Intelligent Life in the Universe

Infantile Giganticus Among Other Species

The thought of civilizations far away (or perhaps nearby) making contact with humans has captivated humans for most of history, and is even a constant component in our vast entertainment industries today. Apart from religions, which have commonly described Gods as cosmic beings for thousands of years, the first documented mention of alien life forms came in the 2nd century in the form of a satire called "True History" by Lucian.  Since then we have seen aliens referenced consistently throughout history; from 10th century Japanese tales, to 17th century Baroque literature, into modern media with War of the Worlds (1940), Star Trek (1966), E.T. (1982), and The Avengers (2012).

Hollywood isn't the only one pondering aliens.  Science has also taken a fascination with extraterrestrial life and have quietly offered some interesting thoughts as to what might be lurking in the Universe.  I'll discuss some of the more thought-provoking concepts below, including the Fermi Paradox, Drake Equation, SETI, and more.

To begin we'll start with the assumption that because the Universe is so large, there must be intelligent life out there, right?  The Fermi Paradox came from scientists wondering that if this were true, why haven't we met these life forms?  It states four key assumptions:

1. Our Sun is 4.6 billion years old, the Universe is 13.8 billion years old, and there are billions of stars like our sun that are much older.
2. Some of these stars have habitable zones that produce planets similar to Earth, where life can evolve into intelligent life over billions of years.
3. Some of these civilizations would be capable of interstellar travel if we're already considering such technology (like the Alcubierre Drive).
4. In a time scale of billions of years, galaxies should be colonized within a few million years of interstellar travel becoming possible.

Even conservative calculations predict the proper heavy elements were around and conditions were stable enough for habitable planets to start forming roughly 12 billion years ago.  At nearly 8 billion years older than Earth itself, these ancient planets have had more than enough time for millions of advanced civilizations to have been born and passed on already.  Going back to the Fermi Paradox, if we assume those 4 points are valid, Earth should have been colonized or at least visited, yet we've never observed evidence of other civilizations.  From this starting points there are many great arguments as to why we haven't made contact.  

The Drake Equation is a famous formula meant to estimate the number of technological civilizations in the Universe, and equals (and skip this if you don't care, seriously):

R (rate of star formation) * Fp (fraction having planets) *  Ne (average # of life supporting planets per star that has planets) * Fl (planets that could support life / planets that would develop life) * Fi (fraction that would then develop intelligent life) * Fc (fraction that would have technology we could observe signs of) * L (length of time those signals would be released into space)

The Picture Summary For Those That Don't Care, Seriously

Each element of the equation is based in some field of science, but still are reliant on variables that depend on who is inputting the calculations, and can result in widely varied estimates of the number of advanced civilizations.  The wide results range from 2 intelligent civilizations to 280,000,000. 280,000,000 is a huge number but the fact that the low is still greater than 1 should be the more important observation.

Deferring to the great thinkers on this subject, Steven Hawking proposed 4 possibilities as to why we had not observed the intelligent life that should be out there.  

1. The first possibility is that perhaps life is such an extremely rare occurrence that there are only 2 or 3 civilizations separated by the vastness of the Universe.  With only one species of intelligent life to observe, our sample size is too small to know how likely life is to form, although most scientists agree it should form fairly easily in the vastness of space and time.  
2. The second possibility is that evolution of intelligence is not necessarily beneficial to survival, and so intelligence evolves from such random mutations that there may be life everywhere in the Universe but it doesn't evolve past the intelligence of most alpha predators on Earth (just enough to live comfortably on instincts).  Part of the support for this proposal is that it took around 2.5 billion years on Earth to evolve from single cell to multicell organisms, from there life required more resources to grow into bigger animals.  Large meteor strikes would wipe out any organism bigger than small mammals, which scientists predict might occur around once every 20 million years.  It's been 70 million years since the last such strike, which is an abnormal amount of time, and fortunately enough for intelligent life to come around.  
3. The third possibility Hawking presented was that when civilization enters the external transmission phase (develops written language) life eventually destroys itself (nuclear war, global neglect, artificial intelligence, etc).  Hopefully this isn't the case for humanities sake.
4. The fourth possibility is that we have simply overlooked signs of intelligent life so far, and that is exactly why Hawking is a firm backer of SETI.

SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, was initially a United States government project until private funding took over in 1995.  SETI itself is a collection of entities, led by Harvard and University of Cal, Berkeley, that looks for signs of intelligent life (non naturally forming occurrances) such as electromagnetic radiation and gamma-ray bursts, and continues to search today. 

Waiting For The Next Columbus

There is another possibility that many are probably wondering about, which is that intelligence life has traveled past Earth, or maybe even stopped off to visit.  One line of thinking revolves around the assumption that intelligent life knows about mankind and chooses to remain secret.  They might choose to remain secret in order to study us.  Or, they might simply not care.  If they're vastly technologically superior the common metaphor is that a human wouldn't stop to interact with an anthill in the same way an extremely advanced species wouldn't stop to interact with a species that hasn't even colonized its neighboring planets.  Additionally, if a person dropped a candy wrapper next to the anthill the ants wouldn't know that the wrapper isn't naturally occurring and instead comes from an advanced species, so perhaps we've overlooked their presence.  If that sounds outrageous, consider: Basic tribes were all that existed on Earth 8,000 years ago, and considering where we are today, how might a human in 40,000 years look at us today? What about 40 million or the 8 billion years planets might have existed with intelligent life before us?

If we don't want to wait patiently to be discovered we will need to travel and colonize the planets. Luckily we have about 5 billion years before our sun explodes, at which point our solar system should be a distant memory.  Of course in 15 billion years the rest of the stars will die out according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but there's no reason we can currently foresee us not living on forever. In the near term we need our species to find a way to live when Earth is depleted, as it will be one day (go see Interstellar).  Luckily we're intelligent life and that means be adapt.  According to Hawking we've entered a new stage of self designed evolution where we'll evolve, through technology, at an exponential rate until one day we're cruising the cosmos with the other civilizations.

-Ryan Gardner

But Seriously, A Warp Drive?

Seriously, a warp drive.

As I mentioned in my last post (A 3D Future?), the idea that something like a warp drive could work within the laws of physics might easily be the most exciting concept of the next 100 years, although one based purely in theory and requiring significant funding and effort.

The science for the idea has been around since 1994 from theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre.  He wrapped theoretical science like relativity around the stunning idea that humans can travel faster than the speed of light to come up with the Alcubierre Drive.  When Einstein came up with the theory of relativity mankind began to unravel the mysteries of physics and the universe.  Einstein's famous formula says that E=MC2, or, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.  Therefore, as we near zero mass (molecule/photon small), to have any significant energy would require immense speed.  The greatest speed we could imagine is the speed of light in a vacuum (no friction) which comes out to just over 186,000 MPH.  Except that's not true.

The Alcubierre Drive, Colorful Lights Not Included

A Simple Quote From A Super Simple Man

The key to this is dark energy.  Dark energy is 75%-85% of matter in the universe yet we know very little about it.  Think of dark matter as the water of the Pacific Ocean, with planets, stars, or anything else with mass represented by fish.  If the fastest fish swims forward at 150,000 MPH (less than the speed of light) we can observe this speed.  However, we're also in the current moving across the Pacific at an additional 200,000 MPH, but this is relative to us so we still say the fish is moving 150,000 MPH, not 350,000 MPH.  Dark matter is the water we float in, and it doesn't follow normal rules.  Imagine pushing a few Skittles into a Play-Doh disk and then stretching the Play-Doh out, the Play-Doh is the expanding fabric of the universe that is pushing planets (Skittles) further away from each other.  To conclude, dark matter can expand and contract faster than the speed of light.  The Alcubierre Drive is simply finding a way to ride that wave.

Not Play-Doh

Artists Interpretation Of Dark Matter, Allegedly

The Alcubierre Drive itself is not a spacecraft, but rather a device attached to a spacecraft that creates a massive amount of energy, expands space behind your ship, and contracts space in front of the ship.  If you refer to the picture below the mechanics are more obvious.  The (1) on the left side is space being expanded behind the ship (think of a wave coming up out of the ocean propelling you forward), while the (3) on the right side is space being contracted in front of the ship (literally there is less space between the ship and its destination, like a breaking wave).

Imagine Turning Headlights On Going Faster Than Light

Hopefully you're excited about the possibilities at this point, but there are many difficulties still standing in the way of this becoming reality, the first of which is the need for massive amounts of energy.  Initially Alcubierre formulated that to generate enough energy to bend space would require a Jupiter sized object.  However in 2011 Harold White (a NASA engineer) played with the equation and and discovered that a slight change in shape and thickness could shrink the required equipment from Jupiter sized to 1,600 pounds!  The technology to generate the energy would most likely utilize something called the Casimir Effect for those interested, but that's a whole other article in itself.  Additional problems include that what happens within the expanding/contracting bubble as well as the effects of decelerating from such a high speed are unknown.  Either way, the theory has enough roots in reality that NASA moved the project up from 'conjecture' to 'speculation'.

North America To Scale On Jupiter. Keep Running Forrest.

If we can ignore the fact that such technology may take decades to work, if it ever does at all, we can imagine some truly awesome possibilities.  In terms of speed, travelling to our closest neighbor star takes over 4 years at the speed of light, but only about 2 weeks with Alcubierre's Drive. Extrapolating forward that means that humans would suddenly possess the ability to travel to other hospitable planets, and either colonize or meet colonies of other galaxies.  Limited resources would suddenly be unlimited with the ability to mine/collect these resources from unique asteroids and planets everywhere.

Like the Earth sized planet made out of diamond 40 light years away worth $26.9 Nonillion, or for those like me not well versed in numbers over the Trillions: $26,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

That's Gonna Be One Lucky Girl

If the Alcubierre Drive doesn't work we can always look at the Krasnikov tube or worm holes.  Until then just hope we see something like this in our lifetimes, it would be more important than just about every invention leading up to it, combined.  Plus I'd really love to shake hands with an alien.

-Ryan Gardner