From: "Mark A. LeCuyer" 
Subject: IUFO: An Inhabited Universe?
Date: 10 Jun 1999 01:34:30 -0400
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Source: PBS Online

An Inhabited Universe?
by Seth Shostak

The soft lights from the stars on a summer night appear romantic, even
enticing. But 
distance deceives us about the true nature of the universe. It is
stupefyingly vast and depressingly empty. The cosmos is cold, silent,
and brutally impersonal, a dark, 
three-dimensional canvas only occasionally punctuated by stars. From
the surfaces of 
these glowing globes, scorching flames of gas lick the sky.  Deep
within the stars’ 
interiors, elementary particles, unseen and unheard, wildly collide in
response to the 
ferocious heat of a billion-year-old nuclear reaction.  

Extreme conditions are the norm. While the majority of the universe is
a near-perfect 
vacuum, in some places matter overwhelms space. Where large stars have
died or smashed together, the inexorable pull of gravity has crushed
their raw materials into a volume 
that's smaller than a pinhead, smaller than an atom. In the vicinity
of these so-called black holes, the very fabric of time and space is
rent and twisted.  These are truly the universe’s most bizarre
neighborhoods, the intellectual stomping grounds of Stephen Hawking.

Space is host to the most inhospitable environments imaginable.
Nonetheless, there are subtle properties of the universe that allow
the delicate process of life to exist. Indeed, it appears as if the
cosmos has been “fine tuned” to permit life. Had the Big Bang happened
more quickly, the early condensations of matter that led to galaxies,
stars, planets and us would never have taken place. Had it happened
more slowly, the universe would have quickly collapsed and
disappeared. If the physical constants that  govern the pace at which
stars age and die were slightly different, life would not have had the
time to evolve to produce you, me, or Stephen Hawking.

The entire universe has been constructed with one blueprint. Physics
is the same throughout. So if biology has appeared here, around an
unremarkable star in the outskirts of a run-of-the-mill galaxy, won’t
it have appeared manifold times elsewhere? After all, there are more
stars visible to our telescopes than all the sand grains of 
Earth’s beaches.  Shouldn’t we expect that life is a natural, frequent
occurrence?
    
Seth Shostak holds a degree in physics from Princeton University, and
a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology. He
is the Public Programs Scientist at the SETI Institute, in Mountain
View, California. His book, SHARING THE UNIVERSE, will appear in the
winter of 1997.

We don’t yet know, but there is enticing evidence that what has
happened on Earth may be the norm, and not the exception. In the past
three years, astronomers have succeeded in finding planets around
other stars. They have done this by measuring the subtle dance made by
these stars in response to orbiting worlds. While scientists have long 
suspected that planets are common throughout the cosmos, they now have
observational proof. And planets may be sweet oases in a hostile
universe. 

We believe that it is only on these tiny, cool worlds that the complex
chemistry necessary for life can exist.  It now seems probable that
there are many such worlds. In August, 1996, a team of NASA and
university researchers announced evidence for fossilized microbes in a
meteorite that had been torn loose from the surface of Mars. This
evidence suggests that billions of years ago, when the red planet was
warmer and wetter, primitive life floated in its long-vanished oceans
and rivers. Although controversial, this research implies that life
could spring up on any half-decent planet. If it’s true that Mars once
sported biology, then life is a statistic, not a miracle.

Supposing that planets are common and life is easily begun, then
perhaps the universe 
contains not only myriads of living creatures, but sophisticated
societies as well. Perhaps the intelligent aliens that routinely
appear in films and television have real 
counterparts in our galaxy. 

How could we find such extraterrestrial beings? Rocketing off to other
star systems is not feasible: Even with our fastest spacecraft, it
would take more than 50,000 years to reach the nearest of these.

But nearly four decades ago, it was realized that while interstellar
travel was expensive and time-consuming, interstellar communication
might not be. Radio waves, particularly those at microwave
frequencies, could easily penetrate the gas and dust between the
stars. And even a modest signal, if properly beamed, would be
sufficient to 
send a message from one star to another. Such signals would travel at
the speed of light.

Scientists don’t broadcast deliberate signals into space, hoping to
stir the interest of nearby aliens. But what some astronomers have
done for many years is to listen. They use large antennas (radio
telescopes) connected to sophisticated digital receivers in the hope
of eavesdropping on radio traffic that may already suffuse the star
fields of 
our galaxy. This enterprise is known as SETI, the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

For nearly two decades, SETI was a NASA program, carried out by NASA
centers in California. But in 1993, an amendment by Senator Richard
Bryan of Nevada ended this effort. Since then, SETI has been a private
endeavor, funded by individual donations.

The most ambitious search for cosmic company is known as Project
Phoenix, and is conducted by the SETI Institute, in Mountain View,
California.  Phoenix scrutinizes the vicinities of about one thousand,
nearby, sun-like stars for signals that are clearly of artificial
origin.  Since no one can be certain exactly where on the radio dial
the 
aliens might be broadcasting, Phoenix carefully sifts through two
billion narrow-band (1 Hz) channels between 1000 and 3000 MHz.  It is
in this spectral regime that the natural background noise from
galaxies, quasars, and other celestial transmitters is minimal.  It is
a good band for a cosmic “hailing” signal.

So far, none of the SETI projects has booked success. Not a single,
confirmed peep from the cosmos has been heard. But of course, that
could change tomorrow, next week, or next year. If so, what would be
the consequences?

To begin with, we would be confronted with one of the biggest news
stories of all time. Unlike the daily reports of UFOs buzzing the
countryside or of sex-starved aliens abducting citizens for salacious
purposes, a signal detected by SETI researchers wouldn’t rely on
anecdote or unsteady home videos. It could be quickly and repeatedly
confirmed by scientists world-wide. The signal itself would come under
intense scrutiny, and new receivers would be built to check it for
“fine structure”—rapid variations that might convey a message.  

But even if such variations are found, it’s unclear whether we would
ever understand them. Humans have had radio technology for only a
century, but any extraterrestrials we hear will more than likely have
had it much longer. Their civilization will be far in advance of ours,
perhaps by tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Only if they wish
to educate us, to enlist us as members of some sort of “galactic
club,” will they make it easy for us to decode their signal.  In that
event, we could experience a transcendent moment in human history. We
would be brought into the fold of a society beyond our abilities to
imagine, and might leapfrog millennia of history.

But even if none of this happens, even if we never understand the
signal that we receive, we would still know that in the desolate
vastness of a brutally hostile cosmos, other thinking beings exist and
thrive. In Stephen Hawking’s universe, neither he nor we would be
alone.

-Mark-

            Alien Astronomer - Exploring Our Universe
        http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583
Astronomy, UFOlogy, Secret Societies, Hi-Tech Secret Projects
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