For awhile (before upgrading to OS X), I had the SETI screensaver on my main working machine. Sometimes I would fall into a reverie watching as Fourier transforms and other arcane algorithms sifted throught the cosmic white noise seeking intimations of intentionality. How wonderful to be the person whose spare CPU cycles provide us the first sign of alien intelligence!
It's my belief that we will not fully mature as a species or even a biosystem until we know that we are not alone. We need an encounter with the truly Other to know ourselves.
At NASA, the search of extraterrestrial life is gaining momentum. A whole new generation of spacecraft designed to look for planets and assess their life-bearing qualities is on the drawing board, according to a New York Times article.
At best, a distant planet would appear as a faint dot, a single pixel, in such instruments. What to do with those precious photons has become a cottage industry among astrobiologists. Dr. Turner of Princeton invited audience members to imagine what they could learn from Earth were it shrunk to a point. As Earth rotated, geography and weather would cause its brightness to vary. The more complex a planet's so-called light curve, he said, "the more interesting" the planet.
Another tool astrobiologists could use to sense life on that dot is spectroscopy, breaking down the light into its component wavelengths where the signatures of individual elements and molecules in the planet's atmosphere can be seen. Atmospheric oxygen, which on Earth was produced and maintained by photosynthesis of plants and bacteria, would be the "most reliable" indicator, Dr. Beichman said.
Another is plant leaves, whose cell structure produces a spectral feature known as "the red edge," said Dr. Sara Seager, an astronomer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Dr. Seager said that Galileo spacecraft had detected the "red edge" effect during a 1990 flyby of Earth on its way to Jupiter. In a 1993 Nature paper, a group of scientists led by the Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan concluded that the red edge combined with abundant atmospheric oxygen and radio signals constituted "evidence of life on Earth without any a priori assumptions about its chemistry." The red edge also shows up strongly in spectral measurements of Earthshine reflected off the dark parts of a crescent Moon by Dr. Neville J. Woolf of the University of Arizona, reported Dr. Wesley Traub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
There are some who argue that if we knew that life was abundant in the universe we would be even more careless with the fragile ecosystem we've got (after all, if we break this one, we wouldn't be extinguishing all life, everywhere). I wonder. I suspect that, tribal creatures that we are, we would work harder to preserve and protect our particular life-system's identity, so as not to disappear into the vast universal ocean as just one more bio-drop.
4:12:45 PM
Meet the Neighbors
"Everyone needs to be alert to this threat. Your assistance is essential."
I've been living in the same apartment building for 8.5 years now. In many ways I've enjoyed the anonymity ~ but by now I actually have met each of the 4 residents of my end of the hall. I don't remember all of their names, but at least I know them on sight.
Now, meeting the neighbors is not only neighborly, it's the patriotic thing to do. Every time I start to forget, something else comes along to remind me that things have changed.
Write to me!
