AndrewKrause

*Statistically speaking. As Benjamin Disraeli is quoted by Mark Twain as saying, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. Statistics is actually a science, and as much as an art as a science at that. Whereas the rest of mathematics is concerned with running calculations on data to produce a singular fact, statistics takes data and manipulates it to consider the possibilities.

Most people don’t understand statistics. As with all things, people who don’t understand an issue will accept a statement regarding it based on their trust in the authority of the individual making the statement. I’m not going to waste your time explaining statistics. There’s a reason that statistics is taught as its own course and not neatly packed into algebra the way matrices, topology and sums-of-series are. There is no such thing as a primer in statistical analysis.

Shift gears. In 1977, an egghead radio astronomer named Dr Jerry Ehman was staring at printouts of data recorded from the Big Ear Telescope in Ohio when he came across the seemingly cryptic “6EQUJ5″. Like a vanity plate on a Porsche, you and I might stare at this plate until the traffic light turns green and not figure out what the hell it’s supposed to mean. But to Ehman, it meant “a loud very unnatural radio signal” of the type you’d only associate with a purposeful communication. Ehman scribbled “WOW!” onto the printout and circled the data. The signal, which lasted 72 seconds and originated in the constellation Sagittarius (this authors sign no less), and has not been heard since.

In the annals of SETI lore, this incident is referred to as the “Wow! Signal.” Could it have been an extraterrestrial intelligence? All of the behaviors we’d expect of a radio transmission emitting from an alien world are there. First, it was clearly fixed in the sky and thus ruling out satellites locked in geostationary orbit or passing overhead. The frequency was at 1.4 GHz with a bandwidth of less than 10 KHz. So… let’s just assume that out there was some intelligent life form communicating, presumably with another. The question worth asking is… why only one “Wow! Signal”?

There is a bit of mathematical poetry referred to as the “Drake Equation”. It attempts to predict the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that are in our galaxy. It’s not actually scientific at all, which is why I call it poetry. Each variable in the Drake Equation can’t be nailed down to a definitive number. For instance, the first variable is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Here is where I start quoting Dr. Carl Sagan: “billions and billions”. Seriously, conservative estimates put the number of stars in our small spiral galaxy alone at at least two-hundred billion. Expand the Drake equation to the entire universe, and that conservative estimate climbs to the brain-straining figure of seventy sextillion stars. (That’s “70″ with twenty-two zeroes after it.) In order to put this in human terms, Dr. Sagan would (and did) say “more stars in the sky then… grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.”

The Drake Equation continues to other variables, like the number of those stars that could have planets habitable by life. The “habitable” by life part can be constrained to look for carbon-based life forms, but that takes a somewhat arbitrary and chauvanistic view of life. Why don’t we limit it to mammalian life forms? Bipedal ones? Primates, even hominids? Wouldn’t we be shocked when our first contact with alien life is in the form of a silicon based life form with copper blood? (Yes, I’m talking about Star Trek:TOS episode 26 “The Devil in the Dark”, with the famous Bones line “Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a brick-layer!”)

In the end, the Drake Equation can either be lots of fun, or a huge disappointment. That’s because any way you play it, you can never have just one possible civilization. The smallest possible values give us “2″, which means we’re definitely not alone at this time. Realistic values put the figure somewhere in the mind-boggling range of 10,000 civilizations in our Galaxy alone which are capable of communicating with us. And yet… one “Wow!”?

The wonderful thing about science fiction is that it provide an avenue for otherwise serious scientists to explore possibilities we’d otherwise dismiss out of pragmatic necessity. If you talked about the likelihood of an advanced civilization capable of traveling through space and meeting other similarly advanced civilizations, engaging in war, commerce and fraternity… you’d be doing it in a padded room with a rather unfashionable garment involving padlocks. But, if you write it as a story and hand your script to Lucille Ball, you’ll find yourself at the helm of quite possibly the hottest story since the Bible. (Yes… Gene Roddenberry took his first script for Star Trek, which he described as “a Wagon Train to the stars” to Lucille “I Love Lucy” Ball, who was the head of DesiLu studios in the late 60’s. She personally green-lighted production of the pilot which was picked up by NBC and run for 100 episodes.)

While Roddenberry wasn’t technically a scientist, most scientists aren’t technically writers. So science fiction writers like Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Will McCarthy or Stanislaw Lem represent an interesting cross section of polymaths who bring the right mix of talents to both titillate the imagination and not completely offend the senses. The key to good science fiction is that you present your audience with a story that is not realistic, but doesn’t require you to significantly suspend disbelief.

If our science fiction is scientific enough, and our science isn’t too fictional, we have to accept that we’re not alone. We are, in fact, crowded with other intelligences. Why is there no evidence of them? Carl Sagan once said that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absense.” Humans tend to be egocentric and chauvanistic. When the scribes of old Judea put Genesis to paper for the first time, they wrong in the first chapter, twenty-sixth verse that we were created in His “likeness.” But the Hebrew word דְּמוּת (dymut) doesn’t actually mean to describe physical appearance, but rather carries a sense of spiritual and mental similarity. We are intelligent, thinking beings unlike 99.9995% of all other life on the planet. But there is evidence that our fellow primates and our marine cetacean cousins also possess intelligence and self-awareness on a primitive level.

We’re not even alone on our own planet if we’re open-minded enough to consider it, and capable of communicating in meaningful ways to creatures in our universe that aren’t human. Consider then that any civilization capable of communication may not necessarily do so with speech, or written word. Radio signals are troublesome even for us, so an advanced civilization may use directed energy such as laser/maser beams, ultra-low frequency radio waves or even the perturbations of gravity itself. In the latter case, we don’t even have the technology to detect gravity waves, much less create them. To paraphrase Jonathan Swift, ‘none are so deaf as those who do not hear.’