Space race: Is there anyone out there?

            I grew up in what was called “The Space Age,” which superseded “The Jet Age.” Living in a rural area with very little light pollution, I was able to marvel at the stars and planets, identify the constellations, and dream of discoveries of worlds beyond Earth. “The Space Race” was under way, pitting the United States, bastion of democracy and godliness, against the Soviet Union, that oppressively communist and atheistic regime that wanted to destroy America.

We had to win the Space Race, and I dreamed of being part of it. Twice I asked for a celestial telescope for Christmas. I still have the second of those telescopes, which allowed me to see the craters on the moon, count the moons of Jupiter, see the red dust of Mars, and ponder the rings of Saturn. I stayed up late in 1969 to watch “One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.”

Reports of UFOs — Unidentified Flying Objects — intrigued me, and I became convinced that the reports of other-worldly spacecraft were factual, indicating that beings from other planets were observing or perhaps trying to communicate with us.

As my career interests shifted from astronomy to writing, I grew less convinced about the reports of UFOs and less interested in astronomy (which, I had discovered, entailed a lot of mathematics).

So much has changed since the days when my elementary school gathered the entire student body to watch the launch of a Mercury astronaut. The simple mention of NASA no longer makes hearts flutter with excitement. We’ve been to the moon and might get no farther. Unmanned probes have explored Mars, but the obstacles to putting astronauts on Mars remain daunting. Planetary probes and fly-bys are interesting, but wouldn’t a cure for cancer be better?

The latest intriguing object in space is an anomalous visitor to our solar system that does not behave like any planet, asteroid or comet ever detected. Some scientists believe the object, which flew past Earth recently, might be an exploratory probe from a distant civilization, which might be checking out the civilization on Earth. This theory is being taken seriously by scientists.

Residents of Earth have been searching for signals from distant civilizations for generations. The SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) program has listened and watched for signals from other planets. Some of the biggest names in astrophysics, such as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, have supported SETI. Simple odds seem to favor the existence of intelligent life somewhere out there.

“If you roll the dice so many times, and there are tens of billions of stars in the Milky Way, it is quite likely we are not alone,” Isaac Chotiner wrote in The New Yorker.

The odds certainly favor some form of life on distant worlds, but the chemical combinations to sustain life don’t seem to be common. The odds of basic life forms evolving into intelligent life capable of creating an interstellar probe seem prohibitively greater. Life on Earth defied extraordinary odds over billions of years. Suppose it’s a miracle and not an accident.

Even if we accept that SETI is scientifically valuable, the incomprehensible distances of interstellar and intergalactic space makes meaningful contact with extraterrestrial life impossible. A two-way conversation between Earth and another planet would be an intergenerational task. The closest stars with planets are dozens to hundreds of light years away. We would be waiting hundreds of years for a reply to our greeting, and that assumes that language barriers could be overcome. Einstein established that nothing can travel faster than light, so the “warp speed” dreamed up by “Star Trek” writers defies the laws of physics

Among the billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy or the trillions in the thousands of other galaxies known to us, there might be intelligent life, but communicating with that civilization, much less visiting it, appears impossible.

Be awed at the vast heavens, the unfathomable distances, the varieties of objects and the enigmas of how it all came to be, but don’t count on spending your vacation on some distant world hundreds of light years away.

             

This article first appeared in The Wilson Times Feb. 2, 2019.

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Other worlds are beyond our rreach

For all the folks excited about the discovery of planets orbiting stars other than our sun, or those folks who are hoping to live long enough to join the crew of the Starship Enterprise, please curb your enthusiasm. Getting to exoplanets is a lot more difficult than just calling out, "Warp speed!"

Take the latest discovery, touted by NASA in a press release complete with artist renderings of the surface of these planets that have not been actually seen by the human eye but only surmised because of the planets' darkening of their star's light. Before you buy your tickets to travel to these new worlds, know that this solar system is 40 light years away. That's 235 trillion miles! It takes light from that star 40 years to reach Earth. Given that accepted science contends that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and current space vehicles travel just a few thousand miles an hour, sending a space capsule to these new planets could take longer than modern man has existed on this planet. Even supposing that great advances will be made in interplanetary speeds, a capsule traveling at half the speed of light would take 80 years to arrive in the solar system and another 80 years to return. Anyone want to volunteer for that assignment?

Some science fiction dreamers suggest that we are wearing out good ol' Earth, and we should find us another place to homestead for the survival of the species. But even sending a manned craft to Mars, our nearest planetary neighbor, risks killing all crew members from exposure to interplanetary radiation. That's a problem that hasn't been solved even for "short" trips in the neighborhood. If astronauts can't survive a two- or three-year trip to Mars, how would they survive an 80-year trip to exoplanets?

These "astronomical" distances even present a problem for the highly touted efforts to contact extra-terrestrial life in other solar systems. Any speed-of-light communications we might receive and reply to would require a response time of many years, even centuries. Would civilization and technology last that long?

Rather than focus on the fascinating but rather pointless search for exoplanets and intelligent life beyond our solar system, humanity would be better served concentrating on repairing the damage being wrought on Earth, the only place in the universe we know is capable of supporting human life — if we don't destroy it. 

This is a new sign of the times

So ... what's your sign?

The lamest of all pickup lines just got a lot lamer. An astronomer has sparked a bit of a controversy with the 2,500-year-old news that traditional astrological signs are inaccurate. The 12 signs of the zodiac — actually stellar constellations through which the sun, moon and planets appear throughout the year as the Earth revolves around the sun — were established about 3,000-plus years ago in ancient Babylonia. Astrologers of the day attempted to predict the future by reading "signs" in the stars. These star-gazers based their predictions on the erroneous belief that the sun and planets were traversing the constellations when, in fact, the movements were based primarily on the Earth's revolution (plus the planets' orbits around the sun).

That was all well and good as long as you were sold on ancient superstitions, but the ancient signs of the zodiac held one serious flaw: They didn't take into account the Earth's "wobble" in its orbit. Because of that wobble (think of a spinning top with an axis that moves around as the top slows down), the sun, moon and planets were no longer in the constellations they had been when the Babylonian astrologers defined the signs of the zodiac. Astronomers (and even astrologers) have known this for more than 2,000 years, but why mess with superstition?

When Minneapolis astronomer Parke Kunkle emphasized the changing zodiac in a TV interview, the whole astrological world went topsy-turvy. What you thought was "your sign" wasn't anymore because the sun was not in the constellation it had been on your birthday 3,000 years ago. It had moved to another constellation. What's more, Kunkle said the modern zodiac includes a 13th sign — Ophiuchus. I, for example, had been a Pisces but am now an Aquarian. There's nothing fishy about it.

The sense of anguish and shock among some people has been amazing. "But I'm a Leo," one woman told a reporter. "I'm exactly that type ... now I don't know what I am." The notion that stars hundreds of light-years away could have any influence on one's personality and fortunes has always seemed ludicrous to me. As a child, I dreamed of being an astronomer who, by definition, sees the stars not as determinants of destiny but as huge, hydrogen-based thermonuclear reactors, so I never cared for astrology or the zodiac, even as pickup lines in singles bars. I don't read horoscopes and don't know what my personality should be based on my sign, either ancient or current.

All those guys who have perfected their zodiac-based pickup lines, and all those women who base their judgment of men on the alleged compatibility of different signs? Better develop some new lines and a more rational evaluation system. And the people who have their (now erroneous) sign tattooed on their body parts? You should have realized that tattoos are permanent, even if the zodiac is not.