Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos Revisited -A Galaxy Classic

If all goes as planned, in ten months NASA's Phoenix Mission will land on the northern plains of the Red Planet and dig three-feet into the soil and water-ice looking for evidence of microbial life.

The Phoenix mission puts a renewed, glaring spotlight on the enduring question posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, known today as the Fermi Paradox, if there's life elsewhere in the universe, "Where is everybody?"

Each new robotic probe makes the story more intriguing. First came hints of ancient oceans that vanished-- perhaps able to support life back in our own dinosaur era which ended 65 million years ago. More recent probes showed probably still has a lot of solid ice just beneath the surface. This year even brought photos strongly suggesting that water flowed down a Martian gully in the past three or four years.

Could be microbial Martian life be alive in that ice today? Originating in Mars's warmer and wetter past, we know from our own Earth-bound extremophiles that microbes that can survive freezing for a very long time. Scientists digging deep into Antarctica have found "exotic" living microbes in ice that's millions of years old.

"It is not unthinkable that life in some form could persist today in underground springs warmed by heat vents around smoldering volcanoes, or even beneath the thick ice caps," NASA says in a summary of the Mars mission. Ultraviolet radiation would scour most life off the Martian surface, but beneath the surface there are possibilities, and that's one of the things that's attracting people's attention more and more.

If microbial life is found, as we suspect it will be, it will underscore the possibility of the evolution of life to current human levels and beyond. But it will we necessary for the Phoenix team to prove that life and Earth life are each unique. We know that Earth and trade rocks and it's highly probable that microbes have hitched a ride sometime in our Solar System's 4.5 billion -year history.

If Mars' life is shown to be unique, It will underscore the huge question of why the enduring, deafening "Great Silence" from an observable universe with a 100 billion galaxies and our own galaxy with its diameter of 100,000 light-years and an estimated 100-400 billion stars and potentially thousands of habitable planets?

The answer to Fermi's question and the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is greatest unsolved challenge and question of science.

Or are we poised at the knife's edge for an imminent breakthrough, like the scientific communities of 15th-century prior to improvements in ship-building technology provided them with the means to explore beyond the limits of the known world and allowed for the discovery of the previously unknown American civilizations?

The irony of Fermi's question is heightened by a few of the recent inter-disciplinary breakthroughs and insights that have evolved, not the least of which is our vastly improved measurement and mapping of the visible and invisible universe which is bringing the enormity of the cosmos into tighter focus.

The Universe formed 13.7 billion years ago. The Milky Way Galaxy formed a mere 200 million years later, making our Galaxy nearly as old as the Universe itself, with recent estimates of Earth-like planets forming 9 billion years ago, with three quarters of earth-like planets in the Galactic habitable zone estimated to be older than the Earth.

Since May of 2007 over 240 exosolar planets have been discovered; most of these so-called “hot Jupiters.” The possibility that their planets, many with stable circumstellar habitable zones, may harbor life, cannot be ruled out.

On Earth, life emerged rapidly, only some 600 million years after the formation of rocks.There is a significant probability that we inhabit a fertile Galaxy in which ‘life seeds’ are strewn about. The Earth itself has been a potentially infectious vehicle for nearly 3 billion years. We also now know that rocks can travel from to Earth and Earth to Mars.

As astrobiologist, Paul Davies points out in "The Goldilock Enigma," scientists are discovering that a number of cosmological parameters are so specific, in fact, that any minor alteration to key parameters would throw the entire Universe off kilter and result in a system completely unfriendly to life. The physics of the Universe that are in place are so specific as to almost suggest that spawning life is in fact what the Universe is supposed to do.

As physicists Freeman Dyson of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies puts it: The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.

As Dyson implies, the Universe appears capable of spawning radically advanced intelligence – the kind of advanced intelligence that machine-intelligence theorists such as Carnegie Melon's Hans Moravec speculates about, namely post-biological machine minds.

Moravec says, “I see a strong parallel between the evolution of robot intelligence and the biological intelligence that preceded it. The largest nervous systems doubled in size about every fifteen million years since the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago. Robot controllers double in complexity (processing power) every year or two. They are now barely at the lower range of vertebrate complexity, but should catch up with us within a half century.”

Given intelligent life's ability to overcome scarcity, and its tendency to colonize new habitats, it seems likely that any advanced civilization would seek out new resources and colonize first their star system, and then surrounding star systems needing anywhere from one million to 100 millions years.

Instead, the Universe seems to echo Fermi's question: "Where is everybody?"

Although the accumulating body of hard evidence suggests that life-encouraging substances -organics and water- are found throughout the universe, it's long haul from basic building blocks -organic or non-organic- to even the most primitive living organism.

This past January, using a computer simulation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, Rasmus Bjork, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, proposed a controversial answer to the Fermi Paradox. Bjork proposed that an alien civilization might build intergalactic probes and launch them on missions to search for life.

He found, however, that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, - NASA's current Cassini mission to Saturn is gliding along at 32km a second - it would take 10 billion years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore a mere four percent of the galaxy.

Arguments counter to Bjork's pointed out that technologically advanced civilizations would be more likely to have equally advanced means of space travel that would utilize molecular assembling nanotechnology capable of launching self-replicating probes. Initially, the spread of Von Neumann probes would be slow, but like any exponential process, progress would eventually explode and be capable of reaching the farthest reaches of the Milky Way in anywhere from 5 to 50 million years.

The answer to Fermi's question will be found in the stars: whether the origin of life was a weird chemical fluke that may have happen only once, or was the natural outcome of an intrinsically bio-centric laws that facilitate the emergence of life where ever the required conditions prevail, be they organic or non-organic.

In Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life, astronomer David Grinspoon suggests that "Maybe an advanced civilization long ago spread throughout the galaxy, but to them we are so clearly not intelligent, and incapable of meaningful conversation, that they don't bother with us. To the truly intelligent species in the galaxy, we may not seem threatening or promising." Yet.

The Spanish theoretical physicist Beatriz-Gato-Rivera in a paper on the "Undetectability Conjecture" asks how would we even know if we were embedded in a magnificently advanced technological civilization; after all, he asks, are mountain gorillas aware that they are embedded in a 21st-century world of Internet communications and interplanetary robotic explorations?

Marko Horvat, a computer scientist at the University of Zagreb, calculated the odds of detecting alien civilizations of different lifespans from their radio signals. If 10 civilizations, each with a lifespan of 250,000 years, live within radio reach of Earth, the probability that one of them will be detected is about 9 per cent, assuming near-perfect radio telescopes scanning the sky constantly . If there are 10 alien civilisations with a much longer lifespan, the chances of detection drop to almost zero, because they will probably have developed better means of communication that we are unable to detect at our present state of technological expertise.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Comments

Phoenix Mission's unfavorable Calculation?

What a pity, as the launch date was subjected to the timing of the weather pattern, instead of the influence and effect of the solar system pattern. Accordingly, by Kerry her research "indicates quick, sudden and unexpected losses that have destroyed earlier missions".

Question 1) Why shouldn't costly projects in the multi millions at least consider the solar system patterns and not just the weather pattern upon launch?

Question 2) Is the launching of the spacecraft more important than the whole complete mission success? It just seems premature to conclude that a weather pattern here on Earth should determine the outcome of the voyage out in space going to the planet Mars! I would think the weather on Mars would also have an effect. Kerry's research takes this into account and not just the patch of blue sky over Florida.

Her blog: http://kerrytheory.blogspot.com

Her Website: http://kerrytheory.info

May: Thank you for this ! Our best, Casey.

Posted by: May Wang | August 06, 2007 at 02:01 PM

There is no question that there is or ever was life SOMEWHERE in the universe at one point in time or even now. I hate how people don't believe there is. If there is a star like our sun, and if there is a planet that is exactly the right amount of distance away from the sun (not too hot and not too cold) than that triples the percentage of having life on it. And out of all the billions of galaxies we have in the universe, the probablility that there is a planet relativaly simular to ours is extremely high. It's just too bad that we don't have the technology to prove that or even explore other galaxies. In my opinion I think it is impossible to be able to invent ANY space craft that can travel so fast that it would make a 10 million year journey to another galaxy be less. Even for alien civilizations. But, I guess ancient people had no idea that we would someday invent cell phones either...so I guess it COULD be possible...but not for at least a few hundered years.

Posted by: Pamela Johnston | August 06, 2007 at 05:40 PM

The Daily Galaxy: Great Discoveries Channel

November 23, 2007

Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos Revisited -A Galaxy Classic

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