It's Time to Protect Extraterrestrial Locations that Might Support Life

 In 1972, Christopher Stone, a legal scholar at the University of Southern California, wrote a paper titled “Should Trees Have Legal Standing?” Although it took a few decades for the idea to catch on, it marked the beginning of the Rights of Nature movement. The United Nations has recently referred to it as the fastest-growing legal movement of the 21st Century.

Previously, a person or a group had to prove harm from some other person or company disturbing the environment before any legal action was taken. The Rights of Nature charter allows a person or a group to directly represent some aspect of nature that has rights of its own. It is similar to the legal cases in which parties, like children, can’t represent themselves, yet need legal protection. Some countries have put such protections in local and national laws, and some even in their constitutions.

Now, three scientists from the United Kingdom, an astrobiologist, an earth scientist, and a legal scholar, published a space policy paper saying such protections should extend to any extraterrestrial life we may discover and the environments in which they exist or may have existed.

We currently have probes on the surface of Mars seeking conditions, past or present, which might support life, as well as any living things that might currently exist there. Some moons, notably Europa, which orbits Jupiter, and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, have organic materials that may well indicate the presence of living microbes there. Even a few asteroids exhibit some of the conditions that might be explained by extinct microbial life forms.

Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, is venting water and organic molecules.

Europa, a moon of Jupiter, possesses a 100-mile-deep ocean with organic molecules.

On our planet, despite this movement, we too often destroy natural environments, leading to a loss of habitat for species living there. This is one of the major causes of the extinction of flora and fauna on Earth. These scientists are advocating that we not do the same to extraterrestrial locations where life, however simple, might, or may in the future, exist.

In their Space Policy paper, the three chronicle many of the successes of the Rights of Nature movement. They say we need to extend this “circle of Rights beyond Earth” and suggest that environmental groups join forces with organizations that govern space activities, such as the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

We don’t always have a great track record of protecting species on Earth. This paper urges that we do not create the same sorts of environmental destruction in extraterrestrial locations that currently support or once may have supported any form of life.

 

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. After it is published there, I post that same column to my blog page.

This is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.

What Do We Do When We Discover Extraterrestrial Aliens?

 We humans have numerous scientific activities currently involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). These include observations of numerous star systems looking for radio signals. as, for example, radar signals like those our airports send into space. The spacecraft we have sent to study the other planets and moons in our solar system have found intriguing hints of microbial life. However, we have yet to find any concrete proof of any life anywhere other than on Earth.

The James Webb Space Telescope can study planets orbiting other stars, searching for potential signs in their atmospheres that might indicate technological presence. Again, we have not yet found any such signs, only possible hints.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Credit NASA

Most astronomers and other scientists believe it to be just a matter of time before such discoveries are made. What should we do then? Kate Genevieve from the Astro Ecologies Institution led a study that included 13 other researchers from various universities. They believe that previous preparation efforts, including the most recent guidelines, which were developed in 1989 (pre-World Wide Web), are outdated.

The study authors believe we need a detailed plan. NASA and the global scientific community, they say, should prepare for the moment humanity detects signs of extraterrestrial intelligence in the internet age. The research paper states that "a technosignature detection will trigger a complex global process shaped by uncertainty, misinformation, and multiple ideological stakeholders."

Getty Images

One area of preparation that the study says needs much more research on is how to understand minds that think radically differently from the way humans do. We need to develop "Other Minds" paradigms. Techniques the paper claims we need include studying whale songs and bird navigation to understand communication patterns in non-human entities. Whales, dolphins, and birds represent some of the most intelligent non-primate species on Earth, making studying them a good way to start learning how other intelligences think.

The authors also state that we need research studies on “the psychological, social, and global dynamics of post-detection scenarios.” They suggest analyzing science fiction to learn how different cultures imagine alien contact, giving us insight into how Earthlings as a whole might react, and providing an understanding of expectations and fears.

The team members strongly emphasize the need for strong international coordination of efforts and programs now. A fractured response by different nations could well lead to severe problems.

The paper doesn’t say that detection of extraterrestrial intelligence will occur soon, but it emphasizes that with new technologies like the Webb Space Telescope and the soon-to-be-operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory, such discoveries could come soon. The researchers feel we need to do much more before aliens come calling.

 

    Each month, I write an astronomy-related column for the Oklahoman newspaper. After it is published there, I post that same column to my blog page.

     This is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.

Can Aliens Receive Our Radar Transmissions?

  

One of the most fundamental questions that we as a civilization might ask concerns the possibility that other intelligent beings may also inhabit our galaxy. On November 16, 1974, a group of scientists led by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan sent a message towards a large star cluster in the constellation of Hercules. At a distance of 13,000 light years, the message is still a long way from getting there. That event is considered the beginning of our search for other civilizations.

 

Frank Drake, credit SETI Institute.                     Carl Sagan, credit NASA Science

SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. The two most active organizations doing this are the SETI Institute and the Breakthrough Listen program. Both primarily use sophisticated radio telescopes to search for artificial radio signals from other planets that could support life. The thinking behind these projects is that any other intelligent civilization is likely to use radio signals for communication and detection.

The Allen Telescope Array, used by the SETI Institute.

The Very Large Array radio telescopes used by Breakthrough Listen. 

We humans use radio for these very purposes. Civil and military airport radar represents our most powerful radio signals. We’ve been using this technology since World War 2, and today’s radars are far more powerful and sophisticated. They are so powerful that they can be detected by any civilization with radio telescope technology at the same level as our SETI searches use.

Ramiro Saide, a Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester, led a research project to calculate how far away our radar facilities could be detected by civilizations at least as advanced as us. Our radio telescopes are capable of detecting a signal like what we emit from our airport radars from 200 light years away. There are more than 120,000 stars within 200 light-years of Earth. Although we currently have no evidence that any of those stars are home to intelligent aliens, we do know that they likely have some 200,000 or more planets that orbit them. Most of those aren’t capable of supporting life as we know it, but some may well be able to.

Saide said of the study that our radar signals would appear “clearly artificial to anyone watching from interstellar distances with powerful radio telescopes. These military signals can appear up to a hundred times stronger from certain points in space, depending on the observer’s location. Our findings suggest that radar signals – produced unintentionally by any planet with advanced technology and complex aviation system – could act as a universal sign of intelligent life.”

While our efforts to detect other civilizations have not yet provided any absolute proof of their existence, at least we know that our equipment could detect their radar emissions. The SETI Institute and Breakthrough Listen will continue to monitor the skies for any neighbors we might have.

 

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. After it is published there, I post that same column to my blog page.

This is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.

Making Distances in Space a Bit Easier to Imagine

 Warning to my readers: I’ll be using some big numbers in this article. Hopefully, I have made it as painless as possible.

Distances to objects in space from Earth are, well, astronomical. The Moon is 239,000 miles away. We’d have to travel 93,000,000 miles to reach the sun. That may seem like a great distance, but the next closest star, Proxima Centauri, is 22,876,214,400,000 miles away. Proxima Centauri is the closest of a three-star system known as Alpha Centauri. Using miles as a distance measure in space is quite impractical. The numbers get very big very quickly. Instead, we use light-years, the distance light travels in one year.

Artist's rendering of the Alpha Centauri three-star system. Credit NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Light travels at the fastest possible speed, moving through space at 186,000 miles per second. That’s 669,600,000 miles/hour or 5,865,696,000,000 miles/year. We call that distance, 5,865,696,000,000 miles, one light-year. Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light-years away, which is easier to write.

Let’s think about those astronomical distances in terms we can more easily visualize. Imagine one light year equals one mile. We all have a good understanding of how long a mile is. On this scale, light travels 0.002 inches per second. That’s a big change from the actual speed of light. The moon is 1.3 light seconds from Earth, or 0.0026 inches with this new light-year. We would orbit the sun, 8.3 light minutes away, from a distance of just under an inch. Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years away, which now equates to 4.25 miles. Now it’s a lot easier to imagine these distances.

The fastest speed that any of our spacecraft has ever flown is the Parker Solar Probe. It used multiple gravity assists from Venus to get it close to the sun. It orbits so close to the sun that it passes through the sun’s outer atmosphere. In order to orbit the sun that closely, it has to move fast, achieving a maximum speed of 430,000 miles per hour. That’s really moving. But scaled to our new light speed of one mile per year, that corresponds to a mere 0.00064 miles per hour. At that speed, it would take 1,557 years to reach Proxima Centauri. Even in this shrunken universe, our Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 miles across, and our closest comparably large galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, is still a mind-numbing 2,537,000 miles away.

As you can see, our universe is so incredibly large, even when shrunk by a factor of 5,865,696,000,000, it’s still huge beyond easy comprehension.

 

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. After it is published there, I post that same column to my blog page.

This is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.

Trees "Remember" Previous Eclipse and Warn Young Trees

 The amount of daylight we receive goes through cycles. Earth’s rotation creates day and night. Earth’s orbit around the sun, combined with its 23-degree tilt, causes our seasons, which in turn affect the amount of daylight we receive at different times of the year and, consequently, our weather patterns. Understanding these patterns was critical for early humans as they tracked animal migrations and allowed us to master agricultural practices. We developed clocks and calendars to tell us when these changes would occur.

These changes are regular and could be easily tracked and anticipated. To our early ancestors, there were unpredictable cycles that affected sunlight. Solar eclipses occur when our Moon passes between us and the sun. If you happen to be on the narrow eclipse path, you can experience a total solar eclipse. Sunlight levels will drop to a small fraction of the brightness of the normal daytime sun. Primitive cultures ascribed the loss of sunlight to a creature of some kind devouring the sun, or perhaps to some evil spirit stealing sunlight. They would make loud noises to scare off the creature or chant incantations to ward off the evil spirit.

The chances of a total eclipse occurring in a specific location are rather remote. A given location on Earth experiences a total solar eclipse only about once every 360 to 400 years, making them unpredictable. Anyone within a few hundred miles of the eclipse path will see a partial solar eclipse, but those are generally less dramatic and less cause for concern. For any given location, partial eclipses are far more common.

Biologists have studied the behavior of animals during a total solar eclipse. The rapid decrease in light level and the consequent drop in temperature cause animals to start nighttime activities. Birds start to roost. Many animals, like butterflies and bats, use sunlight for navigation and stop flying. Fireflies start flashing.

Until recently, virtually no studies existed of how plants might behave during an eclipse. We know that trees communicate via chemical methods transmitted between trees by an extensive network of underground fungi and bacteria, which biologists refer to as the “Wood Wide Web.” A group of scientists noted that an eclipse was to occur over the forests in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy on October 25, 2022.

The interdisciplinary team, consisting of researchers from Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Australia, placed custom-built sensors throughout the forest. The team recorded simultaneous bioelectrical responses from the spruce trees starting a few hours before the eclipse and continuing throughout the eclipse. They found that electrical activity from individual trees became "significantly" more synchronized. Even more surprisingly, they found that the activity in older trees began earlier than in younger trees. This, the authors say, suggests the older trees hold ancient memories of past eclipses. When such an event is imminent, the old trees "remember" and inform younger trees.

A spruce tree with a recording unit attached in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy. Credit Monica Gagliano/Southern Cross University

Spruce trees do not possess a brain or a central nervous system, yet they recognized that the light would dim significantly, affecting photosynthesis, and warned the younger trees about what to expect.

 "By applying advanced analytical methods — including complexity measures and quantum field theory — we have uncovered a deeper, previously unrecognized dynamic synchronization not based on matter exchanges among trees," said Alessandro Chiolerio, Italian Institute of Technology and University of the West of England, and the study co-leader. "We now see the forest not as a mere collection of individuals, but as an orchestra of phase-correlated plants."

The next time you hear of an upcoming solar eclipse, you should have a greater appreciation of how amazing our planet is.

 Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. After it is published there, I post that same column to my blog page.

 This is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.

Do "Dark Comets" Pose a Danger to Earth?

 You have probably seen pictures of comets with their long tails of dust and ice sweeping majestically behind them. That tail is one of the defining characteristics of comets. Small objects orbiting the sun that do not sprout a tail have long been considered to be asteroids. While astronomers have found some “dead” comets, those with no tail being pushed off by the sun, they have become asteroids.

As the ice melts from the comet by the sun’s heat, it pushes off the comet with a small force. Think of a pot of water evaporating. Even though you can’t feel the “wind” caused by this water vapor leaving the water, it’s there, and it pushes back on the water with a tiny but persistent force. With comets, this force of the vaporized ice leaving the comet acts like a tiny rocket motor. It can push the comet in its orbit in a way that astronomers can measure. The orbit of a comet isn’t controlled solely by the gravity of the sun, planets, and other objects in our solar system, but also due to this outgassing. Asteroids don’t behave this way.

Or so astronomers thought.

In 2016, astronomer David Farnocchia, with NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, discovered something quite puzzling. He found an asteroid, 2003 RM, whose motion through the solar system couldn’t be fully accounted for by the gravity of other bodies. It behaved like a comet shooting water vapor into space, except that he could find no evidence of that.

There is another force, known as the Yarkovsky effect, which can alter the orbit of small bodies around the sun. As photons from the sun impact a space rock, they deliver an almost imperceptible push on the rock. Though minuscule, it can, over time, affect the rock’s orbital path. Also, the sunward side heats up from the sun’s thermal energy. But, as the asteroid rotates, the heated side rolls into the dark and radiates the excess heat into space, again providing a tiny bit of thrust. Farnocchia took all of that into account for 2003 RM, yet it still couldn’t explain the small deviation of the asteroid’s orbit.

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS credit Wladimir Bulgar - Science Photo Library via Getty Images

With all comets, as the ice is vaporized and outgassed from the sun’s heat, it also releases dust trapped in the ice. That beautiful tail we see coming from a comet is actually composed of dust. But even using our biggest and best telescopes, no one has found any dust trailing 2003RM. It behaved as if it had a tiny rocket engine attached to it. Eventually, Farnocchia and other astronomers found thirteen more such objects. They dubbed them “dark comets.”

This is more than just a curiosity for astronomers. Farnocchia’s job is to search for asteroids that have a possibility of hitting Earth. “My job,” he says, “is to predict how things move in space. So if there’s something novel or unexpected, that’s where the advance in the field lies for us.”

Current telescopes can easily see any dust that might be coming off of a comet, but none has been found to date. New telescopes planned or already under construction will be able to detect any tiny bits of water vapor that may be puffing off these dark comets. And since some are close enough that they might have a chance of collision with Earth down the road, being able to predict their position and movement may become more crucial in the future. For now, he will monitor them and track their movements, just in case one wanders too close to us.  

Do Cosmic Events Cause Mass Extinctions on Earth?

 Scientists recognize five major mass extinctions in Earth’s history, episodes when a large fraction of life all over our planet went extinct in a very short time on geological time scales. Scientists blame various causes for these extinctions. Climate change was often the real killer, but the cause of climate change varied.

The most recent mass extinction, the K-T extinction 66 million years ago, is perhaps the most famous and best understood of the major extinctions. It led to the end of the dinosaurs and most marine reptiles. At that time, an asteroid 6 miles in diameter slammed into Earth just off the coast of what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. It threw hot ash and molten rock into the air that covered the planet, resulting in worldwide fires, killing off many species. The resulting cloud of debris and smoke then reduced sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for a period of years, causing the death of many plant species which dramatically diminished the entire food chain.

A new study suggests an astronomical cause for two other extinction episodes. The Ordovician extinction event occurred 443.8 million years ago. This was a time known for rapid diversification in marine life and the appearance of the first plants on land. Scientists estimate that 71% of species disappeared during this event.

The Late Devonian mass extinction occurred 372 million years ago leading to the extinction of nearly 70% of species. It is the least understood of the five major events, and scientists have offered several possible explanations for it. The new study provides plausible astronomical explanations for both of these events.

In both the Ordovician and late Devonian extinction events, there is evidence that Earth’s ozone layer was severely depleted. A new study led by Dr. Alexis Quintana at the University of Alicante in Spain, including other researchers from Keele University in England, puts the blame for both events on nearby supernovas.

When a massive star runs out of fuel, it explodes with so much energy that a single supernova can temporarily release more energy than its entire host galaxy. The debris includes not only high-energy radiation, like X-rays and gamma rays, it also includes cosmic rays, charged particles moving at nearly the speed of light. A nearby supernova can blast enough energy to destroy our ozone layer. With that protective shield gone, the high-energy cosmic rays and the deadly radiation can bathe Earth’s surface at lethal levels.

The Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant in the constellation of Taurus. 

Credit NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Space Telescope Institute.

Life on our planet owes its existence to supernovas, as all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium – including oxygen, carbon, calcium, iron, and all the chemical elements that make us up – are created in those stellar explosions. As the authors say in the study, it is "a great illustration for how massive stars can act as both creators and destructors of life".

Dr. Quintana states, "Supernova explosions bring heavy chemical elements into the interstellar medium, which are then used to form new stars and planets. But if a planet, including the Earth, is located too close to this kind of event, this can have devastating effects."

It seems the universe can give us life, but can also take it away.

 

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. After it is published there, I post that same column to my blog page.

This is reprinted with permission from the Oklahoman and www.Oklahoman.com.