by Paul Gilster | Oct 16, 2012 | Exoplanetary Science |
Continuing with what promises to be a seriously interesting week in exoplanet studies, I want to home in this morning on PH1, a planet that reminds us how much the public has become involved in ongoing science thanks to the widespread distribution of computer power. As presented at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Reno (NV), the finding pairs volunteers working with the crowdsourced Planet Hunters project with an international team of professional astronomers led by Yale University’s Meg Schwamb.
The volunteers — Kian Jek of San Francisco, California, and Robert Gagliano of Cottonwood, Arizona — were the first to spot the telltale lightcurve of a transit, which was then confirmed by astronomers using the Keck instruments at Mauna Kea (Hawaii). What the investigation uncovered was a gas giant about 6.2 times the radius of the Earth, putting it into Neptune-territory. But what really flags the attention is the fact that PH1 orbits within a four-star system. The planet is on a circumbinary orbit of two stars — with mass of 1.5 and 0.41 times the Sun respectively — every 138 days. At about 1000 AU in the same system is a second binary pair orbiting the first.
The inner pair comprise an eclipsing binary tagged KIC 4862625, located in the Kepler field and examined by the Planet Hunters duo using the first six quarters of publicly available Kepler data. PH1 is the seventh confirmed transiting circumbinary planet, giving us new information about the orbital configurations of multi-star planetary systems. From the paper:
These planetary systems provide new boundary conditions for planet formation This ever increasing sample of dynamically extreme planetary systems will serve as unique and vital tests of proposed planetesimal formation models and core accretion theories…
Image: A family portrait of the PH1 planetary system: The newly discovered planet is depicted in this artist’s rendition transiting the larger of the two eclipsing stars it orbits. Off in the distance, well beyond the planet orbit, resides a second pair of stars bound to the planetary system. Credit: Haven Giguere/Yale.
As for Planet Hunters, the Yale researchers believe the ‘citizen science’ model may continue to play a role in gaining new information about such systems:
PH1 was found serendipitously by Planet Hunters volunteers examining the light curves of the known Kepler eclipsing binaries. The discovery of PH1 highlights the potential of visual inspection through crowd sourcing to identify planet transits in eclipsing multistar systems, where the primary and secondary eclipses of host stars make detection challenging compared to planets with single host stars. In particular, Planet Hunters may exploit a niche identifying circumbinary planetary systems where the planet is not sufficiently massive to produce measurable eclipse timing variations that would be identifiable via automatic detection algorithms.
Co-author Jerome Orosz (San Diego State) echoes the sentiment, saying that “Many of the automated techniques used to find interesting features in the Kepler data don’t always work as efficiently as we would like.” Putting many sets of eyes on the data becomes a potent tool when linked up with the professional instrumentation and judgement needed to confirm the find. For more, see this Yale University news release. The paper is Schwamb et al., “Planet Hunters: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet in a Quadruple Star System,” submitted to The Astrophysical Journal (preprint).
by Paul Gilster | Oct 15, 2012 | Exoplanetary Science |
Because it’s going to be an interesting week for exoplanet studies (for reasons I’ll talk about soon, though not today), I’ll lead off with some thoughts on eta-Earth, defined as the fraction of Sun-like stars with a planet like Earth orbiting them. We have a lot to learn about the frequency of terrestrial worlds, and as Philip Horzempa points out in a recent article for The Space Review, the image that’s gradually emerging is of fewer ‘Earths’ than Carl Sagan once estimated when he said in the 1980s that half of all stars could have a planet like our own.
Image: Artists’ concepts of small exoplanets compared to our own planets Mars and Earth. As Kepler continues to hunt, how can we move beyond its findings to learn more about terrestrial planets around much closer stars? Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
With Kepler’s continuing datastream and improving ground-based instrumentation, we’re learning more about planet distribution, but Horzempa notes that even now, estimates of Earth analogs have ranged from about 2 percent to as high as 35 percent. He cites John Rehling, who went to work on biases inherent in the Kepler data set, namely that 1) the Kepler data are more complete in regions close to the host star and 2) the transit method detects larger planets more readily than small ones (see Looking Into Kepler’s Latest for more on this analysis, which appeared last March). Rehling’s findings led him to support a low 2% figure for eta-Earth but more complete Kepler data now has him backing off the number. Here’s what Horzempa says on the matter:
[Rehling’s] analysis has shown that the abundance curves for certain planet types, such as super-Earths, do not follow a smooth distribution curve. Rather, there is a peak, followed by a falloff, with increasing distance from the parent star. The distribution curve for Earth-sized worlds shows a positive slope, so far. Therefore, at present the best that can be said about eta-Earth is that it probably has a value of 2-12%. Only an extended Kepler mission will be able to determine the actual fraction of stars that have an Earth orbiting it. A low value for eta-Earth will mean that the search for Earth analogs in nearby solar systems will need to be pursued with vigor, and with multiple approaches.
Kepler, of course, is working with a large field of stars about 2000 light years away, the idea being to gather statistical information that will help us understand the broad trends of planet distribution. The mission has been extraordinarily successful, but it’s interesting to speculate, as Horzempa does, on what missions could now follow up on its findings. The article looks at the Gaia space telescope that should be operational by 2014 as well as the New Worlds sunshade concept that could be deployed for use with the James Webb Space Telescope, but I want to focus on Horzempa’s third mission concept, an ‘Earth’ finder called NEAT.
The Nearby Earth Astrometric Telescope has been proposed to the European Space Agency as a mission that could home in on nearby terrestrial planets in ways Kepler cannot. The idea here is to fly a pair of spacecraft separated by some 40 meters, providing the needed focal length to create high angular resolution. One of the spacecraft carries a 1-meter mirror while the other is a detector probe that collects the focused light onto an array of CCDs. The goal is to detect Earth analogs within 50 light years, with an accuracy of 0.05 microarcseconds for selected targets. Says Horzempa:
The NEAT duo will observe a list of 200 nearby Sun-like stars over several years. It will be able ascertain whether planets down to a mass of 1 Earth, or larger, orbit those stars. In addition, NEAT will be able to survey the solar systems discovered by Kepler, detecting giant planets that were missed by Kepler. These would be planets that did not transit their parent star during the Kepler mission, either because of the “wrong” orbital inclination or because their orbital period is too long. This will help to “fill in” the architecture of those solar systems, allowing a better understanding of how those systems are formed.
As you can see, NEAT would require formation flying in space, something that will demand a precursor experiment that the French space agency CNES has already funded, drawing on progress in formation flying that has been achieved by Sweden’s PRISMA program. The hope of the NEAT planners is to move beyond this experiment to a smallsat follow-up called micro-NEAT, which would put the formation flying algorithms through their paces, though at a separation of 12 rather than 40 meters. Quite a lot of serious work could emerge from such a mission: Horzempa notes that micro-NEAT would be able to detect planets down to one Earth mass for our nearest neighbors, Alpha Centauri A and B. It would also be able to detect larger planets (with a lower mass limit of 10 Earth masses) around the 25 nearest stars.
You’ll want to read all of Horzempa’s essay, which will include a second installment to be published today. With funding for projects like DARWIN and Terrestrial Planet Finder in perpetual limbo, smaller missions that can advance the exoplanet hunt — and help us refine the value of eta-Earth — are the next priority. They will be designed and, let’s hope, fly in an environment enlivened with still more detailed findings from our existing space observatories as well as instruments on the ground that reveal planets in the habitable zone of their stars.
NEAT was submitted as an answer to the call for proposals for M-class space missions in ESA’s “Cosmic Vision 2015-2025” plan. For more, see Mablet et al., “High precision astrometry mission for the detection and characterization of nearby habitable planetary systems with the Nearby Earth Astrometric Telescope (NEAT),” available online. The NEAT proposal summary is also available. A NEAT workshop was held in November of 2011 in Grenoble, France.
by Paul Gilster | Oct 12, 2012 | Uncategorized |
by Kelvin F. Long
I recently asked Kelvin Long to write an introduction to the Institute for Interstellar Studies he has created, and he was kind enough to send along a useful overview, along with a backgrounder on his own work: “Kelvin Long is an aerospace engineer and physicist. He is chief editor of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, author of the book Deep Space Propulsion: A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight, and was the key founder behind the starship design study Project Icarus. Since 2007 he has worked to catalyse the interstellar community through the organization of lectures, symposia, publications and design studies. He is currently the Executive Director for the Institute for Interstellar Studies, founded in August 2012.” Here Kelvin describes the new Institute and relates its mission to prior work in deep space technologies.
The subject of Interstellar Studies derives its name from a set of special red cover issues of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, published between 1974-1991. These issues included papers on interstellar communications and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This collection of papers represents a golden age of interstellar research. Indeed, the British Interplanetary Society (established 1933) has been the ‘torch holder’ of the interstellar vision for much of the last half century. Prior to this, the first technical paper addressing the interstellar challenge was published in the same journal in 1952 by Dr Les Shepherd. This can be considered the beginning of interstellar studies as an academic research subject. Throughout the last 60 years many papers have been published addressing the science and technology associated with interstellar flight. Publications have also examined wider questions of social consequences, philosophical viewpoints and political or economic issues. This large body of work demonstrates that the interstellar challenge is one that engulfs a broad range of subjects and likely requires the application of a multitude of solution types.
In recent decades, the subject has gradually gained prominence with several books being published and documentaries made. This has occurred in conjunction with the successful rise of science fiction and the visions of other worlds or starships that these stories would have us visualise. Yet, despite this progress the subject remains unorganized, uncoordinated, un-financed. Most of the credible research is conducted by volunteers, who would perform some other occupation during the day, and design starships during the night. Several organizations have been created in recent years that seek to work towards a coordinated effort. These organizations have noble goals and mission statements but neither has succeeded in creating an umbrella organization for interstellar research or in garnering significant financial investment into the interstellar subject. Although these are excellent attempts to catalyse interstellar research, these organizations have at times struggled to work together co-operatively because of differing ideas of how to achieve the objective for mutual benefit; a necessary condition if the goal of getting the interstellar subject accepted as a mainstream research field is to be achieved.
My own observations of having worked within the interstellar community now since 2007 are what partly motivates me towards the founding of the world’s first dedicated Institute for Interstellar Studies. You could ask why is such an institute needed now? Well, we are at what may be called an inflexion point in national space programs with the emergence of space tourism and space commercialisation, the discovery of many exo-solar planets reigniting interest, all within the backdrop of apparent retreating national space programs. When DARPA and NASA Ames Research Center ran the 100 Year Starship competition, no matter who won, there was a clear message that came from this: The US government put a stamp of approval on the interstellar agenda. This is perhaps the biggest contribution they could have made. Now is the time to use this opportunity and to provide a nexus about which the interstellar community can gather around.
All of the research that has been performed to date on interstellar has been dominated by theoretical studies. These are extremely valuable and they need to continue. This includes more starship designs. I claim that there is only one “starship design” in history and that is the British Interplanetary Society Project Daedalus. This is a controversial claim, but let me explain. In aerospace design, the word ‘design’ has a specific meaning. To me it refers to going from a requirements document, producing a concept, preliminary design and then a detailed design. This includes a configuration layout, performance specification, and appropriate consideration for the systems and subsystems integration. Although the Daedalus design is not without its flaws (due to technological advancement) and design contradictions (a consequence of trying to integrate 1970s technology with several decades hence), the design does meet my criteria for what is meant by an aerospace design.
As an aside, I also refer to starship design as “extreme aerospace engineering”, because the techniques and methods by which you down select to a design solution are no different from any other conventional aerospace vehicles — it is merely the environmental requirements which are extreme. Harsh conditions of radiation exposure, thermal gradients, pressures, detonation rates, cruise velocities, risks and reliability. The only other design which comes close to Daedalus, in my opinion, is the Project Orion design which was completed to the same level of fidelity, although that was mainly for an interplanetary vehicle. To my knowledge, the “interstellar” version was never fully designed. All other papers that have been written on interstellar vehicles, are either mission or vehicle concept studies and not full designs. Hence my claim that Daedalus is the only starship design in history.
Given we only have one attempt, how can people claim that interstellar flight is not possible? We need more reliable and credible studies and this is one of the functions that the Institute for Interstellar Studies will provide. This is also one of the reasons why I created Project Icarus, which is currently managed by the non-profit Icarus Interstellar, for which I was also a co-founder and former Director. Those teams continue to do good work in addressing a wide suite of technical problems. In addition, we want to go beyond just the theoretical studies, and also pursue numerical and experimental programs. These activities will help to build the profile of interstellar, recruit numbers to our ranks, and make the case for interstellar precursor mission studies. Provided all of this is done within an organization that has a viable governance structure and a fully operational and tested program, it is my belief that the securement of investment into the interstellar community will become more viable. No philanthropist is going to invest in one small team with an idea, but they will take a second look if the business case is sound, the organization is professionally established and the cause worthy.
The Institute for Interstellar Studies was created in 2012, sixty years after the publication of the JBIS paper by Dr Les Shepherd. Our goal is to create a long term research strategy which pulls all of the other organizations together in a cooperative way and if we can, to invite significant investment across the field, be it with people, energy or financial assets. If we are successful, then we would share these resources with the other organizations to assist them in growing their grassroots support base, research programs and organizational structure. The vision of the Institute for Interstellar Studies is not to see one organization subsumed into another, but to create a nexus about which all of the other organizations can depend upon, so as to assist them to affect their individual mission statements to the best of their ability and resources. Each organization would then leverage the capacity and contacts of the others for mutual benefit. In addition, the institute will also undertake its own research programs as well as set up an educational academy to assist students who desire to work towards a career in space.
Similar science institutes have been created throughout history which serve as an example of what is required. One example includes the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, which opened in 2001. This is an independent research center in foundational, theoretical physics located in Waterloo, Ontario. Founded in 1999, it works to advance the understanding of physical laws and develop new ideas about space, time, matter and information. They started with an initial seed of $100 million in October 2000, received a further $50 million in June 2008. They have had annual budgets of order $50 million in both 2006 and 2007 from the Canadian government. Another example is the SETI Institute, which was founded in 1984 on a $25 million donation from Paul Allen and matched by a further $25 million donation and government grant. The institute is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. Both the PI Institute and the SETI Institute do excellent work, and these organizations serve as examples for what can be accomplished, with some work. Although the Institute for Interstellar Studies begins life as a virtual entity, its ambitions are to become as big as these organizations and discussions are already under way towards the securement of a physical facility.
The current mission of the Institute for Interstellar Studies is to conduct activities or research relating to the challenges of achieving robotic and human interstellar flight. We will address the scientific, technological, political and social and cultural issues. We will seed high-risk high-gain initiatives, and foster the breakthroughs where they are required. We will work with anyone cooperatively from the global community who desires to invest their time, energy and resources towards catalyzing an interstellar civilization. Our goal is to create the conditions on Earth and in space so that starflight becomes possible by the end of the twenty-first century or sooner by helping to create an interplanetary and then an interstellar explorer species. We will seek out evidence of life beyond the Earth, wherever it is to be found. We will achieve this by harnessing knowledge, new technologies, imagination and intellectual value to create innovative design and development concepts, defined and targeted public outreach events as well as cutting edge entrepreneurial and educational programs.
The Institute for Interstellar Studies will focus its efforts on several areas, this includes:
(1) Providing a facility for fundamental research into interstellar flight.
(2) Providing an Educational Academy to support students on their careers to become space scientists or other related fields.
(3) To initiate knowledge capture activities so that information is readily available to the research community through data libraries and publications using new technology tools.
(4) To undertake educational activities which are focussed on increasing the designer capability of physicists and engineers as well as other scientific disciplines, so that we may better assess the various technical problems associated with Starship design.
(5) To create actual blueprints for Starship concepts, designs and mission demonstrators.
(6) To properly assess the requirements for an appropriate strategic and technological roadmap that will see interstellar flight become a reality over the next century.
(7) To help to foster new theoretical, computational and experimental tools to help scientists and engineers to solve the fundamental R&D problems that can make the designs become viable.
(8) To organize or contribute to symposiums, workshops or conferences, to provide an opportunity for networking and the sharing of ideas.
(9) To help communicate the vision of interstellar flight to the public, media, industry and government through the technical programs or the arts.
(10) To provide for a co-operative relationship between the institute and similar organizations, aligning programs where appropriate and seeking to work towards shared ambitions.
(11) To garner investment into the community, including financial. This can then be used for the provision of salaries and grant awards which is needed if we are to create a new industry.
Our view is that an interstellar-capable society can be established by the end of this century. What does this mean? It does not mean that by the year 2100 Starships will be travelling regularly between stars. What it means is that as a society, we will have the science knowledge, public understanding and support, political and economic provision, to begin a program for the first human mission, using the capabilities that exist at that time. That said, we believe it is quite plausible to send uncrewed robotic ambassadors towards the stars in the coming decades and the Institute will work towards that goal as a key mission and technology demonstration. We will focus on interstellar precursor missions first, but then later move towards full interstellar missions as our capability increases.
The motto of the Institute for Interstellar Studies is “Scientia ad sidera” or “Knowledge to the Stars”, because we believe in the determination of a scientifically informed strategic and technological roadmap in our planning. If people believe that what we are doing has merit, then we invite you to join with the Institute in some capacity. We are a young organization, and the world’s first ever dedicated interstellar research institute, founded in August 2012. But we are optimistically hopefully that by working together, we can bring to fruition the fulfilment of a dream and send humans to the system of another star. I challenge everyone in the interstellar community, and anyone with an interest in moving the interstellar agenda forward, to join in shared friendship and cooperation, so that we may work together towards the same aim – catalysing an interstellar society.
The web site for the Institute for Interstellar Studies can be found here: http://www.i4is.org/
The Institute’s blog page is located on our knowledge capture web site, The Interstellar Index, and can be found here: http://www.interstellarindex.com/blog/
Interested members who wish to contact the Institute can email us on:
interstellarinstitute@gmail.com
by Paul Gilster | Oct 11, 2012 | Astrobiology and SETI |
The idea of the multiverse — an infinite number of universes co-existing with our own — has a philosophical and mathematical appeal, at least if you’re a follower of string theory. Indeed, there are those who would argue there could be as many as 10500 universes, each with its own particular characteristics, most probably inimical to the development of life. But I have to say that I’m far more interested in the universe that is demonstrably here, our own, and thus the news that Geoff Marcy has received a grant to look for Dyson spheres catches my eye more than news of a similar grant to physicist Raphael Bousso to probe multiverse theory.
Not that I have anything against Dr. Bousso (UC-Berkeley) and his work, and if he eventually does find a way to make predictions of multiverse theory that can be tested, I’m all for it. But I think the new grants, given to the researchers in a series called New Frontiers in Astronomy & Cosmology International Grants (funded through the UK’s Templeton Foundation), were wisely balanced between the practical (observational astronomy) and the highly theoretical. Marcy will use his to probe the continually swelling Kepler datastream looking for distinctive signatures.
Instead of planets, though, Marcy has more unusual targets, the vast structures Freeman Dyson hypothesized over fifty years ago that could ring or completely enclose their parent star. Such structures, the work of a Kardashev Type II civilization — one capable of drawing on the entire energy output of its star — would power the most power-hungry society and offer up reserves of energy that would support its continuing expansion into the cosmos, if it so chose. Marcy’s plan is to look at a thousand Kepler systems for telltale evidence of such structures by examining changes in light levels around the parent star.
Image: A Dyson sphere under construction. Credit: Steve Bowers.
Interestingly, the grant of $200,000 goes beyond the Dyson sphere search to look into possible laser traffic among extraterrestrial civilizations. Says Marcy:
“Technological civilizations may communicate with their space probes located throughout the galaxy by using laser beams, either in visible light or infrared light. Laser light is detectable from other civilizations because the power is concentrated into a narrow beam and the light is all at one specific color or frequency. The lasers outshine the host star at the color of the laser.”
The topic of Dyson spheres calls Richard Carrigan to mind. The retired Fermilab physicist has studied data from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) to identify objects that radiate waste heat in ways that imply a star completely enclosed by a Dyson sphere. This is unconventional SETI in that it presumes no beacons deliberately announcing themselves to the cosmos, but instead looks for signs of civilization that are the natural consequences of physics.
Carrigan has estimated that a star like the Sun, if enclosed with a shell at the radius of the Earth, would re-radiate its energies at approximately 300 Kelvin. Marcy will turn some of the thinking behind what Carrigan calls ‘cosmic archaeology’ toward stellar systems we now know to have planets, thanks to the work of Kepler. Ultimately, Carrigan’s ‘archaeology’ could extend to planetary atmospheres possibly marked by industrial activity, or perhaps forms of large-scale engineering other than Dyson spheres that may be acquired through astronomical surveys and remain waiting in our data to be discovered. All this reminds us once again how the model for SETI is changing.
For more, see two Richard Carrigan papers, the first being “IRAS-based Whole-Sky Upper Limit on Dyson Spheres,” Journal of Astrophysics 698 (2009), pp. 2075-2086 (preprint), and “Starry Messages: Searching for Signatures of Interstellar Archaeology,” JBIS 63 (2010), p. 90 (preprint). Also see James Annis, “Placing a limit on star-fed Kardashev type III civilisations,” JBIS 52, pp.33-36 (1999). A recent Centauri Dreams story on all this is Interstellar Archaeology on the Galactic Scale but see also Searching for Dyson Spheres and Toward an Interstellar Archaeology.
by Paul Gilster | Oct 10, 2012 | Astrobiology and SETI |
Back in 2007, science writer Lee Billings put together a panel for Seed Media Group on “The Future of the Vision for Space Exploration.” The session took place at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, and I remember flying to Washington with a bad head cold to moderate the event. Miraculously, my cold abated and I enjoyed the company of Louis Friedman (The Planetary Society), Steven Squyres (of Mars rover fame), Edward Belbruno (Princeton University) and interstellar guru Greg Matloff (CUNY). But I particularly remember conversations with Lee. I can’t say I was surprised to see him go on to emerge as one of the most gifted science writers now working.
Not long afterwards, Lee wrote an essay called The Long Shot for SEED Magazine that took him into the thick of the exoplanet hunt, from which this fine paragraph about the nearest stars and why they have such a hold on us:
Alpha Centauri is today what the Moon and Mars were to prior generations—something almost insurmountably far away, but still close enough to beckon the aspirational few who seek to dramatically extend the frontiers of human knowledge and achievement. For centuries, it has been a canonical target of the scientific quest to learn whether life and intelligence exist elsewhere. The history of that search is littered with cautionary tales of dreamers whose optimism blinded them to the humbling, frightful notion of a universe inscrutable, abandoned, and silent.
Image: Alpha Centauri and nearby stars. Notice that Centauri A, B and Proxima Centauri all appear as a single light source. Credit: Akira Fujii/David Malin.
I have to add my own cautionary note, that Billings and I share the view that intelligent life is rare in the galaxy, though I suspect that Lee would be as pleased to be proven wrong as I would. I mention all this because these topics will come up in detail in a book he is now working on called (with a nod to Gabriel García Márquez) Five Billion Years of Solitude, which starts with the search for planets like Earth but moves to a broader view that places our world in a cosmic context. As he did in the SEED essay, Billings spends time with some of the top scientists in the field, discussing the hunt for life elsewhere and explaining why his own optimism for the future of humanity has begun to dim.
Here my views diverge from his, but this excerpt from a recent interview Lee did with Steve Silberman is worth quoting to give a flavor of what’s coming in the book:
I now believe that while life may be widespread in the universe, creatures like us are probably uncommon, and technological societies are vanishingly rare, making the likelihood of contact remote at best. I am less confident than I once was that we will find unequivocal signs of life in other planetary systems within my lifetime. I believe that, when seen in the fullness of planetary time, our modern era will prove to have been the fulcrum about which the future of life turned for, at minimum, our entire solar system. I believe that we humans are probably the most fortunate species to have ever arisen on Earth, and that those of us now alive are profoundly privileged to live in what can objectively be considered a very special time. Finally, I would guess that though we possess the unique capacity to extend life and intelligence beyond Earth into unknown new horizons, there is a better-than-even chance that we will fail to do so.
We’ll have to await the book (it’s due out in 2013) to see how and why these ideas developed, but the interview with Silberman, done on the latter’s NeuroTribes blog, is wide-ranging and gets into the question of what would happen if we did indeed encounter a civilization more advanced than our own. Billings sets up three contact scenarios that are themselves cautionary, in that they remind us of the difficulty in establishing meaningful communication with an alien intelligence. It could be, for example, that differences in our two biospheres would be so profound that communication is all but impossible. Jacob Bronowski made much the same point in The Ascent of Man back in 1974, saying that evolutionary paths would not follow ours on different planets, and that it was conceivable that we wouldn’t recognize alien entities as intelligent or even alive.
So much for the ‘take me to your leader’ trope of early science fiction movies. Another possibility Billings examines is that intelligent aliens might be relatively similar to ourselves because of trends of convergent evolution (here Conway Morris inevitably comes to mind with his 2005 book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe). This can be a troubling scenario as well given that competitive evolution could have produced creatures that, like ourselves, have become expert at conquering, manipulating and exploiting their native biosphere. In this case an alien encounter would not necessarily be benign and we should not assume good intentions.
But even a benevolent superior civilization could stir humanity’s kettle in dangerous ways, and our culture has been less imaginative than it should be in considering the philosophical and moral choices such an encounter could produce. From the interview:
If suddenly an Encyclopedia Galactica was beamed down from the heavens, containing the accumulated knowledge and history of one or more billion-year-old cosmic civilizations, would people still strive to make new scientific discoveries and develop new technologies? Imagine if solutions were suddenly presented to us for all the greatest problems of philosophy, mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology. Imagine if ready-made technologies were suddenly made available that could cure most illnesses, provide practically limitless clean energy, manufacture nearly any consumer good at the press of a button, or rapidly, precisely alter the human body and mind in any way the user saw fit. Imagine not only our world or our solar system but our entire galaxy made suddenly devoid of unknown frontiers. Whatever would become of us in that strange new existence is something I cannot fathom.
No one can fathom the result because it is utterly beyond our experience, leaving us to do what Billings does, which is to talk to the players who are pushing our knowledge forward and, using their insights, gain a perspective we can draw upon in the event of such a contact. Billings set out on a career in neuroscience but made a move into writing and journalism that allows him to range widely through the scientific disciplines in search of just that perspective. He mentions several writers who have been formative (Sagan, Stanislaw Lem), but to me his graceful, lapidary prose owes much to John McPhee. I suspect Five Billion Years of Solitude is going to be Lee’s breakthrough.
