Aliens!!!

Are They Out There?

What’s with all the interest in aliens lately?  CNN’s Miles O’Brien is “looking into” alien life, and over at Discovery Channel Space DISCO, our own favorite BadAstronomer, Phil Plait got interviewed about his view of aliens, UFOs and other such topics. Sure, aliens are a perennially interesting topic, as are UFOs. People LOVE to talk about them because — well, let’s face it — they’re mysterious and somehow related to space and the cosmos.

Any of us who write and/or talk about astronomy and space in public run into the inevitable questions from people who really ARE intrigued with the idea of life elsewhere in the cosmos. Usually they’re thoughtful and interesting questions from thoughtful people. But, sometimes you get the woo-woo contingent — the folks who have gone a little off the deep end for all things alien and UFO-ey.

Whenever somebody asks me about aliens, I always say what I think — that there’s no reason why life shouldn’t exist elsewhere in the universe. Of course, we haven’t found it yet. We will, eventually. Our methods are getting better all the time, as is our understanding of what it takes to create life and where it can flourish.

If somebody asks me about alien visitations of Earth, I usually say that there’s not a shred of reliable evidence to prove that aliens have been visiting us.  Bring me some evidence and I (and, more importantly, scientists who want to find evidence of alien life just as badly as the rest of us do) will take it seriously.

But, the kicker here is that it has to be real evidence. Blurry pictures of flying saucers aren’t going to be taken seriously. Nor are  garbled memories of body probes by big-eyed monsters, or strange archaeological finds that somehow are supposed to “prove” that aliens walked among, impressed,  or even impregnated ancient humans.Those all represent a lot of wishful thinking more than they do solid evidence. And, evidence is what science needs in order to establish the existence of life, aliens, and even flying saucers (if they really exist).

Go read Phil’s interview — he pretty much says the same thing and also brings up the fact that there are thousands and thousands of amateur astronomers watching the skies each night, and they’re not seeing aliens landing.  You’d think that if a self-respecting spaceship was going to come screaming for a landing, its ion trail would be completely obvious to a HUGE number of people who spend nearly every night studying the sky (and believe me, these folks KNOW their skies).

Well, evidence aside, let’s get to the question I asked at the top of this article: are THEY out there? That’s an excellent question. I don’t know if they are or not. We haven’t received any signals that we can recognize as alien communications to us from other star systems.

Yet.

Nobody’s landed here that we know of.

Yet.

If they’re out there, and I hope there are aliens out there exploring the skies (same as us), they’ll eventually get around to saying hi.  If we were “out there” exploring the galaxy, wouldn’t we do the neighborly thing and drop in for a visit?  Why, of course we would.  Space is big. It’s lonely. And, just like people who live in isolated parts of our own planet get together with their own neighbors for some socializing, I would like to think that beings who inhabit other planets out there in the vast stretches of the galaxy would also feel the need to greet the neighbors when they go exploring.

If they’re out there, eventually we’ll meet them.  What we do next — well, that depends on the situation when it happens. And, if you’re into science fiction, there are many, many excellent stories written about First Contact that represent our human condition and what might be like.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to go find some and read them.

Hey, You! Yeah, Look at THOSE Bright Stars!

Follow the Pointer

A wide-field image of WR-25 and Tr16-244 in the Carina Nebula. Courtesy NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

My friend Phil Plait has a thing about instances of pareidolia — the tendency of humans to see interesting patterns in things.  It’s a peculiar psychological thing that our primate brains do to us when we see things we don’t immediately understand or can’t place in context. So, for example, you look up at clouds in the sky and see spaceships or dogs playing or sheep sleeping or whatever it is that the cloud seems to resemble. And, of course, there are tendencies among some folks to see things like faces of deities in toast and tortillas, or peeling paint, or the bark on trees. It’s all very amusing and shows you how complex our brains are.

Astronomy images provide hours of merriment for pareidoliacs.  Take this picture, for example.  It’s a Hubble Space Telescope view of a gas and dust cloud where star formation is taking place. Notice in the very top of the picture that there’s a thick cloud of dust in the shape of a pointing finger. At least, that’s what it looks like to me.  And, it  might appear that way to you, too.

Well, you might ask — what’s it pointing to?  Good question, and the answer is what the subject of the image really is:  a pair of massive bright stars down in the lower third of the image that are shining out like a pair of headlights. (Or, if you’re a fan of LOLcats, they look like “cat lazors” charging up.)

This scene is smack in the middle of the Carina Nebula, a huge region where clouds of gas and dust are combining to form new stars. It is about 7,500 light-years away from us, and also contains the luminous blue variable Eta Carinae, which is expected to pop off as a supernova pretty much any time now (in cosmic terms).

It turns out those two bright stars have an interesting connection to the pointy-finger cloud. The bright star in the lower center is called WR-25, and its quite massive — more than 50 times the mass of our Sun.  In fact, it’s really two stars orbiting a common center of mass. They hot, bright, and interacting with each other.

The star to the left of WR-25 is called Tr16-244, and it’s actually three stars orbiting a common center of gravity — a triple-star system. Together, these two star systems are eating away at the clouds of gas and dust. That “cannibalization by radiation” is actually what sculpted the finger-shaped cloud. It’s amost as if the cloud is pointing the finger of blame back to the stars that shaped it — a nice case of cosmic pareidolia.

Cautionary Words about NASA’s Future

From One Who Knows

My friend Alan Stern (formerly the associate administrator for science at NASA until earlier this year) has a very pointed, harsh, and ultimately truthful opinion piece in the New York Times today. In it he says “A cancer is overtaking our space agency: the routine acquiescence to immense cost increases in projects.” He goes on to explain just how and why NASA’s budget processes aren’t working and why HUGE cost overruns on the few programs NASA is planning to do in the future may well be threatening that future. These are important missions, but they are running way over budget, threatening the existence of the agency at a time when it can’t afford to have its budget slashed (but, instead, needs guidance from an honest administration about how best to run its budget to the best science at affordable costs (and no, I’m not suggesting the failed “faster, better, cheaper” approach)).

There are, of course, many factors that affect mission costs, as Alan points out. Some can’t be helped, others can. But, there remains the issue of political will to do the right thing. In that regard, one paragraph of his piece really stood out:

As a scientist in charge of space sensors and entire space missions before I was at NASA, I myself was involved in projects that overran. But that’s no excuse for remaining silent about this growing problem, or failing to champion reform. And when I articulated this problem as the NASA executive in charge of its science program and consistently curtailed cost increases, I found myself eventually admonished and then neutered by still higher ups, precipitating my resignation earlier this year.

It turns out that the politics of the outgoing administration played into many NASA decisions that affect the science and technology advances that NASA routinely delivers. On the one hand, the Bush administration put people in charge who had little knowledge of science, and fostered a poisonouse atmosphere at the top.  Money was sluiced in by pork barrel politics in order to help Congresscritters and Senate folk who have NASA bases in their districts. There are countless other examples of mismanagement and bad decision-making by folks at the top of NASA.

Of course such politics has always infested NASA decision-making at some levels, but it seems that the worst political interference has come in the past eight years, done by anti-science zealots who were determined to gut one of the few government agencies that has (for the most part) routinely done good things for our culture, our economy, and U.S. technology dominance. I have many friends who work for (and with) NASA and they are good, solid folks who want to do the best science they can. The processes that threaten NASA’s overall budget will almost certainly affect them and the work that they do. I want to see that they get what they need to do the best job they can, unaffected by the political horseplay that has inflicted that cancer that Alan refers to.

I am hoping that a new administration and a morally courageous Congress and Senate can see their way clear to stop playing politics with NASA and help the agency grow back to do what it does best. As I’ve said in other places, screwing with NASA is like eating your seed corn. Once you’ve done that, you have nothing left to grow. Alan Stern gets that — the rest of us who support NASA and space exploration should make sure our Congresscritters and Senatorial folk understand it, too.