Thirty miles from Harvard University, scientists are using an 84-foot-wide radio telescope as a kind of intergalactic eardrum to listen for the distant murmurings of some technologically advanced alien civilization. Foolhardy Earthlings.
If these astronomers got out of their observatories more often and, say, took in a few summer movies, they would realize these aliens aren’t in a chatty mood.
Yes, a few years back E.T. was cuddly and friendly, taking rides past the moon in a bicycle basket while cooing about phoning home. Now he uses a bug-zapper-blue death ray to disintegrate the White House.
Earlier this summer, sinister aliens landed in “The Arrival,” and had it not been for Charlie Sheen, who realized they were trying to take over the world, there could have been real trouble.
This failure apparently only made the aliens angrier, though, because when they return Tuesday in “Independence Day,” they will level the world’s important cities. (Chicago, ever the Second City, doesn’t make the first-round, but has the consolation of knowing it will be obliterated in the second wave.)
In a sense, the people who pay to see these movies are not much different from those astronomers huddled outside Harvard listening for the intro music to some spontaneous radio show from space. They are both scratching at the same celestial itch.
Twentieth Century science and 20th Century Fox are being pushed by the same tectonic shifts in cosmology and society.
The revolution that be-gan with Copernicus–who back in 1543 pulled off the cosmological switcheroo that put the sun, not the Earth, at the center of things–continues to nudge people away from anthropocentricity.
And though most of its wonders remain hidden, space has been demystified, reduced from Heaven to gas and old atoms.
These little issues nag at a culture, making it uneasy, restless and unsure of the darkness. Just like the homeowner who thinks he hears rustling outside his window, it eventually leaps up and cries out, “Is anybody out there?”
Science is doing what it can to answer the question.
Although there had long been noodling over the possibility of other worlds (ancient Greek atomists believed in an infinite number of them), that rustling outside our Weltanschauung has been getting unbearably loud over the last century or so.
By the end of the 19th Century, the sciences–both the social and the physical ones–had taken man and Earth down a few notches.
Earth was the center of nothing. Man was little more than a really smart monkey.
Charles Darwin gave it all another good nudge by showing how life evolves into ever more complex organisms. Was it hard to imagine that it could start with nothing more than the flotsam and jetsam of the universe?
Culture led the way
Science in the early 20th Century wasn’t in much of a position to test the hypothesis that life might exist elsewhere. But the culture was willing to crawl into the rocket ship science couldn’t yet build.
In 1897, H.G. Wells wrote “The War of the Worlds,” one of the earliest chapters of our culture’s ever-expanding Field Guide to Monsters From Outer Space.
Dr. Steven J. Dick, an astronomer and historian of science at the U.S. Naval Observatory, notes that in the same year, a German novel portrayed aliens as benevolent creatures.
“You can see the two main traditions starting, malicious versus benevolent, and it carries all through the 20th Century, right down to the movie aliens,” Dick said.
In a new book, “The Biological Universe” (Cambridge University Press), Dick makes the argument–relied upon heavily here–that early science fiction efforts were the nascent attempts of 20th Century man to come to terms with a new world view, one which includes the acceptance that there might be something like us somewhere else.
“The whole 20th Century has been spent trying to prove this world view,” Dick said in an interview. “It is a world view that is testable scientifically, but it is also played out in science fiction and literature.
“Science fiction is just the popular culture trying to work out the options of what they are,” he said. “In terms of what they are like as moral beings, science fiction has as good as an idea as science.”
As the century progressed, the question became more pressing. It’s sometimes difficult to appreciate how much the cosmos has changed–grown, mostly–this century.
It wasn’t until 1923 that Edwin Hubble showed that despite the Milky Way Galaxy being a mighty big place, there are other galaxies, just as big, beyond it. (Remember, the word “galactic” comes from the Greek word for milky, because the Milky Way was long believed to be the only galaxy.)
Through Hubble, though, the number of suns out there went through a whopping population explosion.
After World War II, America was ripe for the massive alien invasion that came from some of these stars.
Like some devil-beam from Saturn, the light of movie projectors cut through the overhead darkness in 1956 to show “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” signaling the start of the invasion.
Science was following the same impulses that were driving people to drive-ins to see the sci-fi B-movies.
The SETI begins
In 1959, the journal Nature published the first sophisticated article suggesting that radio waves be used to seek contact with extraterrestrials.
A year later, the 85-foot antenna at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia was used for Project Ozma–the first bona fide SETI, an acronym for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.
(As Carl Sagan might say, this is a field with billions and billions of acronyms.)
Since then, there have been 60 SETI searches carried out in eight countries. None of them, however and importantly, had ever used a FUDD (more on that later).
Paul Horowitz, a Harvard astronomer, has been using an 84-foot radio telescope outside Boston in a SETI that dates to 1983.
“We are the first generation on Earth that could realistically do this,” Horowitz said. “We’d be nuts not to try.
“It would be the end, in the very real sense, of the Earth’s cultural isolation. It would be the greatest discovery in the history of mankind.
“Are you going to sit on your hands?”
NASA got into the SETI business in a big way, spending $58 million to begin HRMS, the High Resolution Microwave Survey in 1992.
But the agency had its ear to the sky for just one year before Congress put a cork in it. Budget cutters there called it a hunt for Martians.
Ejected from its natural environment in NASA, the program somehow found a way to survive in the sometimes hostile atmosphere of the private sector. Not-for-profit agencies like the SETI Institute and the Planetary Society have taken over much of the fund-raising that the Internal Revenue Service did when NASA was in the game.
Eavesdropping in a big way
Earlier this year, Project Phoenix, with funding from the SETI Institute, set up shop at an Australian radio telescope. The most sophisticated search to date, its eavesdropping was a staggering 100 trillion times more sensitive than that done in 1960 as Project Ozma.
Most importantly, though, Phoenix is the first SETI project with a workable FUDD–a Follow-Up Detection Device.
SETI researchers have long wrestled with the technical problems of following up on interesting signals they find in all the data they amass. Historically, when they go back to take another listen, they get nothing.
Phoenix, however, finally has developed the technology to check out intriguing signals instantly.
The heavens generate endless radio waves. But those that nature creates are rather wide and sloppy. Phoenix is looking for narrow, tidy waves–“A pure tone,” as Project Phoenix leader Jill Tartar calls it.
In Australia, Phoenix picked up some 109,000 signals. Of those, 94,000 were found to be naturally occurring interference. Some 15,000 other signals went to the FUDD, which quickly determined that most were nothing. However, 36 signals made it past the FUDD screening. Every one of those, however, were confirmed to be caused by manmade devices, mostly satellites.
“It may be a disappointment, but in some sense, that is a wonderful success,” Tarter said. “We now have a system that we know allows us to cull out the signals.
“To have a believable negative result bodes well for having a credible positive result.”
“People keep asking, `Are you close?’ ” said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute.
“It’s like asking Christopher Columbus, `Are you getting close?’ He says, `I don’t know, all I see is water.’ You don’t know you were close until you get there.”
