formed about the same time our own solar system did Evolution would not take the exact same path on that planet. Even assuming that it starts with single-celled organisms and, at some point, mixes two of them to produce a superorganism that, like our prokaryotes, allows the development of macroscopic life. Further assume that, against all odds, one of the species thus produced develops the ability to not only use tools (which lots of animals do), but use tools to create other tools. As yet another assumption, let's have this species build tools upon tools upon tools, eventually leading to space exploration and colonization. That's a lot of assumptions, but I'm saying this to illustrate an evolutionary process similar to our own. Now, in Star Trek, almost every tech-using species encountered has roughly the same level of technology as humans do. There are exceptions, of course, like the Organians, or the Metrons, or the Q Continuum, who are mostly used as god stand-ins. On the other side of the range, there are cultures who are just behind us on the tech ladder, and we can't contact them without violating the Prime Directive. Here's the thing, though: in our own experience, technology accelerates fast. It took billions of years for humans to appear with their stone axes and fire; a few hundred thousand years for industrialization to happen; and then, in the span of little more than 100 years, we went from first powered flight to seriously considering a permanent human presence on the Moon and Mars. My point is that, in my hypothetical almost-Earth above, that 100-year window could happen later. Or earlier. The chance of noticing someone with the same, or slightly lower, or slightly higher, level of technology is, pun intended, astronomical. Add to that the idea that some stars are older and some are younger, and many of them are too unstable to sustain life for the requisite billions of years, and the chance starts to decrease even further. This is not even including the possibility that someone way ahead of us doesn't have a Prime Directive, and in fact desires to be the only tech-using species in the universe, and has the firepower to make that happen. Laugh all you like; I can see humans becoming that species. Or it could go in a more ethical direction, like in Star Trek. This is why science fiction isn't really about science or technology, but about humans. With a large enough sample size, even the most improbable events become likely to happen somewhere. The galaxy might not be a large enough sample size. The entire universe might be a large enough sample size, but then you get into lightspeed issues where the further out you look, the further back in time you see. So, yes, let's look. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. |
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