SETI and Intelligent Alien Life in the Solar System

by Mac Tonnies

1. The Demise of "Academic" SETI?

The "mainstream" Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has finally conceded that it's not impossible that aliens are already here, rather than diligently manning radio telescopes hundreds of light years away. Inevitably interpreted by some as signaling a conspiratorial inside agenda, SETI's change of perspective is more accurately attributed to recent advances in science and their implications for the human future.

While SETI continues to ridicule the UFO phenomenon as evidence of ET visitation, arguments by physicist/ufologist Stanton Friedman remain especially topical. Friedman, a long-time critic of SETI's justifications (he's interpreted the acronym as "Silly Effort To Investigate"), has justifiably lambasted the "old school" SETI assumption that extraterrestrial civilizations will necessarily forego interstellar travel because of the daunting requirements of chemical rockets. Indeed, SETI's long-held contention that beings thousands or millions of years more advanced than us would be constrained by Apollo-era technology (already near-obsolete here on Earth) has always seemed something of a convenient anachronism for researchers content to keep the study of ETI comfortably academic.

2. The Postbiological Cosmos

Rapid advances in computing, manufacturing and physics (theoretical and otherwise) suggest that intelligent extraterrestrials (assuming they exist), are almost certainly more exotic and technically capable that previously assumed. Scientists such as roboticist Hans Moravec, who predicts that the human species will become effectively obsolete within the next few hundred years, and K. Eric Drexler, whose work with nanotechnology has done nothing less than redefine how futurists view the coming decades, have collectively modeled a future in which artificial intelligence is near-omnipresent ("ubiquitous computing" or "ubicomp") and practical travel between stars is moved out of the arena of wishful thinking and into the realm of the imminently possible.

Recent books such as Moravec's "Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind" and Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" present technologies as optimistic as any dreamed by Arthur C. Clarke--and as potentially hazardous as the dystopian nightmares of neo-Luddite Bill Joy.

At the same time, breakthroughs in fields as seemingly arcane as quantum teleportation (and possibly antigravity) reveal a universe alive with untapped potential. If the human species can survive what astronomer Carl Sagan poetically termed our "technological adolescence," predicting the future with any hope of accuracy becomes impossible. In all probability, the minds that will plot our trajectory through the next millennium will be humanity's cybernetic offspring; the role of humans as we know them is quite unguessable (although Moravec argues that we will coexist peacefully with our "mind children," perhaps even merging with them until the distinction between "animate"and "inanimate" is thoroughly dissolved).

3. SETI's Disturbing Double Standard

Such speculation fuels SETI's new intellectual renaissance, as addressed by senior researchers Seth Shostak and Jill Tarter (the inspiration for Jodie Foster's character in "Contact"). SETI's reappraisal of the galactic neighborhood is both welcome and long overdue. Rather than reflecting a hidden agenda, SETI's willingness to entertain once-heretical notions indicates the (perhaps grudging) need to acknowledge the changing scientific zeitgeist.

However, SETI's implicit rejection of UFOs and evidence for extraterrestrial artifacts on Mars betrays its frailty as a political entity. Ignoring the evidence in Cydonia is ironic, as Carl Sagan's own early calculations suggested that our solar system may have been visited once every 20,000 years. Even if Sagan grossly overestimated, a single visiting ET civilization could have left artifacts within our ability to discover. (This scenario is presented in the Brookings Institute's famous report to NASA, with Mars cited as a candidate for ET intervention.)

Interestingly, mainstream SETI astronomers have made no secret of their searches for "Bracewell probes," theoretical automatic devices left by visiting civilizations (much like the "monolith" left buried on the Moon in "2001"). Bracewell probes, in any exist, are thought to occupy orbital Lagrange points, where they can remain stable for millennia. Acting as calling cards, such devices could alert their long-departed creators upon detecting intelligent life; conversely, the probes themselves could establish a dialogue with an emerging technical species. (I personally think that such a "machine intelligence" could be responsible for some UFO encounters. A similar hypothesis has recently been advanced by Richard Dolan, author of "UFOs and the National Security State.")

Since SETI is willing to look for ET artifacts in space, why not planetary surfaces? Perhaps if the disconcertingly human-like "Face" hadn't first been discovered and popularized, radio SETI's attitude toward "planetary SETI" (the search for ETI on planetary bodies such as the Moon and Mars) would be different. Cydonia, with its implied "terrestrial connection," has been neatly excluded from mainstream SETI research for no apparent scientific reason (NASA's erroneous "tricks of light" and bungled MOLA data notwithstanding).

Merging planetary SETI and mainstream radio SETI promises to advance objective efforts to detect intelligent alien life, even if eventual "contact" is one-way. The hoped-for signal sought by Jill Tarter may not be an electromagnetic emission from some distant sun, but a collection of geometric anomalies on a planet we've already pronounced as "dead."

Not long ago, a geologist involved in JPL's robotic exploration of Mars remarked that the proper way to view the fourth planet was to "expect the unexpected." We would be wise to apply this maxim to the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence as well.

Date: 3/28/03
From: Forrest Gehrke
Subject: Proposed binary dark star