Post by auntym on Apr 22, 2014 14:22:59 GMT -6
www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/04/what-makes-an-alien-intelligent.html
April 21, 2014
What Makes an Alien Intelligent?
Posted by David Berreby
On Thursday, astronomers announced that they’d reached a new milestone in the search for Earth’s “twin,” or a planet much like ours that orbits in what’s known as the Goldilocks Zone—not too close to its star, nor too far away. In the five years since NASA launched the Kepler satellite to look for such worlds, the best we’ve been able to find is a portly cousin that is forty per cent larger than Earth. But the new discovery, called Kepler-186f, is only ten per cent bigger than Earth. Though it’s not exactly a twin, it’s a much closer relative. And so, despite its distance (five hundred light years from Earth), it automatically becomes a candidate in any future search for life. Earth, after all, is the only example we have of a life-producing world, so for decades we have sought its mirror image—a rocky world that’s neither too hot nor too cold to have liquid water on its surface. The search for intelligent alien life has proceeded along similar lines—it began with radio telescopes trained skyward to detect the sort of signals that we make.
Yet, even as the Kepler mission gets closer to finding a mirror image of our own planet, many scientists have ceased believing that we should be looking for ourselves in space. There are other ways for a planet to support life, they argue—and there are other ways for life to be intelligent.
That’s the point of a recent paper in Acta Astronautica by the dolphin-behavior researcher Denise Herzing. She warns against the seductive tendency to turn the question of a creature’s intelligence into one about how similar that creature is to humans. Instead, she writes, we need “a non-human biased definition and measure of intelligence.” This would allow us to identify signs of intelligent life that a human-centric explorer might overlook—for instance, in creatures without limbs to manipulate their surroundings, mouths to make sounds, or even brains to process information. (After all, microbes and plants learn about and react to their environments.)
CONTINUE READING: www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/04/what-makes-an-alien-intelligent.html
April 21, 2014
What Makes an Alien Intelligent?
Posted by David Berreby
On Thursday, astronomers announced that they’d reached a new milestone in the search for Earth’s “twin,” or a planet much like ours that orbits in what’s known as the Goldilocks Zone—not too close to its star, nor too far away. In the five years since NASA launched the Kepler satellite to look for such worlds, the best we’ve been able to find is a portly cousin that is forty per cent larger than Earth. But the new discovery, called Kepler-186f, is only ten per cent bigger than Earth. Though it’s not exactly a twin, it’s a much closer relative. And so, despite its distance (five hundred light years from Earth), it automatically becomes a candidate in any future search for life. Earth, after all, is the only example we have of a life-producing world, so for decades we have sought its mirror image—a rocky world that’s neither too hot nor too cold to have liquid water on its surface. The search for intelligent alien life has proceeded along similar lines—it began with radio telescopes trained skyward to detect the sort of signals that we make.
Yet, even as the Kepler mission gets closer to finding a mirror image of our own planet, many scientists have ceased believing that we should be looking for ourselves in space. There are other ways for a planet to support life, they argue—and there are other ways for life to be intelligent.
That’s the point of a recent paper in Acta Astronautica by the dolphin-behavior researcher Denise Herzing. She warns against the seductive tendency to turn the question of a creature’s intelligence into one about how similar that creature is to humans. Instead, she writes, we need “a non-human biased definition and measure of intelligence.” This would allow us to identify signs of intelligent life that a human-centric explorer might overlook—for instance, in creatures without limbs to manipulate their surroundings, mouths to make sounds, or even brains to process information. (After all, microbes and plants learn about and react to their environments.)
CONTINUE READING: www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/04/what-makes-an-alien-intelligent.html