Living in the Universe

ET May Be Bored

Fourth Week of January 2008

Here’s an interesting question. What if ET is so bored by terrestrial transmissions towards them that they don’t bother to respond? Think about it. The messages sent into space so far have been rather simple mathematically coded descriptions of basic physics and chemistry and some biology and descriptions of humans thrown in. It’s not really that interesting, so it’s a distinct possibility that these messages are beneath the consideration of the ET’s that they’re aimed at.

Only four messages have been beamed into space in binary code, the first in 1974 was designed by Frank Drake and sent from the Arecibo Observatory. All of these messages have the technical problem that they’re short on redundant information so it’s possible that they may be misconstrued or not understood at all. The first one was also aimed at M13, a globular cluster that’s very unlikely to have planets and is tens of thousands of light years away. That’s a pretty bad choice. But the real problem, as pointed out by Canadian astrophysicist Yvan Dutil, is that if a civilization is advanced enough to understand the message, they’ll already know most of its contents. He says, “After reading it, they’ll be none the wiser about humans and our achievements. In some ways, we may have been wasting our telescope time.”

For a good example of this, consider the movie and book Contact. Remember the scene where Jodi Foster is sitting in the control room at the radio telescope, and the first extraterrestrial signals come in? It’s a sequence of prime numbers from beings on a planet around Alpha Centauri. Prime numbers are fourth grade math, not that interesting. Does that really tell us how advanced the aliens were? And we’ve been doing the same thing beamed out at them. It’s like getting to see the President, no, better than that, the Dalai Lama and saying, “Wow, I’m really glad to meet you.” If that’s all you can think to say, you may as well not have bothered.

In 1999 and 2003, Dutil and fellow researcher Stephane Dumas beamed messages in a language of their own design into space, and now they’re hard at work on composing more interesting messages. “The question,” Dutil says, “is what is interesting to an extraterrestrial? We think the answer is using some common ground to communicate things about humanity that will be new or different to them, like social features of our society. Luckily, those kind of subjects are already being described mathematically by economists, physicists, and sociologists.” The language they use for this work is called Lincos, or Lingua Cosmica, which was invented by the mathematician Hans Freudenthal in 1960. He wrote a book called “Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse,” which sounds a little more exciting than it actually is.

They’re using his language to compose messages about more interesting problems. One topic the researchers are working on is called the cake-cutting problem, how you share out resources, which is a classical problem for all human civilizations. Democracy is another eye-catching subject. According to Dutil, “The math shows that with more than two choices there is no perfect electoral procedure.” So he started working on encoding this into a message in which we can explain our methods and say, “What do you use on your planet?” Social physics, which is the application of mathematical techniques to societies, provides good material that’s potentially interesting to any aliens. Every social network that humans have ever constructed is highly complex and probably not optimized. So the issues we’re dealing with as societies are probably similar to the issues that aliens are dealing with. Another fundamental challenge for old civilizations is how to use resources sustainably to avoid dying. Any good examples out there could help us a lot; it’s not clear we have much to teach aliens on that score.

Dumas designed software that’s like a word processor for composing messages in their symbolic language. There’s also an automatic decoder that should help avoid slips like the missing factor of ten in the duo’s 1999 message. Oops. That’s right, eight or nine years ago they made two mistakes in a message that they beamed out into space, substituting the wrong symbol twice for the equals sign. The mistake was discovered by a gamer in the Netherlands, but the information didn’t get back to them in time and so the message was sent out into space by the radio telescope in Russia, making human civilization look not quite as smart at they might have hoped.

Another commentator on this work has been Douglas Vakoch, the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute. He agrees that humans need to make interstellar chat more compelling. He says “If we only communicate something their receiver already knows, it’s not going to be interesting.” He’s held workshops to try and widen participation in messaging extraterrestrials beyond astrophysicists. “I think the most important question is how do we represent what being a human is, and science disciplines can’t always help.”

Vakoch points out that email like messages may not be the best approach. One alternative is to send software code for an avatar that could answer a lot of basic alien questions. That would also get around the problem of delays produced by large distances across space. If you think about it, we’ve sent messages thousands of light years across space. If there’s a mistake, as there was in 1999, or if the message is boring or confusing, it takes that light trip time twice over before we can rectify that problem. That’s rather slow and inefficient. Another approach is to send a lot of stuff and hope there’s enough redundancy for them to spot patterns. Basically we would just send them the Wikipedia. Dutil agrees that these other options are worth exploring but points out that sometimes only a message would do. He says, “It would make sense to have an answer phone message ready in case we are contacted just to say we’ll get back to you while we figure out what to do.” You may have your own thoughts about what the best message to send to ET is to stop him, her, or it from being bored.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

The Mars Rock Revisited

Third Week of January 2008

Back in 1995, a small lump of grayish rock from Mars made a big splash in the newspapers with the claim, put forward by NASA researchers, that it contained remnants of ancient life. This rock had a very interesting journey from the surface of Mars, being blasted off and spending millions of years in space before falling into the Antarctic tens of thousands of years ago. It was discovered in 1984. The rock was called Allan Hills 840001 and it has come to be known simply as the “Mars rock.” It’s one of several dozen Martian meteorites that have been found scattered over the surface of the Earth, mostly in the Antarctic because meteorites can easily be spotted there on the pristine ice surface.

NASA held a big press conference to highlight the claim of extraterrestrial life. Several strands of evidence were presented: small, elongated forms that looked a little like microbes, carbonate deposits, and a form of magnetite that’s often found associated with a metabolic process. Since the discovery, more research has cast doubt on the claims, and only a small number of researchers now believe there’s evidence for life in this particular rock.

Part of the reason this Martian meteorite is so interesting is that it contains organic compounds. Life is thought to have emerged on the Earth from a primordial soup of such compounds based on carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, although we don’t exactly know how it happened. Scientists found little nodules of organic material in ALH 840001 that could have been created by life. Surrounding them were tiny traces of magnetite. There were also small, elongated forms that looked like tiny bacteria, but subsequent research has found that the elongated forms, perhaps the most compelling evidence at the time, could easily have been created by violent processes when the meteorite was blasted off the surface. They’re molten splatter remnants within the rock.

A team of researchers has returned to the issue of the carbonates, and they’ve just published their findings in Meteoritics and Planetary Science, which is a research magazine. There was also a claim at the time that life on Earth may have started on Mars, being born there and traveling to the Earth in rocks like ALH 840001. These are exciting possibilities, but the team from the Carnegie Institution of Washington decided to identify exactly which rocks and minerals the Allan Hills meteorite contains and then compare the results to rocks that formed definitively on Earth. They used a variety of techniques for their study. As the original researchers did, they found that the tiny spheres of carbonate material are surrounded by an iron oxide mineral called magnetite.

At the time ALH 840001 first hit the headlines, some true believers thought that the magnetite supported the cause of life in the meteorite. That’s because certain Earthly bacteria make small grains of the mineral in order to navigate their habitats using the Earth’s magnetic field, just as human navigators once used lodestone compasses made of magnetite to find their way around. However, most of the magnetite on Earth is not bacterial. It’s ejected in liquid form from volcanoes. If this magnetite cools in an environment rich in water and carbon dioxide, which is usually the case for terrestrial volcanoes, it can act as a catalyst for the formation of organic compounds from the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms in the raw ingredients.

Andrew Steele and his colleagues decided to compare the Mars rock with volcanic rocks collected from Svalbard, the northernmost territory of Norway. These rocks are thought to have formed when volcanoes erupted in freezing, pristine conditions a million or so years ago. They found that the terrestrial boulders also contained carbonates encircled by magnetite. Thus, they conclude that the organic materials in the Allan Hills meteorite were produced not by Martian microbes but rather by normal chemical reactions within the rock.

This may seem a disappointing conclusion to astrobiologists who hope to find life on other planets and hoped they might have found it on one of the nearest planets, but it does also offer them hope, because if Steele and his colleagues are correct then volcanic activity in a place other than the Earth has produced very interesting looking organic compounds that are indeed the raw materials for life. That means the building blocks of life may exist on cold, rocky, volcanic planets throughout the universe. And remember, the universe is a very big place.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Top Ten Stories of 2007

Early in the year I like to cover the top ten stories of the previous year in the search for life in the universe. Obviously if we’d found life elsewhere in 2007, I wouldn’t need to tell you about it months later; it would be the biggest science news of the year and maybe the biggest news in any subject. We didn’t find life beyond Earth in 2007, but there were some exciting steps on the research road towards finding biology elsewhere. I’ll summarize them in chronological order, rather than in any order of importance.

Early in the year there was official notification of the threat to the biosphere of the planet Earth when the journal The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their Doomsday Clock, the one that counts down to midnight and annihilation, to five minutes to midnight. This indicates we are threatening our biosphere at a level that could extinguish life on this planet. So even though we have the only living planet, it may not be a living planet forever, that was a sobering way to start the year.

The second story came in March. The world’s oldest sedimentary rocks showed that carbon dioxide released by volcanoes saved the Earth from a snowball episode seven hundred million years ago, one that nearly annihilated life. A third story was the detection of water in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet, the first time this vital substance for biology had ever been detected at any of the exoplanets. It was very exciting, but this planet is a giant hot Jupiter and definitely not habitable by life as we know it. That caveat is very important; astrobiology is often hampered by not knowing how strange life elsewhere might be.

The fourth story was for me the top story of the year: the discovery of the most Earth-like planet yet, sitting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf dozens of light years away, a planet only five times the mass of the Earth. This exoplanet is a place where liquid water could exist and, who knows, maybe life. That was late April. In a splashy announcement in the middle of the year, in one press release, twenty-eight new exoplanets were released, thus bringing the total to over two hundred and fifty, an exciting sign of how far the harvesting of exoplanets has progressed in the last decade.

The sixth story was the release of a report from the National Research Council urging that scientists search for life as we “don’t know it.” The report said that if they presume too absolutely that there’s only one kind of biology, scientists might completely miss the discovering weird forms of life. Most of the life out there in the universe might not be based on the template of our biology. The seventh story, which is close to my heart as I work at the University of Arizona, was the launch of the Phoenix probe for the Martian pole. It’s due to arrive in May this year, and you’re sure to hear much more about that in upcoming months.

The eighth story was of DNA being brought to life from eight million years ago, but the related discovery that DNA degrades by about fifty percent every million years probably limits the amount by which life could survive in space and travel between stars. The ninth story was the announcement that the science fiction idea teleportation is actually possible and is not precluded by the laws of physics. The tenth story was the discovery of five planets around a star, one of which was in the habitable zone, but was fifty-five times the mass of the Earth. This discovery of a complex system of planets shows that the discovery of planets has moved to a new phase, not just one planet per star but entire systems of planets around stars.

To give another perspective, I crosschecked these ten stories with the Astrobiology Magazine released online by NASA. We had three stories in common: the flight of Phoenix, the discovery of the most Earth-like planet, and the discovery that DNA degrades fifty percent every million years.

Astrobiology Magazine also highlighted the COROT telescope being launched by the European Space Agency, and a robot that went deep into a sinkhole to pioneer technology we’ll use to explore Europa we hope in upcoming decades. They also looked at a story that uncovered the inventory of frozen water at the south pole of Mars, which gives us a sense of how that planet might have supported life in the past. A weird story was the discovery that four hundred and twenty million years ago fungi stood as tall as trees, reaching twenty feet in height. I’m not sure what that tells us about life in the universe, but it’s a pretty scary thought. Another story that I didn’t have in my list was evidence against the panspermia hypothesis, the idea that life could travel from planet to planet in meteorites. The last two stories were the discovery of the parent object whose breakup led to the impact that killed the dinosaurs and many other species sixty-five million years ago, and the launch of the Dawn mission to study Vesta and the planet Ceres in the asteroid belt.

Those are the top stories of the last year, and it would be nice to report that we finally discover life elsewhere in the 2008. With the Phoenix mission landing on Mars, and new SETI telescopes listening for intelligent radio signals from distant planets, it’s just possible. We’ll keep our fingers crossed and wait.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Paying for Astrobiology

First Week of January 2008

The season of goodwill does sometimes end with a hangover, if not due to alcohol then of course to the bills that come due. After weeks when we look forward to opening packages for the cards and presents they contain, we dread that one credit card statement that arrives sometime in January. So to echo that discontent, we’ll start 2008 by looking at how astrobiology is paid for. Where do the budgets for astrobiology come from? This exciting research is severely challenged by current constraints on the federal budget.

First, the big picture. Science in the United States is funded by four agencies: the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and the Department of Energy. NSF could fund astrobiology, but for historical reasons it doesn’t. So virtually the entire federal funding of this subject comes from NASA. NASA has a sixteen billion dollar budget. One-third of that is for science. The rest is for the shuttle program, the International Space Station, and ongoing research on propulsion technologies. Of the one-third science budget, which amounts to about five billion dollars, less than two percent goes to astrobiology.

NASA’s been in tough times the last few years. It had deep cuts to its research budget of several hundred million dollars. That’s a fifteen percent drop in what’s called the Research and Analysis or R and A budgets. Astrobiology, which is a new discipline, took an even worse cut, fifty percent, and making matters worse, NASA made the cuts retroactive so scientists who thought they had funding lined up for the year were suddenly scrambling for new grant dollars. This is a part of the science game that most people don’t realize. I’m lucky. I have a tenured job as a faculty member and teacher at a big university. I can’t be fired, except for gross dereliction of duty or malfeasance, neither of which I plan any time soon. I only have to raise the three months of my summer salary with grants. There are many people on what’s called soft money who go from one year to the next, having to perhaps support a family, paying their entire salary with evanescent budgets of NASA and the NSF.

Last year, NASA appointed a new Associate Administrator, Alan Stern, who took office pledging to reinvest in Research and Analysis as one of the main thrusts of his strategy for getting the most out of the agency’s flat budget. He brought along two deputies, one of whom, Yvonne Pendleton, said, “R and A is only a tiny part of the overall science budget, but when you cut it you feel the effect very quickly. The people who live off this money have very little else to fall back on.” When R and A spending is cut, it affects not only the scientist who sent in the proposal but also the graduate students and post docs that would have been fed using the grant. Stern has pledged that while he’s at the helm there will be no cuts from Research and Analysis, and that’s good news for every researcher in astronomy.

In the mean time, it’s a tough game. Only one in four NASA proposals is funded. NASA is also experimenting with what Pendleton calls demand-driven balancing to ensure that all scientists, regardless of their discipline, have a roughly one in four chance of winning a grant. As the situation now stands, some of NASA’s programs fund nearly every proposal they receive while others can only afford to fund about one in ten. By moving money around, the Science Mission Directorate hopes to give every scientist an equal chance of winning a grant while at the same time ensuring that the hottest disciplines get their fair share of the available pie.

This change will definitely help astrobiology. Astrobiology is popular enough that the oversubscription of money is often worse than four to one, and so the success rate is under twenty-five percent. So things could be looking up for astrobiology. Stern has promised to rescind the fifty percent cuts to only twenty percent. But a cut is a cut, and it’s hard to do the research with less money.

While we’re looking at the NASA budget and how it affects astrobiology, we can recall that the grants program is only one part of the pie. We fall back here on the Willie Sutton principle. Willie Sutton, you may recall, was a famous bank robber from the 1970s who told the judge that he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. Well on the Willie Sutton principle, if you want to balance the NASA budget you don’t look to the grants program, which is only a few hundred million dollars, but to the big missions which are several billion dollars of NASA’s budget or ten times bigger. Unfortunately for astrobiology, some of its missions have been the villains in mismanaging or underestimating their costs.

Back to Alan Stern, who must be known in some circles as the grim reaper dude. Stern’s first target for cost overruns was the Kepler mission, a mission started in 2001 to launch a planet-hunting telescope that hopes to find Earth clones. Because of management problems and technical difficulties, the price tag went up, and the launch date slipped well beyond the original 2006 target. NASA steeled itself for a twenty percent cost overrun that raised the price to five hundred and fifty million dollars and accepted a 2008 launching date, but then the Kepler team came to Stern last spring and asked for an additional forty million dollars. He said no. In fact, he said no four times. To give teeth to the directive for fiscal responsibility, NASA threatened to open the project to new bids so other researchers could take over the equipment that had already been built. Well, that concentrated minds wonderfully, and Kepler team came up with a solution. The duration of the four-year mission was cut by six months, and pre-flight testing was scaled back. This compromised the mission but does let it go forward.

Another mission that had cost overruns was an astrobiology flagship mission, the Mars Science Laboratory. This has a price tag of 1.7 billion dollars, and its goal is to launch a nuclear powered, wheeled, robotic laboratory to Mars in late 2009, a craft that will be three times larger than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that are now operating there. Last summer, a review revealed seventy-five million dollars in cost overruns, so Stern’s office scaled back some of its capabilities, eliminating a camera that would have taken pictures of its descent and stopping work on a laser chemistry instrument called ChemCam, developed by researchers in the United States and France, that was designed to burn off surface coatings of materials to determine their composition.

This was unpopular, stirring a real uproar among scientists. The Planetary Society space advocacy group mounted a public campaign against it and also called for a congressional review of the decision. Then, in November, Stern announced that ChemCam and the descent imager were back in the mission. The designer had offered to finish the instrument at its own expense, and the ChemCam team got more money from Los Alamos Lab, its main sponsor, and the French partners. These hardnosed tactics by NASA’s associate administrator are hoping to keep a lid on the ever-escalating cost of missions and thereby feed more money into the more modest grants program that does most of NASA’s science.

However, there is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room as far as budgets are concerned, a mission I haven’t mentioned yet: the James Webb Space Telescope. This telescope is Hubble’s successor. Originally pegged at five hundred million dollars, the budget over the years has ballooned to over four billion dollars, and it won’t even be launched for six or seven years. It will be impossible for NASA to do all the science it wants to do while the budget of this one behemoth of a mission is growing in an uncontrolled way. Astrobiology will be hurt and many other types of science too. Sometimes you don’t really want to see how sausages are made, but this week I hope I’ve given you a little insight in how the sausages in of science of astrobiology depend on what goes on deep within NASA.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites