ThinkingShift

If you ask astrophysicist, Prof Stephen Hawking, if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, he is likely to quip: “Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare.. some would say it has yet to occur on earth.”

Hawking gave a lecture last week to commemorate NASA’s 50th anniversary. Can you believe that a half century has already gone by since we first flung ourselves into space in tiny capsules (flying death traps if you ask me being someone who’s not keen on confined spaces). I read anything by Hawking, what a mind. And his NASA lecture, Why We Should Go Into Space, was fascinating and gave me hope that we will resuscitate our efforts to “seek out new worlds”. You can read his lecture here on the NASA site and check out the streaming video of Hawking’s lecture (if you can stick through all the introductory comments, it’s worth it get to the Prof and his daughter, Lucy).

The Prof considered whether intelligent life is “out there” (mmm…I know it’s not in some organisations I’ve worked in!) and started off with this reflection:

“Why we should go into space? What is the justification for spending all that effort and money on getting a few lumps of moon rock? Aren’t there better causes here on Earth? In a way, the situation was like that in Europe before 1492. People might well have argued that it was a waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase. Yet, the discovery of the new world made a profound difference to the old. Just think, we wouldn’t have had a Big Mac or a KFC.”

And with all the crap that goes on in our world these days (sorry, in dark, brooding phase about humanity), this comment from the Prof had me thinking:

“Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect. It will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all…..It won’t solve any of our immediate problems on Planet Earth, but it will give us a new perspective on them and cause us to look outwards and inwards. Hopefully, it would unite us to face a common challenge“.

Considering that we are fast depleting our natural resources, searching out new worlds could be the only factor that could possibly unite human kind. Mind you, we’d then rapidly pillage any new world we arrived on.

Now, we all know the decline in the education system around science and the arts and this was highlighted for me when Lucy Hawking said: “In the United Kingdom, a recent survey found that a third of U.K. school children believe that wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the first man to walk on the Moon.” Cough: I’m sure Neil Armstrong will be really pleased to read this. Some blonde bimbos around 17 years old on some reality TV show recently said they’d never even heard of Winston Churchill. Obviously, to conquer space we need a new breed of scientists (along with some trained historians I’d suggest!).

Worse, the same survey found that “40% of children thought Mars was a chocolate bar, 35% of children said the Earth was not an official planet, and extraordinarily, 72% could not identify the Moon from pictures.” Quell horror! Not sure how we’ll be “going where no-one has gone before” if we keep taking the emphasis off science, history, classics and arts education. Thank goodness Lucy and her father are producing kids’ books on science to whet the appetite with great questions like - what exactly does happen when you get to the edge of the Universe? well, very clearly you fall into the abyss of a KM programme that is languishing in some organisation….sorry.

The Prof goes on to consider panspermia (the chance that life hitchhiked from planet to planet on a meteor for example), so maybe other worlds have species that share a similar DNA with us. Although Hawking added: “On the other hand, an independent occurrence of life would be extremely unlikely to be DNA based. So watch out if you meet an alien. You could be infected with a disease against which you have no resistance.”

My UFO fans: sorry Hawking, doesn’t believe we’ve been visited by aliens and says: “We don’t appear to have been visited by aliens. I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?”. And despite “an extensive search by the SETI project, we haven’t heard any alien television quiz shows. This probably indicates that there are no alien civilizations at our stage of development within the radius of a few hundred lightyears.”

This could be a good thing though: there might be a sensible alien civilization out there, one that doesn’t have nuclear weapons; one that doesn’t spend the majority of its time in hedonistic pursuits or killing off their world; one that respects and tolerates “difference” instead of trying to annihilate it in the name of some higher authority (probably not called God).

Hawking reckons there are three possible reasons aliens haven’t tried to contact us (well, one is that they are super smart and are giving us the flick):

• the probability of primitive life appearing on a suitable planet is very low
• the probability of primitive life appearing may be reasonably high, but the probability of that life developing intelligence like ours may be very low
• life appears and in some cases develops into intelligent beings, but when it reaches a stage of sending radio signals, it will also have the technology to make nuclear bombs and other weapons of mass destruction. It will, therefore, be in danger of .destroying itself before long (and adds: let us hope this third possibility is not the reason we haven’t seen ET yet).

Lots of great stuff in this lecture, including whether we could actually live on other worlds with a different atmosphere. Go on, pamper the inner Hawking in you and read it.

Well, first of all: a very Merry Christmas to all ThinkingShift readers, that is if you celebrate it. If you don’t, maybe you’re just having a relaxing time off work. Either way, to amuse you over the Christmas holiday period is today’s post on “What is interesting to an alien?”.

New Scientist had a recent piece on how our messages to extraterrestrials have gone unanswered and ponders why this is so. One of the reasons for lack of response could be that aliens are too bored to reply according to the article. The alien chat line has so far consisted of four messages - largely mathematical, coded descriptions of the biology of the human race. Now if aliens are anything like me, they’d fail to understand the message because they flunked maths at school or because the topic is just plain dull. An advanced civilization out there has probably visited us so many times that they know all about our physical and genetic make-up according to Canadian astrophysicist, Yvan Dutil. After reading the messages Dutil says: ” they will be none the wiser about us humans and our achievements. In some ways, we may have been wasting our telescope time”.

So Dutil and his seriously smart buddies are now working on composing more interesting messages. But the question is: what on earth is interesting to an alien? They’re probably pissed off with us for wrecking up the world and think we’re pretty dumb. So they’re trying to find some language and common ground to tell aliens things about human society that they’ll find worthy of taking note of. One of these topics is the vexing question of how to cut a cake (no joking).

I’ve not noted this problem because when there’s cake around, I don’t care how it’s cut as long as I can lay my hands on a piece! But apparently mathematicians have resolved the problem of ensuring that everyone gets their fair share of cake. Clearly, this has implications for the equitable allocation of resources in society, which I think any aliens would be far more interested in. So democracy might be a hot topic for extraterrestorials - who knows what sort of political system they might have, so they could be eager to learn about democratic institutions. Perhaps they could study the USA

Maybe aliens would be interested in learning how we’ve managed to snuff out some glorious civilizations through conquest or transmitting disease or through needless warfare. A good lessons learned project perhaps. Maybe we could tell aliens about Facebook and MySpace, heck even invite them to have a MySpace page! But then again, advanced civilizations would probably conclude from social networking sites that we’re only concerned with self, getting plastered onto YouTube and being micro-celebrities.

One scientist suggests that we simply send aliens the encyclopedia (would that be wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica?) and hope that there is enough redundancy for them to spot patterns. Whilst another suggests that we should have a sort of Help Desk with a message ready and waiting should aliens make contact: “We’ll get back to you, once we’ve figured what on earth you’re asking us”.

So if we don’t know our audience, it is pretty hard to compose meaningful messages and questions. Scientists have tried using teenagers to send messages to extraterrestrial intelligence and told them about humans’ internal emotional world amongst other stuff - getting into emotions might have scared them off particularly if they’re like Spock of Star Trek fame and don’t understand human emotions. Heck, even humans find it hard to understand human emotions. Even a Theremin concert has been flung into space. Maybe the aliens didn’t like the music played.

This all had me thinking: what message would you send to aliens? What questions might you ask them? Who should be the spokesperson for the human race? How would we explain to aliens what it means to be human? How do we explain the concept of God? As to our spokesperson or ambassador, if we want to keep ET away from our planet, we could use Prez Bush. And why select a human representative? Maybe a dolphin or whale would have a better chance at establishing contact than a human.

What message would you send? And who would you select as an ambassador?

Awhile back, I did a post on UFOs - not because I believe in them but because I had been reading a lot of stuff on Neil Armstrong and NASA. And I started to think about whether astronauts had ever had a close encounter and what had happened to Kenneth Arnold, the dude who first reported spotting UFOs way back in 1947. So I did a post that was largely tongue-in-cheek - asking things like why aliens have such unusual names and why they seem to wander aimlessly in the desert.

What I didn’t expect was the reaction to that post - over 5,000 hits in the course of a few days, but more surprising was the email reaction and some of the comments left. One email that stood out was from someone in the US who says he is a Raelian - 14th generation to be exact. Now I may not believe all the stuff I was told, but I respect everyone’s right to an opinion and I looked up every book or link that people sent me.

The reaction prompted some further thinking. I cast my mind back to the Jurassic Park era when I was growing up (pre-fall of Berlin Wall, I’ll reveal that much). I remember kids in my high-school obssessed, as I was, with Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica reruns on TV; we had “launch parties”, whenever a space shuttle took off or landed (hey, remember this was pre-internet, iPods and other exciting stuff). Then in the early 1990s, it was all about The X-Files and the delectable David Duchovny (the thinking woman’s sex-symbol). Along came the internet and somehow over the last 10 or so years, it seems to me we have been sidetracked by matters less extra-terrestrial.

A space shuttle launch these days produces a stifled yawn; NASA’s talk of aiming for Mars falls on less excited ears; a TV show about alien autopsies barely rates against reality TV drivel; aliens appear to have become lost in space.

So this had me thinking: why do we no longer seem to be interested in whether or not aliens are amongst us? Why are kids these days more interested in becoming the next singing idol than they are in watching Star Trek: Enterprise? I didn’t have to ponder this for too long because my RSS feeds delivered a very interesting article in the New Statesmen, which talks about how in the age of the internet and instant communications, aliens have become irrelevant. Gasp! Perhaps the Department of Homeland Security has been really successful in keeping out immigrants :)-

Anyway, the US used to account for about 99% of all UFO sightings (what are they drinking over there?) but now there’s barely a sighting reported these days. One interesting theory is that there is an exact parallel between the rise in the use of the internet and the fall in UFO sightings. Pre-internet (and I struggle to remember what it was like), I guess there was more time available to spend staring at the heavens and we’ve swapped this for staring at a blinking computer screen. But the article also talks about another far more intriguing theory: “…. aliens are a projection of our inner irrationalities, anxieties and fears. The spaceships arrived as a cultural device for making sense of things incomprehensible to ordinary folks. Now we have a new, all-encompassing tool. So, instead of projecting our fears of the inexplicable on to outer space, we project them into cyberspace“.

The flurry of UFO sightings of course occurred during the heady days of early space travel and against the backdrop of the Cold War. You just never knew what those pesky Russkies were up to - would they beat the US to the Moon? Had they come across a crashed alien craft and exploited alien technology for their Sputnik programme? It was all a lot of space bluff really, but these were our cultural references in the 1950s and 1960s - Russia, spies, space race, secret squirrel stuff. And so our anxieties over the then Soviet Union, for example, manifested as spaceships zooming around the sky or projecting bright mysterious beams onto houses and sucking up kids and parents to conduct medical experiments on. The rise of science eclipsed earlier times when religious beliefs functioned as cultural reference points and led to miraculous sightings of the Virgin Mary or burning of witches. Strange experiences could be explained in terms of science, UFOs, aliens, alien abductions etc and so the apparitions of the Virgin Mary or the spectre of witches was replaced.

And so the decline of UFO sightings can be explained by viewing the Internet and instant communications as our new cultural reference point. As the article says: “People seek to explain the inexplicable through the internet - by developing virtual communities, in chat rooms, through exploring virtual worlds and playing games where they can actually take on the persona of visiting aliens. With the internet, we have become self-absorbed and inward-looking. UFOs have become irrelevant“.

Even Steven Spielberg is pondering why there are less alien sightings at a time when pretty swish technology could easily record First Contact. As Spielberg says: ““There are millions of video cameras out there and they’re picking up less videos of UFOs, alleged UFOs, than we picked up in the 1970s and 1980s. There’s 150 per cent more cameras, so why are we getting less from up there?“

Really, maybe there’s just not anything particularly alluring for aliens anymore. Maybe an atmosphere thick with pollution causes a UFO to go into a gyrating free fall; maybe we’ve scared them off with reality show drivel, which causes them to think that humans are a pretty trashy, idiotic bunch. But then again, maybe the aliens are a pretty clever lot and have disappeared into cyberspace - a cunning ploy intended to put humans off their guard. And of course, there’s the theory that the internet is based on alien technology - since the internet’s origins lay with Arpanet developed by the US Department of Defense - the theory goes that military types found high-tech stuff on crashed spacecraft and turned it into the internet. Doesn’t work for me though. I’m sure any aliens would have far more advanced technology. We’re also busy using the internet to contact aliens (now, this would assume that any extra-terrestrials out there actually bothered to get a connection to the internet to hear what we’re communicating!).

I sure miss the “good old days” (you know you’re getting old when you mutter this phrase). The time when there was no internet and you watched an episode of Star Trek (can’t beat the original) on a Sunday night and you spooked yourself by wondering if maybe, just maybe, some aliens were staring at you through your living room window, ready to whisk you away to their world of two moons and a red sky.

UPDATE: two readers from the US have emailed me a link and an amusing comment. A comment from Bob - ” They came looking for intelligent life. Stopped at the White House and decided there was none.” LOL. And from Donna - a link to Coast to Coast, showing a video of Bush with an alien appearing in the window behind him:)- Thanks Rob and Donna!

Time for a change of pace. I’ve been researching more into my pet topic - the surveillance society - and have thoroughly depressed myself (watch out for a post soon on my findings). So I needed some light relief. I’ve been reading a great book - Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon, and have just polished off the first authorised biography of Neil Armstrong, so I’m obviously in some sort of space travel frame of mind. Beam me up Scotty!

I started thinking about whether astronauts have seen UFOs on their space voyages and this led me to thinking about the history of UFO sightings, and the ultimate question: whatever happened to Kenneth Arnold, the salesman and pilot who reported way back in 1947 that he’d spotted nine objects flying in a V formation that tipped their wings like “a saucer if you skip it across water”. And so the term ‘flying saucer’ entered the lexicon.

I am a sucker for a good conspiracy theory and as I was growing up, I was convinced that aliens were amongst us (well, I still think that in some organisations I’ve worked in, aliens have been present!). I was obsessed with UFOs; I watched Star Trek episodes repeatedly to the frustration of my parents; I could name the planets in order by the time I hit kindergarten (easier to recite now that poor old Pluto has been vanquished); I was precocious enough to blurt out to my teachers that the two moons of Mars are Deimos and Phobos, doesn’t everyone know this?; I dreamed of being an astronaut (I wasn’t astute enough at such a young age to figure out that only men reached the moon until the Shuttle programme gave women a ticket to ride). By the time I reached high school, I could recite any fact you needed to know about Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the Moon. I still marvel at the feat of the Powered Descent in Eagle, using primitive 1960s computers.

When I was about 14 years, I was waiting outside the house for my parents - we were off to dinner - I was gazing at the night sky and saw two UFOs. They were probably satellites, but I was convinced. Surely my father would understand - he’d been an air force fighter pilot and must have seen white lights dancing around the sky or UFOs tracking him - but he just looked at me with a perplexed expression. He stared skyward but could see no UFOs.

Somewhere in my 20s, I lost interest. Studying law tends to do that to you - there’s no “Alien Rights Bill” or Alien Discrimination Act to learn about :)- But recently, I’ve been drawn to the space travel section of my favourite bookstore and bought 5 books on the Apollo programme…and then…in came an article from Wired on 60 years of UFO sightings that really piqued my interest.

But first, whatever happened to Kenneth Arnold, the man who sparked off the whole Roswell conspiracy theory? A quick dive into Wikipedia tells us he died in 1984 and, following his 1947 UFO sighting, he seems to have spent the rest of his life interviewing UFO witnesses and even wrote a book (mmm…missed that one).

Now, I’ve always wondered why contactees of aliens seem to come across them as the aliens wander through the desert. The most famous contactee was George Adamski, who allegedly met an alien called Orthon in the California desert on November 20, 1952. These “friendly” space people warned of the dangers of scientific progress and gave spiritual messages for humanity. Did Orthon lose his GPS and couldn’t find the bright lights of LA? And what’s with the strange monikers aliens seem to be labelled with: Orthon and Eloha.

Eloha is an interesting alien sighting. I didn’t know about the International Raelian Movement, founded in 1974 by Rael, aka Claude Vorilhon, a former French motor-racing writer. Apparently, Rael encountered Eloha (probably in the desert) and Eloha told him that humans are the product of a cunning DNA experiment and that the Bible and other religious texts refer to encounters with aliens, not God or His angels.

This Rael dude thinks he is related to Jesus and Mohammad and has managed to attract several thousand followers who are planning to make their headquarters in Las Vegas. Las Vegas?? How perfect if you ask me. Las Vegas: the venue for the 2007 UFO Conference and the place where Prophet Yahweh, Seer of Yahweh, called down UFOs and spaceships for the media to photograph. Seems the aliens and their spaceships missed the glossy photo shoot as they never appeared.

I ended up thinking that the hysteria over UFOs, alien abductions, aliens with dire prophecies for mankind and so on, was the result of too many people in the 1960s taking magic mushroom trips or perhaps was a result of the jet and space age following WWII. With jet planes, military and weather balloons, satellites and meteor showers whizzing through the atmosphere, our imaginations were bound to leap to the extraordinary.

But maybe not: approximately half the US population currently believe the media is conditioning them for an alien encounter. As recently as 2002, a Roper Poll found that one in seven people in the US claim to have spotted a UFO or have been a contactee (no word on whether all alien encounters occurred in the desert). I haven’t looked into whether Australians believe the same but we do of course have our very own UFO capital - Wycliffe Well, near Tennant Creek in Central Australia (the Outback, the desert - is there a pattern here?)

I remember being caught up in the Roswell thing - that some poor aliens crashed their spacecraft in Roswell, US and the US Government recovered the technology and conducted autopsies on the alien bodies. I think somewhere I even read the suggestion that what the US Government recovered allowed the Americans to build the lunar landing vehicles or Apollo spacecraft. And then of course we had Alien Autopsy in 1995 - supposedly genuine footage of an autopsy of one of the Roswell aliens, obtained from an old US cameraman. This was around the time of the X-Files, a TV series said to have been inspired by Roswell (and great TV viewing if you ask me). Why the old footage made its surprise appearance in 1995 and not years earlier I don’t know.

Actually, the 1990s was gripped by refueled interest in UFOs and aliens - Hollywood films like Independence Day (1996) and Men in Black (1997) - but things really started heating up in 2005 when a document said to have been written in the 1970s came to light. One of the Roswell aliens survived the crash in the 1940s (he was called EBE1, not Joe or Bob or Bill). EBE1 rounded up some military types and specially trained them and then they all took off for EBE1’s home planet, Serpo. Twelve humans stayed on Serpo from 1965 to 1978 - two remained on Serpo whilst the others died on the planet or when they returned to Earth. Say what??? You can read about it here. Mind you, this story does explain what has happened to some of the relatives I lost touch with - phone home please :)- Apparently, Serpo is a planet of Zeta Reticuli (where?). I had to fight hard not to succumb to the temptation of reading the report and getting caught up in this stuff.

Getting back to us being groomed to the idea of meeting aliens, some Ufologists considered the film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), a U.S.-government-backed project to get the public used to the idea of friendly aliens. The film had such an impact on the British House of Lords, it held a three-hour debate on alien abductions in 1979. Her Majesty’s government, however, decided UFOs were not alien spacecraft and were not a threat to the nation. Thank goodness, can you just imagine Her Majesty meeting someone called Eloha or Orthon.

NASA is now talking about a manned mission to Mars and “terraforming” is the new buzz word with news that Lowell Wood, a noted physicist, has outlined a plan to transform the Red Planet into a habitable world by the end of the 21st Century. Will we now see a spate of Martians whizzing around our planet in UFOs or walking aimlessly in some desert somewhere? As we get closer to a possible Mars mission, will UFO hysteria crop up again I wonder.

What’s always intriguing to me is that aliens seem to all be doctors. Barney and Betty Hill were driving peacefully in their car in 1961 when they noticed a UFO following them (as you do). When they reached home, they could not remember a large chunk of the journey and hypnosis revealed the couple recalled being abducted by aliens who subjected them to intimate and gruelling medical examinations. I can’t remember large chunks of my life, so a spot of hypnosis might just reveal that I haven’t really been working in law or KM - that I was abducted by aliens who conducted their nasty experiments (send the medical reports to my doctor please).

Joking aside, there are some people out there who are very serious about UFOs and aliens - take Stanton Friedman, a leading Ufologist who says: “The evidence is overwhelming that some UFOs are intelligently controlled ET spacecraft...” and he argues further “that the subject represents a cosmic Watergate, that there are no good arguments against these conclusions and that flying saucers and the worldwide government cover-up are the biggest story of the millennium“. You can check out Friedman’s site here.

And then there’s the Disclosure Project: ex-CIA and military officers describing their experiences covering up UFO and extraterrastrial encounters. I haven’t checked this site out thoroughly yet, but I plan to. Just in case you come across an alien, here’s a Layman’s Guide to Alien Contact.

I’ve spent so many years in law, teaching, information and knowledge management, that I’ve lost touch with the latest in alien encounters and UFO theories. But I often think that this vast universe can’t just be ours alone. What are your thoughts: why do humans seem to be so keen to believe that we are not alone in the Universe? Ever encountered an alien or seen a UFO?