Intelligent Life, Radio Waves, and Self-Destruction

Intelligent life has yet to find us.  And at the rate we are going, we may never be discovered.  We, the human population aboard this spaceship Earth, may self-destruct before we find intelligence and other intelligence locates us.

I am convinced that some people living among us are not friendly and would willingly reward all of our technological progress to this point with total annihilation if given a chance. 

Consider Sandy Hook, where Adam Lanza slaughtered 26 people, mostly small children, with a Bushmaster assault rifle before taking his own life.   Perhaps you recall Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, who in 1995 killed 168 people with a homemade truck-bomb that he parked in front of the Federal Building there.  He wished to trigger a revolt against the U.S. government.

Our history is over-filled with carnage.  Stalin and Hitler institutionalized genocide.  Saddam Hussein murdered an entire Kurdish town with poison gas.  How many perished in Pol Pot’s Cambodian killing fields?   Perhaps most disturbing and indicative of all is the event we now call “nine-eleven.”

Why it that disturbing?   The men responsible for flying the planes into the twin towers not only willingly killed thousands of people, they were also quite eager to perish.  Those men—a collective—had reached a religious conclusion that they would even be rewarded for obliteration.  Some thought their rewards would include 70 virgins in a life beyond.  Whether the beliefs of the men who perpetrated the acts of bringing down the towers were rational or not is of no consequence.  They were many.  They were capable.  They were willing.

How safe are we as more nations acquire nuclear capabilities?  Can we count on the stability of everyone around us?   How far-fetched to think that one day a person of similar intent to the nine-elven terrorists may find his (statistically this will be a man) way to the trigger of the final bomb?  Have we not had crazies rise to power before?  And what precisely does the Biblical Book of Revelation describe happening to this world, if not annihilation?        

Poof! 

Silence.

Back to intelligent life.  We have been seeking signs of intelligent life in space ever since we became technically savvy enough to do so.  We must also assume—as I suggested at the opening of this writing—that any intelligent beings, if out there, will be looking for us.

Mostly in surreptitious fashion, governments have long been watching the skies and listening to various wavelengths to seek the presence of aliens (forgive the terms) from outer-space.   SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), a privately funded group, also took-up listening and watching for signs of other advanced alien civilizations.  Such notables as Carl Sagan and the founders of Hewlett and Packard have been SETI benefactors.

Presently, we are loud and dancing fast.  We are emitting radio waves and microwaves and, in turn, listening for the same.  These waves are the first signs of advanced civilizations.  Back in 1961 a gentleman named Frank Drake devised an equation, now known as the Drake Equation, to help everyone focus on the factors that may help us find intelligent and communicating civilizations in our galaxy.  The equation accounts for such things as the number of stars, the percentage of those likely to have planetary systems, the number of planets capable of supporting life, and so forth.  I do not wish to get lost in the equation because each factor is a full study.  Instead, I have posted a link at the end of my blog to a video that fully explains the equation.   

The Drake Equation: N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL

For now, all we need to know this:  N, is the estimated number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy.  On the left (business) side of the equation, fL is the fraction of a planet’s life that a communicating civilization is expected to survive.  That brings us back to the opening of this blog—the part where I questioned the possibility of our ever being discovered. 

Here is the deal…to calculate the span of time that a communicating civilization will survive; a variable must be established to determine how many advanced civilizations out there might obliterate themselves with weapons of mass destruction of their own making.  Moreover, how does that impact the overall duration of their intelligent communication?  Will they have blasted themselves back into silence before we can reach them?

No firm answers here.  

On December 1, 2010, Pieter van Dokkum (Yale University) released findings from a study conducted at the Keck Observatory on the Big Island of Hawaii which tripled the number of stars estimated to exist in the universe.  The study, which focused on so-called red dwarfs, also at least triples the estimated number of earth-like planets that may anchor intelligent life.

Chances of finding others in the galaxy or of being found by them seem to be improving…that is if we can hold the crazies at bay and keep the radios playing. 

--Mitchell Hegman

For more information on the Drake Equation:  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/video/Calculating-The-Odds-of-Intelligent-Alien-Life.html