Post by auntym on Feb 15, 2021 15:11:32 GMT -6
www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/aliens-extraterrestrial-life.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210210&instance_id=27000&nl=the-morning®i_id=83887531&segment_id=51427&te=1&user_id=131313ae495876029a121fc0f820aab4
Aliens Must Be Out There
Why aren’t we looking for them?
By Farhad Manjoo / www.nytimes.com/by/farhad-manjoo
Opinion Columnist
Feb. 11, 2021
The sun is not special. I know that’s a churlish thing to say about everyone’s favorite celestial body, our planet’s blazing engine and eternal clock, giver of light, life and spectacular Instagram backdrops. Awesome as it is, though, the sun is still a pretty ordinary star, one of an estimated 100 billion to 400 billion in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And the Milky Way is itself just one galaxy among hundreds of billions or perhaps trillions in the observable universe.
Then there’s Earth, a lovely place to raise a species but, as planets go, perhaps as unusual as a Starbucks in a strip mall. Billions of the Milky Way’s stars could be orbited by planets with similarly ideal conditions to support life. Across all of space, there may be quintillions of potentially habitable planets, or even a sextillion — which is more than the estimated grains of sand on all of Earth’s beaches.
So isn’t it hubris to assume that we’re the only life around? Since Nicolaus Copernicus posited nearly 500 years ago that Earth is not at the center of the universe, much of what humanity has learned about the cosmos has confirmed our insignificant ordinariness. We live aboard Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” In all the vastness of space and time, then, doesn’t it seem likely, maybe even obvious, that there exist other ordinary beings on other insignificant motes?
You might respond with the physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous paradox: If life is so common, why haven’t we seen it?
Now, in a dazzling new book, “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” the astrophysicist Avi Loeb offers a forceful rejoinder to Fermi. Loeb, a professor at Harvard, argues that the absence of evidence regarding life elsewhere is not evidence of its absence. What if the reason we haven’t come across life beyond Earth is the same reason I can never find my keys when I’m in a hurry — not because they don’t exist but because I did a slapdash job looking for them?
“The search for extraterrestrial life has never been more than an oddity to the vast majority of scientists,” Loeb writes. To “them, it is a subject worthy of, at best, glancing interest and, at worst, outright derision.”
That attitude may be changing. In the past few years there has been a flurry of new interest in the search for aliens. Tech billionaires are funding novel efforts to scan the heavens for evidence of life, and after decades of giving the field short shrift, NASA recently joined the search.
Still, Loeb argues, we are not looking hard enough. Other areas of physics, especially abstruse mathematical concepts like supersymmetry, are showered with funding and academic respect, while one of the most profound questions humanity has ever pondered — Are we alone? — lingers largely on the sidelines.
Loeb is a former chair of Harvard’s department of astronomy, and the director of its Black Hole Initiative and its Institute for Theory and Computation. He’s spent much of his career studying the early universe and black holes, but in the past few years he has become best known for his eccentric analysis of a cosmic mystery that unfolded over 11 days in 2017.
That October, a telescope in Maui captured an exotic speck speeding across the sky. It was interstellar — recognized as the first object we’ve ever seen that originated outside our solar system. Unusual though it was, the astronomical community quickly arrived at a consensus: The object — named Oumuamua, which translates roughly to the Hawaiian for “scout” — was some kind of comet, asteroid or other body of natural origin.
Loeb disagrees. The “simplest explanation,” he writes, is that Oumuamua “was created by an intelligent civilization not of this earth.” The object’s size, shape, luminosity and in particular its unexpected trajectory around the sun suggested something like a lightsail — a large, thin reflective object that might propel a vehicle using starlight in the way a sailboat is pushed by the wind.
Loeb would know; before Oumuamua was discovered, he worked on a plan to use a laser-powered lightsail to send a tiny probe to Alpha Centauri, a star system about four light-years from our sun. Reaching speeds up to 100 million miles an hour, Loeb’s proposed lightsail would reach Alpha Centauri in about 20 years.
I’m far from qualified to determine which side has the upper hand in the debate over Oumuamua. (The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert has a terrific piece sorting through the evidence.) www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/25/have-we-already-been-visited-by-aliens ) But in some ways the origin of Oumuamua is not the deepest mystery in Loeb’s book; a bigger puzzle is the closed-mindedness of the scientific establishment, its grumbling reluctance even to entertain the idea that an unusual object might be of alien origin.
What accounts for the reflexive skepticism? Much of it is a matter of optics — looking for alien life just sounds kind of zany. In 1992, NASA spent $12 million on a project to listen for radio signals from other planets; the next year, Congress cut the funding, with one senator joking that “we have yet to bag a single little green fellow.” The joke illustrates a persistent problem for scientists who want to look for alien intelligence — the “giggle factor,” a sense that there’s something unserious and whimsical about the entire endeavor. These perceptions tend to stick; for almost three decades after the 1992 funding, there was essentially no NASA support for the search for extraterrestrial life.
CONTINUE READING: www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/aliens-extraterrestrial-life.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210210&instance_id=27000&nl=the-morning®i_id=83887531&segment_id=51427&te=1&user_id=131313ae495876029a121fc0f820aab4
Aliens Must Be Out There
Why aren’t we looking for them?
By Farhad Manjoo / www.nytimes.com/by/farhad-manjoo
Opinion Columnist
Feb. 11, 2021
The sun is not special. I know that’s a churlish thing to say about everyone’s favorite celestial body, our planet’s blazing engine and eternal clock, giver of light, life and spectacular Instagram backdrops. Awesome as it is, though, the sun is still a pretty ordinary star, one of an estimated 100 billion to 400 billion in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And the Milky Way is itself just one galaxy among hundreds of billions or perhaps trillions in the observable universe.
Then there’s Earth, a lovely place to raise a species but, as planets go, perhaps as unusual as a Starbucks in a strip mall. Billions of the Milky Way’s stars could be orbited by planets with similarly ideal conditions to support life. Across all of space, there may be quintillions of potentially habitable planets, or even a sextillion — which is more than the estimated grains of sand on all of Earth’s beaches.
So isn’t it hubris to assume that we’re the only life around? Since Nicolaus Copernicus posited nearly 500 years ago that Earth is not at the center of the universe, much of what humanity has learned about the cosmos has confirmed our insignificant ordinariness. We live aboard Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” In all the vastness of space and time, then, doesn’t it seem likely, maybe even obvious, that there exist other ordinary beings on other insignificant motes?
You might respond with the physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous paradox: If life is so common, why haven’t we seen it?
Now, in a dazzling new book, “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” the astrophysicist Avi Loeb offers a forceful rejoinder to Fermi. Loeb, a professor at Harvard, argues that the absence of evidence regarding life elsewhere is not evidence of its absence. What if the reason we haven’t come across life beyond Earth is the same reason I can never find my keys when I’m in a hurry — not because they don’t exist but because I did a slapdash job looking for them?
“The search for extraterrestrial life has never been more than an oddity to the vast majority of scientists,” Loeb writes. To “them, it is a subject worthy of, at best, glancing interest and, at worst, outright derision.”
That attitude may be changing. In the past few years there has been a flurry of new interest in the search for aliens. Tech billionaires are funding novel efforts to scan the heavens for evidence of life, and after decades of giving the field short shrift, NASA recently joined the search.
Still, Loeb argues, we are not looking hard enough. Other areas of physics, especially abstruse mathematical concepts like supersymmetry, are showered with funding and academic respect, while one of the most profound questions humanity has ever pondered — Are we alone? — lingers largely on the sidelines.
Loeb is a former chair of Harvard’s department of astronomy, and the director of its Black Hole Initiative and its Institute for Theory and Computation. He’s spent much of his career studying the early universe and black holes, but in the past few years he has become best known for his eccentric analysis of a cosmic mystery that unfolded over 11 days in 2017.
That October, a telescope in Maui captured an exotic speck speeding across the sky. It was interstellar — recognized as the first object we’ve ever seen that originated outside our solar system. Unusual though it was, the astronomical community quickly arrived at a consensus: The object — named Oumuamua, which translates roughly to the Hawaiian for “scout” — was some kind of comet, asteroid or other body of natural origin.
Loeb disagrees. The “simplest explanation,” he writes, is that Oumuamua “was created by an intelligent civilization not of this earth.” The object’s size, shape, luminosity and in particular its unexpected trajectory around the sun suggested something like a lightsail — a large, thin reflective object that might propel a vehicle using starlight in the way a sailboat is pushed by the wind.
Loeb would know; before Oumuamua was discovered, he worked on a plan to use a laser-powered lightsail to send a tiny probe to Alpha Centauri, a star system about four light-years from our sun. Reaching speeds up to 100 million miles an hour, Loeb’s proposed lightsail would reach Alpha Centauri in about 20 years.
I’m far from qualified to determine which side has the upper hand in the debate over Oumuamua. (The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert has a terrific piece sorting through the evidence.) www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/25/have-we-already-been-visited-by-aliens ) But in some ways the origin of Oumuamua is not the deepest mystery in Loeb’s book; a bigger puzzle is the closed-mindedness of the scientific establishment, its grumbling reluctance even to entertain the idea that an unusual object might be of alien origin.
What accounts for the reflexive skepticism? Much of it is a matter of optics — looking for alien life just sounds kind of zany. In 1992, NASA spent $12 million on a project to listen for radio signals from other planets; the next year, Congress cut the funding, with one senator joking that “we have yet to bag a single little green fellow.” The joke illustrates a persistent problem for scientists who want to look for alien intelligence — the “giggle factor,” a sense that there’s something unserious and whimsical about the entire endeavor. These perceptions tend to stick; for almost three decades after the 1992 funding, there was essentially no NASA support for the search for extraterrestrial life.
CONTINUE READING: www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/opinion/aliens-extraterrestrial-life.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210210&instance_id=27000&nl=the-morning®i_id=83887531&segment_id=51427&te=1&user_id=131313ae495876029a121fc0f820aab4