Wired tries to defend SETI and UFOlogy. They argue that there are 3 branches of inquiry — exobiology, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the study of UFOs — and each has their place in our battery of methods.
Aliens—hypothetical beings from outer space—fall into roughly three categories. They could be far-away microbes or other creatures that don’t use technology humans can detect; they could be far-away creatures that use technology earthlings can identify; or they could be creatures that have used technology to come to Earth.
Each of these categories has a different branch of research dedicated to it, and each one is probably less likely than the last to actually find something: Astrobiologists use telescopes to seek biochemical evidence of microbes on other planets. SETI scientists, on the other hand, use telescopes to look for hints of intelligent beings’ technological signatures as they beam through the cosmos. Investigating the idea that aliens have traveled here and have skimmed the air with spaceships, meanwhile, is the province of pseudoscientists. Or so the narrative goes.
The issue, the article argues, is that the boundaries of legitimate research have shifted over time and are culturally determined, not objective at all. There’s a continuum of legitimacy, and it’s entirely arbitrary that we place UFOs in pseudoscience, and don’t fund SETI, and think exobiology is valid and interesting. That is a good point, except that I think there is a solid criterion that is rooted in how we do science.
Here’s the deal: early in our training, we’re taught to keep an open mind — you use hypotheses to guide a line of research, but we must be prepared to find unexpected results and alternative explanations. We’re adapted to thinking, “My experiment to test my hypothesis should find X, but if it finds Y we’ll have to modify the hypothesis, and if the answer is Z, well, back to the drawing board, but gosh, that would be exciting.” Experiments are designed that give interesting results, and whether the results are compatible with our hypothesis or reject it are equally useful.
Exobiology fits the paradigm. We’re looking at other worlds with they hypothesis that life produces chemical signatures we can detect, and even if we don’t see them, we learn something about that alien planet. We gather data looking for biology, and if we don’t see it, we still have data on extraterrestrial chemistry. That’s the safe bet funding agencies look for, that we’ll learn something even if our preliminary hypothesis fails.
SETI doesn’t work that way. SETI is looking for specific patterns in extraterrestrial signals; they have a pre-set goal, rather than an open inquiry. Not finding a signal they are looking for is a literal failure that tells us nothing. That star isn’t transmitting anything useful? Abandon it, move on, look somewhere else. Over and over again. It also doesn’t help that all their hypotheses look like ad hoc dreck contrived to convince people that there might be someone out there, with infinitely bendable variables.
UFOlogy, on the other hand, is an extreme example of that latter phenomenon. We don’t see what we’re looking for — no little green men, no crashed spaceships — so they invent elaborate and often contradictory rationalizations. The evidence isn’t there, but they are determined to pretend that it is. It’s a kind of anti-empiricism where the accumulated data is irrelevant to the conclusion.
It’s as simple as asking, “What will we learn from doing the observation/experiment?” SETI’s answer is nothing, unless we find a one in a trillion possibility, then it’s the jackpot. UFOlogy’s answer is that they already know little green men exist, so we just have to photograph thrown pie plates until we’ve persuaded the establishment. Neither is good science.
Both SETI and UFOlogy are strongly susceptible to apophenia as well. They are trying to fit complex data to a prior expectation, so there’s a tendency to impose patterns on noise. Here’s a classic example: NASA has observed complex sand dune formations on Mars.
Cool. What causes it? These are windblown rills shaped by topography and prevailing, but changeable, winds that formed under more or less chaotic pressures, producing lines and bumps and branches.
But, if you’re looking for it, it could be a signal. Perhaps, if we ignore the physical mechanisms that made them, these dunes could be Martian handwriting. Or better yet, a Martian code.
Right. So someone, probably as a bit of lark, tried to interpret them as dots and dashes, and then translated them into Morse code (why ancient Martians would have used a code devised by a 19th century American is left as an exercise for the reader). The Martian dunes therefore announce to the universe these immortal words:
NEE NED ZB 6TNN DEIBEDH SIEFI EBEEE SSIEI ESEE SEEE !!
I’m sure that means something profound in the original Martian. Either that, or it’s a compressed recipe for cored cow rectums.
That’s the problem with SETI, though. The universe produces patterns all the time, and human brains strain to impose interpretable derivations on them — SETI will milk that for all the news and attention they can get, even if it is ultimately meaningless.
Meanwhile, UFOlogists already know that the aliens are living on Mars, and have trained Bigfoots raking the dunes to send secret messages to the fleet hovering invisibly in our atmosphere, and you ignore it at your peril, you fools.
The dunes are reformed Egyptian. You need a top hat and a couple magic rocks to decode them.
There is also a 4th category, aliens that are intelligent enough to know they don’t want anything to do with earthlings.
Recommended reading about exactly why we are alone:
“Lucky Planet: Why Earth is Exceptional – and What that Means for Life in the Universe” by David Waltham,
and “Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe” by Donald Brownlee
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Also, for a fictional take on SETI; -no, not the one by Carl Sagan. The one by Stanislaw Lem: “His Master’s Voice” -with a rather unexpected ending.
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There is of course a greater chance if you regard exo-bacteria (pond scum) as bona fide aliens.
But communication with them will be difficult (“but not impossible” .quote by Arnold Rimmer, “Red Dwarf”).
Stargazing by UFOlogist crowd? https://xkcd.com/2274/
….and here is why the aliens died out https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/astronaut-interview
True, but we could certainly use the right sort of jackpot:
“Hi Earthlings. We had most of the same problems as you 100 Earth years ago, but now we’re a libertarian socialist utopia! Here’s how to zzzzncccismtl;spewewl!!!dklvfkld-ws-sas=-cfvDGHHHJHW?F”
I’m trying to reconcile the statements made here and the encoded message, “Polar mission failing out of supplies SEND WHISKEY!!”.
Obviously, a message from the Irish polar exploration team.*
As for SETI, I always have a chucklefest. Consider our radio signals that have been blasting out of our atmosphere since just before WWII. Maybe, just maybe they’d be detectable in the Centuri systems, no way in hell that they’d make the trip to Banard’s Star. The inverse square law isn’t optional, it’s a law of physics, if it doesn’t apply, you’re no longer dealing with science, but with magic.
Don’t even get me started on the notion of listening on the ground state wavelength of the most common element in the universe!
As for xenobiology, I hate to think what a xenobiologist would think of an organism that has sudden outbursts of methane and hydrogen sulfide, even money, they’d think it’s for propulsion and for an emergency option, it could ignite the gas.
Rather than simply consider that it only farted. I’ll respect that field more once we do detect something that was probably life and they could explain those signs.
Crud, forgot my footnote.
*One can ascertain if the ethanol requestor was Scottish or Irish by the spelling of the spirit, Whisky for Scots, whiskey for Irish.
Well yes but technically UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. Such entities do exist and some of them have been difficult to explain. There’s nothing wrong with trying to figure out what’s going on, without assuming it has to be ET.
As for SETI, it’s arguably a low probability of success but on the other hand, would constitute a discovery of incomparable importance. I understand that it isn’t the sort of thing that normally gets government funding but if people want to do it and can get Elon Musk to pay for it I don’t object.
They are looking at certain types of evidence, while others look at other types of evidence. Big deal.
There are lots of star systems, thus there’s lots of evidence to look at. You learn something, and it tells you something, every time you collect evidence. If a result of “noise, not signal” lowers the probability that intelligent life exists there, that is something that in fact you did not know ahead of time.
What you regard as interesting or important knowledge is a mystery. All of the scientific work you’ve ever done is likely to be utterly useless to me — it doesn’t appreciably change anything about how I understand the world. And yet I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t be doing it, that it isn’t science, etc., because it’s not “important” in some sense that I cooked up just for this one argument.
You shouldn’t be contriving dreck to convince people that there couldn’t be someone out there. The idea that there “might” be is entirely reasonable.
You’re awfully quick to deliver the insults at the obvious crackpots, but we shouldn’t excuse bullshit like this either. UFO bullshitters have no real power and no say in academic circles, but people like you do.
Even here, where it should be easiest to understand, you miss the point, in your attempt to dismiss the whole thing as pseudoscience. There is purported evidence of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. You don’t have to be a believer in UFOs simply to honestly examine whatever evidence there may be to that effect, of any type whatsoever, including that type of evidence. You don’t fail to look at it because of some half-cooked, unsupported theory about how you think things are “supposed to be” in science. There is no way of carving off some piece of the available evidence that we “shouldn’t” pay attention to, because you say so. We just have to take it all in, in whatever form it comes, like it or not.
To put it differently, all of the valid empirical arguments that you (or anyone) could possibly give to support a claim that UFO claims are bunk, etc., depend precisely on honestly examining the relevant evidence. Whether that’s “science” or just plain old “good reasoning” is a rather abstract and esoteric concern to worry about even for philosophers of science. But whatever you end up calling it, actually doing a serious critical examination of the evidence is our only good option. What you definitely can’t do is brush it all aside with smears and name-calling and so forth.
They won’t see a signal, unless they see a signal. Duh.
You are prejudging the issue, without evidence, and pulling a random small number out of your ass. (It’s not even very small, given how quickly observations can be checked.) If that’s what “science” is, okay, but there’s nothing disreputable about it when other people want to do something else which isn’t your stylized form of “science.”
Look, I’m extremely doubtful that we will find any evidence of extraterrestrial life any time soon. I won’t say “never,” because that’s obviously stupid. Give people enough time, and I have no idea what will happen. Neither do you.
About a century ago (back in Hubble’s time), we knew practically nothing about our galaxy, much less the observable universe. Since then, barely any effort has been spent on looking for evidence of life elsewhere. But somehow, you have already made up your mind that the whole project should be dismissed as pointless (or even dangerous) fake science. Even the tiny amount of effort spent so far on looking at all of the available evidence is (inexplicably) too much for you, despite the fact that this represents a huge and extremely significant blindspot in our basic knowledge about the world, which we should be strongly motivated to correct to the extent that we can.
Again, I’m sure we’ll probably have no very concrete answers for a long time, but mocking it all (with your cherry-picked crap about Morse codes and whatnot) is simply ridiculous. Take a step back. You’re a biology professor. This is not your field, and nobody is telling you that you ought to spend any of your time doing any of this work. You can do your own work on spiders or whatever, which is also likely to be heading down tons of blind alleys and dead ends, before it ever comes across anything remotely useful or important. And that’s okay.
But if we don’t do SETI, how will we ever hear C’asee K’aysm count down the Andromeda Galaxy Top 40?
SETI can (is? should?) be expanded to also be an open ended inquiry based on hypotheses about what intelligent life would produce.
Searching for signatures of methane and oxygen and the like in exoplanet biospheres counts as legitimate exobiology? You can do the exact same experiments looking for the signatures of CFCs and the like, and if you fail to find them, you still obtain the same data about natural atmospheres of exoplanets. (Indeed you can look for all of these signatures at once, in the same experiment).
Looking for evidence of advanced orbiting alien megastructures also provides evidence for naturally orbiting phenomenon like planets, asteroid belts, etc.
Last time I read about SETI, they were very upfront about the fact that we are too faint for anyone to hear us and our receptors are pretty much unable to hear any signals from distant stars. They wanted to listen as best they can to get a sense of what noise is out there and develop ways of screening. They weren’t expecting to hear any actual alien messages. They weren’t even able to scan the whole sky,they just looked at a bit of it.
They probably ought to change their name though, One can argue the UFO investigation is about studying atmospheric phenomena, but the people who do that call themselves Meteorologists or Atmospheric Scientists, not UFOlogists.
If we expand SETI into an open-ended inquiry, which is a good idea, then it becomes indistinguishable from exobiology. Exobiologists would also be able to recognize the signatures of intelligent, technological civilizations, you know.
@12: UFOs aren’t necessarily all atmospheric phenomena. Making that assumption is really not very different from assuming they are ETs. The whole point is we don’t know the explanation, that’s why they are called UFOs. Could be artifacts of human perceptual system, secret military technology, phenomena associated with meteors, optical phenomena, malfunctioning radar, whatever. No reason this is the exclusive province of atmospheric scientists.
The message actually says “All your base are belong to us.”
Ahem, wish I could add something of substance to the discussion. All I got is This
I think that this describes one of the main reasons there is a focus on searching for extraterrestrials
uncle frogy
Silly Scientists!
Mars really wants to tell us,
In other words, “Turn me on, dead human!”
#8 “some of them have been difficult to explain”. No, its been difficult to get people to believe the explanations but they have normally been really easy to explain.
cervantes@14–
Since someone has already brought up Stanislaw Lem, I will bring up his Tales of Pirx the Pilot which includes a story (I think it was “On Patrol”) about spaceships trying to track alien craft capable of physically extraordinary movements, only to have it turn out that they were caused by ionisation creating a false signal on cathode-ray-tube monitors. Obviously nobody is going to use cathode ray tubes in spaceships any more, but it was still a great story of people misinterpreting physical phenomena.
SETI at least makes testable hypotheses. The problem with UFOlogy is that the hypotheses have already been tested to death and there has never been a data set that demands to be interpreted as due to alien intellgience.
They’ve got it wrong. Any fool can see its a Martian QR-code.
Just got notice that SETI@home is suspending operations as of March 31. They’re hoping some astronomer at UC Berkeley will make use of their infrastructure and client base.
Assuming the Martian dunes were code QR or otherwise, I am pretty sure if we used our decoder ring it would say something like “Don’t forget to drink your Ovaltine”.
You guys should be using Bayes theorem to set a common consistency.
jack16
When you decode the corrupted audio file you get this:
“Hyperdrive – Kill the humans!” https://bit.ly/2TFfUSj
Alien Transmission https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_VnoLyrfdY