The Search for Super-civilizations in the Cosmos

The WISE Telescope

In 1964, Russian scientist Nikolai Kardashev suggested that in the long history of the universe, which began billions of years before the origin of our Sun and Earth, really advanced civilizations might have developed.  Such civilizations might learn to control the total power of their stars -- and, ultimately, the total power of their galaxies. 

Now, Jason Wright and Roger Griffith, a pair of scientists at Penn State University, have actually searched for this last kind of super-civilization.  If such advanced beings have actually colonized and exploited the billions of stars within a galaxy, these civilizations could produce tremendous amounts of waste heat.  

Just like your car and your computer produce waste heat while they are operating, so the thought is that large-scale civilizations will generate an unnatural amount of heat, beyond the heat that all objects give off.

A recent satellite called the Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has been collecting information on sources of heat energy around the sky.  Wright and Griffith have looked at the output of 100,000 galaxies, to see if anyone of them might betray signs that the heat they produce is not natural, but comes from a super-civilization.

Although they did not find any obvious and definitive evidence, they did note some galaxies whose infrared energy was unusual in some ways.  These are worth investigating further. 

Of course no one really knows whether intelligent creatures can ever evolve to a level of technology where they take over an entire galaxy.  So finding one by this method is a long shot. (But I asked Geoff Marcy, the world's leading planet hunter, and he pointed out that just about all our searches for intelligence in the universe so far have been "long shots" -- no one can be sure today what method will pay off.  So Marcy feels we should explore as many different methods as possible.)

I also asked Jill Tarter, the U.S. leader of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence using radio waves, and she also was excited about our adding more techniques to our SETI arsenal.  She told me she was adding the unusual galaxies from the WISE survey to the list of places where they would point radio telescopes, just in case there were any intelligent radio signals to be found.

Indeed, the SETI institute organized a Google hangout about this survey, and included Jill Tarter and Freeman Dyson, who first suggested ways that an advanced civilization might betray itself with infrared waves.  You can hang out and see what they said at: https://plus.google.com/events/cs8lq28m1ebd2bnukspml93njc8  

Where Are All the Aliens?

Saturday, at the request of Jill Tarter (for many years, the leader of the major program to search for radio signals from alien civilizations), I spoke to a group at the California Academy of Sciences about what we call the Fermi Paradox. Perhaps you will agree with me that it's one of the most interesting dilemmas in astronomy.

In the 1950's, physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question to some lunch-time companions, which we can sum up in modern terms this way: There are more than 200 billion stars in our Galaxy and Kepler mission results show that many of them have planets.  The Sun and its family are relatively young compared to the Galaxy (5 billion years old versus 13 billion years old).  So there must have been many stars and planets that developed long before ours did.

If so, life (and intelligent life) should have evolved on some of these worlds long before it did on Earth.  There must therefore be many civilizations out there whose technology is far in advance of ours.  In that case, Fermi and others have asked, where are they?  Why have we not found any signals, artifacts, or visitors from these extra-terrestrial civilizations?

The answer most scientists would give is that the stars are far away, travel among them is slow or expensive, and we have just begun to search for complex signals the aliens might be putting out.  Therefore it's much too soon to ask Fermi's question.

But scientists and science fiction author have delighted in finding other answers as well. Maybe the aliens (like your crotchety uncle) don't like to travel or write letters. Maybe they are so happy playing with their equivalent to Facebook, they don't need to find neighbors among the stars. Maybe they communicate in ways we have yet to dream of.

Or maybe they are here, but are too smart to let us see them watching us (sometimes this is called the "zoo hypothesis.")  Another answer is that while planets are common, perhaps the evolution of technology is very rare, making communication rare too.  What if alien species are more like the dolphins, swimming in a planetary ocean and reciting complex poems to one another?  But they don't mine metals or build telescopes and radio transmitters.

A really depressing proposal is that once aliens develop intelligence and technology, they also develop the ability to destroy their planetary environment through pollution or nuclear war.  A clever science fiction story that develops this further, "The Fermi Paradox is our Business Model" by Charlie Jane Anders, can be found free on the web at: http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/08/the-fermi-paradox-is-our-business-model

Many articles and books have been devoted to the Fermi Paradox.  Scientists enjoy such speculations, but eventually we come back to the notion that in science, the ultimate way to judge what is true is doing an experiment or making an observation.  Those scientists who continue the patient, long-term search for signals or other evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence do so in part because the discovery of another intelligent species in the universe might be the best answer we can give to Fermi's question.