How SETI Believers Avoid Depression

It’s hard to look at nothing for 60 years,
and then have your biggest hope dashed

Some jobs demand patience. Fire lookouts may spend many months, maybe even years, stationed alone on lonely fire towers waiting for a puff of smoke to rouse them. To pass the time, they may read books or browse their computers (if they have internet access) or engage in activities like exercise before scanning the horizon again. The reward, though, is the payoff of sounding the alarm as early as possible to warn their fellow citizens of a wildfire. Citizens are happy to pay them for this lonely career choice.

Pity the SETI lookout by comparison. Even though data collection is automatic now, as radio telescopes routinely scan the heavens for anomalies that might suggest an alien signal, SETI lookouts have had almost nothing to look at. One of the anomalies that made a lookout jump out of his chair and write Wow! on a data sheet has just been explained as not so special.

The Wow! Signal Deciphered. It Was Hydrogen All Along. (20 Aug 2024, Universe Today). Evan Gough writes about the day that a radio astronomer found a strong signal in a computer printout from a radio telescope named Big Ear. Nobody had ever seen such a strong but brief burst like that.

In 1977, Big Ear detected a peculiar signal that’s taken on a life of its own: the Wow! Signal. The Wow! Signal was a strong narrowband radio signal right near the frequency of neutral hydrogen. The Big Ear telescope is long gone now, but the effort to understand what the signal is lives on.

The signal lasted the full 72-second window in which Big Ear was able to observe it. A few days later, astronomer Jerry R. Ehman was looking over the data when he saw the signal on a computer printout. Astronomers had never seen anything like it, and he wrote “Wow!” beside it, and the name has stuck ever since.

The article includes a photo of Ehman’s Wow! in red ink on the printout. Now, 47 years later, Wow! has turned to Whoops. Researchers examining that data set and other more accurate ones since have figured out what caused that flash. It was hydrogen after all, Gough writes.

The researchers say that what Big Ear saw in 1977 was the transient brightening of one of several H1 (neutral hydrogen) clouds in the telescope’s line of sight. The 1977 signal was similar to what Arecibo saw in many respects. “The only difference between the signals observed in Arecibo and the Wow! Signal is their brightness. It is precisely the similarity between these spectra that suggests a mechanism for the origin of the mysterious signal,” the authors write.

Hydrogen is not particularly intelligent. ID advocates would argue that the properties of atoms are, however, precisely tuned for life. In that sense hydrogen atoms are intelligently designed.

Astronomers might finally have explanation for mysterious Wow! signal (21 Aug 2024, New Scientist). Alex Wilkins adds his comments to that “most hopeful sign of alien communication yet.” An embedded video by Sam Wong, light-hearted but informative, surveys history of SETI and the ways it has evolved (pardon the expression) over the years in terms of strategy and philosophy. Wong remains balanced on the possibility of life or the opposite possibility that we are alone. Maybe they’re already here. If so, Wong jokes, he can offer them a discount on subscriptions to New Scientist.

Wilkins spoke with another astronomer who mentioned that bright, exploding objects like magnetars have been discovered since 1977. It’s not even necessary that a cloud was aligned with such an object to brighten it as an optical maser when Big Ear detected it. The telescope may have simply observed the magnetar itself.

Drake Equation (SETI Institute). N is the number of advanced civilizations. Almost all the other factors are unknown.

Are we alone? Intelligent aliens may be rare, new study suggests (20 Aug 2024, Space.com). Report Keith Cooper engages two astronomers, David Kipping and Geraint Lewis (co-author of A Fortunate Universe with Luke Barnes; see 14 July 2022 commentary), in a fact free speculation party about what might be out there. They reduce the Drake Equation to a simplified “steady state” version which is no less a piece of guesswork than Drake’s original. It only imagines a ratio between birth and death rates for extraterrestrial civilizations (ETIs), neither of which is known. Science fiction lovers might enjoy the article, but without data, it is not science. The discussion is filled with perhapses and maybes. Even so, they conclude that intelligent aliens may be rare in the universe.

So what do SETI enthusiasts do to avoid depression? Here are things we have found them doing. Some of these are mentioned in Sam Wong’s video. Others are ones we have observed in 23 years of reporting about SETI.

• • Grow SETI into Astrobiology. That gives them more to look for.
  • Don’t just look for live ETIs. Look for dead ones that left behind the ruins of their cities.
  • Look for alien craft instead of radio signals.
  • Blame artificial intelligence for the failure to make contact (The Conversation, 8 May 2024).
  • Learn the art of fundraising. Find rich benefactors who will keep lending them more money (22 July 2015).
    
  • Write children’s books to motivate a new crop of SETI-ologists who will value imagination over facts.
  • Love Darwin as the greatest scientist in history.
  • Sing “Imagine” until a trance brings visions of little green men.
    
  • Attack intelligent design for supposing that SETI depends on ID principles.
  • Avoid the Bible at all costs. SETI-ologists must never think seriously about a worldview with purpose and plan.

Exercise: Contribute your ideas for activities that lonely SETI lookouts can do to prevent boredom and depression.