The Importance of Being Interested by Robin Ince

Author:Robin Ince
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

‘I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer’ – Dr ‘Bones’ McCoy2

For the time being, we haven’t been able to signal our existence to others any great distance from us. We’ve been waving by radio signal, so we require the extraterrestrials hopefully to be fans of The Jack Benny Program or The Archers, if we want a response. There is a little shell around Earth of eighty light years, in which the totality of every signal that we have sent into space is currently constrained. If the extraterrestrial intelligence is looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos and they are trying to find out whether Earth has it, they will have to be within that shell of eighty light years; and if they are further away, then those signals will not yet have had time to reach them. If they do encounter that signal, well, it’s going to be maybe eighty light years before we would get their response.

Tim O’Brien had the keys to the gate of the Lovell Telescope on the day I visited Jodrell Bank, so I am indebted to him for the chance to take the lift and the ladder into the centre of the dish. He has also played a major part in the Bluedot Festival. Tim has combined these two disciplines of music and astronomy by fusing music and sounds detected by the telescope, such as pulsars and the bleeps of space missions. Collaborators have included bands such as Sigur Rós and New Order. Tim created a single, ‘Hello Moon, Can You Hear Me?’ with Tim Burgess of The Charlatans. ‘Hello Moon, can you hear me?’ was a sentence that was bounced off the Moon in the late 1960s. Bernard Lovell himself was not originally keen on using his telescope to search for signals of extraterrestrial life, considering it a mere frippery for such technology. He changed his mind.

As with almost everyone else, Tim’s initial interest in aliens stems from science fiction. For him, it was Doctor Who and Space: 1999, in which aliens with eyebrows made of hundreds and thousands could transform themselves into falcons and tigers.* His fascination has become more factual over time, but it was an area of interest that could be easily dismissed in the past. At a conference in 1985 no one was studying exoplanets – planets outside the solar system – and it would have seemed a very odd thing to do. This has all changed now, and it is a very important part of modern astronomy.

Like Seth Shostak, Tim believes there must be life elsewhere, possibly even in our solar system, such as microbial life on Mars. It seems too weird for life to have evolved only here. Optimistically, there should be at least a few other civilizations in our galaxy; 200 billion stars offer a lot of possibilities for quite a few of them to hold an Earth-like planet or two in orbit.

Tim believes that if every other planetary system had some sort of technological civilization on it, then we would have seen evidence by now.

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