Blockbuster Science

by David Siegel Bernstein

  PARTING COMMENTS

  There might be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost certain that there is life somewhere in space.

  —Buzz Aldrin

  This chapter has been about the chances of communicating with intelligent alien life. If the chances are truly high, why haven't they made first contact? I want to leave you with one more reason we might not have received their voicemails. If a large number of intergalactic civilizations (or even only a few) exist, we might be out of sync with them. Here's why.

  Detecting an extraterrestrial intelligence's signal during the fleeting time in which the sender still exists is unlikely. Intelligent life could have developed and burned out long before we decided it would be fun to export television signals of Twilight Zone episodes. After we've transitioned into our post-biological form, it's very likely that we will no longer consider it worthwhile to send radio signals because we'll be operating in an expanded virtual universe (chapter 21 covers virtual reality).

  CHAPTER 15 BONUS MATERIALS

  BONUS 1: UFOLOGY

  Ufology is the study of reports, records, and physical evidence related to unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Don't let the -olgy fool you. Ufology is pseudoscience, a belief mistakenly taken as science. Nothing about it is based on the scientific method. Hopefully, this book will help you separate the real from the pseudo.

  Pseudoscience joke: If you believe in telekinesis, please raise my hand.

  Three types of UFO close encounters were described by ufologist Josef Allen Hynek in his 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry:8

  First: Visual sightings of a UFO.

  Second: A physical UFO event such as electrical interference.

  Third: An encounter with an alien or robot created by alien intelligence.

  This categorization was popularized by the 1977 Steven Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a first-contact movie.

  BONUS 2: CARBON AND WATER, A MARRIAGE CONTRACT FOR LIFE. IS IT RECOGNIZED EVERYWHERE?

  Life requires water, nutrients, and energy (carbon cycle). Carbon provides humans with both energy and physical structure. If a molecule is devoid of carbon, chemistry considers it inorganic. Consider the movement of carbon through a cycle of photosynthesis and respiration.

  Photosynthesis is the process where plants feed on the mix of solar energy from the sun, carbon dioxide, and water. In return they produce sugar, starch carbohydrates, and (take a deep breath) oxygen. We eat the sugar and starch (or animals that have eaten plants), and we breathe out carbon dioxide. The process repeats.

  None of this would be possible without water molecules. H2O is a solvent that supports life because the hydrogen (negative charge) and oxygen (positive charge) components act as intermediaries for chemical reactions in living bodies. Now go back and reread the fourth point of the Rare Earth Hypothesis.

  In the local search for life, astronomers believe they have evidence of water vapor rising from Europa, Jupiter's largest moon. Europa is a little smaller than Earth's moon, but it harbors a big secret. It is estimated to have twice as much water hidden below its icy surface than Earth has.9 This makes the possibility of finding life on Europa a lot higher.

  If the vapor is confirmed, drilling won't be required to retrieve samples. It just got safer to be an astronaut working the Europa beat. To search for evidence of life, the astronaut can simply test the vapor.

  BONUS 3: A WORLD PROTOCOL FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL CONTACT

  How do you say “We come in peace” when the very words are an act of war?

  —Peter Watts, Blindsight

  The International Academy of Astronautics, a nongovernment organization dedicated to promoting science and the technology of human space travel and exploration, have devised a “Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” These rules will save our collective rear ends if extraterrestrial signals are ever confirmed. Below is the protocol (slightly paraphrased) pledged by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).10

  Any individual, public or private research institution, or governmental agency that believes it has detected a signal from or other evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence (the discoverer) should seek to verify that it isn't human made or a natural occurrence before going public.

  If the signal can't be traced to a human or natural source then prior to making a public announcement that extraterrestrial intelligence has been detected, the discoverer should inform all other observers or research organizations that are parties to this declaration. They need to do their own checking for confirmation. The discoverer tells her national authorities.

  If the signal is creditable then the discoverer should inform international organizations including the Secretary General of the United Nations in accordance with Article XI of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Bodies.

  The confirmed detection of extraterrestrial intelligence should be announced to the public promptly. The discoverer should have the privilege of making the first announcement.

  All relevant data should be made available to the international scientific community.

  The discovery should be monitored and recorded for further analysis and interpretation. The data should be made available to the international institutions.

  If the evidence of detection is in the form of electromagnetic signals, the parties to this declaration should seek international agreement to protect the appropriate frequencies.

  No response to a signal or other evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence should be sent until appropriate international consultations have taken place.

  If evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence is confirmed then an international committee of scientists and other experts will act as advisors for continual observation going forward of the discovery.

  The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

  —George Bernard Shaw

  Imagine you are an explorer light-years away from Earth when your ion engine goes kaput. You need to send out a distress call. Of course, you will have to wait decades for a response. Darn you, speed of light—the galactic speed limit! This chapter is dedicated to the difficulty of interstellar communication and provides potential—although unlikely—real science solutions for instantaneous chatter.

  Distance isn't the only problem. Time adds another snarl. Oh, yeah, special relativity can be a real kick in the rear for intergalactic civilizations. Think of how different the frames of reference are between a slow-moving planet and an accelerating spacecraft. Some pages have built up since you read chapter 1, but remember the bottom line of special relativity: the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.

  A starship and its home planet will observe the other experiencing time differently (they are in different inertial time frames). So the idea of instantaneous messaging makes my mind spin. What if a ship traveling at warp factor four opens a channel to a ship traveling at sub-light speed to coordinate a tea party with the emperor of the Klax? I challenge you to come up with a nonfictional way for the conversation to occur in real time.

  A (not scientific) method used in science fiction is the ansible, a device thought up by Ursula K. Le Guin in her 1966 novel Rocannon's World. The ansible sends instantaneous short texts even across a galaxy, relativity be damned. Legend has it she came up with this name because it sounded like the word “answerable.”1

  For the Ender series, author Orson Scott Card ratcheted up the ansible's abilities to full-on conversations. Both authors have interesting techno explanations that I will allow you to research on your own.

  In the Crystal series and the Brain and Brawn Ship series, Anne McCaffrey's characters use synchronized crystals. Is this scientifically possible in our universe? Or is it science fantasy, an element that is internally c
onsistent but that doesn't obey the known rules of our universe?

  Starfleet in the Star Trek universe relies on a subspace communication network for instantaneous communications. I have yet to hear of a mechanism backed by science on that show. If Spock techno-spoke to Kirk about how sending a signal through subspace to other points in spacetime actually sends signals through unseen dimensions defined by string theory that reenter space wherever they want, then maybe, just maybe, they'd have a cool explanation.

  THEORETICAL LONG-DISTANCE CALLS

  Since I'm sure you are familiar with the traditional means of communication, I chose a few far-fetched, but scientifically credible, possibilities supported by general relativity (chapter 1), quantum mechanics (chapter 2), and string theory (chapter 3).

  Gravity Yes, it is scientifically possible (or at least not excluded by science) to use gravity as a tool for intergalactic communication, but it would be tremendously difficult. Pulling this off would require at least a type III civilization.

  Everything we know about the cosmos stems from electromagnetic waves such as radio waves, visible light, infrared light, X-rays, and gamma rays. But because those waves encounter interference as they travel across the universe, they can tell only part of the story. Gravitational waves experience no such barriers and are believed to be unaltered as they ripple through spacetime. Thus they can offer a wealth of additional information. Black holes, for example, do not emit light, radio waves, and the like, but they can be studied via gravitational waves.

  Think back to the flat sheet we pulled taut in chapter 1. We are going to reuse this sheet to represent a two-dimensional version of spacetime, only this time instead of placing a bowling ball at the center to represent a star or planet, I toss a rock onto the sheet.

  The sheet ripples much the same way a lake does after a pebble has been dropped into it. This is analogous to the ripples of moving masses within our four-dimensional spacetime. The more massive the moving object is, the larger the waves are. And, similar to waves in water, they grow weaker the farther out they radiate. An advanced civilization might be able to modulate these gravitational waves to send messages.

  Let's blend some science fiction into the science to explain how that might be accomplished. At the receiving side, you will need an Uhura-level communications officer who is experienced in interferometry, the method used by astronomers to detect ripples in spacetime. The sender will use their type III technology to slightly manipulate the orbits of small planets (or, more ambitiously, stars) to modulate a signal.

  Remember that the speed of this type of communication is limited to the speed of gravity, which is equal to the speed of light. Unless you are dealing with an ancient alien message sent thousands of years ago from thousands of light-years away, this setup is limited to communication with nearby solar systems.

  Quantum communication Quantum communication is like the Wild West. Only instead of rounding up cattle, particles need to be lassoed and trained before being sent to a customer. In science speak, this means the particles must be entangled and then teleported away.

  Quantum teleportation is the instantaneous transference of the quantum properties of one particle to a different particle. This isn't physical teleportation; it's the transfer of particle measurements. Think of it as teleporting the spin of one particle to another. In an experiment conducted at the University of Calgary in Canada, scientists were able to teleport the quantum states of photons over 6.2 kilometers.2 The results were presented at the International Conference on Quantum Cryptography on September 12, 2016.

  I encourage you to review chapter 2's quantum phenomena like fuzziness, uncertainty, and the wave-particle duality, all of which are the same thing, mostly. To understand quantum communications, you must reacquaint yourself with the idea of quantum entanglement. This is when two particles are said to share the same quantum state despite residing in separate locations. A change in the state of one particle instantaneously changes the state of the entangled partner. This “action at a distance” is also referred to as nonlocality.

  After the particles are entangled, one of them must be teleported to another location for the system to work. If the two particles have never been entangled locally then teleportation is impossible. Think of two people who have never met, who live in different countries, and no third person is a common friend to both. The odds of a long-distance text between them are very small.

  Quantum particles can only travel so far. They will be lost or become scattered along the way, just as photons are lost as they shuttle along optical fibers. Quantum teleportation systems could include repeaters so the particles could travel farther. The repeaters would need quantum memory to store and pass down the entanglement. Satellites could extend the distance of communication because in space, fewer photons are absorbed or scattered.

  Theoretically (the bare minimum required for quality hard science fiction), quantum communication allows for instantaneous communication anywhere in the universe. The important element here is that instantaneous implies faster-than-light (FTL) communication. No wonder Einstein got a headache thinking about quantum physics.

  Imagine a three-way civilization led by Earth. Here's the science on one possible communication method: Earth Central Communications Center (the ECCC) entangles two different pairs of particles. Particle A is entangled with particle B, and particle C is entangled with particle D.

  Now suppose the ECCC sends particle A to a colony in the Antares system and retains particle B. The organization also sends particle C to a space station orbiting the red dwarf Wolf 359 in the constellation Leo and retains particle D. The ECCC then entangles particles B and D. Presto! An interstellar communication system. Of course the ECCC will charge a hefty fee for that data plan. This might be a reason for conflict, and conflict always makes for good science fiction.

  Measurement is the key to a functional quantum communication system. The act of measurement on one entangled particle will collapse the wave function of both particles, and the spin of the measured particle will instantaneously make the other particle spin the same way. Spooky. Again, distance does not matter. Now you have a quantum communication system translating spin into language (similar to Morse code).

  Here is the cool bit: because the particles remain in quantum superposition (in all possible states) until measured, any attempt at eavesdropping is foiled. If someone tried eavesdropping she would need to make measurements, and this would randomize the entangled particles. Quantum encryption can secure the internet against data theft or tampering. No matter the distance, quantum entangled photons will instantly mirror any disturbances from one to the other. This is an unshakable system without the encryption key.

  In 2016, the Chinese Academy of Sciences put the first quantum satellite into orbit.3 The plan is to use the satellite to transmit quantum keys to two different locations. If successful, someday a string of satellites might provide a quantum internet for communication.

  Quantum entanglement is not only for communication between people or their civilizations; it can also be used for communication between quantum computers. Imagine a civilization using quantum entanglement to store information and pass it between computers anywhere in the galaxy—instantaneously.

  Gravitons A graviton, first mentioned in the atomic interlude, is the quantization of gravity. A way of thinking of quantization, as mentioned in chapter 2's bonus material, is to imagine zooming in so close to an object that it appears pixilated. This pixel is the quantized particle of what you were zooming in on. According to this theory, if you zoom in enough, you will find a discrete particle (pixel) of gravity.

  This hypothetical particle puts us squarely back in the world of quantum mechanics. The particle is also a wave, and, if we go “all in” on string theory, the wave might be vibrating in extra dimensions. This extradimensional access might explain why gravity appears so weak compared to the strengths of the other universal forces. It dilutes its strength by spreading across dimensions.<
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  Talk about an opportunity. Dimensional leaking makes interdimensional communication possible. If brane dimensions do exist then gravitons might allow communication with other universes. As described in chapter 3, our four-dimensional spacetime might be a single sheet or a brane among many floating in a higher-dimension bulk. Our first contact with an alien intelligence might not even be from our own universe!

  Neutrino beam communication A neutrino is the jealous cousin of electrons. Why jealous? These poor fellows were born with a neutral charge, so they don't get to play in the electromagnetic field with all the other family members that all carry a charge. Its main playmate is the weak nuclear force, one of the four known universal forces and a fan favorite of this book's first interlude. Technically, three different types of neutrinos exist. For the sake of simplicity, I will generalize.

  So, where do neutrinos come from? An atom with too many protons or too many neutrons (disrupting its relationship with the strong nuclear force) is cranky and unstable. To feel better, the atom must first suffer through a process called beta decay during which a neutron is transformed into a proton, or vice versa. This happens so that atoms can return to their “happy place,” the so-called region of stability. The changes in the atom force it to find a new home on the periodic table of elements.

  When a neutron quickly changes into a proton, its new positive charge is offset by spitting out a negatively charged electron. This process guarantees a neutral charge similar to that of the original neutron, but (there's usually a “but” in physics) the sum of the masses of the new proton and the new electron are less than the mass of the original neutron. The law of conservation must be obeyed, so the difference between the “before” and “after” is the neutrino particle (technically an antineutrino, but remember, I'm generalizing).