Endless Life Checks: Life Check# 24 Space war is coming — and the U.S. is not ready

Space war is coming — and the U.S. is not ready

‘We are now approaching a point where “Star Wars” is not just a movie,’ one government adviser warns.

• War is coming to outer space, and the Pentagon warns it is not yet ready, following years of underinvesting while the military focused on a host of threats on Earth.
• Russia and China are years ahead of the United States in developing the means to destroy or disable satellites that the U.S. military depends on for everything from gathering intelligence to guiding precision bombs, missiles and drones.
• Now the Pentagon is trying to catch up — pouring billions more dollars into hardening its defenses against anti-satellite weapons, training troops to operate in the event their space lifeline is cut, and honing ways to retaliate against a new form of combat that experts warn could affect millions of people, cause untold collateral damage and spread to battlefields on Earth.
• “We are now approaching a point where ‘Star Wars’ is not just a movie,” said Steve Isakowitz, CEO of The Aerospace Corp., a government-funded think tank that serves as the military’s leading adviser on space.He said the U.S. can no longer afford to take its dominance for granted."That supremacy in space has enabled us to have the world’s greatest war-fighting capability ... whether it is our soldiers on the field, our drones that fly overhead, our bombers that travel around the world, intelligence we collect," he told POLITICO. "More and more every day, literally, we become more dependent on it."And our adversaries know that," he added in an interview.

Americans' fears of a possible Soviet military advantage helped inspire the first space race after the Sputnik launch in 1957, and former President Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program in the 1980s sought to create a space-based shield against a nuclear missile attack. In recent decades, though, space has mostly been a realm for peaceful exploration and collaboration, typified by the Russian rockets that carry American astronauts to the International Space Station.

But the worry that cooperation could turn to confrontation has been in the background for years. A 2001 report issued by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that an attack on space systems during a conflict “should not be considered an improbable act.”

“If the U.S. is to avoid a ‘Space Pearl Harbor,’ it needs to take seriously the possibility of an attack on the U.S. space system,” the report said.Some experts speculate that military leaders never followed through on the warnings, in part because the terrorist attacks later that year drew far more attention to what resulted in two ground wars in the Middle East.One sign of the new urgency is President Donald Trump’s recent call for establishing a “space force” — a separate military branch responsible for ensuring American supremacy in space, a role now primarily played by the Air Force.

“My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea,” Trump said last month. He added: “We have the Air Force, we’ll have the space force."

A model of the Soviet Earth satellite Sputnik 1 is on display at the Prague Czechoslovakia exhibition on Oct. 7, 1957. The actual Sputnik 1 capsule was launched by the Soviet Union three days earlier, starting the first space race with the United States. | AP Photo

Already, the Air Force, which oversees an estimated 90 percent of the military’s space operations, regularly conducts space war games, including one in which troops simulate how to attribute potential attacks on U.S. satellites. One that took place last year was set in 2027 and included international partners from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Army soldiers also now regularly undergo training to operate in the field as if their GPS signals went dark.
Meanwhile, Trump's new National Security Strategy, issued late last year, designated space a “vital interest” for the first time and directed military to “advance space as a priority domain."
“Any harmful interference with or an attack upon critical components of our space architecture that directly affects this vital U.S. interest will be met with a deliberate response at a time, place, manner, and domain of our choosing,” it says.
Trump's attitude has made a big difference, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told POLITICO.
"We have a president who has said now, publicly, that we have to expect that space will be a war-fighting domain," Wilson said in an interview. "That’s a very big deal."

The Trump administration’s latest budget request seeks $12.5 billion for military space efforts — not including secret projects. One focus will be what Wilson calls a "more dependable architecture" for the four Air Force satellites designed to provide early warning of missile launches.

"We stare at the Earth and look for the telltale signs of a rocket launch and within seconds, detect that launch and detect where it’s heading and alert the National Command Center," she explained. "So whenever the television shows that picture of North Korea launched a missile, that arc actually comes from the Air Force."


Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson speaks about the need to invest in the future of space operations at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in 2017. | Wayne A. Clark/U.S. Air Force

A major focus of the new effort will also be defending the Air Force's 31 Global Positioning System satellites.
"The Air Force provides GPS for the world, for about 1 billion people every day," Wilson said. "The timing signal for the New York Stock Exchange comes from the Air Force GPS satellites. If you’ve gone to an ATM machine, that is connected to GPS satellites for the timing signal so you can’t simultaneously take money out of two ATM machines. GPS enables Uber Eats, all kinds of things."
"In this budget," she added, "we’ve proposed to upgrade GPS to what we call GPS III, which is more resistant to jamming."

In some ways, GPS is already under assault. During the Iraq War, forces loyal to Saddam Hussein used electronic jammers to try to block the signal for precision-guided munitions that relied on GPS for targeting, according to Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, which promotes sustainable and peaceful uses for space.

More recently, Russia has used GPS and satellite jammers to try to disrupt space communications in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, Weeden said. “In that sense, it’s already a part of conflict on Earth."
The Pentagon is also making new investments in technologies that allow the military to track, in real time, all space assets and ensure that the two dozen military communications satellites rely on an advanced frequency that cannot be jammed.

"We must expect that war of any kind will extend into space in any future conflict, and we have to change the way we think and prepare for that eventuality," Air Force chief of staff Gen. David Goldfein told the Air Force Association, an industry group, in February.

Some still think it's not enough. War in space "is going to happen,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, the Alabama Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, in an interview. “It’s just a matter of whether it happens in the next couple of years or the next five or six years.”

He said he worries about whether the Air Force is making space enough of a priority. “They always say, ‘We got this, we’re planning for this in the future,’" Rogers said. "But when you ask them to prioritize space this year, they say they can’t. People have to remember when it comes to fighting a war, our eyes and ears are in space. We can’t let adversaries take our eyes and ears out.”

Air Force chief of staff Gen. David Goldfein gives a talk about innovation during the Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium in February. “We must expect that war of any kind will extend into space in any future conflict, and we have to change the way we think and prepare for that eventuality.” | Wayne A. Clark/U.S. Air Force

When the Pentagon talks about a space war, it doesn’t mean troops in celestial camouflage, maneuvering with jet packs and targeting the enemy with laser guns. The conflict could take many different — and largely silent — forms, ranging from jamming a GPS satellite to temporarily blinding a sensor with a laser or relying on a cyberattack to disrupt services.


Then there is the potential for an actual physical attack — with a missile or laser — to destroy space assets. Some experts worry the most about that scenario, which was exemplified by a 2008 test in which China tested an anti-satellite laser to blow up one of its own satellites.

That kind of space war would impose especially heavy costs on the U.S., because each such explosion creates debris that will linger forever — including the millions of pieces left over from that Chinese test. Even small pieces of matter traveling at 17,000 mph can do serious harm to the satellites that the United States so relies on. For example, a fleck of paint the size of a thumbnail once hit the 6-inch-thick windshield of one of NASA's space shuttles and went about 3 inches into the glass, an Air Force official said.

No way exists to clear away the lethal clouds of space junk that a shooting war would create.
“If deterrence fails, we lose,” the Air Force official said.

That means that if shots are fired in space, the United States may not respond in kind and instead might fight back through other means — like a cyberattack or political retaliation — to avoid creating more space debris, Brig. Gen. John Shaw, the director of strategic plans, programs, requirements and analysis at Air Force Space Command, told reporters. “We have to be prepared ... for war to extend into space, but we’d like not to do it."

But all the talk of an inevitable conflict raises concerns that the world may be facing the worst kind of space race — one that only heightens the chances of a conflict back on Earth.Some of the efforts underway could also violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, signed by the United States and most other nations.




In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson signs a proclamation declaring an international treaty barring nuclear weapons and military bases from outer space and prohibiting any nation from claiming sovereignty in space. The treaty was signed by 13 nations. | Harvey Georges/AP Photo

"The Outer Space Treaty very clearly says that space is only for peaceful purposes," said James Vedda, senior policy analyst at the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at The Aerospace Corp. and a noted expert on the 1967 pact.

Cassandra Steer, acting executive director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, said she has noticed "a discernible shift in international rhetoric” on the topic, as well as a lack of transparency by all the nations involved about their preparations for space conflict.

The result is "a cyclical escalation which has led some commentators to describe this as a conceivable return to a Cold War-type arms race," said Steer, whose center is hosting a closed-door meeting this week of leading government and industry experts about the "weaponization of outer space."

"An armed conflict in space would be catastrophic for all players," she added, "including neutral states, commercial actors and international civil society."

Others are urging the Trump administration to think more carefully about its military space policy.

Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security at the Naval War College, takes issue with the notion that space can be treated like any other battle zone.

Endless Life Checks: Life Check# 23 New Instrument May Aid Search for E...

Endless Life Checks: Life Check# 23 New Instrument May Aid Search for E...: For 2 weeks on the Greenland ice cap, scientists tested an instrument that might help us find life on icy moons with oceans beneath their c...

Life Check# 23 New Instrument May Aid Search for Extraterrestrial Life

For 2 weeks on the Greenland ice cap, scientists tested an instrument that might help us find life on icy moons with oceans beneath their crusts.

A researcher looks over the Greenland ice cap, a “frozen ocean.” Eleven scientists just returned from a field campaign testing an instrument that can scrutinize holes in ice for signs of life. Someday, such an instrument might find its way to Europa or Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael J. Malaska

Ocean worlds are on planetary scientists’ minds. More and more, evidence rolls in about the potential habitability of ice-covered bodies like Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The findings point to heat-driven processes in their subsurface oceans that could support life. Scientists are now beginning to wonder: Could the search for life end on one of these icy satellites?

Assuming humanity does land a spacecraft on Europa or Enceladus, any evidence of life it might uncover would receive heavy scrutiny. In a recent report on a possible landing mission to Europa, scientists devoted multiple chapters to discussing the kinds of evidence they’d need—like finding amino acids and other organic molecules in patterns similar to those in organic matter on Earth.

The idea would be to include a WATSON-like instrument on a lander bound for Europa, Enceladus, or even Mars’s polar ice caps.But even before these signatures can be detected by a probe or scrutinized by researchers in a lab, scientists need an instrument that can take data directly from a hole drilled into an icy surface.

Now scientists at NASA have begun to test such an instrument, a culmination of 20 years of technological development, called the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and Engineering, or WATSON. The idea would be to include a WATSON-like instrument on a lander bound for Europa, Enceladus, or even Mars’s polar ice caps, said Rohit Bhartia, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and a WATSON team member.

Bhartia and a group of scientists recently returned from a 2-week field campaign in southern Greenland, where they tested out WATSON in holes they drilled into the Greenland ice cap.

“What we were doing in Greenland has never been performed before,” Bhartia said. “The technology was simply not available.”

Frozen Ocean

Mike Malaska said that ice poking out of the landscape reminded him of waves or shark fins. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael J. Malaska

Each day of the trip, the team would greet the Greenland morning from their dormitories at the Kangerlussuaq Science Support Facility, which hosts teams of scientists conducting research. They’d load their equipment into a couple of trucks and drive about an hour onto the ice, where they’d spend several hours drilling, looking for new sites to drill, or analyzing boreholes with WATSON.

For Mike Malaska, another WATSON team member and planetary scientist at JPL, the trip was “epically awesome.” It was his first experience conducting field work on a large ice cap.

“It’s hard to put it into words, but you just felt the vastness and largeness of the landscape,” he said. The wind- and Sun-sculpted peaks of ice poked up like shark fins, making the icy scenery look like a “frozen ocean.”

Each fresh snowfall or cloudy sky changed the scenery to dramatic effect, Malaska said. “Every direction we looked it was just an incredible beautiful vastness that couldn’t be captured by a photo; it had to be experienced in person,” he said.

Science on Ice

The WATSON instrument analyzes a drill hole, using fluorescence/Raman spectroscopy to detect organic molecules. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Rohit Bhartia

The researchers set out to study the kinds of signatures life leaves in the ice, like organic molecules or even physical alterations, which will help future scientists evaluate potential evidence for life elsewhere in the solar system, Bhartia said.

Scientists know that microbes on Earth can live under, inside, and around glaciers, but they can’t do any analysis in the field because the technology doesn’t yet exist. Currently, researchers remove an ice core, package it, ship it thousands of kilometers, and study it at a lab bench. Not only can this contaminate the core, but it also leaves out important context about the environment in which the core was found, like how microbes got into the ice: Was it through a subglacial lake? An aboveground fracture?

Enter WATSON, an instrument that can analyze the environment surrounding a core. After the researchers drilled into the ice, they lowered WATSON—a long, silver tube attached to a tripod—into the hole to analyze its walls and hunt for signs of microbes. WATSON contains an instrument called a fluorescence/Raman spectrometer that can detect organic molecules in the ice. It does so by zapping the walls of the borehole with an ultraviolet laser that excites some molecules into a higher-energy state, Malaska said. The molecules then return to their original state, emitting the excess energy as photons. The device collects and measures the energies of those photons to determine what kinds of organic molecules are present on the inner surface of the borehole. It also detects molecules by looking at how much they scatter or change the light of the laser. Other components of WATSON create a visible map of that surface that scientists can overlay with the spectrometer data.

Scientists extracting a core from the ice. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael J. Malaska

Once it is fully operational, WATSON should be able to rapidly combine these data sets to identify regions of interest within the walls of the borehole. The combined data set will reveal the distribution of the molecules to help scientists conducting these field tests learn more about the many kinds of signatures that indicate the presence of microbial life, Malaska said.

Next Steps

The April campaign was only the first step in testing WATSON, a step Bhartia called “wildly successful.” WATSON functioned as intended—quite a feat, as it was designed, fabricated, tested, and deployed within less than a year, Bhartia said. WATSON generated heaps of data about the organic molecules within the test boreholes. The researchers also collected ice cores from the locations where they drilled, which they will analyze in the coming months at Montana State University in Bozeman. There, the researchers will use the core data to verify WATSON’s data.

The team is currently “feverishly analyzing” their data and preparing for more Greenland field campaigns in 2018 and again in 2019, Bhartia said. If all goes as planned, on those future trips, the researchers will have integrated WATSON with a drill to test the feasibility of the fully operational instrument..

B#23

Endless Life Checks: Life Check# 22 Two Large UFOs Photographed Over Th...

Endless Life Checks: Life Check# 22 Two Large UFOs Photographed Over Th...: Two large UFOs have been seen flying over Chelmsford Onlookers were baffled as to what they were looking at ...

Life Check# 22 Two Large UFOs Photographed Over The United Kingdom

Two large UFOs have been seen flying over Chelmsford

Onlookers were baffled as to what they were looking at

A man has described his surprise at seeing two large UFOs in the sky over Chelmsford.

The resident, who did not want to be named, saw the objects in the air over Manor Road where he lives on Monday afternoon (July 17).

The two UFOs, which were different shapes, were first spotted by a group of people in the street just outside the city centre.

The man who contacted Essex Live said he was in his garden when he saw a small group of passers-by staring up into the sky.

Multiple witnesses had no idea what they were looking at

"When I looked up I saw two large objects in the sky. They were jet black underneath. They were quite big and quite high up. They were sort of rolling over and over in the sky. At first I thought they were bits of a large balloon but they didn't move like that.

"Then I wondered if they were bits of plastic that had got up into the sky but they were moving faster than the wind which didn't make sense. One was almost a cylinder shape and the other was longer. It was very strange.

"There is no way they were aeroplanes. At this point I rushed indoors to get my camera and when I came back they had moved a bit further away but I managed to get a few snaps.

The objects were said to be moving faster than the wind.

"I have never seen anything like it before. I have no clue what they were. They seemed to be almost linked together as they kept at roughly the same distance apart the whole time.

"I watched them move off into the distance as they headed towards the cricket ground but then I lost sight of them. I wouldn't like to say what they were, I really have no idea."

The man has since showed the photos to "six or seven" people and no one has been able to hazard a guess at what they might be....

B#22

Endless Life Checks: Life Check# 21 The Science of Ufology Is Undergoin...

Endless Life Checks: Life Check# 21 The Science of Ufology Is Undergoin...: Close Encounters: Why UFOs Are Having a Moment A new biography on Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a scientist who became c...

Life Check# 21 The Science of Ufology Is Undergoing a Metamorphosis

Close Encounters: Why UFOs Are Having a Moment

A new biography on Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a scientist who became convinced that we truly could not identify some objects in our skies, opens up new questions about UFOs.

When the unassuming turn of phrase "unidentified flying object" was coined in the 1940s, it was intended to suggest that the objects in question were nothing more mysterious than a rogue weather balloon or an unfamiliar aircraft. UFOs have since become synonymous with aliens, from cartoon flying saucers to abduction stories, to X-Files-style conspiracy theories – in the popular imagination their mystery has been solved, UFOs equal aliens, whether you're a true believer or not. This unshakable association came to be despite the diligent work Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a scientist who became convinced that we truly could not identify some objects in our skies, and kept pushing throughout his life for a scientific explanation, while keeping open every possibility, some of them way further out there than little green men.

Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs, a new book by Mark O'Connell, serves as a biography for both the modern UFO phenomenon and for Hynek, an astronomer and professor at Northwestern University who died over 30 years ago, but whose ideas make him one of the most surprising scientific figures of the 20th century. The book reveals an academic committed to rigorous, methodical study, but whose deep intellectual curiosity also harbored a mystical side, intrigued by Rudolf Steiner's concept of "supersensible knowledge" and the idea of a universe composed of many dimensions. By the time of his death in 1986, he was much more interested in the idea that UFOs might be evidence of interdimensional overlap or proof of a Jungian collective conscience, than the comparatively quotidian concept that they are vehicles carrying visitors from faraway planets.

Hynek's struggle to properly inform the public through a dedication to the scientific method, while also embracing the very edges of what is possible strikes a chord today, in an era rife with a deep mistrust of the government and of mainstream science. Conspiracy theories have moved from the fringe since we stopped agreeing on what constitutes a basic scientific fact, and there are more than a few big ones involving the coming alien takeover and of course, NASA, which sits at the intersection of science, government and outer space.

Just last week a NASA spokesperson told The Daily Beast, in all seriousness, that the agency does not have child slaves laboring on Mars, in response to an Infowars segment claiming otherwise. The Disclosure Movement believes that governments around the world have already been in contact with alien intelligence and have suppressed this information from the public, and no, Trump would not be tweeting about it because the President is kept out of the loop in this scenario, says O'Connell. This is deep state stuff. Even the ever-pragmatic Hillary Clinton vowed to release classified information on UFOs and aliens while being interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel last year during her campaign. The unknown and how we go about knowing it is very much on our minds as a culture.

Though he would be dismayed to see that the orthodoxy of personal belief in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary has persevered, even flourished in the 21st century, Hynek would certainly find our present appetite for conspiracy and for polarized debate familiar, from climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers to the Disclosure crowd. Over his long career he learned that "It's very, very easy to disappoint people by telling them the truth," O'Connell tells Rolling Stone. "Everyone wants to believe that the next case is the big one, the one that finally proves that these are spaceships from another world and unfortunately, up to now that's never been the case, but the hope just doesn't die."

Born a few days before Earth passed through the tail of Halley's Comet in 1910, Hynek died just a few months after traveling through the comet's wake again in 1986. He spent the interceding years as an astronomer who changed the field of celestial imaging by developing a high-altitude telescope and video telescope, founded the Corralitos Observatory in New Mexico, led a team that devised the first tracking system for satellites before there were any man-made objects in orbit, and reassured a nervous American public after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, which put him on the cover of Life magazine.

Hynek was also one of the first scientists to evaluate UFO sightings for the U.S. Air Force, working on a series of classified projects in the 1950s and 1960s. Though he started out a skeptic, he went on to found the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, landing a cameo in Steven Spielberg's 1977 hit, Close Encounters of the Third Kind after contacting the director when he learned that the film’s working title was drawn from his work.

Even more than 30 years after his death, Hynek remains a controversial figure in UFOlogy, mainly because of his refusal to choose a side. O'Connell, a screenwriter and UFO history expert who writes the blog High Strangeness, has already had some of Hynek's legacy rub off on his own reputation, which he takes as a sign that he is following in Hynek's footsteps as an unbiased, open-minded researcher, rather than writing for one camp or another.

"Just based on what little some people know about the book and the interviews I've been doing, I already have some UFO establishment figures accusing me of being a skeptic, which is a really dirty word in UFO circles," he says. "The labeling has already begun."

Hynek proved to be a thorn in the government's side when it came to investigating UFO reports, refusing to dismiss the unexplainable as the product of mass hysteria or unreliable witness testimony. Indeed, a great number of the seminal 20th-century sightings that convinced Hynek that UFOs were worth further study involved highly credible witnesses, including airline and military pilots, law enforcement officers and Delbert Newhouse, a Navy photographer who caught such an object on film in the Utah desert in 1952. Hynek though refused to say that the strangeness of UFOs and UFO sightings proved they were alien spacecraft, which made him unpopular on the other side of the debate as well. An intellectual independent, he ended up sandwiched between the government, which demanded mundane explanations for sometimes fantastic sightings, and a public convinced that aliens walked among them.

"The inability for ambiguity to exist is a powerful force in UFO research," O'Connell says. "You have to go one way or the other, there's no middle ground."

Throughout the heyday of UFO sightings, significant incidents, including reported contact with alien entities and their aircraft, frequently popped up in clusters, referred to as "flaps" by Hynek. Though the last flap occurred after Close Encounters of the Third Kind debuted in 1977, UFOs are having a moment right now, too. This year Spielberg’s film celebrates its 40th anniversary, and the 1947 sighting of "flying saucers" over the Cascade mountains in the Pacific Northwest by pilot Kevin Arnold, which is widely noted as the beginning of the modern UFO phenomenon, marks 70 years of celestial intrigue. The History Channel just picked up a scripted series about Project Blue Book, the UFO investigation project that Hynek led for the government in the 1950s and 60, with Robert Zemeckis as executive producer. And of course, there's the matter of NASA's secret slaves on Mars. Are we headed for a new flap?

O'Connell is not so sure. "You would think that this amazing advance in technology, in photo imaging would have delivered us with the perfect UFO photo by now," he says. "You would think that but it hasn't happened and it's hard to decide exactly why. You can definitely argue that there are more people watching the sky with cameras in hand than ever before in human history."

What he's most interested in, beyond seeing Martin Freeman cast as Hynek – though he was amused by the thought of David Duchovny donning the professor's signature goatee – is an embrace of Hynek's balance of rigour and open-minded curiosity. Like Hynek himself, O'Connell wants to reposition the conversation about UFOs, as well as an agreement to adhere to the scientific method itself, back into the mainstream and plumb what might be possible, rather than single-mindedly trying to prove, or disprove the existence of aliens.

He finds some of Hynek's heady combination of scientific rigour and mysticism in the work of quantum physics and astronomers who are working on exoplanets right now. "Both of those fields involve, in my opinion, leaps of faith, leaps of intuition," he says. "We've shifted very dramatically from this idea that life on other planets must be exceedingly rare to this space where now where we're talking in terms of life in the universe being unbelievably abundant because we keep on finding all these goldilocks planets with our high powered space telescopes. Those are the two areas where I see that same kind of thinking that same kind of approach to science coming back to the way that Hynek saw things."

B#21

Endless Life Checks: Life Check# 20 Five Myths About Aliens That Hollyw...

Endless Life Checks: Life Check# 20 Five Myths About Aliens That Hollyw...: Why Real Scientists Think Aliens Would Never Eat Humans When the Martians first land on Earth in the 1996 sci-fi comedy  Mars Attacks! ...

Life Check# 20 Five Myths About Aliens That Hollywood Wants Us To Believe

Why Real Scientists Think Aliens Would Never Eat Humans

When the Martians first land on Earth in the 1996 sci-fi comedy Mars Attacks!, for a moment it appears all will be fine. "We come in peace," says their leader, as the music swells and a dove soars overhead. Seconds later the Martian pulls out a laser gun and opens fire on a crowd of human onlookers. Yet another blockbuster alien invasion has begun.

That's Hollywood, of course. But the melodrama underscores one of humanity's most widely held fears: that if and when we do encounter extraterrestrial beings, they will wreak all kinds of havoc, much as they do in the movies.

Or will they? For his new book, Aliens: The World's Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life, quantum physicist Jim Al-Khalili asked a series of experts to explore how humans might actually make contact with aliens. The possibility is not as far-fetched as it once seemed: since NASA launched its Kepler mission in 2009, researchers have discovered thousands of new planets and "revolutionized our concept of how many habitable worlds could exist," writes astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol in one of the book's essays.

But while Hollywood suggests we should expect to battle their inhabitants, science tells a different story. Here, five popular alien myths that Aliens debunks.

MYTH NO. 1: Aliens would eat us

Movies like The Blob and Critters imagine aliens harvesting humans for food, an unpleasant prospect. But it doesn't track with the science of nutrition, writes astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell. In order for aliens to get nourishment from eating us, their bodies would have to be capable of processing our molecules (like amino acids and sugars). And that requires having a similar biochemistry--a long shot for a species that hails from a different world.

MYTH NO. 2: Aliens would breed with us

Both of this summer's extraterrestrial blockbusters, Alien: Covenant and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, involve human-alien hybrids. But given that we can't even reproduce with our nearest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee, it's "overwhelmingly improbable" we could do so with aliens, according to Dartnell.

MYTH NO. 3: Aliens would look like us

Human evolution depended on so many unique and unpredictable factors, it's near impossible that an extraterrestrial species would have human-like features, like the aliens in The Day the Earth Stood Still and Star Trek. It's far likelier, writes neuroscientist Anil Seth, that they'd be as different as the octopus, "our very own terrestrial alien," which has a high level of intelligence, a decentralized nervous system and an alternative style of consciousness.

MYTH NO. 4: Aliens would be "living" creatures

Even restrained films like Arrival get this one wrong, according to some scientists. Should aliens contact us, cosmologist Martin Rees believes we will hear not from fellow organic creatures, but from the robots they produced, who can, in theory, live forever.

MYTH NO. 5: Aliens would steal our water and metal

The aliens in Independence Day famously arrive to strip Earth of its resources. But again, that logic doesn't add up, writes Dartnell. Most of our metal is in the Earth's core, not its crust; asteroids would be far better targets for mining. And icy moons, like Jupiter's Europa, would be easier places to stock up on water. They're uninhabited, and they don't have Earth's strong gravitational pull.

So if aliens aren't interested in harvesting our lands or our bodies, why would they make contact? Dartnell suspects a purer motive: curiosity. "If aliens did come to Earth," he writes, it would probably be "as researchers: biologists, anthropologists, linguists, keen to understand the peculiar workings of life on Earth, to meet humanity and learn of our art, music, culture, languages, philosophies and religions."

B#20

Endless Life Checks: Life Check# 19 Scientist Believe We Are On The Bri...

Endless Life Checks: Life Check# 19 Scientist Believe We Are On The Bri...: We Are on the Verge of Discovering Aliens, According to These Scientists A fascinating new book seriously tackles the question of ex...

Life Check# 19 Scientist Believe We Are On The Brink of Discovering Alien Life

We Are on the Verge of Discovering Aliens, According to These Scientists

A fascinating new book seriously tackles the question of extraterrestrial life from the perspective of leading astronomers, astrophysicists, geneticists, and neuroscientists.

c Theoretical physics may be difficult and complicated, "but it does have sex appeal." So says quantum physicist Jim Al-Khalili. "It's easy to find an audience for popular science or for a TV documentary about the Big Bang or about black holes," he recently told me. Al-Khalili's work in the field has led to the fascinating new book Aliens: The World's Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life, which explores what he believes is the likely possibility of alien life.

The Iraqi-born, UK-based Al-Khalili's intro opens with an anecdote: The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Enrico Fermi is jokingly discussing flying saucers with some colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory when he poses a simple question: "Where is everybody?" His point, Al-Khalili writes, is that the universe is so massive and contains so many planets, that it makes little sense for Earth to be the only place where life blossomed, unless our planet is "astonishingly and unjustifiably special."

Aliens, out this week from Picador, proceeds in the way that one imagines that Fermi's conversation at Los Alamos might have: serious scientists, in occasionally cheeky dialogue with one another, acknowledging that the question they're pursuing—Is anybody out there?—has long been pursued by kookier personalities, conspiracy theorists obsessed with Area 51, and alien abductions. Instead, Al-Khalili's book offers research-driven essays by prominent astronomers, astrophysicists, geneticists, and neuroscientists, and their pieces offer a wide range of ways to think about the question of extraterrestrial life. Several astrobiologists consider what life requires and which planets and moons might have the right mix: neuroscientist Anil Seth considers the "alien" intelligence of the octopus here on Earth; cosmologist Martin Rees speculates on the possibility of humans merging with machine intelligence and setting out to explore the universe as a new cyborg species.

But for the most part, these experts are weighing in on one fundamental question: Is life special, a unique and almost impossible trick that happened here on Earth? Or is it easy, almost inevitable, a spark that just arises where the conditions are right? It's an age-old question, that, as Al-Khalili explains, we may finally have the technology to answer.

VICE: What drew you to the questions that the book addresses? Are you someone who has had a lifelong interest in the idea of aliens?Jim Al-Khalili: It's not so much aliens, but more to do with the question of what is special about life. Probably all scientists find that topic fascinating. There are certain questions in science that we don't have answers to, which we say, those are the big questions: What was there before the universe, before the Big Bang? How did life begin on Earth? How did chemistry turn into biology? What is the nature of consciousness? These are the questions that transcend disciplines. If you get a chemist, a physicist, a biologist, a computer scientist—all of them are going to be fascinated by this.

When I was young, I suppose I was interested in aliens like anyone else. I'm a sci-fi fan. But, for me, the question was really what is so special about life how did it start on Earth and whether it is unique to Earth.

The book is serious, but the interest in extraterrestrial life has a reputation for being pretty quirky.Someone once told me that half the internet is devoted to conspiracy theories to do with alien abductions and UFOs. Half is probably too much, but there's so much out there, from X-Files to science fiction in movies, that it is surprising to think that scientists would treat the question of extraterrestrial life seriously at all. And that's what made this so refreshing. The book is highlighting the fact that there are lots of questions that are of interest to scientists that you can actually treat seriously. If you really want to know the possibility of whether there are little green men out there, here are the serious scientific takes on it, from all angles. So, it's meant to be of interest to the wider lay audience but dealt with in a grown-up way.

You mention that there has been a shift within the scientific community toward taking this seriously and away from the era of imagining little green men. Do you have thoughts on when and how that changed?
This shift has come about because of advances in astronomy and space exploration in the last decade or two. We have started to send probes to Mars, to the moons of the gas giants Saturn and Jupiter, and we are seriously starting to be able to study the places where there potentially could be life in our solar system. And at the same time, in the past decade, we have discovered planets around stars outside our solar system, exoplanets. Astronomy has been advancing so quickly that what was unthinkable a decade ago is now reality. We can now not only pinpoint which stars have planets going around them, but we can look at those planets and even tell whether they have an atmosphere. Just from the light passing through the atmosphere from the star that they are going around, we can study that light and that can tell us the chemical composition of the atmosphere and that can tell us what elements, what molecules, what compounds are in that atmosphere, and would they be there naturally or would there have to be life present to have made them. So, these advances in astronomy and space exploration suddenly mean that we can actually address this question. It's got to the point now where I'm quite optimistic that in my lifetime, it's likely that we will discover life elsewhere.

Wow.

Ten years ago, I wouldn't have thought that. Now, all these things are coming together. One of the contributors in the book, [professor of evolutionary biochemistry] Nick Lane, talks about the building blocks of life. What do you need? Is there anything magical? You get molecules getting more and more complicated, and then eventually you get something that can make copies of itself, and that's the first precursor of life. Well, until recently we thought there was a missing step—"and then some magic happens"—and then you get biology from chemistry! But there seems to be no magical steps necessary. I now reckon that the consensus among most scientists is that it would be quite surprising if we don't find life elsewhere, probably within our lifetime. It might not be interesting life—it won't be men in flying saucers—it will be some form of microbial life. But, hey, for scientists that will be enough.

"Astronomy has been advancing so quickly that what was unthinkable a decade ago is now reality. It's got to the point now where I'm quite optimistic that in my lifetime, it's likely that we will discover life elsewhere."

So on the big question in the book, which is something like "is life on Earth special and unique or is it common?"—and there are great arguments posed for each side—where do you fall on that spectrum personally? 

There's a wide spectrum of opinion among informed scientists. So the fact that I sit somewhere in the middle is because I've been influenced by both sides. My kind of naïve view is that we only know of life happening somewhere: on Earth. We are beginning to see that the conditions on Earth are not unique. Forgive the metaphor, but a lot of stars have to have aligned for that—we have to be the right distance from the sun, we have to have an atmosphere, we have to have a moon that gives us tides, we have to have a big planet like Jupiter that is sucking up the debris so it doesn't bombard us. But there are so many other star systems; there are so many other exoplanets, just in our galaxy alone, that there must be millions, billions of other Earths that have the conditions necessary for life. So in that sense we know we are not unique.

But that doesn't mean that we know how life got started, just because those conditions exist. We know that life began on Earth very soon after Earth cooled down enough for life to possibly exist, almost 4 billion years ago. Now, over 4 billion years ago, the Earth was just a ball of fire. It wasn't conducive to anything. So, as soon as the conditions were right for life, life got started. But it didn't develop into complex life until much, much later. So I'm of the view that life as a simple single cellular form may well be not that difficult. It may be almost ubiquitous in the universe. But multicellular life, life that could then evolve into complex organisms, some of which could develop consciousness and intelligence and civilizations—that actually may be the harder step. How hard it is, we don't know yet.

I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the role of human radio, TV, and satellite communication and how that factors into the search for alien life. Why do people assume that aliens would also use this same kind of signaling?

We're starting with the assumption with the idea that the laws of physics and the forces of nature are the same throughout the universe. We know of four of these forces. Two of them are active inside of atoms, the nuclear forces. And the only other ones are gravity and the electromagnetic force. Gravity is limited technologically, but the electromagnetic force is versatile: Light is the electromagnetic force, and radio waves are the electromagnetic force. So it's a means of sending information from one place to the other. So we're assuming that whatever form life takes elsewhere, even if its not carbon based—it could be something really beyond our imagination—we still think they will make use of electromagnetic forces. It is a potentially universal way of communicating.

So if we are announcing our existence to the rest of the universe, then it may be that life elsewhere that is doing the same thing. Which is why the whole SETI program is about listening out into the universe to hear some electromagnetic signal that we don't think could have just happened naturally. Of course, we've only been announcing our existence to the world for about 100 years or so, when we first developed radio. So our electromagnetic signals have only extended out to a radius of 100 light years. And actually there aren't that many star systems within 100 light years. The universe is vast—there's billions of stars in our own galaxy—but there are only a handful within that range. Of course, an alien civilization may have been announcing their existence to the universe millions of years ago, for all we know, so those signals, if we do receive those signals, they may have traveled across vast distances—it won't mean that we can then say, "Hi, we're here," and then make contact with them. But just the knowledge that there is life out there somewhere would be profound.

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