Are we alone in the universe? We do not know. But as Carl Sagan once said, if we're alone, then it seems like a terribly useless waste of space. At the recent Singularity University Global Summit, SETI's Jill Tarter spoke about her mission of finding answers to a question that has haunted us long enough to ask.
The SETI Institute is an organization whose mission is to find a sentient signal from space - which will indicate that we have a company - and Tarter is in it from the beginning. Ellie Arroway, Jodie Foster's character from the movie Contact, was sketched from Tarter and her work.
But unlike Kontakt, we haven't found a signal yet. Although Tarter thinks we're already close.
In recent years, Tarter says, we've learned that life can survive in surprisingly extreme and diverse environments, and that there are many more planets like ours in the galaxy than we ever imagined. We even found one such planet orbiting our nearest neighbor. Proxima Centauri is a small, faint star just four light years away, and there is a planet next to it that may look like Earth.
It would seem that the chances are great as never before.
Tarter says the main question now is: "Which of these potentially inhabited worlds are actually inhabited?" SETI is one of our ways to find out for sure. Sifting through the electromagnetic confusion in space, we could find something even slightly structured that only another technological civilization could produce.
This signal will stir the world.
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Why SETI?
If you're as obsessed with space as I am, the SETI search is an amazing initiative.
However, it is easy to assume that each of us is possessed, but that would be far from the truth. The universe is ridiculously large; its most amazing features are separated by gigantic distances; and astronomical research seems to many to be out of touch with reality on Earth.
Proxima Centauri, for example, is just a stage in the grand scheme of things, but it's still mind-bogglingly far from us. If the Voyager spacecraft travels at its current speed in the desired direction, it will reach Proxima Centauri in tens of thousands of years.
We may one day build ships faster. But even moving at the speed of light, at the universal speed limit, it will take us 100,000 years to traverse the galaxy, from edge to edge.
Why waste time, money and energy to find another civilization that we may never visit or even with which we will not be able to talk? But Tarter believes that is not the only problem.
She believes that the search for aliens gives us a kind of perspective of unity and makes our differences smaller. And if we successfully find another civilization, it will give us hope for the survival of our own species.
Quoting Philip Morrison, Tarter calls SETI "the archeology of the future."
Traditional archeology is the study of the past based on what surviving evidence we find still standing or half buried in the sand. Ancient civilizations have already disappeared, others have come in their place. Traditional archeology tells us what we once were. SETI can tell us what we will become.
If technological societies like ours do not survive, the likelihood of hearing something from them will be extremely low. The whole history of mankind is a drop in the sea of cosmological time, and in one molecule of this drop we have advanced technologies. If intelligence and technology do not last long, it can be assumed that civilizations like ours are like scattered drops in space, shiny but short-lived and hardly able to see each other.
But if SETI succeeds and finds a technological signature somewhere in space, it would suggest that technological civilizations do live long enough to make contact over time. And that, in turn, might suggest that despite our difficulties and problems with disadvantages, we too could survive.
And that means that such a signal could be an encouraging picture from the future.
Find yourself
We can find simple life in our own solar system, somewhere on Mars, or on the watery moon of the outer solar system. But in order to search for a technological civilization like ours, we will probably have to turn to other stars. There are several ways to make this discovery.
A more advanced society than ours could build large structures around its stars. These massive structures would, in theory, block out much of their sun's light.
One mysterious case, dubbed the Tabby Star, recently caught the attention of astronomers when they observed 22% of the star's light being blocked from time to time. There are a number of competing assumptions as to why this is happening, including a swarm of comets, but of course, the thought of technological civilization came first. The issue with the star Tabby is still not completely resolved.
But more often than not, SETI uses radio telescopes to listen to the types of signals that humans began to produce not so long ago, along with the advent of telecommunications technology. In the history of such wiretapping, there were several interesting cases, like the famous Wow! or the recent incident with the Russian telescope - but none of them has yet received an interesting continuation.
“There will be signals that you will only see once and never again,” SETI's Seth Shostak said recently. “It's like people who see ghosts. You see him, but the next time you return with the camera, he is gone. What to do?.
In the case of the signal from the Russian telescope, despite wild assumptions, the origin of the signal had technogenic roots. But we have only just begun our search.
“Today we are very young technologies in a very old universe, and we do not know if these technologies can mature. We don't know if technology can provide a stable civilization,”says Tarter. "But if SETI succeeds, we will know about it instantly: it means that someone has managed to grow up, which means that we will succeed."
ILYA KHEL