Back
around 1960 Frank Drake proposed an idea to search for alien civilizations by
looking for their radio signals. He thought that any technological society
would have developed some form of electromagnetic communication, and any
technologically advanced society would realize that the best place to announce
their existence was in a specific range of frequencies known then as “the
waterhole.” Drake proposed a search of certain stars close to Earth that would
most likely have developed life and to scan the waterhole radio frequencies.
The effort failed.
There
were a number of assumptions that were made here, one of which suggested that
most stars had planetary systems. In 1960 we didn’t know if our solar system
was rare or common. The assumption seemed to be that as the gases and debris were
drawn together by gravity to form stars that the leftover material would form
planets. But in 1960 we didn’t know about dwarf planets, the Kuiper Belt, the
Oort Cloud and that the Solar System extended nearly two light years from the
sun.
In
today’s world we know that many stars have planetary systems and our first searches
for exoplanets seemed to identify only the huge planets with masses that
rivaled and surpassed Jupiter. As the techniques were refined we began to find
smaller planets some of them about the size of Earth, or rather just a bit
larger.
This
was done, not by seeing the planet’s reflected light, but by finding their
shadows as they crossed the disk of their stars. By following that, by seeing
these regular transits, planets were found and their sizes could be calculated.
Today literally thousands of exoplanets have been found.
And
while SETI has found some radio transmissions that seemed to suggest an
artificial source meaning something created by an intelligent extraterrestrial
race, these signals did not repeat. I am reminded of the old days in which we
had analog television and large antennae to receive the signals. Sometimes,
when the conditions were right, television signals would “skip” around the
atmosphere. While living in Iowa I remember a signal from a Miami television station
that lasted for some twenty minutes. Another time there was a signal from a
station in southern Missouri that lasted for about an hour. These were onetime
events that were not repeated which made me wonder if the conditions had been
just right for those alien signals to skip through interstellar space to reach
us. A onetime event that is not repeated because the conditions weren’t right
again.
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| The Very Large Array on the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico. |
Now
we have something found by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope that suggests some of
our assumptions about the detection of alien life might have been wrong and we
have found an intelligent civilization through their construction of a massive
object in space near their home world. A star, named KIC 8462852 (what a
horrible name and I suggest we change it to Randle’s World) had provided repeating
transits that appear strange.
This
isn’t some wild-eyed, tinfoil hat wearing group claiming this, but scientists
who have presented a paper to the Journal
of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. According to the
report, "Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed
to undergo irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20
percent level.”
Tabetha
Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale said, “We’d never seen anything like this star. It
was really weird.”
The
scientists said that they had thought of various natural phenomena that might
account for these irregular dips in light from the star, but nothing seemed to
fit. A second paper is being written that will explore the theory that this is
some kind of gigantic engineering project by the aliens (which, of course, if
they’re operating in their own system means they are the indigenous population
and not aliens, but I digress).
While
all this is preliminary and there will probably be a solution for the anomaly
that doesn’t involve an advanced civilization, it does give us a hope that we
have finally found the answer about other life in the galaxy. And, if we have found
another intelligent civilization that close to us, it suggests that the galaxy
is teeming with life, but most would be very far away.
This
star is some 1500 light years from Earth which isn’t exactly our neighborhood,
but it is certainly close by, in relative terms… our galaxy is some 110,000
light years in diameter and some 30,000 light years deep. We won’t be dropping
in on them for a long time so they have nothing to worry about from us. But, if
they can construct something large enough to be detected by us, it means that
we might see them dropping in for a visit.
