Extra Terrestrial Intelligence-3: The most likely contact scenario

What is likely to be our reaction if we did receive an unambiguous signal that there existed ETI somewhere else in the universe?

The reaction would be hard to predict because it is not a topic that is not publicly discussed much. This is a bit surprising because it is not such a stretch to think that we could wake up one morning to find out that we have received some signal from an alien civilization. I suspect that the reason why we don’t speculate on this question is that any such occurrence might be extremely difficult for most people to absorb into their existing worldviews, so they avoid thinking about it.
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Extra Terrestrial Intelligence-2: The chances of ETI existing

I thought of ETIs because of recent sudden reports of their appearance. About 40 residents of the town of Stephenville in Texas reported seeing a UFO a few weeks ago. And then the website Machines Like Us highlighted the reception of a mystery signal by a radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Nothing definitive has been said about the source of either signal, leaving the field ripe for speculation by ETI believers.

Now I think it is likely that there is life somewhere out there in the universe. The huge number of stars in the universe seem to imply that as long as the probability of life emerging spontaneously is not zero (and we know this is true since we are here), then we should not be surprised at it occurring in other places, perhaps in many places. The catch is that given the size of the universe, the probability of any one of these forms of life encountering another is very small. The most likely way that we will detect their presence is by accident, if they happen to send out a signal strong enough in all directions so that is it detectable by us even at these huge distances. Even then, although we would know the direction from which the signals came, it would be hard to know how far away they are. The premise of Contact was that a planet fairly close to us (near the star Vega just 25.3 light years away) containing ETI had received our old TV signals, thus discovering our existence, and then decided to reach out to us.

But although I think that it is likely that ETIs exist, what I am really skeptical about are the usual reports of UFOs and other sightings, where alien spacecraft dart hither and thither at high speed, playing peek-a-boo with us. If intelligent life evolved near other stars long enough ago that they could travel the likely millions of years necessary to get to Earth, they must be possessed of a vastly superior science and technology than us simply in order to even find us.

After going to all that trouble, why would they then start playing the fool, scaring the daylights out of rural Americans? And why is it that it seems like it is mostly rural Americans who get these visits? Why don’t they drop in on Central Park in New York City?

While it seems likely that the present kinds of UFO sightings are nothing more than misidentifications, the idea that we could receive a signal from ETIs is intriguing and worth mulling over. The most likely thing to happen is that we do get some sort of identifiable, non-noise, intelligently created electromagnetic signal from outer space, broadcast by the inhabitants of some distant planet without any specific intention of contacting anyone, just the way our own radio signals have been beamed out to the universe for the last 100 years or so and TV signals for about 70 years. Electromagnetic waves have some huge advantages as communication devices: they can carry detailed information, can travel through the vacuum of empty space, and travel at the fastest possible speed allowed by the laws of science, which is the speed of light. But that very fact shows how limited our reach is, since it would take about 100,000 years for these waves to just cross our own Milky Way galaxy.

Even if we did get such an unambiguous signal about the existence of an ETI from some source and could decipher it, there is little that we could do with it, just the way that a distant civilization would be baffled if, millions of years from now, they were to pick up the weak signal from a broadcast of American Idol. We would not be able to communicate back and the long times involved in sending and receiving messages would sap the enthusiasm of the most ardent believer in ETI. In science fiction, this limitation is overcome by invoking speculative scientific exotica like black holes and worm holes that enable space travelers to circumvent the speed-of-light limitation and somehow ‘tunnel’ to distant locations in very short times. But while that meets the plot needs of authors, there is no hard evidence that such things exist or, if they do, could be used for such kinds of travel.

But if we leave all these kinds of exotica aside, what intrigues me is what would happen if we simply experience the absolute minimum, which is the receipt of some signal that unambiguously indicates that somewhere out there, however far away and unreachable, there exists intelligent life. Would that change anything here? Would it influence the way we think and behave amongst ourselves, even if there was no possibility of actually communicating with that intelligent life? Or would the novelty soon wear off, and we go back to our usual practice of killing each other?

Next: How should we react to receiving a signal?

POST SCRIPT: Wisdom beyond any price

What would be do without our profoundly wise national commentariat?

Extra Terrestrial Intelligence-1: Getting a signal

In the years 2002 and 2003, during the peak of the intelligent design creationism (IDC) movement, I was invited to a few meetings of that movement to provide the opposing view. This was the time when the IDC side was promoting such debates as a means of increasing visibility for IDC ideas.

During those meetings I heard over and over again about the significance of the film Contact, based on the novel of the same name by astronomer Carl Sagan. This surprised me because I knew Sagan was a self-described agnostic. Why was the work of such a well-known skeptic being shown so much love at gatherings of religious believers? I was intrigued by this question but didn’t get around to reading the book or seeing the film until I did both last month.

I now understand the IDC people’s fascination with Contact. The book and film deal with extra-terrestrials making contact with people on Earth. The signal of their existence is that radio telescopes on Earth start receiving a series of pulsed signals from outer space that are the sequence of prime numbers, which are numbers that can only be divided by themselves or one. (i.e., the numbers, 1,2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,…)

While prime numbers are a source of great fascination for mathematicians and are used by them in a wide variety of ways (cryptography being one), there is no naturally occurring physical process that generates those numbers. Hence the reception of prime numbers is an unambiguous signal of a real intelligence out there manufacturing these artifacts, unlike the earlier false alarms created by the detection of pulsars in 1967. Those earlier signals consisted of regular pulses of energy with very precise times between each pulse and initially were thought to be signals sent by an extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) but were later found to be caused by rotating neutron stars. But one would be hard pressed to find naturally occurring physical explanations for signals that had the pattern of the prime numbers

The IDC people used this idea from Contact to argue that the existence of certain biological systems could not occur naturally and hence were similarly unambiguous signals for the existence of an ‘outside’ intelligence. While this intelligence could also be extra-terrestrial (as postulated by the Raelians), the IDC people preferred to believe that it was caused by god. This was the Paley’s Watch and Mount Rushmore metaphors modernized.

I found both book and film interesting but mildly dissatisfying. Sagan’s weaknesses as a novelist show, though his knowledge and command of science help to make the book readable.

All books and films that deal with contact with ETIs suffer from the same problem, that the really exciting part is the thrill of discovering the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence and the anticipation of what aliens look like, are like, and their attitudes towards us. But we just do not have any data at all on which to base our conceptions of these alien beings, so any choice the authors make is bound to be seen as deficient. Whatever the creators dream up about the actual encounter cannot help but be a bit of an anticlimax.

All the novels that I have read on this topic (admittedly not that many) suffer from the fact that the plot’s dynamic requires a revelation of the ETI at the end but the actual realization of the concept is almost always disappointing. I don’t see any way around it.

Next: More on ETIs.

POST SCRIPT: How to become a New York Times columnist

All you have to do is be consistently wrong.

Anniversary reflections on this blog

Today’s post will mark the completing of three years since this blog began. Although I tend to ignore anniversaries of any kind, they do provide convenient points at which to step back and look at the big picture, to reflect on what was achieved, what was not, and where one should be going.

I have been on a regimen of writing five op-ed type essays a week, resulting over the last three years in over 700 essays and close to 900,000 words. The blog has registered about three million hits.

While it is not easy to produce this level of output, it is not that hard either, provided one is interested in what one is writing about. One of the consequences of producing this output is that I now have extreme contempt for most of the well-known columnists (David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Charles Krauthammer, David Broder, Richard Cohen, etc.) that occupy the pages of newspapers and magazines. Many of the better known ones are employed full time and have paid researchers to help them gather material for their columns. Given all those resources, it is remarkable how vapid and lacking in content their columns are.
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Review: God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

I finally got around to reading Hitchens’ book debunking all forms of religion. I must say that I found it curiously unsatisfying. It is hard to put my finger on the reasons since I agreed with almost all the things he said.

The book seeks to show that religions (he focuses mainly on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism) are basically frauds initiated by charlatans and con-men, perpetrated on gullible people, and perpetuated by huge religious vested interests that either make a lot money out of the religion racket and/or use it as a form of coercion to suppress dissent (both in thought and practice) often in collusion with corrupt governments.

The book looks at the sacred texts of these religions (Bible, Koran, Book of Mormon) and shows how they are riddled with contradictions and inaccuracies and downright barbarisms, are very parochial in their thinking, of extremely doubtful historicity, and the product of many writers and editors, polishing and changing to suit their own needs and to achieve largely self-serving political and social goals.

The book also looks at the founders of these religions (Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Joseph Smith) and either finds little or no evidence for their actual existence (no evidence at all for Moses and little for Jesus) or if they occurred later enough that their existence could be at least partially corroborated (Muhammad in the 7th century) or fully corroborated (Joseph Smith in the 19th century), contemporaneous records indicate that they were likely self-serving con-men who founded movements and doctrines that conveniently coincided with their own interests and personal gain.

All this is well and good and I have no quarrel with any of it. I think that what bothered me about the book was the unevenness of its writing, coupled with a certain amount of pretentiousness. Everyone, including critics of his views, says that Hitchens is a brilliant writer and I get the feeling that this has gone to his head, so that he tries too hard to live up to that reputation, dropping esoteric references to erudite works and inserting unfamiliar phrases in French and Latin without translations. I find him to be a good writer when he is in good form but have never been overwhelmed by his alleged brilliance. In this book, there are some very good passages mixed with others that seem to lack coherence, a product of either laziness or bad editing.

He also has some annoying verbal tics. For example, he frequently refers to human beings (especially those he does not approve of) as ‘mammals’ instead of ‘people’. This is, of course, true but it is still jarring to read.

The book also flits from topic to topic, not going into much depth, and taking shots all over the place. It is a polemical book, which is fair enough. But it seems to be simply a collection of pot shots taken at religion. Let’s face it, religion is an easy target: it is full of internal contradictions, free of evidence for its preposterous claims, lacking contact with reality, riddled with barbarities, profoundly anti-science, and its history is awful. Taking broad swipes at it as Hitchens does is bound to hit the target somewhere, just like firing a shotgun at a dense flock of birds is sure to bring down something as long as one aims in the general direction. But it is not pretty.

I personally prefer the rapier skills of writers like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett or Victor Stenger. They are the authors of more tightly argued books, which carefully lay out the premises and claims of religion, and then proceed to systematically demolish them.

Perhaps it is no accident that these other writers are scientists while Hitchens is not, and I am partial to science-based critiques of religion. I believe that it is science that is steadily demolishing the case for religion and god and thus scientists are best situated to deliver these blows. Science is advancing all the time, explaining the previously inexplicable and giving ever more reasons to not believe in god. In contrast religious apologists have no new arguments and still trot out those proposed by apologist religious philosophers from centuries or millennia ago, people who could only plausibly claim make their cases at a time before Newton and Darwin and Einstein, when the world seemed a lot less comprehensible than it does now. Even then, these philosophers’ claims have to be reinterpreted and limited to take into account modern scientific developments.

So while Hitchens’ book is a quick and easy read (I finished its nearly 300 pages over a weekend) and I can recommend it, it is not a book that will be on my reference shelf to be periodically sought for fresh insights.

When reading a book I like to mark out for future reference good passages that make a point tellingly. There are some in Hitchens’ book that are very good and I have used them in previous posts. But sadly, he had only a very few passages that struck me as worth preserving.

God is Not Great is a good book, worth reading, but I expected much better. Perhaps that is my fault.

POST SCRIPT: Dan Savage in South Carolina

Dan Savage reports from South Carolina just before the Republican primary, and then has an amusing discussion about his experiences there with religion on Bill Maher’s show.

Our inner fish and other evolution fun facts

Even though I am not a biologist, I find evolution to be an endlessly intriguing subject, constantly throwing up intriguing new facts. Here are some recent items that caught my eye.

Stephen Colbert has a fascinating interview with evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin, discoverer of the fish-land animal transitional fossil Tiktaalik, about how much of our human biology came from fish. In his 2008 book Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body, Shubin points out that although superficially we may look very different, many of our human features can be found in to have analogous forms in fish and thus probably existed from the time that we shared common fish-like ancestors with them. (Incidentally, Shubin was one of the expert witnesses in the Dover intelligent design trial in which he discussed the theory of evolution and the role that Tiktaalik played in clarifying the link between fish and land animals.)
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Religion and gullibility

Here are some video clips of people claiming to have supernatural powers.

In the first, magicians Penn and Teller debunk a person who claims that she can talk to dead people. (Language advisory)

Notice how, when she interviews the black man at the end about whom she has no inside information, she resorts to inferences based on racial stereotypes and simple hereditary similarities in order to make her guesses. She is clearly hoping that he has a father, uncle, or other father figure who died from heart disease. Such ‘mediums’ often play the odds this way.

In the next clip, Penn and Teller take a look at someone who claims that she can talk to animals using telepathy

In the third clip, Penn and Teller and fellow magician James Randi debunk Nostradamus-based predictions.

In the final one Penn and Teller take a look at an exorcist at work. (Language advisory)

What do all these things have in common? They all share one feature and that is that unscrupulous people are taking advantage of people’s gullibility about the existence of the supernatural and using their emotional needs to con them. A lot of people would love to talk with their dead loved ones, they would love to talk to their pets, they would love to know what lies in the future, they would love to think that their problems are caused by demons that can be removed by a simple procedure. Thus they are only too eager to believe charlatans who promise them that they can do these things.

But all this rampant naïve credulity about the supernatural has to have a source. Why are there so many people who are so willing to believe things for which there is no evidence? I think that it is because religion has softened their minds up since childhood, weakening their powers of reasoning and logic. It has taught them that there are mysterious things out there that are beyond the reach of normal logic and evidence and science, and that one must simply believe in them. Such people are easy prey to all the charlatans out there, out to make a quick buck.

It is necessary for their very survival that religious organizations cultivate a deliberate naivete in their flock. They may say they appealing to the virtues of unthinking faith for noble reasons but they are effectively making their religious followers susceptible to fraud.

In Christopher Hitchens’ book God is Not Great, he describes how religions depend upon and take advantage of people’s credulity.

It is not snobbish to notice the way in which people show their gullibility and their herd instinct, and their wish, or perhaps their need, to be credulous and to be fooled. This is an ancient problem. Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus one of humanity’s great vulnerabilities. No honest account of the growth and persistence of religion, or the reception of miracles and revelations, is possible without reference to this stubborn fact. (p. 160)

Without people being indoctrinated early on by religion, these other fraudsters would have a much harder time making a go of it. They depend on the dulling of reason and the intellect produced by religion in order to ply their trade.

The later Martin Luther King

(Today is the official day to commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I am reposting (updated and edited) something I wrote two years ago.)

In reflecting on the life and message of Martin Luther King, I feel there is a need to resurrect an essential aspect of his message that he articulated during the last phase of his life. Over time, layers of gauze have covered this portion of his legacy and blurred the increasingly hard-edged and accurate vision that characterized the last years of his life.
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The candidates that corporate executives like

In my two posts titled Meet the Villagers (see here and here), I argued that the oligarchy that runs the US decide early on who they approve of to be political leaders and then use the media to make sure that everyone else is eliminated from the race early. The high-handedness of the media in deciding what views we should be exposed to was on extraordinary display when MSNBC first invited Dennis Kucinich to appear in the Nevada debate because he had met their criteria, and then at the last minute changed their criteria to exclude him. (I suspect that when they first set the rule about including only the top four candidates, they assumed that the fourth would be a Villager-acceptable candidate like Biden or Dodd or Richardson.) They thus ensured that issues like single-payer health insurance and the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and the closing of bases there (to name just a few issues) would not be raised in the debate.

Recall that I said that the Villagers want election campaigns in which there is a consensus amongst the candidates to support the issues that the oligarchy care about. We are almost there.

Now a January 11, 2008 Reuters article by Kevin Drawbaugh has actually asked corporate executives which candidates they like and fear and the results bear out what I said. Of the leading candidates, they like Clinton and McCain and Romney and think they can deal with Obama.

The corporate suits fear John Edwards most. In fact, the title of the piece is “Corporate Elite Fear Candidate Edwards.” Mike Huckabee is the most feared candidate on the Republican side. This is because although both their policy platforms are hardly radical, neither is strictly following the pro-business script that gets Villager approval.

The media has, as always, dutifully picked up on these cues, especially on the Democratic side. The Washington Post dismisses Edwards as “angry” (anyone who highlights and attacks the corporate control of US politics is almost invariably described as “angry” or as otherwise irrational) and insists that this is already a two-person race between Clinton and Obama. Unsurprisingly, the more overtly right-wing corporate mouthpiece Fox News also attacks Edwards.

But the best way to undermine a candidacy is by ignoring it, especially in the early stages, the way that the Edwards, Dodd, Biden, Richardson, Kucinich, and Gravel candidacies were largely ignored. If not for the televised debates, these people would have been largely invisible. Another way you eliminate those whom you don’t feel deserve to be in the race is to give extraordinary attention to trivial differences among the Villager-approved candidates so that all the oxygen is used up discussing absurdly unimportant issues.

For example, by focusing heavily on spats between Obama and Clinton (Did she ‘play the race card’?), and on trivialities (Did she really cry after Iowa? Is he secretly a Muslim?), and on topics like gender and ethnicity and Clinton’s ‘likability’ and even the way she laughs (!) rather than on policy issues, the media effectively avoid talking about other candidates and thus give voters the impression that this is now a two-person contest. This despite the fact that some polls suggest that Edwards is the Democrat most likely to beat any Republican in the presidential race, while Hillary Clinton fares much worse than Edwards and Obama.

As the pro-Democratic blog Firedoglake summarizes: “If Hillary’s the Democratic nominee, we could very easily lose to any likely GOP nominee. If Obama’s the nominee, he does OK so long as he doesn’t face McCain. But if Edwards is the nominee, we’re sitting pretty. Which, I suspect, is one reason why Big Media hates John Edwards so much and does everything it can to destroy him. (Speaking of which: KingOneEye at DailyKos pointed out this morning how the NYT is ignoring a key result of its own poll on the race — namely, that as more people get to know him, Edwards’ favorability rating keeps going up.)” Greg Sargent also notes a study that supports the contention that the media is underreporting Edwards.

On the Republican side the Villagers have not been able to narrow the contest as effectively, to focus just on McCain and Romney. Huckabee keeps bobbing up to the surface although they seem to have effectively buried Ron Paul’s candidacy, although the latter is doing as well as, or better than, Villager-approved candidates Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani who still get a lot of media play. It will be interesting to see if and for how long Huckabee can withstand the media pressure to disappear.

David Sirota tries to combat the “just a two-person Democratic race” narrative fostered by the Villagers:

For those of you who think the Democratic presidential nomination fight is just a two-way race between Obama and Clinton, check out this brand new poll from the Reno Gazette-Journal. Yup, that’s right – it shows the Nevada caucus race [which will be held on Saturday-MS] a three-way, dead heat with John Edwards right in the mix.

Interestingly, this poll comes right on the heels of the Establishment viciously ratcheting up its angry attacks on the Edwards candidacy. Late last week, we saw a Reuters story headlined “Corporate Elite Fear Candidate Edwards” detailing how Wall Street moneymen and K Street lobbyists are frightened about Edwards populist, power-challenging message against greed and corruption. We also saw self-anointed Democratic “expert” Lawrence O’Donnell pen a fulminating screed demanding Edwards get out of the race – not surprising coming from a man who made his name running the U.S. Senate Finance Committee – long the most corrupt, lobbyist-ravaged panel in all of Washington (somehow, running the U.S. Congress’s version of a pay-to-play casino now makes people credible “experts” in campaign strategy and political morality).

According to the nonpartisan Project for Excellence in Journalism, Edwards has long faced a media blackout – one that at least some honest media brokers like Keith Olbermann have noted. As I said a long time ago, that Edwards has even been able to compete in such a hostile environment is a testament to the power of his message.

The question we should ask is what the hostility and media blackout is really all about? I’d say the media’s behavior is motivated by the same impulses that moves lobbyists to whine and cry to Reuters and self-important bloviators like O’Donnell to publicly burst a blood vessel on the Huffington Post – the people who have gotten used to the status quo are truly terrified by any candidates who they really believe will change things and threaten their power and status. Edwards is just such a candidate – one who threatens to muck up what the media and political elite want to be a race between two “nonthreatening,” Wall Street-approved candidates. Obviously, it’s a three-way race at this very moment – whether the Establishment likes that or not.

Incidentally, this is why efforts to broaden the base of voters are almost always done by grass-roots activist groups working independently of the major parties. These new voters are unpredictable and hence undesirable to the Villagers. The pro-business/pro-war single party is quite comfortable with the way the current political system works since it gives a huge advantage to the status quo.

POST SCRIPT: Religion and politics in the US

British comedian Pat Condell gives us his take on this topic, in a clip he calls “Pimping for Jesus.” Condell’s home page cheerfully describes his attitude to religion: “Hi, I’m Pat Condell. I don’t respect your beliefs and I don’t care if you’re offended. Cheers.”

Trying to assuage guilt

On my return from Sri Lanka last week, I read the back issues of the Cleveland newspapers and found that a big story was the vicious beating of a middle-aged white man by a group of six black teenagers who had accosted him while he was on a walk in his neighborhood. The man was saved from possible death because of the alarm raised by a resident (who is a faculty member at Case) who had observed the assault from his home front window and raised the alarm, which caused the attackers to flee.
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