Jason Irwin dot Net

Can You Hear Me, Now?

February 9, 2010 Featured, Home

Kenji and I have had countless conversations on a number of very different topics. From attitudes of people at work, to Japan’s suicide problems, to netbooks in the workplace. Nothing is off limits. So it should come as no surprise that he and I engaged in a rather heated discussion earlier this year on the possibility of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. What’s interesting, though, is that even though our discussion may have gone a little over-board at times, we both feel strongly that life exists elsewhere … but are we capable of recognizing it?

It was only 50 years ago that an astronomer by the name of Frank Drake first listened to radio transmissions from Tau Ceti in the hopes of picking up a stray alien transmission. Since that time, scientists and enthusiasts around the world have invested incredible sums of time and money in the search for some form of communication from E.T. Aside from a few instances of false positives, people’s hopes have been mostly dashed. So, considering how we can receive radio signals billions of years after their initial transmission, where the heck are our neighbours?

It seems we have all of the right conditions to find life elsewhere. There are untold trillions of stars in our single Milky Way Galaxy. There are hundreds of planets that have been found orbiting several dozen stars outside our solar system. Even with conservative figures, surely this means that there must be at least a handful of intelligent species out there we can communicate with, no?

It is an interesting question. If other intelligent life existed within relatively close proximity to us, would we not have been contacted, conquered, or exchanging goods with them by now?

Kenji’s View

“You don’t expect to carry a conversation with moss, so why do you expect to carry one with an extra-terrestrial?”

This was his opening argument, and a pretty good one at that. Kenji points out that almost all of the planets we’ve observed outside our own solar system are uninhabitable behemoths that defy imagination. Massive gas giants circle so close to their star that a single year can pass in less time than it takes to fly from London to Cairo. Ancient stars are so old that any circling planets would be too cold to sustain liquid water … something we believe to be a necessity for living organisms to survive. Others are so large and massive that they’ll burn out and explode long before sentient life could evolve and escape its mother sun. This corner of the galaxy is not a hospitable one for creatures such as ourselves, so why are we surprised to find the neighbourhood empty of people like us?

His argument comes down to organic complexity. Most of the organisms on Earth are incredibly complex and required billions of years of relatively stable conditions in order to evolve as they have. Small temperature changes have caused ice ages that have wiped out millions of species. Asteroids have obliterated dominant creatures in a cosmic blink of an eye. The one form of life that does keep trudging along, though, is microbial life. It’s the Timex-watch of organisms, so to speak.

I hold a very different view, though.

The Cocoon

The universe is much older than the Earth. In just ten thousand years the human race went from living in caves to where we are today. To think that another intelligent species couldn’t do the same or more would be an act of immeasurable hubris, which is why I believe there is at least one other intelligent species in our local vicinity who has taken great measures to keep us cocooned away from the rest of the universe.

Crazy, you say? Perhaps.

Several dozen ancient texts and paintings refer to giants coming from very far away to give communities technologies and skills in exchange for people; usually virgin women. While I have doubts about aliens coming down to Earth to seek out people willing to prostitute their children in exchange for technology, it’s not so farfetched to believe that other intelligent beings have come to the Earth and found us to be an interesting species; perhaps one worth studying.

Naturally, in order to study a species with as little interference as possible you’d need to cover your tracks as best as possible. One way to do this would be to put radio cancellation devices somewhere in the Oort Cloud at the very edge of our solar system. This would ensure that no radio-based communications from outside would penetrate into the inner solar system. Of course, an intelligent species that is capable of making the trip from one star to another would either have an incredibly long lifespan or faster-than-light travel in order to complete long journeys around the local galaxy within a realistic amount of time. As a result, the odds of such an intelligent species using something as slow as radio for communications would be slim at best; they’d be using something that is not limited to relativistic speeds … something we don’t yet understand or have access to.

With such simple measures in place, an intelligent species could then use our own local geography to their advantage. Listening posts could be positioned on the Moon, or in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. High speed craft could make close passes with high speed cameras or scanning devices to see what’s happening on (or below) ground-level. Heck, stealth satellites could be placed into orbit to monitor us and send back information at faster-than-light speeds to save our watchers the hassle of dealing with the over-head costs of maintaining a habitable work environment in the harshness of space.

If I were in charge of studying a more primitive culture and didn’t want to give away our presence or activities, these are the things that I would do. The whole solar system would be cordoned off and marked “Off Limits” the same way national parks and other important plots of land are around the world. Then, from the comfort of a desk, we could be watched by a team of specialists. Our history could be recorded and analyzed. The cultural psychologies of generations compared and contrasted to each other. Great works analyzed, and lesser works archived.

We would, in essence, be little more than a curiosity to be studied.

But when would it end? A benevolent species would wait for us to stumble onto the right set of technologies that would put us on track to communicate with them. A means of propulsion that can move vehicles at faster-than-relativistic speeds, or a communications technology compatible with theirs. A human-like species would probably intervene and make such technology “impossible”, leaving us to live out our existence within the solar system like a goldfish stuck in a bowl.

I’m hoping it’s the former.

Utter Nonsense

Naturally, the Kenji and I knew before getting into the meat of the discussion that we were going to do nothing more than spout conjecture and speculation regarding the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but it’s an interesting topic nonetheless. What’s your take on the situation, though? Will we find intelligent life within our lifetime? What would it mean to the human race if we did find others? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Tags: alien, intelligence, Kenji