AST 309part 2:

Extraterrestrial Life

The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence(SETI)

The Drake Equation:

N = N* fpl nhab fL fC fT L/T

         Stars?      Planets?    Habitable          Origin          Complex        Intelligence,          Life;me                                      planets?            of  life?            life?              technology?      of  civiliza;on

Another way to see what theDrake equation represents:

What is the likelihood orprobability that thesequence of events shownto the right will occur,ending up with the peculiargroup of phenomena listedat the bottom branching?

And are there many otherpossible branchings that wehaven’t thought of, or areincapable (for, say,biological reasons) ofimagining?

Intelligence, technology

Intelligence—If we want to communicate with aliens, they must have somethinglike what we usually call “intelligence.” What does this mean? Are there different “types”? What about otheranimals? Other cultures? Especially oral tradition cultures.Why did humans evolve such big brains?Why think that extraterrestrials would share our forms of cognition?

Factor in Drake equation:What is probability that life elsewhere develops “intelligence”? Call it fI .

Communication, technology—If we want signals, the aliens must have somekind of system of representation, like a language. How likely? Other forms?Musical? Unimaginable? And no matter what kind of language they have, theyhave to be technological civilizations if they are to send signals across the Galaxy.

We could enter these topics as two more probabilities, fC fT .N(planets with life that also developed intelligence and technology) =

N* fpl nhab fL fC fT

Lifetime of the communicating phaseWe left out one crucial factor: The fraction of the Galaxy’s ageT that a civilization is in the technologically communicatingphase. We know the age of our Galaxy is T ~ 10 billion years.Consider our chances if civilizations only last for 100 years…

Average length of time spent in the communicatingphase L. Sometimes referred to as lifetime of a technologicalcivilization. Call it L. Our final Drake equation is then:

N = N* fpl nhab fL fC fT (L/age of Galaxy)This represents the number of communicating civilizations in our Galaxy.We have been “this way” for only ~ 100 yr. If this were L, then N (number ofcivilizations for communication in our Galaxy) would be around 1.Even if N ~ 100, there is no hope for two way communication, and probablyvery difficult to locate them among a 100 billion possibilities. And too far forbiosignatures.

In order for our Drake equation “N” to come out reasonablylarge (say a million), the average lifetime L must be extremely large,something like 100,000 to a million years.

This means we can expect any nearby civilizations to have had a longlifetime, i.e. be very advanced. I think this is the only thing we can know withany certainty about extraterrestrial civilizations: If there are enough of them tomake it likely we will find them, then they must be very advanced (usingbeacons)!

SETI web sites

SETI atSpace.com http://www.space.com/searchforlife/index.htmlSpaceRef.com

http://www.spaceref.com/Directory/Astrobiology_and_Life_Science/seti/

Ongoing SETI searches:SETI Institute/Allen Telescope Array http://www.seti.org/Project SERENDIP, UC Berkeley http://seti.ssl.berkeley.edu/serendip/serendip.htmlSETI@home http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/Sourthern SERENDIP, Univ. Western Syndey http://seti.uws.edu.au/SETI Italia http://www.seti-italia.cnr.it/

Optical SETI atBerkeley http://seti.ssl.berkeley.edu/opticalseti/Harvard http://seti.harvard.edu/oseti/

Amateur SETI:Project BAMBI http://www.bambi.net/SETI League http://www.setileague.org/Project ARGUS http://www.setileague.org/argus/index.html

STRATEGIES FOR COMMUNICATION WITH EXTRATERRESTRIAL CIVILIZATIONS

SETI is concerned with searches for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, not spectral“biomarkers” we discussed earlier in course, or actual travel to other star systems.

Except for 1974 signal to globular cluster M13 (thousands of light years away), weonly try for reception, no transmission. (“What if they are all listening?”)

“Signals” could be intentional (they are trying for contact) or nonintentional (weeavesdrop, one way or another). A few unintentional candidates listed on next slides,but we are most concerned with intentional signals, and with establishing a two-wayconversation.

Remember: Distance to even the nearest 1000 or so stars ~ 50 light years, and we expectonly a tiny fraction of them to have life, let alone intelligent communicating life, so we arenecessarily asking whether to undertake a search with a guaranteed very low probability ofsuccess, and, even if successful, communications will involve decades or even centuries.

You can see why funding for SETI is sparse!

Four types of nonintentional types of signals:

Leakage radiation from radio, TV, or other radio broadcasts.Earth as example: Many TV stations broadcasting different shows, or same shows

at different times, radio waves emanating from Earth have always been incoherent,completely scrambled. It is not true that alien ETI could be seeing our early TV shows!

Alien communications, e.g. between home planet and colonies.We would have to be almost exactly in the line of sight between home planet

and colony, and guess the frequency range.Seems very unlikely.

Dyson spheres -- hypothetical constructs built by advanced civilizations in order tocollect nearly all the energy of their parent star.

Spherical shell at same distance from star as the home planet. The intercepted energy is somehowchanneled to planet. But shell is heated by the incident radiation: What will its temperaturebe? At what wavelength would you conduct a search for Dyson spheres?

Products of technological activity – e.g. gamma rays from their (hypothetical)fusion propulsion systems, … CFC molecules from their air conditioners…

TV leakage radiation

World TV spectrum World TV power vs. time

Geographical distribution of TV stations

As Earth rotates, this “pattern ofpopulated areas” is the only evidence

for TV broadcasts

Geographical distributionof TV stations

How would an alien civilization try to communicateacross many light years of space?

The only thing that is almost certain is that they will use photons—fastest andcheapest way to transmit information that exists (as far as we know).

Even though photon signals are the only choice we can think of, that still leavesmany considerations that we need to guess about:

Where to point our telescopes? What kind of stars should we point ourtelescopes toward? Or would it be better to survey the whole sky?

Wavelength: What wavelength region should we expect is optimum for sendinginterstellar signals? Radio? Optical? Other?

Bandwidth: What range of wavelengths? Broadband or narrow-band? WHY?

Recognition and Interpretation: How would a message, or some sign that it isnot a natural phenomenon, be distinguished, and how would a meaningfulmessage be encoded?

We’ll discuss each of these in turn.

WHERE TO POINT?a. Sky survey. Survey entire sky with telescope’s “beam” – this mightinvolve millions of directions for typical radio telescopes. If you want to finishin your lifetime, you could only spend a very brief time on each direction, so

youcould only detect very strong signals. But at least you won’t miss any of them.And the method doesn’t make any assumptions about what the most likely stars

arefor signal reception. This is a low-sensitivity method, but complete for strong signals.

b. Targeted search. Point at the nearest (less than about 50 to 1000 l.y.) starsroughly like the sun and cooler (recall conditions for habitable planets).Could detect weaker signals, i.e. would have higher sensitivity.

But you will only cover a tiny fraction of the sky. This is a high-sensitivity method, but severely incomplete.

Most current searches have shifted to a sky survey mode (a) However planschange rapidly—the Allen Telescope Array (largest current project)combines both approaches.

And some “optical SETI” searches (see below) are targeted searches.

What frequency should be used to listen orsend interstellar messages?

From the Earth’s surface, most radiationis blocked by the atmosphere.The exceptions are optical (visual)and radio photons.

Earth’s atmosphere also blocks out most of the infrared part of the spectrum due to watervapor in our atmosphere. From the highest mountains or a jet plane, the infrared isbarely accessible, but not for the continuous kinds of surveys we have in mind.

Note that if we could do such a survey from Earth orbit (expensive), or, if we onlyhad about $100 billion dollars so that we could build a facility for SETI on the farside of the moon (“Project Cyclops”), our considerations might be different.

• Why have most SETI searches concentrated on radio wavelengths instead ofoptical?

A single amazingly influential paper by Cocconi and Morrison (1960 Nature) set thestage.

Their arguments for radio SETI are on next slide.

Reasons for radio SETI:

1. Interstellar dust selectively blocks shorter wavelengths (higherfrequencies) strongly suggests we use the IR or radio parts of thespectrum (long wavelengths or small frequencies). But IR isdominated by Earth’s atmospheric molecular emission if searchfrom surface, so that leaves radio.

Notice that radio SETI allows reception from the entire galaxy, butoptical isn’t that bad, since we can see stars out to ~ 1 kpc.Besides, most radio searches are concentrating on nearby starsanyway. (We don’t want 1000-year “conversations.”)

2. Radio photons are cheaper to send than optical photons (becauseenergies are ~ 100,000 times smaller for radio).

3. The main consideration is noise: Here “noise” means anything thatis not an alien signal--any kind of interference.

We should listen (or send) where the noise is minimized, so that we canrecognize the (probably weak) signal. Noise is minimum in a region ofthe radio part of the spectrum. This is summarized in a classic graphshown on next slide.

Arecibo Home of SERENDIP, SETI@home, Phoenix

Allen Telescope Array,SETI Institute, N. Calif.

A message will arrive in a narrow wavelength band or bands, not spread over the whole 1-

10 GHz region. There are 10 billion 1 Hz bands in this range. How to decide whichones to pick? First, must understand bandwidth.

Alien signaling: Choosing a wavelength range thatminimizes “noise” -- anything that is not an alien signal

Avoid very low frequencies(wavelengths too large), becausesynchrotron radiation from supernovaremnants dominates there. (Far left infigure)

Avoid frequencies higher than about10 GHz because of H2O and O2emission from Earth’s atmosphere.

Cosmic microwave backgroundradiation sets “floor” at intermediatefrequencies, and that is wherethe noise is minimum, and where weshould search.

The importance of bandwidthBasic idea: Can pack more power in a narrow frequency range (narrowband signal) than

spreading out over a large range (broadband signal). So can distinguish a narrowband signal from the background more easily.

Think of the everyday radio analogy again, and it should be clear!

SETI@home: Each vertical “band” is a 10 kHz “slice” of the 2.5 MHz wide SERENDIP data.There are 250 such “slices.” But search is for signals much narrower than these bands.

Which frequency?If it is true that narrow-band signal is the only sensible approach, how will we decide

whichband to use?Suggested “beacon frequencies” (or “hailing frequencies” or “magic frequencies”):

HI (neutral hydrogen) 21cm (wavelength) line? The frequency is 1420 Megahertz = 1.42GHzNatural, abundant, but lots of interference by interstellar gas. (Latter has apparentlybeen forgotten.)

OH line at 1.7 GHz? H + OH = H2O, so maybe region between these two--> “the waterhole”. Alien civilizations will know that these two lines are fromthe dissociation products of water, whatever they call H and OH. Not taken too seriously,But convenient range to strive for. (Allen Telescope Array uses this range, and more.)

OTHER ‘MAGIC” FREQUENCIES•Some frequency based on combinations of fundamental constants of nature? (e.g. speedof light, Planck’s constant, …) The combination can be expressed without referring to “our”units (e.g. meters)

•”Intergalactic” frequency standard based on temperature of cosmic background radiation?

•Many others have been suggested. Too many! None in use today.

SETI projects: partial historical list

Ozma (1960)• In 1960, radioastronomer Frank D. Drake, then at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory

(NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia, carried out humanity's first attempt to detect interstellarradio transmissions. The stars chosen by Drake for the first SETI search were Tau Ceti andEpsilon Eridani.

• From April to July 1960, for six hours a day, Project Ozma's 85-foot NRAO radio telescope wastuned to the 21-centimeter emission (1420 MHz) coming from cold hydrogen gas in interstellarspace. A single 100 Hz channel receiver scanned 400 kHz of bandwidth. The astronomersscanned the tapes for a repeated series of uniformly patterned pulses that would indicate anintelligent message or a series of prime numbers such as 1, 2, 3, 5 or 7. With the exception of anearly false alarm caused by a secret military experiment, the only sound that came from theloudspeaker was static and no meaningful bumps superimposed themselves on the formlesswiggles on the recording paper.

SETI projects: partial historical list

Arecibo: message sent to M13 (1974):

• Globular cluster ~25,000 lyr away• Message written by Drake, Sagan, et

al.• Frequency: 2380 MHz• 1679 binary digits

SETI projects: partial historical list

Ohio State University SETI(1977-1997)With the Big Ear fixed radiotelescope(used Earth’s rotation to scan the sky)August 15, 1977: detected a strong narrow-band signal for 72 secs:

• Duration consistent with extraterrestrial source• Strength: 30 times above background noise• Frequency: 1420 MHz (neutral H)• Bandwidth: <10 kHz

SETI projects: partial historical list

The location of the signal in the constellationSagittarius, near the Chi Sagittarii star group.

RA= 19h25m31s ± 10s or 19h28m22s ± 10s declination= －26°57′ ± 20′

There were ~50 follow-up searches performed in this area, but nada

=> Origin of the Wow! signal is still undetermined

SETI projects: partial historical listNASA asks for SETI proposal, astronomers propose “Project Cyclops”, 1000100 meter radio telescopes on back side of moon, costing $10 billion (1970s).NASA asks for more moderate plan, planning for next ~ 17 years.

Ohio State SETI: 1977-1997 (replaced by golf course).Best known for the “wow” signal.

Harvard, Paul Horowitz and Project META (millions of bands in frequency), Project BETA (billion bands infrequency). Horowitz and Sagan 1993 Astrophysical Journal summarize results. One of first SETI papersin refereed journal.Harvard and Horowitz now converted to Optical SETI, largest in world.

UC Berkeley’s Project SERENDIP. Since 1977! Part of data analyzed by 5 million home computers throughSETI@home.

Dec. 1991. NASA funds $100 million SETI effort (“MOP”). Detailed plan for combined targeted and skysurvey searches. 1993: Funding removed by senate amendment

Project Phoenix (SETI Institute) rises from the ashes. Piggy-backs off various radio telescopes, mainlyArecibo.

2001: Paul Allan and others fund the Allen Telescope Array, 350 6meter telescopes. 42 complete byOct. 2007.

SERENDIPOne of oldest operational SETI searches--since 1979, UC Berkeley.1997--installed as piggyback at Arecibo radio observatory (picture below), largestsingle-dish radio telescope in world (but can only point in one direction).SERENDIP = Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed

Intelligence Populations. SERENDIP IV is the fourth instrument of the project, collectsdata by 'piggybacking' on top of the Arecibo radio telescope.

SERENDIP IV instrument is basically a 200 billion operations per second supercomputerthat scans 168 million narrow (0.6 Hz) channels every 1.7 seconds for signals thatare significantly 'louder' than the background static.

Some of its data is analyzed through SETI@home for desktopcomputers--so far millions of users, largest distributed computingproject in world, led to ~ 100 other distributed computing projects,e.g. folding@home, prime@home, climatenet@home, …(details on next slide)

The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico,

used by both SETI Insitute for Project Phoenix,

and by UC Berkeley for their SERENDIP IV.

SETI@home: Now searching for pulses

August 2008: SETI@home switches to search for pulsed radio signals.

Observations are from SERENDIP piggy-backed on radio telescope atArecibo that is built into a mountain. This dish only points in one directionas sky drifts across this direction--the drift takes about 12 seconds for agiven point in the sky.

SETI@home searches for signals that rise and fall in 12 seconds--any objectwill do this, but most will be broad-band sources (top image).

Narrow search by requiring narrowband signal (2nd image).Will check for several different bandwidths.

Information in image? Search for pulsed signal (3rd image).If from planetary system, should also be Doppler shifting

(“chirped” signal), as in 4th image.Home computers look for various combinations of frequencies, bandwidths,

and chirp rates. See if you can understand why the white “thing” in theillustration below might be a signal…

SETI@home screensaver Can you see the alien signal??

SETI@home and distributed computingBy 2007 over 40 projects had joined the BOING distributed computing family,using the software provided by SETI@home.

Protein folding: folding@home, predictor@home, Rosetta@home, Proteins@home

Primegrid.com: privately run mathematical project that searches for very large prime numbers and has already found more than 100 new primes.

Einstein@home is based at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and searches for pulsars in the sky based on data from the gravitational wave detectors LIGO and GEO.

climateprediction.net: Oxford Univ. UK high-profile climate simulator. Jan 2005: First paper in Nature, 2,570 simulations of Earth.By 2007: 50,000 simulations. Goal is several million, to explore

23 parameters of the climate model.

Allen Telescope Array (ATA)

Eventually 350 6 meter antennas, equivalent to 100 meter single dish.42 dishes saw “first light” in Oct 2007.Entered hibernation due to funding problems this year!=> Maybe restart in Sep 2011 due to private donations > $200,000

Unique features: Large field of view, so can scan sky faster in survey mode. Large range of frequencies (1-10 GHz for targeted search, five times range of

Phoenix), and small bandwidth (~ 1Hz), using more than a billion channels. Finally offers SETI 24/7 monitoring

(Phoenix had Arecibo for only about 3 weeks per year 1998-2004)

Goals: Targeted search: Survey 106 stars with good sensitivity between 1 and 10

GHz for weak non-natural transmitters. Sky Survey ~ monitors inner Galactic plane in “water hole” range 1420-1720

MHz for very strong non-natural transmitters.

Optical SETI (OSETI)

Current projects:Berkeley: Monitors 2500 stars as part of exoplanet search. Searches for ultra-narrow band signals.Harvard: since 1998, using 61 inch telescope. Nearly 100,000 observations.Dec. 2000: new 72 inch telescope dedicated to an all-sky survey. Can detect nanosecond (billionth of

a second) pulses and cover entire sky in 200 nights.Lick Observatory Targeted search began in 2000. First results published in Stone et al. 2005

Astrobiology. 14 candidate events

When faced with the question “What kind of signals would alien civilizations transmit,the traditional answer has been: Continuous narrow-band radio transmissions

An alternative: Maybe they would send distinct broad-band pulses. They would stand outagainst background noise not because they are precisely centered on a particular wavelength,but because they are very short and punctuated bursts of energy—unlike most other naturalphenomena. This is the world of Optical SETI, which searches for signal in the visible (orinfrared in future) light range, usually looking for nanosecond pulsed laser radiation.

Reasons: Radio 21cm line has huge noise problem with interstellar gas.Laser-like signals are tightly beamed, so can be sent over very large distances (no loss due to inverse-squarelaw). With current equipment can send out pulsed laser beam 5000 times brighter than the SunUnidirectional--can pinpoint direction with high precision. Higher frequency --can encode moreinformation.

There are two OSETI programs at UC Berkeley, and now ongoing or about-to-launchOSETI searches at Harvard, Lick Observatory, and Columbus Observatory.

Encoding a messageSETI researchers focus on a signal anyone could comprehend. Not clear this is sensible!

It is very sensible to expect digital, binary, not analogue signal.

How to encode a picture into a string of binary (0,1) signals?The simplest and most efficient way to encode a message (we think) is binary code. Use only 2 characters,e.g. a 1 and a 0, or a + and a - , or "on" and "off", ... Each 1 or 0 (or whatever) is a "bit". Then the messagecan just be sent as a series of pulses.

Expect the message to be a two-dimensional picture that is encoded in a one-dimensionalbinary string that factors into prime numbers. e.g. 551 = 29 x 19 (or 19 x 29); 1679 = 23 x 73 (the 1974 Arecibo transmission).Example: We receive signal 1111100000101011010110101.

This factors into 5 x 5, giving a picture of the greek letter "pi".Or try the letter "E", etc.

But why would ETI send out signals that anyone could decode? Perhaps they send out signals whichcould be understood only by others who are already "at the same level" as they are.

What would be a difficult signal for us to recognize?Maybe the test would be to recognize some sort of "meaning" in the message. (Think about musicalsignals. At present, there is no viable theory of musical meaning in music analysis, philosophy, cognitivescience, pattern recognition, or any other field that has approached the problem.)

Deeper questions: Will symbolic communication systems be universal among intelligent creatures? Is“grammaticity” hard-wired into our brains? Another example of single mutation?

The Eerie Silence…..

SETI has been on-going for about 50 years and NOTHING has beendetected

Conclusion: are we alone? Are there no ETIs in our galaxy?

No, not yet. But they are probably no nearby ETIs similar to us, nor anearby strong radio beacon intended to notify us of ETI’s presence.

There are many stars not observed yet, so many frequencies not exploredand many other possible ways for ETIs to communicate.

What IF The Eerie Silence is broken!What then?

There is actually a so-called “SETI Post Detection Task Group” (a permanentstudy group of the International Academy of Astronautics). It’s only a think tank,

no legal status, no governmental involvement.

In case a signal is detected the task group would advise to perform the following steps:1. Verify authenticity of ETI signal2. Contact the International Astronomical Union => which will contact UN.3. inform the government of the country (countries) where radio telescope is located4. Public announcement

Such a discovery will have unprecedented and enormous scientific, social,cultural, political and spiritual consequences for humanity. Nobody knowswhat will happen (depends on nature of signal, e.g. distance to source)