Hello! Is Anybody Out There?

Hello! Is Anybody Out There?

Stephen Hawking, who requires no introduction and Lord Martin Rees, Royal Astronomer to Her Majesty, cosmologist and astrophysicist, are few of the names which Russian billionaire Yuri Milner has been able to rope in for his project “Breakthrough Listen”. The $100 million initiative launched earlier in July 2015 aims to survey 1 million star systems and  100 nearest galaxies looking for signs of intelligent life.

The concept that we may be able to receive signals coming from space was recognized by Nicola Tesla in 1896 and was translated into action on ground once we developed the technical capabilities of initiating such a search. Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) was initiated in 1960 under Project Ozma and the search has been on for the past 55 years.  No positive results as yet which is but to be expected though we do keep on getting false alarms from time to time. The telescopes pick up some signals which do not appear to be random in nature but on closer inspection are found to be arising out of some natural phenomenon. Sometimes these “false alarms” too lead to some fresh insights into the cosmos. It is like finding one more piece in the cosmic jigsaw which may one day help us get the complete picture.    

Project Breakthrough Listen has two initial objectives, the first one as stated to study the nearby stars and galaxies and the second one to design a message to beam to the stars; a message which will concisely inform the recipients about “us”. A similar effort had been done earlier with the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft which were launched in 1972 and which carry a plaque containing information about where the spacecraft has originated (Earth, its location in the solar system etc) and about the species which has launched the craft (about ourselves, numbering system followed by us, the chemistry upon which we function etc) to the stars. Similar message was beamed in the direction of globular cluster of stars M13 from Arecibo radio telescope from Puerto Rico in 1974. Both these were very limited one-time initiatives and the scientific community does not have much hope that these messages would ever be received by intelligent beings.

Milner will be launching a separate Breakthrough Message initiative which will study the ethics of sending messages into space and create a message which will used to communicate with other civilizations. It has been reported that the creator/s of such message will receive a prize of one million USD, so if you feel you have what it takes to design a message which the ET will find easy to decipher, just put on your thinking caps. References to both Arecibo and Pioneer messages are given below. These were created by a team consisting of Frank Drake who founded SETI and my favourite science writer, Carl Sagan.

The current initiative will radically increase the time available for active search for ETI. Currently the time available on various telescopes for SETI is pitifully low, only about 24 to 36 hours per year per telescope. Project Breakthrough Listen will provide thousands of hours each on the two telescopes contracted for the project, Green Bank Observatory at West Virginia, US and Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, Australia.  

Drake who is also involved with Project Breakthrough Listen in an advisory capacity was the one who formulated Drake’s equation to estimate the number of possible civilizations that would be in existence concurrently with us. Drake’s equation, at this point of time, has a number of unknowns which need to be estimated to arrive at even a remotely reasonable “guestimate” . And by “remotely reasonable guestimate”, one means a few orders of magnitude. (For a comprehensive discussion on probability of finding intelligent life in the Universe, readers may please refer to “Intelligent Life In Universe” by Carl Sagan and Iosif Shklovsky. I would have loved to provide more details here but as it happens to all good books, my copy was “borrowed” rather permanently by a so-called friend who was immediately thereafter afflicted with selective amnesia as far as that particular transaction was concerned!)

That brings me to an interesting sidelight. It is claimed that around 1992 that is about 20 years after the launch of Pioneer 10, a stone was found in Kupang, Indonesia which message engraved on it which was strikingly similar to the messages sent out via Pioneer and Arecibo.

In my opinion, SETI program which excludes investigations into UFO phenomena is an incomplete one. As an incorrigible UFO-phile, brought up on the diet on Erik Von Daniken’s books in his formative years, the author is one among many enthusiasts who share an unshaken belief in UFOs  and would dearly love some confirmation of existence of ET during our lifetime. Till now investigations of UFOs have  been mainly the precinct of government bodies and an overwhelmingly large number of cases have been dismissed as sightings of moon, Venus, meteors, diffraction in atmosphere, ball lightning, weather balloons, haziness due to fog and a variety of rare natural phenomena. At times the explanations have looked dubious if not plain ludicrous. It will be fitting if a private organization, which operates with a clear mandate of transparency, is given the responsibility of investigating such claims and either verify or debunk the same. After all why go looking around the empty space with a hope that somebody is out there when you can find a calling card left by ET in your backyard here?  

True, a large number of such sightings and narratives of reported encounters of first, second and third kind, would turn out to be hoaxes, but there are a number of instances which clearly warrant some serious introspection. With the proliferation of cameras and cell-phones, the number of recordings of UFO have shot up exponentially. There are sightings from all continents and although a few hoaxes cannot be ruled out, there would be some which cannot be explained away. Physicist Michio Kaku estimates that at least 5% of the sightings are “unexplained”. There are sightings of UFOs flying along jetliners (both military and civilian) captured on video by competent trained personnel who are not likely to be easily deluded. Readers can check many these for themselves by just searching “UFO” on youtube.  

      

I mention here a well documented case which has been recorded by the US Air Force and RAF officers in  Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk UK in 1980. Here over a period of 3-4 days, a number of officers, including Colonel Charles Halt who was in-charge of the RAF station, encountered an UFO and could experience effects like extreme increase in radioactivity, failure of electrical equipment.  Colonel Halt submitted his detailed report in an unambiguous manner about the encounter but as has happened with numerous other incidents, the report was never publicly acknowledged.

Breakthrough Listen, with its hugely influential team, can surely achieve a major breakthrough by accessing the old files in various governments and establishing the truth once for all. I feel an official  acknowledgement of UFOs and encounters with ET will go a long way in generating support for initiatives like SETI and Breakthrough. 

As a small gesture, you can join in seti@home program which will enable you to contribute computer time to SETI for analyzing a part of data which is being collected. Maybe you (or rather your computer) will be the one who will identify that one small message which will change our understanding of cosmos for ever.   

LazyBee aka Shirish Potnis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pioneer10-plaque.jpg  Pioneer Plaque

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message Arecibo Message

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uOfO52dl9k Star map on rock, Kupang Indonesia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUa8u8a6Qeo Michio Kaku and UFO sightings over Alaska and Iran.