SETI Institute

The Pentagon Ran a Secret Program to Find UFOs. Should We Expect Aliens?

Posted by

0


Sight Unseen

Sightings of aircraft moving at high speeds with no visible signs of propulsion. Objects hovering over the sea without any apparent means of lift. Military operators exchanging nervous messages as they try to make sense of what they are recording. These scenes are part of an unprecedented disclosure from the New York Times, one that outlined details about a top secret Pentagon program devoted to the investigation of UFOs.

Between 2007 and 2012, the United States government spent $22 million of its annual $600 billion defense budget on the so-called Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program. This is the first time the Government has admitted the existence of such operations. According to Pentagon spokesperson Laura Ochoa, the programs were terminated because “there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding.”

According to the New York Times, the scheme, now defunded, still exists in a more informal fashion. “The Department of Defence takes seriously all threats and potential threats to our people, our assets, and our mission and takes action whenever credible information is developed,” Ochoa said.

So does this revelation signal the existence of alien life visiting Earth? Is the program just a political pet project? We asked a panel of scientists and analysts to weigh in on the significance (or lack thereof) of this revelation.

Below are their thoughts regarding what the Pentagon’s secret UFO program means in terms of international relations, scientific advancement, the existence of UFOs, and our search for life in the cosmos.

Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute:

The good news is that the New York Times story vindicates the claim that a conspiracy of silence has shrouded the Defense Department when it comes to this phenomenon. Indeed, it seems there really was some activity to look into — the possibility that visitors from light-years away have been sailing our skies. I get the impression that the principal motivation was not to verify (or not) extraterrestrial activity, but to check on the possibility of Russian or Chinese aviation developments.

The bad news for saucer sympathizers is that the investigation doesn’t seem to have come up with any really good evidence. Indeed, if the evidence was obviously convincing, the investigation would have been broadened, not cut back or terminated.

Then there are many other questions one could ask: why give so much of the funding for this project to an individual who has long advocated the point of view that Earth is being visited (and, I note, someone whose background is not science)? What you want – and what the UFO investigations of a half-century ago had – is a body of experts who come to the evidence with open minds.

What’s truly amazing is that, for more than a half-century, some folks have claimed visiting craft are hanging out in our airspace. But the evidence remains debatable, to be generous. On the contrary, when the Spaniards invaded Peru at the beginning of the 16th century, the Inca weren’t still arguing the point 50 years later. They knewthat someone “alien” was afoot in the land. Somehow, the putative extraterrestrials who’ve decided to visit our planet have managed to keep their activities clandestine, and the good evidence secret from everyone but the U.S. government. That’s a tough assignment!

Andrew Siemion, Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley:

My opinion as a scientist is that any objective description of any phenomena should be backed up by evidence and, despite many decades of reports of various UFO and abduction phenomena, we have only personal anecdotes and ambiguous photography. Moreover, astronomers spend their lives looking at the sky with a wide variety of telescopes and techniques, and we have never snapped a picture of a spaceship. For the moment, our searches for radio and laser signals from intelligent life and investigation of astrophysical anomalies (SETI) offer us the best opportunity to detect extraterrestrial intelligence, should it exist.

All of that said, the possibility that, in the past, our solar system could have been visited by an advanced extraterrestrial species, or that we may be visited in the future, is real. We know that intelligent life capable of interstellar travel arose at least once in our Universe, and it might have arisen many, many times.

Trey Menefee, Independent Researcher, Open Source Intelligence Expert, Former Lecturer at the Hong Kong Institute of Education:

I think the US Navy and Air Force have a lot of weird videos and stories to tell. I think the issue is not unreliable narrators, but unreliable interpreters of confusing, conflicting, and otherwise baffling data and presumed facts.

I think the secrecy and closed-door nature of the investigations means that they likely fall victim to the same cognitive traps the Chilean Navy fell into where they didn’t question the ‘priors,’ the assumptions that underpinned their analysis and came to ‘unidentifiable’ conclusions. If the military released all the data, OSINT [Open Source Intelligence] researchers would likely figure what happened better and faster than these classified investigations.

Peter Garnavich, Chair of the Department of Astrophysics and Cosmology Physics at the University of Notre Dame:

As a scientist, I am skeptical of UFOs. They have been talked about since before I was born, yet all we ever have for evidence are grainy images and dubious eyewitnesses. The vast distances between stars and what we know about space travel make these sighting unlikely to be alien life.

As a person, I love the idea of UFOs. They are mysterious and exciting. They embody the science fiction of Star Trek and Star Wars and the idea that humans are worth visiting. So I am not surprised that the defense department had a UFO office, and I am not surprised that they are closing it. Although they could find worse ways to spend that money.

Avi Loeb, Chair of the Astronomy Department at the University of Harvard:

I was surprised to hear about the federal funding of the UFO study. This would make sense if the unidentifiable flying objects are suspected of potentially being a national security risk, used for espionage for example. At any event, they are very likely to be human-made or natural atmospheric phenomena rather than an indication of an advanced extraterrestrial technology.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But all the UFO evidence I have seen was marginal or circumstantial. We are much more likely to find evidence of alien life through our telescopes than through visual reports of pilots.

The Goals of Extraterrestrial AI May “Conflict With Those of Biological Life”

Posted by

0


IN BRIEF
  • An expert on the intersection of science and philosophy posits that our current transition to “postbiological” life could have already been undertaken by extraterrestrial species.
  • She warns that these alien lifeforms could by artificially intelligent, in which case they could pose a tremendous threat to life on Earth.

POSTBIOLOGICAL LIFE

Susan Schneider is a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). She is also an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, and her expertise includes the philosophy of cognitive science, particularly with regards to the plausibility of computational theories of mind and theoretical issues in artificial intelligence (AI).

In short, Schneider has a keen understanding of the intersection between science and philosophy. As such, she also has a unique perspective on AI, offering a fresh (but quite alarming) view on how artificial intelligence could forever alter humanity’s existence. In an article published by the IEET, she shares that perspective, talking about potential flaws in the way we view AI and suggesting a possible connection between AI and extraterrestrial life.

Credits: HBO

The bridge Schneider uses to make this connection is the idea of a “postbiological” life. In the article she explains that postbiological refers to either the eventual form of existence humanity will take or the AI-emergent lifeforms that would replace our existence altogether. In other words, it could be something like superintelligent humans enhanced through biological nanotechnology or it could be an artificially intelligent supercomputer.

Whatever form postbiological life takes, Schneider posits that the transition we’re currently experiencing is one that may have happened previously on other planets:

 The technological developments we are witnessing today may have all happened before, elsewhere in the universe. The transition from biological to synthetic intelligence may be a general pattern, instantiated over and over, throughout the cosmos. The universe’s greatest intelligences may be postbiological, having grown out of civilizations that were once biological.

In light of that, Schneider asks the following: “Suppose that intelligent life out there is postbiological. What should we make of this?”

Credits: Warner Bros.
Credits: Warner Bros.

EXTRATERRESTRIAL, POSTBIOLOGICAL AI

There isn’t any guarantee that we can “control” AI on Earth when it becomes superintelligent, even with multi-million-dollar efforts devoted to AI safety. “Some of the finest minds in computer science are working on this problem,” Schneider writes. “They will hopefully create safe systems, but many worry that the control problem is insurmountable.”

If artificially intelligent postbiological life exists elsewhere in our universe, it’s a major cause of concern for a number of reasons. “[Postbiological extraterrestrial life] may have goals that conflict with those of biological life, have at its disposal vastly superior intellectual abilities, and be far more durable than biological life,” Schneider argues. These lifeforms also might not place the same value on biological intelligence that we do, and they may not even be conscious in the same manner that we are.

Schneider makes the comparison between how we feel killing a chimp versus eating an apple. Both are technically living organisms, but because we have consciousness, we place a higher value on other species that have it as well. If superintelligent, postbiological extraterrestrials don’t have consciousness, can we expect them to understand us? Even more importantly, would they value us at all? Food for thought for any proponents of active SETI.

References: IEET, SETI Institute, BBC Future

                      futurism.com

Neptune’s New Moon May Be Named after One of Sea God’s Monstrous Children.

Posted by

0


This past Monday, the planet Neptune officially got a new moon, a relatively tiny chunk of rock and ice about as wide as Manhattan is long. The object is currently dubbed S/2004 N 1, and it’s the fourteenth now known to circle that distant icy world. Mark Showalter, a researcher at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, found the moon in early July in archived images that the Hubble Space Telescope had snapped between 2004 and 2009. While using special software that stacks up and manipulates sequential images to reveal the motion of orbiting companions around a planet, Showalter tweaked a single line of code, switching the software’s gaze from close-in to Neptune to hundreds of thousands of miles further out. He walked away for an hour, and came back to see the software had found something curious in the old Hubble images, a small white dot that seemed to circle Neptune once every 22.5 hours. Further analyses confirmed it was a moon, one that had previously gone unseen because of its speedy orbit and small size.

 

Such discoveries have become old hat for Showalter, who has also discovered moons around Saturn, Uranus and Pluto. After discovering his two Plutonian moons in 2011 and 2012, Showalter held a contest to allow the public to nominate and vote on its favorite names for both new worlds. The results helped inspire the final names for the new moons, Kerberosand Styx, which wereannounced by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) on July 2.

Shortly after the announcement of Neptune’s newest moon, I called up Showalter to chat about the moon’s environment, its scientific value, and what he plans to name his latest discovery. An edited version of our conversation follows.

Scientific American: Was this a surprise?

Showalter: Not really, no. We went into this more focused on the ring arcs of Neptune, which are peculiar and persistent bright regions in a couple of dust rings around the planet. There were four arcs in the data from Voyager 2’s 1989 flyby, but two of those have now faded away, and we wanted to piece together what’s going on there and make sense of how the arcs are evolving. We always knew there was a possibility for more moons, things that would have been too small for Voyager 2 to see, so we had our eyes peeled the whole time. It’s definitely still a rush to find something like this, though.

Tell us more about the moon — what do we know about it?

We know its orbit pretty well. But we can only see it as an unresolved dot. We don’t even know its color, because to see these things with Hubble you have to use the whitest filters, which don’t give you info about how red, green, or blue something is. Everything else, we infer from context. We can guess how big it is based on how much light it reflects. It sits between two much larger moons, Proteus and Larissa. These and other moons near it all have similar surface reflectivity, or albedo, within 8 to 10 percent of each other. They’re about as dark as asphalt. When we make the educated guess that this moon shares that same albedo, that tells us this thing is probably on the order of 12 miles across.

What would it look like on the surface?

We don’t know for sure, but someday in the distant future, if and when we get a closer look at this thing, we’ll probably find it to be a cratered, irregularly shaped rock. One reason I’m in this field of astronomy — planetary astronomy — is that I like to visualize things, but it’s hard for me to picture a cosmological object like a quasar in my mind. It’s bright, it’s very far away, and that’s about all I can see. But when I think about the objects I study — planets, moons, asteroids, comets — they have landscapes, they can have geysers and volcanoes, they have things that are much more relatable. They’re more “Earth-like,” but also very exotic and different from what we see in our everyday lives. That combination of the familiar and the alien is something anyone who reads science fiction or watches Star Wars or Star Trek can appreciate.

I’m glad you mentioned Star Trek, since so many Trekkies unsuccessfully lobbied to name one of Pluto’s new moons “Vulcan” after Spock’s home planet. Might this new moon get the Star Trek treatment?

Let me just say first that I’m not surprised the IAU nomenclature committee rejected Vulcan despite the support of so many Star Trek fans. I was a little disappointed, but that’s a name already associated with hypothetical objects that may orbit interior to Mercury, so I knew it would be a tough sell. If they didn’t buy it, no problem. It’s still an honor just to have the opportunity to name a moon. Since Vulcan was rejected, I’ve been publicly mocked by William Shatner, and that’s an honor in its own way, too. But getting back to this new moon, the name has to somehow relate to Poseidon or Neptune, the Greek or Roman gods of the sea. At first I thought that wasn’t as interesting as naming Pluto’s moons for minions of Hades, but after a bit of reading I’ve found some great stuff, and I’ve gotten good suggestions from in and out of the research group. And we are talking about involving the public in this again, but having done it once, I know it’s a huge amount of work, whereas I could just sit down with my group in a room and decide on potential names in an hour or two.

One of my favorite possible names comes from The Odyssey, where Odysseus and his crew are on an island with a giant cyclops. That cyclops’s name is Polyphemus, and he is actually a son of Poseidon. “Polyphemus” is also good because it hasn’t yet been used for an asteroid — asteroids have already taken a lot of the great names. So that will probably be on the list. Another is a goddess, a daughter of Poseidon namedLamia. Lamia got in trouble with Zeus and was turned into a nightmarish creature that stalks and eats children. Even into the Middle Ages, people would tell their children to behave themselves, or else the Lamia will get you! So that’s another colorful one. You can probably guess that I’d prefer to name it after a hideous monster. I was a 12-year-old boy once, too, you know.

This is the sixth moon you’ve discovered, and you’re also credited with discovering rings around Jupiter and Uranus. What’s next?

Unlike those earlier moons, this new moon wouldn’t have shown up in the analyses I have done for Hubble observations of Uranus and Pluto, so it might be worth revisiting that data. There are also some very long exposures of the Saturn and Jupiter systems in the archive. Having this refined technique now, where we can take something from being undetectable in a single image to being detectable in several images combined by motion-tracking, is very powerful. One limitation of the technique is that you have to assume what you’re looking for is something in a circular, co-planar orbit, which is generally a good assumption. That’s what lets you extrapolate where an object should be in each image. Who knows, maybe we could find something in these other Hubble datasets, or for that matter even old spacecraft data! You never know what might turn up, so all of these archived observationsshould be reanalyzed at some point. Also, I think anyone would agree that if we sent another spacecraft out to Uranus or Neptune, there would be a huge flood of these sorts of new discoveries coming in, and many of us hope for exactly such a mission from NASA. There’s still so much we haven’t seen around these worlds because they’ve only been visited once, by Voyager 2 as it flew by [in 1989]. The big breakthroughs will always come from actually going to these places and seeing them up close.

Other than the thrill of finding and naming new objects after hideous monsters, what’s the scientific value of this?

Every one of the moons we’ve found, I think, has an interesting story to tell, and you don’t know what story the universe is trying to tell you until you find it. I think it’s possible for a truly boring moon to exist, one that tells you nothing, but so far in the history of solar system science I don’t think we’ve found one. Every moon so far has an interesting story if you look closely enough. In the case of this new moon, I keep wondering how this tiny little thing ended up wedged between two much bigger moons, Proteus and Larissa. This object has .01 percent of the mass between them. It’s minuscule, and yet somehow when they formed together it didn’t just become an extra layer of dust coating Proteus. How did it get left behind? Figuring that out will take some careful study. Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, orbits backwards and was probably captured long ago, and when that happened it must have disrupted any other moons, which means the moons we see today must have somehow re-formed afterward. Maybe this new moon can help us understand more of that early history.

Source: scientificamerican.com