Weird Life by David Toomey

Author:David Toomey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Intelligent Weird Life

SETI has been with us since 1959, the year that physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published a paper in the journal Nature outlining an in-depth strategy by which radio telescopes might be used to detect the communications of extraterrestrials.1 Even for Nature, a journal known to publish work that approached the scientific fringe, it was audacious, beginning with what, it must be said, was a rather startling supposition:

We shall assume that long ago [extraterrestrial civilizations] established a channel of communication that would one day become known to us, and that they look forward patiently to the answering signals from the sun which would make known to them that a new society has entered the community of intelligence.

The paper’s conclusion, no less startling, was a call to action: “The presence of interstellar signals is entirely consistent with all we know now, and . . . if signals are present the means of detecting them is now at hand.”

Cocconi and Morrison did not know that at that same time, the call had already been answered—or at least heard. A young radio astronomer named Frank Drake, then working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, suggested that it was possible to use the facility’s 26-meter receiver to detect artificial radio signals—that is, signals sent deliberately by someone. Drake made a case to the observatory’s director. First, such a project would cost next to nothing. He needed only a narrowband receiver and a parametric amplifier, and he could build both for $2,000. Further, the equipment could do double duty because the narrowband receiver could also search for the splitting of spectral lines in a magnetic field—a phenomenon known as the Zeeman effect. To Drake’s great surprise and pleasure, the director agreed. Drake acted quickly, and chose as targets two Sun-like stars: Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. At the moment he turned the system on, he received a very strong signal. It was cause for a few hours of cautious excitement, but a false alarm. Otherwise, the only sound that came from the loudspeaker at Green Bank was static. Nonetheless, Drake had spurred the interest of other astronomers.

In 1961 an informal meeting was held at Green Bank, its purpose to address questions associated with interstellar communication. There were many such questions, and Drake realized that they could be arranged hierarchically within an equation that, conveniently enough, might provide the meeting with an agenda. Now called the “Drake Equation,” it is a set of seven unknowns ranging from the physical (the rate of star formation) to the social (the longevity in years of a technological civilization).* Replacing the unknowns with numbers yields an estimate of the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy presently capable of interstellar communication.

By the time the conference ended, its members had estimated that the number of civilizations in the galaxy ranged from fewer than 1,000 to 1 billion, with Drake himself putting it at 10,000. The reason for the rather impressive range

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