Aliens Are Dummies? The WSJ Piece That Many Will Still Believe

As humans have continued over decades to search for extraterrestrial signals, a number of different takes have surfaced as well as proposals, advice. In an article I wrote in 1978, 'We Are Not Alone', I warned that our hitherto emitted radio and TV signals could already have betrayed our position to an alien civilization. I suggested that if humans had any residual smarts at all they would take care to conceal their radio presence in future rather than announce it, because we could not be sure who or what might pick the signals up and what they'd do in response.  I then cited physicist Freeman Dyson, who in a 1972 speech, asserted that the extraterrestrials we're most likely to encounter would be “like a malignant, technological cancer spreading across the galaxy” and we’d "do well not to wish for any meeting."  He predicted that it would be the most aggressive species we'd be most likely to meet, and we'd likely regret it.

I also cited British Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Ryle, who pleaded for extreme caution in the nature of radio band signals we send, and advocated for restricting any and all types of electro-magnetic signals and noise emanating from our planet. He warned that it would be foolhardy to be anything but passive listeners given we don't know anything about alien intentions .

More recently, this has echoed  in new warnings from Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, comparing the aliens that are most likely to visit Earth (because of stupidity on our part, i.e. in actively beaming messages) to the first colonizers of the New World - who decimated native populations for resources and territory. Musk, Hawking and others have urged that we do not move to "active SETI" which entails designing radio telescopes to actively transmitting messages as opposed to mere passive reception.

The general tenor of discussion then, has been that the aliens  likely to be contacts will be: a) super -intelligent, far in advance of Earthers' best, and b) highly aggressive.

Never mind. In his WSJ piece (July 25-26, p. C5) Joe Queenan assures gullible readers  (of which there are likely to be many) that "scientists don't want to let on they are searching for signs of average intelligence".

As he facetiously notes:

"The logic is infallible. If aliens were really smart, it stands to reason they would already have contacted us."

Adding, to clarify:

"Really, really smart creatures would want to let us know they were there, if only to show off, the way people who went to Harvard can't order a BLT without letting everyone in the room know they once wrote for the Crimson."

Not really!  And again, though to me his angle was tongue in cheek, it definitely could be literally misconstrued by a hidebound human chauvinist - who would have his belief reinforced that either: a) humans are the only advanced species in the cosmos, or b) any other species would be at the level of "incompetents" compared to us (Queenan uses the analogy of the East Germans before being absorbed by W. Germany)

The reality is that we're more likely to make first hand physical contact with extraterrestrials than radio contact. The logic and basis for this were well laid out in the paper ‘Galactic Civilizations: Population Dynamics and Interstellar Diffusion’ by William Newman and Carl Sagan, in Icarus, Vol. 46, June 1981,

The authors' logic was impeccable and simple. Any civilization worth its salt would at some point enter an Atomic age. Weapons of ultimate annihilation would become widely available as well as potential for nuclear power, possibly fusion. A civilization entering this age would either come out much more advanced and in one piece, or destroy itself. It is the latter category that would most likely limit itself to only radio contact.

The former would be able to parlay their awesome new power into fusion energy, and also interstellar space flight. The latter would open the doors to planetary conquests, given, as the authors noted, interstellar colonization would more likely be accomplished by a technologically aggressive species.  Hawking, for example, compared their arrival on Earth to the arrival of Columbus' expedition to the New World, resulting in the decimation of the Arawaks. Thus, the simple disparity in technology would result in the elimination or the absorption of the less advanced species - without even the veneer of a "war" declaration.

How advanced could such aliens be? Russian astrophysicist I.S. Kardashev, put forward a three-class scheme:[1]

I: Able to harness the equivalent power of the planet Earth
II: Able to harness the power equal to a typical star (10^23 kw)
III: Able to harness the power equal to a typical galaxy (10^33 kw)

Plausibly, an encounter with either Types II or III would amount to Earth hominids elimination or absorption - though it is difficult to see how the latter might work. (Perhaps literally, as food, see e.g.
the Twilight Zone episode 'To Serve Man'). On the other hand, an encounter with a Type I may have more potential for genuine exchange, even if at the analogous level of a human mathematician trying to teach a backward child residue calculus.

What we should not do, is buy into Queenan's theme of meeting or contacting "average" aliens. In terms of actual galactic civilizations, there is no such thing - except perhaps for humans.

[1]Shklovskii, I. and Sagan, C.:1966, Intelligent Life in the Universe, Dell Publishing Co., p. 394.

Is Stephen Hawking Serious About the 'God Particle' Destroying the Universe?

One thing we can say about Stephen Hawking: He's never at a loss to come up with a new way to scare the bejeezus out of complacent humans. Just three years ago he warned of an invasion of advanced aliens that would likely imitate the arrival of the European conquistadors who decimated native peoples in the New World in the 15th-16th centuries. Only this time modern humans would occupy the place of those technologically unsophisticated groups and become fodder for the aliens. It got many people to start thinking that we may have to worry a bit more when we send powerful signals into space - either intentionally or unintentionally.


Most recently, Prof. Hawking has warned that the Higgs boson — or so-called God particle — has the potential to destroy the universe, as reported by the Sunday Times .  This seems even more terrifying than the alien threat because the latter was localized for our own species and corner of the cosmos- as opposed to snuffing the whole 'enchilada'. But when one reads between the lines one quickly realizes Hawking is stretching the bounds of practical scientific prowess and feasibility.

The putative basis of his warning is actually highlighted in more detail in the foreword to the book Starmus, 50 Years of Man in Space.   Therein, the theoretical physicist wrote that if accelerated to high energy levels, the Higgs boson could cause space and time to collapse — and we’d be caught unawares. From the preface:

“The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become megastable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV). This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming.”

However, Hawking is gracious (and sympathetic of human feelings) enough to go on to aver he does not believe that this event will happen in the near future. Gee, thanks a heap, Stevie! But I'd have guessed it anyway given the magnitude of the energy needed from an accelerator (100b GeV) to make that happen. (Let us also bear in mind that the energy scale driving vacuum inflation was last seen just after the Big Bang- whereby the initial cosmos expanded from the size of an atom (about 1 fm in diameter) to several times the radius of the solar system.)

Anyway, Hawking explains for our benefit:

 “A particle accelerator that reaches 100 billion  GeV would be larger than Earth and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.”

Hmmmmmm........"larger than the Earth"...... or more than 8,000 miles long! Yeppers, I believe that would take roughly all the money that's ever been spent on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems - or about 14 trillion dollars (at minimum). So, I don't believe there's anything to fret over, since the energy demands of our population are actually increasing as the reserves are diminishing. (Frackers want you to believe they have the exception but this is mere 'snake oil' to use the parlance of Richard Heinberg)

In point of fact, such energy mastery would be more typical of the Type I Civilization once proposed by Russian cosmologist I.S. Kardashev. By his definition such a civilization would be able to wield and develop energy scales equal to an entire planet's output. (By his reckoning Earth wasn't even at Type 0.1).

(The Higgs boson was theorized by Dr. Peter Higgs in 1964. In 2012, evidence of Higgs boson was discovered by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. )

All of this interjects the question of what Hawking's next scare is likely to be: a possible collision with a mini-black hole (or one created in the CERN machine?) Or, Earth being blasted by the intense radiation of a gamma burst supernova? I am sure Vegas books will soon be taking bets!

Mysterious Radio Bursts Detected - Of Alien Origin?

The Parkes 64 m radio telescope which detected the strange radio bursts.

Six years ago, radio astronomers were baffled on detecting 4 energetic bursts of radio waves that lasted only a few milliseconds. Their bafflement was engendered by being unable to associate the bursts with a specific object.  Now, more recently, we find in the July 5 issue of Science, that Dan Thornton of University of Manchester and colleagues also reported 4 mysterious bursts.

Interestingly, they exhibited energies similar to the 2007 events,  and also resembled them in appearing only once. While researchers still aren't sure what might have caused such a signal they know it wasn't a fluke. The parameters for the radio telescope and the observed events all check out and conform to radio astronomy physics.  So we do know in order to be detected at all,  radio waves must fall within certain physical limits, i.e. brightness temperature, received flux, solid angle etc. One also needs to look at properties of the antenna -receiver such as beam width, gain, antenna temperature, etc. Since all the detected parameters were within conformance to standard radio physics we know the bursts aren't flukes.

In the Science paper, the radio astronomers reported scanning the sky with the 64 m Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia (see image).  They'd actually been searching for the rapidly spinning compact remnants of once massive stars as well as other transient radio sources. In the first case, one expects a supernova would have erupted leaving a neutron star (at least) in its wake. (The 4 newly observed bursts originated in the high latitudes of the Southern hemisphere, and roughly 40 degrees south of the Milky Way's disk.)

The first order of business was to determine the distance of the events. We know as radio wavelength radiation propagates through gas and dust it impacts electrons which smear the signal. The four strange burst emissions showed such a smearing, indicating the bursts were from space and not from Earth. Also, since the point of origin was 40 degrees off from the galaxy's disk the researchers concluded the burst originated outside the Milky Way. Following a computation of how much material the radiation had to travel through, they estimated the bursts' distance at between 5.5 and 10.5 billion years.

As for the energy signature, it was astounding. Each of the four bursts released as much energy in its brief emission time as the Sun puts out in 3,000 years.  So what is the source?

Could it be an advanced alien civilization which has somehow managed to exploit the energy of powerful astronomical objects to dispatch brief, but energetic signals? Granted, this hypothesis can't be totally excluded, since one must recall E.A. Milne's rubric of always dealing with physical proposals by using the concept of a bead on a wire and never letting the bead get to one end (certainty) or the other (impossibility). However, if the distance calculation for the events holds up - it is doubtful aliens are the source. At such immense distances, in effect looking that far back in time, it is improbable advanced alien civilizations existed.

In an article appearing 25 years ago, in The Journal of the Barbados Astronomical Society, I also argued against the likelihood of extra-terrestrials using radio signals to communicate. In order to communicate, say over thousands (or even hundreds) of light years' distance, information is transmitted. It requires energy to do this. Interestingly, a relation between energy and information is available. It can be written as:

E = 0.693 kT

Here, E is the energy associated with transmission of 1-bit of information. T is the temperature of the environment in which it is sent (say the radio transmitting antenna) and k is a physical constant known as the Boltzmann constant. Imagine an alien civilization sending the equivalent of a small novel to humans. This would be approximately 10²⁰  bits of information. The associated energy would be about 0.3 (three tenths) of a Joule.  The energy required, from a practical standpoint, would be much, much larger - maybe 100 million times larger. Why? Because in the process of pure transmission (over light years distance) a significant fraction of signal dilutes. So, at least 30 million Joules would be needed, to have it get to Earth in a useful form.

Arguably, aliens genuinely interested in contact would not waste time or effort with anything so puny as a small novel. It is more probable, if they went to the trouble of first contact (as in the film 'Contact') they'd send a lot of information. Say, equal to an alien encyclopedia of mathematics, or their most prevalent language. In this case, the information content soars to billions of megabytes, and the energy accordingly. For one million megabytes (10¹²    bits) the aliens are looking at an energy for transmission on the order of 3 x 10¹⁹  Joules.

It is well to realize that time factors into this as well. If the aliens kept the transmission going for at least one hour (Earth time), 3 x 10¹⁹   kilowatts of power are needed (assuming the aliens are able to sustain a rate of energy conversion of 1 Joule per second). In the civilization classification scheme of the late Russian astrophysicist I.S. Kardashev, this would put them at a bit beyond Type I, but not quite Type II. Kardashev's three-class scheme is:


I: Able to harness the equivalent power of the planet Earth

II: Able to harness the power equal to a typical star (10²³  kw)

III: Able to harness the power equal to a typical galaxy (10³³  kw)


While the burst energies appear to be close to the last category, there is one problem: no decipherable or intelligible communication was recorded. In this case, it leaves a powerful astronomical object as the likely source.

The astronomers themselves, in their Science paper, propose the most convincing cause is a neutron star known as a magnetar.  Thornton and colleagues suggest some 1,000 of these magnetar bursts occur across the sky every year. We will wait for confirmation to see if this is in fact, the best explanation