The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is suing Walmart for their marketing of homeopathic products, similar to a prior lawsuit against CVS. Their claim is that Walmart is using deceptive practices to sell homeopathy, implying that such products are equivalent to science-based remedies. While I applaud their effort, you can tell by reading the reporting that it is ultimately an exercise in futility.

First let me clearly state my underlying premise – homeopathy is pure 100% nonsense. It is a 200+ year old pre-scientific system of potions with no basis in reality. It is simply witchcraft. And if that is not enough for you, it has been tested in clinical trials (despite being utter nonsense) and has been convincingly, and unsurprisingly, shown to have no effect.

The inherent contradiction this undeniable fact creates is, how do you market homeopathic products without deception and harm? The answer is – you can’t. The only way to actually sell the product is to deceive the customer on some level.

The FDA and FTC have tried to strike a balance between freedom and consumer protection when it comes to homeopathy, but this is a hopeless endeavor. There is no balance. So they each have their guidelines for the industry to promote transparency, honesty in labeling, and to minimize deception. Of course these regulations don’t go far enough. They just mean the industry has to be a little more clever and coy in their marketing.

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I have long maintained that one of the greatest scientific questions for humanity is – are we alone in the universe? How common is life, and how common are alien technological civilizations? When we finally reach out into space, will it be empty for us to inhabit, or will we quickly encounter a galactic civilization? What will alien intelligent species be like, and what will that tell us about ourselves?

It is unfortunately likely that we will not have any real answers to any of these questions anytime soon. But that does not mean we shouldn’t look. Recently NASA held a workup to explore possible avenues of looking for alien technosignatures – signs of advanced alien civilizations that we can see from Earth. Some of the participants also held a Reddit AMA.

So – what are alien technosignatures and how can we find them?

The most basic type is radio signals. There has been an effort to listen for alien radio signals for decades, often referred to as SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The idea is that radio signals are a convenient way to communicate across lightyears, and perhaps an alien world is sending out such signals for others to find. But really, we have been looking for radio signals because we can. It’s like the person looking for a lost item under a lamp post, not because they have any reason to find it there, but because the light is good.

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Earlier this year I wrote about two ways of looking at the probability of there being advanced alien civilizations – the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox, and how to resolve any apparent conflict between the two. The Drake Equation is simply a series of probabilities of all the factors necessary to have technological civilizations.

The Drake Equation is:

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible

and

R_∗ = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy

f_p = the fraction of those stars that have planets

n_e = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets

f_l = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point

f_i = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)

f_c = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space

L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space

Of course we do not know any of the variables. All we can do is input a range of possible answers and see what range of results it spits out. That is exactly what a new study from Oxford researchers did.

This “study” does not include any new information, it is simply a new analysis of the Drake Equation, inputting what they authors think are the most reasonable figures, including the full range of our uncertainty. They argue that the uncertainty is even greater than has been previously considered the case, and when the full range of uncertainty is taken into account, the answers to how many civilizations there are out there varies by orders of magnitude.

Most importantly, the range of possible answers to the Drake Equation equals 1 – meaning that humanity is the only technological civilization in the known universe. They write:

When the model is recast to represent realistic distributions of uncertainty, we find a substantial ex ante probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it.

They argue that their results resolve the Fermi Paradox, which is simply a question asked by physicist Enrico Fermi – If there are any alien civilizations out there, where are they?

Fermi was musing that, given millions of years of spacefaring technology, a civilization in our galaxy could have explored and even settled the entire galaxy. The universe is 13.7 billion years old, and our galaxy, the Milky Way, is almost as old (13.5 billion years) There are an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. That is a lot of time for any civilization to explore and spread out. So why aren’t we seeing them.

One might extend this argument to SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence using radio astronomy. While SETI has explored only a small percentage of the sky, and in a small percentage of possible frequencies, the more we search the more we can say that the galaxy is not humming with alien signals.

The Fermi Paradox can be resolved in a number of ways. It’s possible that the resources necessary for interstellar travel are simply not worth it. It is also possible that our alien neighbors may respect our autonomy and are keeping their distance. But it may also be true that our nearest alien neighbor is a galaxy or more away, really making it not worth the resources to travel to our humble system. All this would take is for any one of the factors in the Drake Equation to be at the low end of estimates.

The one factor we are learning more about is the number of possible worlds in the galaxy that could potentially host life. The search for exoplanets, while still in its infancy, is rapidly finding thousands of worlds around other stars, and we are starting to be able to make statistical statements about typical stellar systems. The numbers are still biased by our search methods, but we are working toward a more accurate representative picture.

First, it turns out that planets are common around other stars. Further, Earth-like planets are also common. Further still, as pointed out by another recent study, this one from Australia, moons may be an even more abundant potential location for life than planets. Large moons around gas giants may have liquid water. We have two such candidates in our own system, Europa and Enceladus. But the researchers are talking more about moons in the goldilocks zone, where liquid water can exist on the surface.

So the answer to the Fermi paradox is not likely to be found in the number of potential host worlds. We can turn next to the probability of life of any kind developing, and that is where we get back to Europa and Enceladus. Even Mars may help inform this question. If we find life or the fossils of life on these other worlds in our own system, that would support the conclusion that life itself is abundant in the universe.

Until, however, we detect actual aliens or their signals, the rest of the factors in the equation are likely to remain a mystery. Put simply – we have a sample size of one. We don’t know how likely life is to develop intelligence, and intelligence technology, and how long such civilizations tend to last. We won’t know until we encounter evidence of aliens.

And, if there are few or no other aliens out there, we will never know the full answer. We would only have increasingly negative evidence and the sense that we are alone.

This does not have to be a depressing thought, however, although it would be disappointing. In response to this study, Elon Musk tweeted:

This is why we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets.

Sure, this is a bit self-serving as his company is trying to get to Mars and this is one of his main justifications for the effort. But it is true, none-the-less. If we are the only technological intelligent species in the galaxy or even the universe, how much the more precious are we. Carl Sagan pointed that out decades ago.

If we are the beneficiaries of a fantastically unlikely series of events, so unlikely that there is only one example in 2 trillion galaxies over billions of years, then we should take all the more care to value and preserve that civilization.

In the world of Dune, human civilization about 10,000 years in the future had colonized the galaxy, with an empire spanning a “million” worlds. There were no aliens to get in our way, so once we had the technology for interstellar travel, we spread out. The first Dune novel was published 15 years after Fermi made his famous observation – essentially, if aliens exist, where are they? Why haven’t they colonized the galaxy like the humans in Dune?

More than half a century later, the Fermi Paradox remains a hotly debated mystery. One might also invoke the Drake Equation in this discussion. I often hear the Drake Equation dismissed as pseudoscience, but it is just a thought experiment. It is an equation that can be used to calculate the number of technological civilizations in the universe by plugging in all the relevant variables – number of stars, then planets, then planets with life, than life that evolved intelligence, etc.  The only thing that can be considered pseudoscience is plugging in numbers that are just guesses and pretending they are scientific estimates.

The Drake Equation

We have started to make progress informing the variables in the Drake Equation, however. Astronomers have a pretty good handle on how many stars there are in the observable universe. Current estimates are that there are about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, with an average of about 100 million stars per galaxy – 200 quintillion stars. We could be off by an order or magnitude or two, either way that is a massive number.

However, many people are interested in the subquestion – how common is intelligent life in the Milky Way galaxy? Therefore, how many stars are there in the Milky Way?  Estimates vary there as well, but it is on the order of 100 billion (could be several hundred billion).

After estimating the number of stars, further estimates in the Drake Equation get immediately dodgy. What we need to know next is how many stars have planets, and what is the typical distribution of planets by size and distance from their host star. In other words, how many stars have planets that can potentially host life? This is further complicated by the fact that we can only guess at how adaptable “life” is. Can life develop under the ice of large moons of gas giants? How about in the upper atmospheres of those gas giants?

It is easier, therefore, to answer the question – how many Earth-like planets are out there?

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This is a (sort of) follow up to my previous post. Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are a legitimate astronomical mystery, and very interesting. They are very brief (30 microseconds to 9 milliseconds) and very powerful bursts of radio waves. To date about 30 FRBs have been detected. Most of these FRBs are one-offs – they occur once and never repeat (at least so far). There is one exception, however, FRB 121102 (more on that below).

What do we know about FRBs so far? They are isotropic, which means they occur all over the sky. They are not concentrated in the galactic disk. This by itself implies they are extragalactic. But also analysis of the radio bursts indicate that they have traveled through intergalactic plasma, for billions of light years. So they must also be incredibly powerful. The radio waves are broadband, so they are spread throughout the radio wavelengths. They are also highly polarized, which means they were aligned at their creation with a strong magnetic field.

Because they are radio bursts, they are studied by radio astronomers, which includes SETI astronomers, whose primary mission is to survey the sky for possible alien communications. In an SGU interview with SETI astronomer Seth Shostak he indicated that SETI does a lot of non-ET-related astronomy. This is a good example of that – they are helping to detect and analyze FRBs, including analysis of FRB 121102.

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Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are brief, bright, and distant bursts of radio emissions that are of unknown origin. Recently they have been in the news because of a paper which explores the feasibility that FRBs have an alien origin.

“Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration and origin at great distances, and we haven’t identified a possible natural source with any confidence,” said theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking.”

Let me first give a little more background on FRBs and then we can discuss the alien hypothesis.

Fast Radio Bursts

The first thing to know about FRBs is that they are, indeed, fast. They typically last only a few milliseconds (thousandths of a second). Recorded FRBs range from 0.05 ms to 9.4 ms. That is extremely brief.

They are broadband radio bursts, meaning that they cover a broad frequency range.

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I love reading articles that discuss the same issue and come to essentially opposite conclusions. In this case, Canadian astronomers have recently performed an analysis of 2.5 million stars and found 234 of them producing pulsed signals that they claim may be of alien origin. The scientific community is skeptical.

The Independent declares, “Strange messages coming from the stars are ‘probably’ from aliens, scientists say.” Meanwhile, worldofwierdthings.com states, “Why hundreds of aliens probably aren’t trying to contact us.”

When you read deep into both articles you find a more nuanced position. The difference is mostly in the headline writing, but also in the overall emphasis of the article. Skepticism can be marginalized or central.

SETI and Skepticism

I have found the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) to be an excellent topic of skeptical discussion. It is a great forum for discussing what is legitimate science, and how scientists decide whether something is likely to be true or not. There is nothing supernatural or paranormal about life evolving on exoplanets, intelligence emerging, and developing a technological civilization that might send signals out into space. We have done it.

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We often don’t give nature enough credit. In many contexts, scientists or explorers find an anomaly and immediately the interest and speculation turns to intelligent agents at work. The ultimate expression of this, of course, is intelligent design creationism, where nature is denied credit for biology itself.

For example, snorklers discovered some odd shaped stones off the coast of the Greek island Zakynthos. The stones were surprisingly round, and so the immediate speculation was that these were the bases of pillars and are therefore the remains of an ancient Greek port, since lost to the sea.

I am not saying that this hypothesis is unreasonable, just that it seems to be the preferred hypothesis. This preference is also not unreasonable, because the remains of an ancient city are a lot more interesting than some oddly shapes stones (unless you’re a geologist).

Of course, there is always going to be someone taking such speculation too far, and prematurely concluding they have evidence for an intelligent artifact, even when further scientific investigation finds otherwise. It’s important to remember that in order to conclude that an anomaly is the product of deliberate artifice, we need further evidence. Greek ruins, for example, are lousy with pot shards. They are just everywhere. None have been found in the vicinity of the alleged pillars, however. This should give any ancient Greek port proponents extreme pause.

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I understand that fervent skepticism can sometimes be annoying, especially when it is aimed at something you believe or at least think is either likely or should not be ruled out. It’s as if the skeptics are trying to disprove your belief.

Well, they are. That’s the point. Welcome to science.

Initial skepticism is a productive response to any new claim, and history bears that out. Often observations or even experimentation leads to the possibility of new phenomenon. Almost by definition this is based on a currently unexplained anomaly.

An anomaly is a phenomenon that does not fit with our current understanding of the universe. If we are encountering an entirely new phenomenon it is likely that what we are observing will be anomalous, because we can’t explain what we don’t know. In fact scientists love anomalies – they point toward new discoveries. Anomalies are where the action is.

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There almost certainly is life elsewhere in the universe. There is no reason to think that conditions and events that led to life on earth are unique, and the universe is a ridiculously vast place. So the odds strongly favor that there must be many occurrences of life out there. There are interesting sub-questions, however – how common is life, how common is complex life, and how common are technological civilizations? Is the universe teaming with bacteria and fungus and little else, or are the stars buzzing with spacefaring races of every description?

The problem with trying to answer this question is that we have an N of 1 – Earth is the only example of life in the universe that we have. We may find examples of life elsewhere in our own solar system (Mars, Europa, Titan, and Enceladus are the current prime candidates), but that will only give us a tiny bit more data. Life elsewhere in our own solar system (especially Mars) may have been seeded from Earth or vice versa, and so we may find life on Mars but still only have evidence for a single life origin in our solar system.

We may also find multiple independent life origins in our solar system, and that would be extremely cool, but would still only answer one of the three questions above. That would tell us that the origin of some kind of life is likely common, and can occur under a variety of conditions, but would not tell us how common complex life or civilizations are.

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