"Citizen Hearings" on UFOs

These days, allegations of conspiracies and coverups are pretty popular in on Capitol Hill, as evidenced by one Senator's recent 13-hour filibuster in order to obtain an assurance that the government isn't going to use robotic aerial assassins to execute U.S. citizens without trials. But that must make it all the more frustrating for UFOologists, who in many ways are the progenitors of the government conspiracy-coverup meme, because they're getting drowned out by all the noisy newcomers screaming that the Boston Marathon bombing was a "false-flag" operation or that the Pentagon is secretly modifying the weather.

The last time UFOologists succeeded in getting any attention from Congress was in the late 1960s, when then-House minority leader Gerald Ford pushed for hearings after a spate of UFO sightings. The future President chided the U.S. Air Force for keeping its Project Blue Book findings under wraps, and proclaimed that "the American people are becoming alarmed by the UFO stories." But good luck getting anyone in office to issue a similar clarion call today.

What We Could Learn From Aliens

If you've ever seen the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still, you may remember the scene in which the flying saucer lands in Washington, and Klaatu the alien emerges, holding in his hand what looks to the terrified humans like a weapon. After a soldier shoots Klaatu, Gort the robot emerges from the spaceship, and employs his otherworldly powers to disarm the soldiers and reduce a tank to scrap metal. It's only then that the wounded Klaatu rises to reveal that what he had in his hand was a miniature telescope, capable of seeing father into space than existing human observatories. From the script:

KLAATU: It was a gift. For your president. (Glances at the broken object ruefully) With this, he could have studied life on other planets.

Okay, that was just from a movie. But the paradox that the scene raises might well turn out to be a real one, if we ever actually make contact with terrestrials, who most likely will come from a vastly more advanced civilization. While we're likely to fear aliens, assuming that they're out to conquer and/or destroy us, it well be that they're actually benevolent creatures who want to share with us what they know. And what they know might have the potential to help us an enormous deal. 

In a 1995 report, the U.S. Naval Observatory's Steven J. Dick wrote that discovery of an extraterrestrial civilization also would have potentially mind-blowing impact upon science and our view of reality, comparable to Europe's rediscovery (through the Arab world) of classical Greek science in the 12th and 13th centuries, orCopernicus' discovery in the early 1500s that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of our solar system.

Here are a few areas in which I think we could make enormous progress as a result of contact with an extraterrestrial civilization:

• Unlocking the secret of faster-than-light travel. Presumably, aliens who visited our planet would come from an enormous distance across interstellar space, since even the nearest potentially habitable planet is probably at least 13 light years away. That might mean that they have developed a technology similar to the warp drive envisioned by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, or something else that is at this point beyond the human imagination. They may also possess antigravity technology as well, since UFOs (assuming that at least some of them actually are alien spacecraft) have been observed to perform seemingly impossible aerobatic feats. 
• Freedom from the limitations of our biology. Humans already are beginning to dabble in transhumanism--that is, augmenting ourselves with powered exoskeletons and electronic gadgetry such as microchip implants that enhance vision. But if an intelligent extraterrestrial species has been around for longer than us, it may well be that they've become completely post-biological creatures whose brains merge natural and artificial intelligence. They may even have discarded their meat bodies completely to live within machines of their own creation (which hopefully don't look like circa 1991 Arnold Schwarzenegger--that would be too weird). Here's a 2006 paper by NASA scientist Steven Dick on that subject. We could make a quantum leap forward toward transhumanism with their help.
• Reversing environmental damage. It's conceivable that extraterrestrials from a far more advanced civilization have mastered planetary engineering--that is, the ability to make major intentional alterations in the environment. (Here's a paper that Carl Sagan co-authored on that subject years ago.)  That might enable them to fix our atmosphere and reverse the destructive process of climate change. 
•  Conflict resolution. International conflicts are killing people at a far lower rate than in the past--about 55,000 people are dying worldwide from warfare each year in the 2010s, according to Foreign Policy magazine, about a third of the fatal casualty rate in the 1980s. But humans still possess an alarming propensity for slaughtering one another, as evidence by the estimated 468,000 homicides committed worldwide in 2011, according to United Nations research. If an intelligent extraterrestrial species has been around for longer than us, most likely they've developed lethal technology at least as potent as ours, and possibly even more so--imagine something along the lines of the Death Star from the Star Wars fictional universe. But the aliens' continued existence would mean that they also have some advanced method for resolving differences without violence. We might be able to get them to share that method with us--or perhaps, as a last resort, to send a legion of Klaatus and Gorts to force us to stop the killing.

If We Do Discover an Extraterrestrial Civilization--What Then?

For researchers involved in SETI--the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence--the ultimate dream is to discover, at last, a signal that is an unmistakeable, ambiguous signal from a distant civilization that is attempting to contact us. But imagine that someday, one of them does find such a message from space--a verifiable, repeating equivalent of the Wow signal picked up by a radio telescope in Ohio in 1977.

But after the immediate excitement of knowing that we are alone wears off, another difficult question arises. What should we do then? Should the scientists try to signal back and alert the extraterrestrials that we've received their message, and want to communicate? Or should we follow Stephen Hawking's 2010 admonition to avoid contact, in order to avoid the danger of being attacked by extraterrestrials?

It's a question that scientists have been wrestling with for a long time. Back in 1960, the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, prepared an advisory paper for NASA that, in part, dealt with potential risks of having contact with aliens.

What If Extraterrestrials Are Just Ignoring Us?

Back in 1924, when Mars made its closest approach to the Earth in two centuries, scientists in the U.S. and Europe eagerly tried to establish contact with the extraterrestrial civilization that many thought might exist there. In Switzerland, astronomers used a heliograph--a giant mirror--to flash Morse code translated into light flashes, in hopes that Martians would notice it and respond. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Chief of Naval Operations, Edward W. Eberly, sent a telegram to Navy radio operators, asking them to monitor the airwaves for "any electrical phenomenon (of) unusual character" that might be a sign of the Red Planet's inhabitants trying to communicate with us by radio. A New York Times article excitedly pondered what the aliens' opinion of their human cousins might be:

...They are of an order of intelligence much superior to ours...It is reasonable to suppose that the Martian knows much more about us than we know about him or his world, and it is interesting to speculate what he thinks of us, of our feverish struggle for a living, our vanities, our suicidal World War, our little gardens and our big deserts. Perhaps he thinks our deserts are pygmies and envies our gardens, for Mars has deserts far more cruel than we can imagine.

In Case of End of the World, New Earth-like Exoplanet Discovered

Before our imagination of how the world will end becomes reality and sends people all across the globe into panic mode, astronomers have already begun looking at other planets in hopes of finding Earthlings a new place to call home.

While the Curiosity Rover is busy examining Mars, others are looking at a newly discovered exoplanet that orbit its parent star, HD 40307, at almost the same distant that Earth orbits the sun. At 56 million miles away from the parent star in the constellation Pictor, the exoplanet, located 45 light-years away from our own planet, is in just the right spot for liquid water to exist.

 [Related - Playlist: Are We Alone]

Mars Landing: 7 Minutes of Terror

We're only a few days away from touch down for the Curiosity Mars rover this Sunday, August 5! And SCIENCE will be airing a special about the Mars landing, Mars Landing 2012: The New Search for Life, on Monday, August 6 at 10PM E/P. 

This latest mission to Mars is to search for any signs of life - past, present or future. The rover will begin the mission inside a huge impact basin called the Gale Crater, which could prove to be the remains of an ancient lake, and span out from there.

What most people don't realize is what an epic task it is just to land the rover on the surface of Mars without something going horrendously wrong. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories created this video to help people understand just how difficult the landing will be:

From Aliens to the End of the World: Nick Sagan Answers YOUR Facebook Questions!

I really appreciate all the questions and sorry if you asked one I didn't have time to answer. 

--Nick Sagan

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Q: Are we ready to make contact?

A: In “Alien Encounters” one of the many excellent points Neil deGrasse Tyson makes is that we can barely get along with ourselves, so how are we going to get along with aliens?  We’re not ready, he says, and looking at our history to this point, he’s probably right.  That said, one can imagine scenarios where first contact brings out the best in us.  And perhaps we’ll find a civilization that’s faced similar challenges in their own history, a people who know how to conduct themselves in a way that maximizes the chance that the experience will be positive for all involved.

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Q: What do you think an advanced civilization would have to gain by making contact with us?

A: It’s hard to predict extraterrestrial motivations but I would imagine an advanced civilization would gain as much from making contact with us as we might upon discovering an intriguing but primitive new species of life.  We’d be a subject of curiosity, perhaps expanding their understanding of how life develops on worlds other than their own.  On the other hand, we may be so far behind them in our development that we’d be utterly uninteresting to them (which may explain why we’ve yet to hear from anyone.)

Science's General Manager Answers YOUR Questions (on Aliens)

A few weeks ago we put out the call to our Facebook and Twitter followers to ask ANY question of Science's General Manager, Debbie Myers. There were sooooo many responses, it's going to take some time to make our way through them -- and we didn't want to play favorites. So, we had Debbie pick the questions out of a hat (or in this case, a jar).

We'll be posting more of her answers shortly, but here's one that's particularly relevant to our celebration of "Are We Alone?" month:

 

Please keep your questions coming. Debbie has pledged to get through as many as she can! Oh, and don't forget to join our search for alien life here!

Debbie Myers
General Manager
SCIENCE

Are We Alone in the Universe?

When Jodie Foster's "Contact" came out, I was a graduate  student studying the impact of media and technology in our society. I remember being both disappointed and relieved at the thought that moment of alien contact depicted was only a film world sci-fi fabrication. I couldn't imagine that humans, with all our ego and ignorance, could handle meeting beings whose intelligence we could never hope to surpass. We prefer more knowable beings: clear-cut enemies like the voracious predators of "Alien," or the little goofballs from "E.T." and "Men in Black."

Little did I know at the time, Jodie Foster's character was largely based on a real person: Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute and a world leader in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth. Over the past year, I have had the good fortune to be able to work directly with Ms. Tarter on an exciting project here at Science Channel.

Zeroing in on Alien Life

It used to be that searching for signs of alien life meant blindly searching any corner of space in hopes of stumbling across something — anything — meaningful. Not surprisingly, us humans have come up empty so far.

But thanks to data from NASA's Kepler telescope, we finally have a way to apply some method to the madness. The mission of the Kepler program is to search a section of the Milky Way galaxy for other Earth-like planets. The main objective from NASA's perspective is to find possible new homes for humans. But the SETI Institute is using the telescope's data to see if any newly-discovered planets already have intelligent life residing there.