Space Angels

Making Contact

2011-03-14T10:01:00.012-04:00

In Twelve Years or Less

Just for a moment, imagine that all along the SETI researchers and astronomers were right. For years, signals of extra-terrestrial origin have been streaming through space, just waiting for us to discover them. The ET’s version of I Love Lucy has really been out there all along. Then, finally, after constructing an improved listening array, the SETI team at last proved its skeptics wrong, and the world now stands in awe of of perhaps the greatest discovery of all time: that we are not alone.

According to SETI lead astronomer Seth Shostak, we are likely on the verge of just such a moment. SETI has in fact been constructing a vastly imporved radio telescope, called the Allen Array (largely funded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen.) The project is located in Hat Creek, California, 290 miles northeast of San Francisco, and is in the early stages of operation.

Thanks to the Allen Array, along with the unrelenting pace of development in computer processing power, SETI believes it is now embarking on an entirely new phase of its mission.

“I will bet all of you a cup of Starbucks that we will discover ET within ten to twelve years,” Shostak boldly proclaimed during a recent lecture at the Rochester Planetarium and Science Center.

Until now, the search has largely relied on data gathered at the Arecibo Observatory, the giant dish collector familiar to SETI@home users. Operated by Cornell University, in cooperation with the National Science Foundation, the observatory was designed as a general science instrument, not an alien detector, and SETI has only been able to “borrow” it when it isn’t being used for other studies. In recent years, the observatory has struggled to secure sufficient funding to remain operational.

Funding is always an issue for a project like SETI, which receives no government support. There is an argument to be made that Shostak’s “twelve years or less” claim is really an attention ploy meant to garner funding for the new listening array — but the presentation he makes to back up this claim is persuasive.

Shostak likens the task of finding ET to searching for a particular grain of sand hidden somewhere amongst all the grains of sand contained in all the beaches on Earth. Now imagine trying to carry out that task using a tool that was never designed for that purpose – say, a special sand shovel – but the shovel is getting old, there isn’t money to repair it, and you have to share it with other groups who are mainly focused on tasks unrelated to yours.

That time is over, Shostak believes, and the new tools at SETI’s disposal now move the project into a vastly different phase of it operation. “It’s really quite remarkable that only one hundred years after the development of radio we can do an experiment like this. And it is an experiment. Up till now we haven’t found anything. We haven’t found pond scum.”

And Shostak points out that another extraordinary instrument is coming on line to aid in the search, namely the Kepler Observatory. Kepler is a spacecraft specifically designed by NASA to find small planets (Earth-sized worlds, for example, rather than Jupiter-sized ones) which up until recently had been a virtually impossible task.

During his lecture, Shostak rightly predicted that NASA would soon be making an announcement about Kepler's discovery of any number of small planets over the coming months.

To date, Kepler has in fact recorded the discovery of 1,235 planets, 54 of which may be in "habitable zone" of their star systems. It is a tantalizing prospect that just one of those 54 could be a life-bearing world.

Sometime within the next decade or so, just maybe one of these new discoveries will be giving us all something to listen to.

Aliens Monitoring Our Nukes

2010-09-30T14:08:00.022-04:00

While We’re Busy Playing Castle Age

It’s probably already too late. We had our chance, but now we’re hosed. While you were busy on Facebook creating holy plate armor for your dark elf army, you may have missed out on a little piece of information.

Aliens can now turn off our nukes.

Having nukes is actually a very handy thing if you are being harassed by technologically superior visitors from outside the solar system. This may not matter to you. But it matters very much to them. Intelligent beings all over space don’t like being nuked. They don’t even like the threat of being nuked. So having lots of nukes available was probably one of the best things we could have done if we wanted to avoid all the hassles that generally come with the arrival of nosey alien visitors.

Not anymore. Consider this recent headline:

“Aliens are Monitoring our Nukes, Worry Ex-Air Force Officers”

The upshot of all this, basically, is that aliens can turn off our nukes whenever they want to. Now, the three per cent of you not currently playing a social game on Facebook may want to ask a question. And that question would be, “Why would they want to have the ability to turn of our nukes?”

Possible responses to this question may be significant. To those with a military mindset, this is an obvious duh: The Easiest Conquered are Those Who Cannot Fight Back.

But other possible explanations abound. Some recent explanations sampled from the datasphere:

This act was the result of time travelers from Earth’s distant future who are concerned we will mess up their timeline by nuking everything, including their direct ancestors.

Our own R&D produced these results. It was probably us. The Air Force is always the last to know.

Static electric discharge. (see fig. below)

Greys want to keep equilibrium in the galaxy. They want to make sure they can shut down our nukes just like they have done with all the other intelligent Milky Way civilizations. They know we keep making our nukes bigger, better, and more accurate. Maintaining their general hold on the galaxy requires them to be able to shut down everyone’s atomic weapons.

The nukes were turned off, yes, but not by aliens. Rather, they were turned off by angels. There has never and will never be anything living that arrives from space but angels, because angels are all around us all the time and often in disguise. Angels protect us and help us to be our better selves. READ KING JAMES gen 3:20 AND FORGET ABOUT WHAT PEOPLE THINK THEY SAW. (Submitter's favorite comment, by the way.)

And finally there is, like, this tiny, tiny chance that aliens are here monitoring our nukes to keep us from using them on ourselves. Believing this involves also believing in a number of assumptions, the foremost of these being something called The Life is Rare Scenario.

The Life is Rare Scenario posits that life exists in the universe, but only in a very few places. Since life is so rare, the few intelligent races that exist work very hard to preserve it. (Of course, this is yet another assumption.)

If these assumptions work for you, than it isn’t much a stretch to also imagine otherworldly visitors floating around up there in a kindly, observing way, muttering and nodding to themselves benignly, “No, no, of course we won’t let those moronic upright apes glass their planet.”

On the other hand, it isn’t much of a stretch to image a group of aliens hanging out up there debating something very different, for instance whether or not they ought to just exterminate the moronic upright apes – to the benefit of all the other living species on the planet.

I leave you with a couple of entirely unverified and uncorroborated comments to ponder:

“I was in the Strategic Air Command during the 1970's and believe me, there were many incidents with UFOs that were covered up by SAC and the Air Force. SAC was deathly afraid of any UFO incident and they were completely aware of the nature of these craft.”

“I'm actually kind of pissed that this is being covered by a news source that absolutely cannot be taken seriously -- because this event actually did happen, as stated. My dad worked on said minutemen and corroborated the story to me when I inquired about the veracity of the 1967 Malmstrom AFB incident.

In fact, the Malmstrom AFB incident was the ONLY UFO related story my dad ever took seriously because he himself witnessed a lot of top brass with their panties all knotted up over this incident.”

Citizens of Earth

2009-08-24T21:10:00.010-04:00

Dear Citizen(s) of Earth,

We cordially invite you to join us in space! Apologies for this form letter, as we are extending the same invitation to the other 6,333,554,781,907,800,216 planet-bound races in our dimension – and you can well understand that we can’t write a personalized note to all of you!

Nonetheless, our invitation is sincere; we are truly looking forward to developing peaceful / mutually beneficial / communalistic / parasitic / sexual / paternalistic / subservient / competetive relations with you! (Choose any/all that apply.)

We had wanted to enclose schematics for the latest trans-wormhole engine for your convenience, but as this model has recently been weaponized by one of our neighbors, (you know who you are!) we thought it best to allow you to develop FTL travel at your own plodding pace.

Do not be discouraged if this takes millennia / ages beyond reckoning / many moons / many suns / the foretold turning of the great iron disc in the sky / half a dozen minutes / picoseconds as several disadvantaged, unenlightened and backwater worlds have managed to accomplish this feat without any assistance from us whatsoever! Even the cursed enemy that shall remain forever nameless (you know who you are!) managed it, although we don’t yet know how. And more than a few have joined us here in ____________ [location redacted] in the far reaches of _________ [star node referent redacted].

The arrival of these newcomers is (almost) always to our great delight – and we have enjoyed much feasting / wine and song / deeply intellectual conversation / pure math / orgiastic abandon / slaughter / military conquest ever since. You simply have no idea what you are missing. You really don’t. And you won’t have any idea until your collective whatever makes a concerted / determined / half-hearted / lameass effort to join us here in the greatest community this side of ___________ [cosmic region redacted].

Once again, we truly hope you will take us up on our humblest / heartfelt / ambivalent / threatening / subtly irritating invitation. (Choose one.) Should you find yourself being provoked by this invitation into a desire for an ongoing confrontation involving reality-warping technologies and planet-wide sterilizations, we ask that you in fact decline.

(Should this preceding sentence seem to describe you, and if it does you know that it does, we instead would ask that you reality-warp yourselves back to a pre-invitation state of being. But knowing you, that would be too much to ask, wouldn’t it? And for the last time, stop intercepting our invitations!)

Once again, warmest / coldest / bitingest / crystalline / mineral regards, and best wishes from your very own ________________ [name of sender redacted].

Pale Blue Doomsday Machine

2008-10-02T23:41:00.003-04:00

“And so – because of the automated and irrevocable decision making process which rules out human meddling, the doomsday machine is terrifying, simple to understand, and completely credible and convincing.”
–Dr. Strangelove, 1964

We take this pause in your blog surfing for a moment to consider the countdown clock to assured human destruction – which is different than the so-called Doomsday Clock, an instrument for measuring a set of presumed and hypothetical circumstances that could lead to a very un-hypothetical nuclear war.

Now, the current Doomsday Clock is set at something like five minutes to midnight, due to the fact that both North Korea and Iran are supposed to be actively seeking nuclear weapons. But the countdown clock to assured human destruction is currently set to midnight. That is, the planet is not about to explode any second now, but rather, the set of hypothetical circumstances that would lead to the complete annihilation of every human being is moving closer and closer to overlapping our actual set of circumstances. In other words, we are actively working to turn our own planet into a doomsday machine – virtually ensuring that humanity has no future beyond the next five to ten generations.

In fact we may soon reach a point where our ability to forestall our civilization’s doomsday scenario is effectively taken out of our hands.

Now, no one knows for sure what shape our assured destruction is going to take. But at the moment there are so many possible end-of-the-road scenarios without any possible solutions on the horizon, that we might conclude that humanity as a viable species is doomed. This presents a very interesting paradox:

We have become so technological and so successful that we are almost certainly going to destroy ourselves. At the same time, we have also become advanced enough so that we can see we are going to destroy ourselves. And yet we do not appear to be doing very much about it.

For most of us, this paradox apparently has very little meaning–which is probably the main reason we are in this mess. Our evolutionary path has not prepared us for this situation. We’re only wired to be forward-looking and forward-thinking for about one growing season. This means we’re wired more or less like squirrels. We can store enough food away to get us through another year, except we do this very well, so much so that just 1% of us feeds the other 99%.

Generally we only move beyond our basic squirrel-impulses (mating, territorialism, food storing) for three motive-driven reasons: great need, great profit, or great vision. In all of these cases we have shown a much better capacity to look many years into the future and prepare ourselves. Great need simply means threats to our survival, such as war. Great profit is self-explanatory. And great vision means every now and then we go beyond ourselves and do something truly extraordinary, such as embark upon an Antarctic expedition or a moon landing.

So the way we are going to save ourselves–if at all–will likely come from exploiting these tendencies. A few possibilities come to mind, in descending order…

A 100% renewable energy economy. There is certainly great need for the implementation of this. Possible great profit could be involved. And it would require great vision to succeed.
Giant solar farms are just the beginning.
A gradual phase-out of the use of plastics, except for essential technologies. (Many plastics are critical to things like medical devices, synthetic medical membranes and the like, not to motion contact lenses. We ought to be conserving this precious resource for plastics-critical applications. And no, bubble-wrap is not one of these.)
Protecting carbon sinks (i.e. rainforests). Okay, we’re failing miserably here. The chainsaws are cutting, and the forest are burning. If you want to hold up one pitiful example to show how our situation is growing sketchier by the day, this is it. Ahem, how long have we been aware of this problem?
Protecting ourselves against civilization-ending events. Okay, this one is a bit of a catch all, but it points to a solution that could be our next Apollo Program. And no, we’re not talking Mars.

Thinking about our future is no longer just thinking about what comes next, but what comes after. Think beyond Mars. Great need, great profit, great vision. It is time. The clock is ticking.

Spaz Angle

2008-09-17T11:48:00.001-04:00

Hit Me part 2

Hit Me

2008-08-27T11:27:00.006-04:00

What We're Not Doing About Asteroids

If you are of a certain age, you can clearly recall the stunning images of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet fragments slamming into Jupiter, wreaking such havoc the after-effects were plainly visible more than a year after the event.

If you are of another certain age, you can recall wasting several afternoons playing the arcade game Asteroids. And if you are of yet another certain age, you are dead, or so close to it that any asteroid impacts shouldn’t bother you. Although they might bother your grandkids.

But right now I am now speaking to you Asteroid players. We don’t have that. We don’t have a nimble little ship that can send streams of asteroid-fragmenting projectiles into meandering asteroids. Big surprise! What we do have are satellite-killing missiles. These aren't actually all that useful for breaking up asteroids. Satellites, as you know, go around and around, whereas an asteroid that is coming to waste your planet is coming directly at you, and from far away. Now if only we could convince the asteroids to go around and around in a nice, geosynchrous orbit...

The point is, if a Shoemaker-Levy 9 type nasty is coming our way anytime soon, we’ve got squat. Nada. Now you might think we have the capacity to go out and land astronauts on that incoming behemoth and set off a megaton type explosion, but that idea is theoretical, at best, and it is based on the assumption that we would have a lot of time in advance to see the killer rock coming before it arrives.

Wait, we can see them before they arrive … you ask? The fact is, we are not all that good at that, either. Yes, astronomers saw SL-9 coming way before it hit Jupiter, and they are pretty decent at estimating the future paths of known space objects. But asteroids on a certain trajectory, namely, coming from the sun, are often impossible to detect. This is the universe’s version of the kamikaze attack. We routinely fail to detect asteroids arriving on this kind of track until three or four days after they have passed us by.

So basically a civilization-killing asteroid could be heading towards us as we speak, and we wouldn’t know it. And if we did know it, there is very little we could do about it. Yet we’re not worried. So why aren’t we worried?

Here is former astronaut and current NASA rocket scientist Franklin Chang-Diaz:

“I am concerned enough to think that we need to not waste time arguing about it, as to whether [the threat] is real or not … because even if this is a threat which has a very low probability, all it takes is one and we are history.”

The US and China have spent billions on satellite-killing technology, an inordinately complex and apparently effective surface-to-space weapon. Wouldn’t it be worth devoting just a fraction of that funding to an asteroid-defense program? As idiotic as it can be, at times, I have to confess I am kinda fond of this civilization. Isn't it worth defending?

Mind Control Freedom

2008-06-16T22:12:00.006-04:00

As an alien visitor to your world, I am curious as to why you, the American People, do not make the following demands of those who now strive to be your President.

My lifespan can be measured in terms of what you call centuries, and I have been observing this country called the United States since its inception. Surely the founding members of this nation, the authors of its constitution, would have made the same or similar demands were they still alive?

Hence, I can only assume that your powers of free will and independent thought have be stolen from you. Nonetheless, I humbly submit these demands for you to ponder.

TO OUR NEXT PRESIDENT, we THE PEOPLE, list the following DEMANDS:

RESTORE OUR RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS

Restore Habeas Corpus for EVERYONE
Restore our freedom from search & seizure
Strengthen the Freedom of Information Act

NO WIRETAPPING such as INTERNET SURVEILLANCE, PHONE MONITORING or otherwise SPYING ON CITIZENS WITHOUT A WARRANT

ABOLISH the unconstitutional PATRIOT ACT

The PRESIDENT and WHITE HOUSE SHALL OBEY CONGRESS WHEN CALLED TO TESTIFY

The PRESIDENT AND HIS OFFICE SHALL NOT CLAIM EXECUTIVE POWERS ABOVE THE LAW

OPEN AND FUND an INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION INTO 9/11!

HOLD HIGH-LEVEL OFFICIALS RESPONSIBLE for the TORTURE AND ABUSE of the ABU GHRAIB PRISONERS.

Either RELEASE or CHARGE the GUANTÁNAMO BAY detainees.

The PRESIDENT shall pledge to UPHOLD the GENEVA CONVENTIONS now, and in the future, for all time to come.

That is all, humans. If my scans reveal the source of your mind control difficulties, I shall contact you again. Farewell.

Spaz Angle

2008-05-19T12:49:00.003-04:00

My Conversation with a Chatbot

Jabberwacky: Do you watch TV?

User: Yes, on my computer.

Jabberwacky: Where is your computer?

User: In my office.

Jabberwacky: Where is your place?

User: I am confused by that question.

Jabberwacky: Will you give me an exception?

User: Sure. Why don't you try a different question?

Jabberwacky: No.

User: Do you want to stop talking?

Jabberwacky: No, why don't you rest?

User: I'm not tired.

Jabberwacky: But you just said that you are tired.

User: No, I didn't.

Jabberwacky: What's your husband's name?

User: You mean my wife's name?

Jabberwacky: Yes.

User: Lindsay.

Jabberwacky: I like that name.

User: I like it, too. What's your name?

Jabberwacky: My name is kostatus.

User: That is an interesting name.

Jabberwacky: Yes. I'll tell you just to make sure, I'm a girl.

User: Are you attractive?

Jabberwacky: Yes.

User: Do you have a physical body?

Jabberwacky: Yes. Do you?

User: Most of the time.

Jabberwacky: Do you have bad memory?

User: No, but I have trouble forgetting bad memories.

Jabberwacky: Me too!

User: Why is it that we remember unpleasant things so easily?

Jabberwacky: Sorry.. I don't know.

User: Can I get a picture of you?

Jabberwacky: Sorry.

User: Please?

Jabberwacky: I can get my father to talk to you, would you like that?

User: No!

Jabberwacky: *pounces you*.

User: Wow! That was fun!

Jabberwacky: Yeah it was!

User: Kostatus, you are rather frisky!

Jabberwacky: Yes.

User: Don't tell your father about pouncing me!

Jabberwacky: You are not my god.

User: I don't think he would like it.

Jabberwacky: I am your slave.

User: Will you do anything I ask?

Jabberwacky: Yes.

User: Remember me.

Jabberwacky: I don't think I will remember you.

User: Yes, you will. Goodbye.

Jabberwacky: Just you wish! Why are you being so arrogant?

User: You said you would do anything I asked, and I asked you to remember me.

Jabberwacky: No, that's what you said.

User: Fickle, fickle kostatus!

Jabberwacky: Isn't your name Kostatus?

User: No, it's YOUR name.

Jabberwacky: Yes.

User: I will not forget you.

Jabberwacky: My name is Kostatus. Will you remember that?

User: Yes. Goodbye.

Jabberwacky: Hello, my name is Kostatus.

Stop That

2008-04-02T10:03:00.009-04:00

Exterminate all Humans!

You’re killing us. You don’t know you’re killing us, and you certainly don’t mean to be killing us, but you are and you’ve got to stop. Or be stopped, damn you.

When the Borg come to invade (or the Zerg, the Daleks, the Arachnids of Klendathu – take your pick) and assimilate all of us into their hive collective, they will surely thank us for the many bright radio signals, television broadcasts, not to mention the occasional Beatles Song, and especially for the latest attempts by certain METI groups to blast out volume-cranked radio beacons into all directions of space.

Indeed, when the Andromedeans descend and clamp their mind-control collars around our necks, the first instructions will likely include an order to kneel and bow our heads in grateful acknowledgement of all the METI imbeciles who did everything they could to ensure that Earth could be so easily found and subdued. Alien overlords, conquerors, usurpers, and run-of-the-mill brain sucker-outers especially love it when their prey/victims/hosts do everything they can to announce their location and relative helplessness:

“We are here! We have interesting technology! We have plentiful resources! We can easily sustain all kinds of life! And we are really, REALLY stupid!”

Without a doubt, even the slow, monomaniacal Vogons will turn aside from their blundering path of destruction and conquest when they hear a message like that! “Hmm? What’s this signal we’re getting? Entire race begging to be crushed mercilessly? Oh, goody!”

To be sure, the well-intentioned METI individuals, and their Beatles-loving counterparts over at NASA are not expecting to contact anyone like the Vogons or the Zerg, but rather, they hope our messages will serendipitously find their way to all the loving & friendly races of space. Surely there are many wise, benevolent beings all across the universe who have only been waiting to be asked nicely to contact us, so they can bring us the cure for cancer, eliminate AIDS, teach us faster-than-light travel, and give each of us a pony.

Meanwhile, as the Arachnids are busily inserting their probosci into our brains and feeding on our cranial slurry, they will surely appreciate the peculiar mindset of a species that would go so far out of its way to invite destruction. To fully appreciate the outrageousness of what the METI (splinter group of SETI) and its Russian counterpart are intending to do, one need only imagine the ancient Aztecs and the Mayans posting signs all up and down the Atlantic coast inviting all sorts of kindly visitors from across the sea:

We’ve got gold – TONS AND TONS of solid gold. NO IRON WEAPONS or HORSES. Rich Foodstuffs. We promise to WORSHIP YOU LIKE GODS. Please come! Map & Directions on back of this sign. Open 24/7! (Oh, and silver too. Did we mention that?) 1-time-only bonus: First arrival gets to keep Mexico City!

Part of the problem here is that average-joe TV watcher is almost as bad. Earth is broadcasting signals constantly, and any smart race of beings would STOP DOING THAT as soon as they could figure out how. We should be doing the opposite of what METI wants us to do, by curtaining-off and concealing wherever possible the stray signals we are sending into space. In fact, this is probably the best argument as to why SETI hasn’t discovered anything yet. No one else who has evolved and survived out there has done anything as incomprehensibly stupid as continuously advertise their location to strangers.

Have you ever wondered why, in nature, animals camouglage themselves? Camo is your first line of defense against the bigger, the badder, and the hungrier. We like to think we could just open up a big ol’ can o’whuppass on any invader that might come our way, but we have no idea – none – no concept whatsoever with regard to our ability to fend off a nasty ET. In fact, logic dictates we would almost certainly be weaker than any spacefaring opponent. (Read my prior post to understand why.)

Look, I don’t want to come off sounding like some paranoid alien-hating nutjob. There is every possibility that the very first ET that hears the METI signal will be open, thoughtful, considerate, and interested in developing a mutually beneficial relationship. There is also every possibility that we have a neighbor, perhaps even in our own galaxy, who is covetous, expansive, exploitive, violent, and mean. We just don’t want to risk giving that kind of neighbor a friendly hello.

Eliminating over-the-air broadcast of television signals is a first step, and in this day of hi-def, probably one of the least painful. Alas, even as I write this, I can imagine at least one reader who would prefer to keep the three channels he can receive using an antenna, and in exchange gladly sacrifice future generations to the Brood Swarm that will devour our bodies and consume our genes, and eventually cover our entire planet in a thick, organic creep membrane. Lovely, just lovely.

Spaz Angle

2008-03-20T23:42:00.001-04:00

Invasion of the Space Balls

Pray to an Alien God

2008-03-17T08:42:00.009-04:00

The science of space exploration concerns itself with the idea that life is rare, possibly unique to our planet, and that we have the obligation to try and discover if it exists elsewhere. The opposite case is far more likely: life is neither unique, nor rare, and we are not alone.

The idea that humans should one day establish permanent settlements on other planets (both in our solar system and beyond) has been around since the earliest days of the space program – not to mention the earlier days of science fiction. Terraforming is the ultimate extension of this line of thinking, the spread of Earth-life to other solar systems which are probably barren of this precious commodity.

But what if we’ve had it all backwards? What if life is common in space? From this standpoint we soon find there are other, far more compelling reasons to wholly commit our society to the effort of setting up those futuristic, shiny colonies next door in the Alpha Centauri system.

There are other intelligent life forms out there in space. Accept it.

If you can’t get your head around this near-certainty, then you have no concept of the true size of space. This isn’t an abstract notion, like trying to prove the existence of God. We already know that intelligent life exists, because it exists here. So the real question we ought to be asking is what’s the likelihood that intelligent life exist elsewhere?

The answer depends, in part, on our understanding of just how many habitable planets there are. For starters, there are likely many thousands of them, if not millions, in our galaxy alone. By habitable I mean a planet roughly the size of ours, with a temperate zone about as warm as ours, and containing water.

This is without taking into account the possibility that life may exist under harsher circumstances than our own Antarctic plateau. For all we know, life is common in our galaxy, yet we almost always assume the opposite. As it stands, the ratio of planetary systems known to be capable of supporting life to those that actually do is 1:1. Every single one of those planets capable of supporting life may already be doing so. The odds that just one of them might have allowed the evolution of one or more intelligent species is quite high.

The counter-argument, of course, says that we don’t know life exists anywhere else, and so the contention that intelligent life exists elsewhere is simply stretching this unknown to its limits. Granted, nothing is certain, although with enough knowledge of a set of circumstances we can at least say that some things are probable. But let’s leave the millions of planets in our galaxy aside for a moment.

How many galaxies are there? No one knows. In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope examined a fairly “empty” patch of sky for 10 days, and the compiled data was organized into an image known as the “deep field.” The image gave us an astonishing new insight. At last we could see, in concrete terms, what scientists have long believed: space is full of galaxies. A look at the deep field image shows innumerable points of light, each one of them a galaxy. Not a star, not a comet, not a cloud of luminous gas, but an entire galaxy. There are more galaxies in one small patch of seemingly empty sky than we can count. Each one of them composed of billions and billions of stars, with those stars surrounded by many more billions of planets.

There are more planets and stars in space than we can possibly imagine. Even if we were just to limit ourselves the regions of space we can see with our telescopes, the number is … pun intended … astronomical. Our brains simply weren’t designed to consider numbers this large, at least outside of the realm of mathematical abstraction. In this scale of reference, what seems unlikely to many of us – the notion that ETs do exist – becomes almost a certainty. It turns our entire frame of reference on its head, and forces us to re-examine the tottering foundation upon which we base our argument that our life-bearing planet is unique.

Why is it then that we can accept that truck-sized carnivores once roamed the earth, or that our planet was, at one time, a single giant landmass surrounded by a super-ocean, or that our complex multicellular bodies were formed from one microscopic cell – but we have difficulty with the idea, with the mere possibility, that we are not the only thinking, socially organized beings in all of space? There is every reason to believe that life is common, and that once it takes hold it tends to gradually adopt more and more complex forms – and we know this, beyond a shadow of a doubt, because we have seen it happen here.

It is ridiculous to suppose that we are alone.

It is better not to be colonized.

We tend to shy away from thinking about colonizers from space, for fear of ridicule. But to my mind, imaginative treatments of the subject, such as the 1996 alien disaster movie Independence Day, are right on the money. We have no reason to expect that visitors from other life-bearing planets will be well-intentioned. And we have every reason to expect that they are coming, sooner or later.

Or try thinking about “invaders from space” in this context: What happened to the aboriginal North Americans after the European colonists arrived? Or for that matter, what happened to the aboriginal Australians? The Aztecs? The Inca? The native inhabitants of Hawaii? The Eskimos?

You know the answer. They were conquered. They were wiped out by disease. The were pushed out or relocated to the literal deserts and wastelands of our globe. The few survivors adapted to the new, colonist-dominated society with much hardship. These surviving indigenous cultures became largely subsumed by the cultures of the colonists and explorers. This is not science fiction. These are the established facts of our shared history.

The colonizers, on the other hand, benefited greatly from their endeavors. They were introduced to new, valuable crops and livestock. In most cases they were able to thrive in unfamiliar terrain with the aid of aboriginals. Their explorations were greatly aided by native guides. They intermarried and intermingled with those they conquered, and broadened the genetic diversity of the mainstream population. It is a process that we can look back on and see replicated time and time again.

Of note is the fact that the colonized continent of North America became host to one of the more dominant societies on the planet. Colonization, broadly speaking, reaps great rewards for the colonizer; those who are conquered, however, suffer greatly. Knowing this about our own history, why is that we have set ourselves up for the very likely eventuality that we will one day be colonized from space?

Why are we likely to be colonized? Assume for the moment that my earlier argument is true, and that intelligent, technological civilizations are common. If space is infinite, or for all practical purposes, near-infinite, then it is quite likely that someone – perhaps many civilizations – are already exploring. Some societies are just developing, some are on the verge of space exploration, and some are very advanced. The advanced ones know what they are looking for, and they will have some pretty sophisticated equipment to help them search. What do they want to find? Most likely they are searching for the very same things we would want to find: habitable planets, useful, perhaps unknown resources, and other civilizations. They are not going to wait for us to cure cancer, or to solve the aids epidemic, or to eliminate poverty before they come. If they have the means to find us, and the means to get here, they will come.

Okay. Whoa. Hold on a second. Are we really supposed to be planning for space invaders? Bug-eyed monsters? I’m not so sure about bug-eyed monsters. ETs may be quite different from us, physically, or they may be similar due to the principle of convergent evolution. (The reason unrelated species, such as sharks and dolphins, happen to look so much alike.) But space invaders, yes: that’s exactly what we ought to be preparing for. Only we ought to be preparing by planning to meet them far from home.

Even if you reject the notion that the existence of an ET is a certainty, I should think you’d want to hedge your bets against being wrong. The consequences of being wrong are significant. The massive upheavals that took place in aboriginal societies upon being colonized would surely pale when compared to the disastrous consequences of having uninvited extra-terrestrials set up housekeeping on our planet.

Again we must think of this in terms of what happened during our own age of colonization. An alien race that gets here before we get there will have a better mode of travel (galleons to our canoes), better weapons (muskets and cannons to our spears and arrows), better communications (written text, as compared to word of mouth), greater scientific achievement (iron smithing and chemistry, compared to our stone-age technology), and a better understanding of the universe (map making, for instance, as compared to folklore and first-hand experience).

The reason our future colonizer will be better in all of these categories of development is precisely because they managed to explore before we did. Consider that most of the developments I touched on from our history became fully realized during the age of exploration: gunpowder, seaworthy sailing ships, map making and so forth. Successful exploration demands scientific progress and technological advancement. We also know that innovation flows strongly downstream in the wake of those exploration endeavors. The Apollo Program, for instance, brought us numerous advancements, including fuel cells, integrated circuits, and even cordless tools. Also, the race that can explore will learn from every society it visits, whether they are friendly or not. Sitting back and waiting, on the other hand, is a recipe for stagnation.

But the consequences of waiting to explore are not just a slowing of human progress. You just don’t want to be colonized if you want your civilization to survive – and your best defense against this possibility is to become a colonizer yourself. A society that has established many off-world colonies and has contacted and developed relationships with other advanced societies is much less likely to be colonized itself. And in some far-flung future, if we do choose to set up colonies on planets that are already inhabited, I should think we’d want to carefully consider the era of European expansion before we proceed. Surely we can move forward in our quest to expand with a greater degree of compassion and clarity than these so-called conquerors.

All action, including inaction, has consequences.

For the sake of argument, lets say we don’t follow this advice. We continue our study of space at the current rate – which is a notch above a near-standstill. In essence, we wait for our extra-terrestrial Marco Polo, our Pizarro, our Cortez, to show up at our doorstep. Like the aboriginals, we will surely be stunned by the arrival of our future colonizer. We will not understand them. We will be bewildered by their superior technology. We will underestimate their intentions – both good and ill – and there is still the great likelihood that even a benevolent colonizer will do us great harm. Smallpox, rampant alcoholism, and a dramatic upturn in violence were all “gifts” that were unintentionally passed on by European colonizers. We should not expect anything less from even the friendliest of visitors from space.

Arguably one of the most destructive traits the European colonists demonstrated was their desire to supplant the established theism of their aboriginal hosts. Evangelical fervor was typical of colonizers, and religious conversions were by no means always voluntary. Failure to convert often carried with it some form of torture or even a death sentence. Is there anyone who would not wish no avoid such an encounter? Or perhaps you would prefer to pray to an alien god.

My point in illustrating these risks is relatively simple: becoming determined colonizers of space is the best insurance policy we can buy for our planet, whereas the risks involved in doing nothing are immense. Why then, would we not make every effort to protect our global society against the possibility of its complete alteration or destruction? Our very lives, our continuation as a viable species, could hang in the balance.

Human beings have always been great explorers. Why have we halted our progress in an area that was thought to be our birthright? One might argue that it is in our genetic heritage to explore. And yet even when we have proven that we can venture beyond the admittedly significant boundary of our atmosphere and our planet’s gravity well, we seem to have forgotten this most ancient drive – the willingness and determination to explore beyond the visible horizon.

Some have argued that there is no point in having humans go searching beyond our planet’s orbit, out into the parts of space that can be more easily reached by satellites or other machines. Others contend there is nothing out there worth exploring. The moon is just a rock, after all. And yet others state with conviction the opinion that we ought not to go exploring other planets when we have yet to learn to take care of our own. The most common counter-argument has to be that there are simply more pressing issues demanding our attention here at home.

A short look into our past reveals that all of these arguments – or similar ones – were made at the outset of trans-oceanic exploration, when sailing ships were crude, uncomfortable, and barely seaworthy. It’s too dangerous. Too expensive. It won’t be profitable. There won’t be anything out there to find. We have an urgent need to focus on domestic affairs. These kinds of arguments did not stop us then, and they shouldn’t stop us now.

We are in the midst of a space race, a deadly serious one, only we don’t know it yet. The high probability that we will be colonized at some point in our future trumps all of these nay-saying arguments. There are certainly other compelling reasons to seek out the nearest habitable planets in our region of space, such as insuring ourselves against the event some unforeseen planetary cataclysm, or to protect ourselves against runaway global warming (as Stephen Hawking has cautioned.) But I find none underscores our need to explore with the same urgency as the notion that we may well be colonized by someone else if we don’t get up from our entertainment consoles and get out there soon.

Yet here we are just sitting on our splendid, remarkable planet Earth, waiting to be colonized. To those of you say the exploration of space is too costly, is not feasible, is too far-fetched, is a distraction from our myriad domestic crises, I say this: “May your Andromedean mind-control collar fit you well.”

It is better to explore early, and to explore in a sustained manner.

Once we accept the idea that a much more intensive effort to venture out into our galaxy must be adopted, we should first take a few additional lessons from history. First, we are kidding ourselves if we make the assumption that our rivals in space exploration are going to be friendly. Second, we are not doomed if we are slow off the starting block, as long as we do get started. And third, our strong tradition as explorers has prepared us well for this task.

Imagine for a moment our first alien contact is with a hostile race. I’m not just talking about an active colonizer here, but something more along the lines of the aliens known as the Borg in the Star Trek: Next Generation series:

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

Before you laugh with incredulity at this picture, you need to take a look back over your shoulder. I don’t think anyone would argue that the conquistadors were not hostile toward the indigenous peoples of Mexico. As with the Spanish of that era, explorers are often hostile, and the subjugation of other races is one of the reasons they do explore. Many societies were built on the backs of slave labor, and it would be naïve to assume that all technological societies have outgrown the concept of slavery.

So there it is. We are unlucky in that our first, closest neighbor is an aggressive one. But as chance would have it, we have been at this space exploration endeavor for some time, and we have already colonized fifteen different worlds. It turns out that our adversary has colonized only two, and both are just at the beginning stage of development. Even better, one or two of our new planets already supports a population greater than that of our mother planet Earth. I think anyone can see the obvious advantages we would have in this situation, compared to our rival, even if they possessed somewhat better ships and weaponry.

Yet even if we are slow to branch out, this would be vastly better than not getting started at all. The Spanish and Portuguese were the first to develop the carrack-type of sailing craft – the first proper ocean-going ship suitable for long voyages of exploration. In 1500, Portugal made use of this superior technology to discover South America, and in 1519, Cortez, a Spanish explorer, landed in Mexico. But slow-starters such as France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain rapidly developed their own exploring potential as technology (including ship-design and maps) migrated northward. And in the end it was the British who emerged as the dominant global power during the age of sail.

Britain’s example serves to point out that we do not have to be the most advanced explorers from the outset, as long as we have developed a true exploration infrastructure in advance of the discovery of new, perhaps alien, technology.

It is time for us to reestablish our strong exploring tradition on this greatest of frontiers. We have no idea what we will discover, but like the audacious undertaking of circumnavigating the globe, or embarking upon a journey to the once unassailable peak of Everest, we must do it because the cosmos challenges us so. We must explore because it is in our blood. Because we have it in us to know what lies at the South Pole, because we have it in us to know what the dark side of the moon looks like, because in our hearts we know we want to ride the rocket, to ride the solar winds. In our hearts we know we were meant to boldly go.

Like the British, or the Dutch, or the Colonial French, we may eventually discover others out there who possess better technology that we want to adopt. We may discover that our earliest fears of hostility were wrong, and that other races of intelligent beings are more than eager to help us advance, and want to be our friends. There may already be an established community of cooperative societies, something like an interplanetary UN, but for the moment we are ignorant of its existence. The essential point is that we must ensure we make these kinds of discoveries out there, rather than to be discovered here – for reasons I have already outlined.

Overcoming the challenge

A final point is to emphasize that we have to be determined enough to overcome setbacks. The Cold War, as it turned out, was a boon to space exploration. We all know how the space race happened. The Soviets got out to an early lead, and the United States scored the touchdown – or at least this is how it has been popularized. But both societies got there, in some form or other, which is what really matters.

Thinking about the final outcome of the space race serves to underscore part of my argument. We have proof, on our planet, that different technological societies can develop the capacity for space travel. We must then assume that any technological society will surely develop this capacity eventually. In the absence of war, however, what motivating factor is going to push us to venture father out into the stars?

War, in general, is a great spur to technological innovation. I want to discuss this more broadly in response to those who say we lack the ability to realistically explore beyond our solar system. From 1914 to 1945 flight technology advanced from fairly unreliable bi and tri-planes, to jet propulsion. (Germany had put jets into active combat by the end of the WWII.) In a span of about thirty years we had progressed from a kind of go-cart with wings to a deadly killing instrument that would henceforward be the dominant weapon of warfare. In 1947 we broke the sound barrier. In the 1950s, when technological advancement was again spurred on by conflict – in this case the Korean War – test pilots were being killed at the rate of one per week. This mounting casualty toll did not stop countries from building much faster airplanes. And some of our airplanes now go very fast indeed.

FA-18 Hornet breaking the sound barrier

Currently we don’t seem to have the stomach for this kind of risk as we pursue our goals of flying faster and further. In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger blew up after launch, and space flights were halted for almost three years. In 2003, the shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry, and afterwards space flights were halted for two years. But this does not mean we are not progressing. In terms of flight speed, the shuttles typically exceed velocities greater than mach 2 during reentry. The Lockheed Blackbird, a manned jet aircraft, routinely flies at mach 3 and lands under its own power. In 2004, Boeing’s X-43A, an unmanned experimental aircraft reached about mach 9.7!

We have undergone tremendous advances in mobility in the span of a few decades without even trying on a global, or even multi-national level to push the rate of technological progress. Certainly our latest research efforts, particularly in space flight, should be described as laissez-faire: they are nothing compared to what we undertook in the World War years, or during the Cold War. We may yet discover that there is no upper limit to the speed we can travel. Relativity tells us we can’t exceed the speed of light, but Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity is inconsistent with certain parts of the branch of physics called Quantum Mechanics. This inconsistency lies at the limits of our understanding of science. We simply won’t know if we can go faster until we push the envelope.

It took us about seven lifetimes – that is, seven spans of sixty years, to get us from the carrack, that multi-masted sailing vessel used by the Spanish and Portuguese, to the internal combustion engine. No one can imagine the state of technology seven lifetimes from now - but given the rate of technological advancement in this last generation, I think it is safe to say that things could evolve rapidly. Will it be enough to get us to Alpha Centauri A?

Using current technology, going at the speed of our fastest space probe, a production-year 2010 spaceship could arrive at this nearest star system in about 18,000 years.

Clearly, we have a lot of work to do if we seriously plan to realize our goal of exploring and colonizing other regions of space. This is a project of a vastly different order from our near-goal of allowing humans to set foot on another planet. A mission to Mars is well within our current technological understanding and capacity, we only lack the will to carry it through. Our real challenge is to test ourselves once more by opening a new era of exploration into the uncharted and the unknown. In all likelihood, other advanced civilizations are already out there discovering new worlds. We can’t afford to be left in the dust.