A SETI Makeover? call it "SETT"

June 02, 2009

On the 50^th anniversary of the first attempt to listen for artificial radio signals transmitted from an extraterrestrial civilization orbiting a nearby star, astronomer Jill Tarter says it's time to rename the acronym SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). She’s proposing SETT: The Search for Extraterrestrial Technology.

The deafening radio silence from the stars could still mean the galaxy may have plenty of civilizations, but they use something other than radio waves to send out greetings, they are predominantly non-technological, or they just do not engage in attempts at interstellar communication. They don't want to pay the roaming charges.

Years ago I proposed the “Proxmire Effect” was behind the silence.  the late Wisconsin senator William Proxmire  found a great gimmick for getting into the headlines. He gave “Golden Fleece” awards to wasteful government spending projects.   

Government funded science research was a convenient target. Science was easy to belittle in mainstream American culture, which is mostly science illiterate and anti-intellectual. The once NASA-funded SETI effort won two Golden Fleece awards. Congress finally decided to stop funding for the project. (It didn’t help that UFO fanatics poisoned the well on the question of life in space by giving it a high giggle factor.) 

My hypothesis is that the Proxmire Effect is rippling across the galaxy. In other words, there is an assumption of mediocrity where alien governments will always have self-serving, narrow-minded politicians who squelch interstellar communication attempts. This tells us a lot about the state of intelligent life in the galaxy.

The fact that we’ve gone for one-half century without detecting signals begins to set a lower limit on what’s out there. Radio communication at the frequencies scanned by SETI observations cannot be a common line of chatter among any nearby civilizations.

So what do we do if nobody wants to talk to us? If we get really lucky, plain old astronomical research might stumble across artifacts of a very advanced  alien civilization, hence SETT.

For the first time in history we are amassing a mountain of astronomical data from observatories all over the world. Astronomers are busy building the National Virtual Observatory that allows observations to be easily accessed and cross correlated with data taken at other wavelengths or times by other observatories.

The signature of an alien technology cound be buried in the NVO archive. “ We are telling our post docs and grad students that when there are some anomalies in the data don’t throw them away.” says Tarter.

Of course  this can go a little too far. I got an e-mail asking if Hubble Space Telescope  saw UFOs. I teasingly replied “yes, but we throw away the pictures.” This is true in that objects in higher orbits than Hubble will cross the telescope’s field of view, leaving streaks in the images. To my chagrin I later found my comment posted on a UFO blogging site: “News director says Hubble sees UFOs!”

There have been radar observations of the Earth-moon and Earth-sun Lagrange points to look for artifacts. A robotic survey ship might park here to simply watch cultural evolution on Earth. But the radar hasn’t returned a blip, that is, at least anything the size of a starship. My bet is that any alien presence in the solar system takes the form of stealthy little nanobots that would be next to impossible to detect.  

Another idea is to look for asteroids with objects orbiting them for mining resources to make, well, more nanobots. The asteroid Ida has a curious little moon called Dactyl. It is simply a piece that has broken off of the asteroid, but at first glance resembles the space pod from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Also, maybe there are disturbances on the surface of asteroids that are relics of past mining by Von Neumann machines. But there are so many asteroids this would be a needle-in-haystack search.

Looking beyond the solar system, one idea has been to try and spectroscopically detect an enhancement of  rare elements in stars. This could be a signature of a civilization dumping waste from fission nuclear power plants. Dumping nuclear waste into the sun was actually proposed to be done in the early days of the space shuttle.

But my guess is that  technological societies quickly evolve past the fission stage, because of the nuclear waste problem, and onto fusion power plants. Leakage from fusion power plants would yield the spectrum of  tritium. It has a short half-life of only 11 years and so might to be artificially produced if found. There is an unusual star called Przybylski's Star (or HD 101065) that has an overabundance of exotic elements. But these have been explained as due to the star’s slow rotation rate and intense magnetic field.

One of the wilder ideas is that a civilization builds a humongous triangle or square-shaped structure and has it transit the star, knowing that nearby civilizations would be conducting exoplanet searches.  Photometry from Earth would show that the object had a unique geometrical shape that could not be naturally produced.

An even wilder idea is for a super-civilization to somehow modify a Cepheid variable star so that rather than rhythmically pulsating, it sends out sort of a Morse code.

Despite all this far-out speculation, we still haven’t stumble across anything that is so anomalous it can’t be explained by natural processes. Probably the most extreme example was the detection of pulsars in the late 1960s. Their radio outbursts were so precisely timed that the source objects were dubbed LGMs for Little Green Men. But this led to the discovery of rapidly spinning neutron stars that shoot out beams of radiation like a lighthouse.

So, maybe buried in the vast archives of the National Virtual Observatory is a signature of an extraterrestrial civilization. But finding it may be as daunting as finding the Ark of the Covenant in the iconic box filled warehouse scene at the end of the 1980 film, Raiders of the lost Ark.

Comments

[MichaelL]

I have heard that some searches are now looking for evidence in the form of laser pulses that a civilization might be sending out.

I suppose if there are civilizations millions of years ahead of us, we may seem as ants to them, and never recognize their existence.

[marie]

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