Could SETI
efforts be simpler? While today's radio searches rely on highly sophisticated
antennas and receivers, our fledgling optical search systems are far less
intricate. Experiments to look for fleeting flashes of light from other star
systems have been conducted using only a modest telescope and about 20 thousand
dollars' worth of electronics; simple and cheap, like onion dip.
But there's
a problem: these searches for momentary pulses of light check only one part of
the sky at a time. Therefore, unless some alien society is incessantly aiming
their lasers in our direction, there's a distressingly good chance that we'll
be looking the wrong way when our solar system gets pinged.
This is
known in the SETI trade as the "synchronicity problem." I was recently
thinking about it over a fourth-rate burger, when it reminded of a passing
remark once made by California radio astronomer Jack Welch, offered at a SETI
meeting in Paris two dozen years ago. Welch wondered whether any gregarious
extraterrestrials might not make a signal so strong and obvious that "even cows
could see it."
Despite the
important fact that cows seldom write for refereed journals, Welch's point is
worth ruminating over: why couldn't an alien civilization aim a signal at Earth
that we could detect simply by pivoting our eyeballs to the night sky?
Indeed,
this type of signal might make sense as part of a two-component transmitting
strategy, something I've broached in these electronic pages before. One
component is an intermittent, powerful "ping" designed to mark a spot on the
sky and get our attention. Having found it, we would surely expend the time and
currency to build whatever instrumentation was necessary to detect the second
component, the (far weaker, but always on) "message."
Historically,
intermittent lights in the sky have frequently grabbed our attention.
Supernovae are an example. Probably the brightest in recorded history (as seen
from Earth) occurred in the year 1006, and was a favorite subject at elite cocktail
parties for months. Then five centuries later Tycho Brahe, the celebrated
Danish astronomer with the metal nose, saw a "guest star" in the constellation
of Cassiopeia. It shone as bright as Venus, and eventually gained notoriety as
Tycho's Supernova.
True, your
average Renaissance man-in-the-street probably didn't remark on Tycho's find. But
it was enough that a few people did. They made it known to everyone, and
forever.
So imagine
there was an occasional, very bright light in the night sky-appearing at least
as frequently as once a year-something that we could see easily, even without a
telescope and 20 thousand dollars' worth of electronics. A few tens of
billions of people have trod our planet since Homo sapiens emerged, and
it seems pretty certain that this intermittent flash would not only have been
noticed many times - it would be written into our folklore, and as familiar as
the evening star.
Yet we
don't seem to have witnessed such a thing. Is this because it's too hard for
the aliens to arrange? Does it require too much energy for them to light up
our sky this way?
Let's look
at the numbers. Virtually everyone (including cows) has observed the strobe
lights affixed to airplane wing tips. You can easily see these at any
altitude, but when a jetliner is only a mile high, the strobes are much
brighter than the brightest star. They flash about once a second, at an
average power of roughly 50 watts.
So what
would it take to make a similarly noticeable flash once a year from, say a thousand
light-years away - a reasonable maximum distance for the nearest aliens?
For those
readers who love the requisite arithmetic, I note that a thousand light-years
is about 6 thousand trillion miles. Ergo, the average power necessary for a
once-a-year flasher that, at Earth, would be as bright as a mile-high jetliner
strobe, is 5 1025 watts. That's trillions of times more
power than all humans use; trillions of times the sum total of every light
bulb, factory, SUV, and Wii. In fact, it's 10 percent of the power output of
the Sun.
But perhaps
I should say, it's only 10 percent of the power output of the Sun. For
some advanced aliens, that might not be very consequential. In 1964, Russian
astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev theorized that the universe could be host to
civilizations on three levels: Type I societies that use the energy resources
of their planet; Type II that use most of the output of their home star; and
Type III societies that command the energy output of an entire galaxy.
Civilizations falling into either of the latter two categories would have the
resources to make our theoretical galactic flasher.
So does the
fact that naked-eye SETI has failed to find such a beacon mean something? Are
we on the horns of a dilemma? It sounds as if we've somehow missed seeing such
a signal, or perhaps there's no nearby civilization with the technical talents
to construct one. The latter would suggest that there's nothing more
accomplished than a Type I society in our neck of the woods, despite the fact
that the Milky Way is 10 billion years older than Earth.
That's possible.
Then again, maybe the truly sophisticated aliens have better means of telling
us where to find information. Or perhaps they have sound reasons to be at least
slightly cryptic.
Still, it
strikes me as paradoxical, given the vastness of the cosmos, that such a simple
signal has not been recognized, a signal that even a cow could see. No lasers
for our grazers. Call it the cow paradox.
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