🍄 Will ‘Oumuamua Phone Home?

Outer space is under the spotlight. Deep Space Exploration and Technology market size to surpass $630.23 Bn by 2028. Are we alone, we wonder?

Jun 02, 2023

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🍄 AudioDose: this is Alice on Sonic Mushrooms. Interstellar travel here.
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Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander.

‘What is true, and I’m actually being serious here,’ former President Barack Obama told ‘The Late Late Show with James Corden’ in 2021,“is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.’ (via NY Times)

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, we have no idea what happened. But once upon a time, half a billion years ago a barren Earth floated in space. Microbes evolved to mollusks, mollusks evolved to dinosaurs and here we are. That much we know.

But how exactly did all of that magic happen? Could our origins be from space? Would that make us the aliens? Earth to Alice! But really, we’ve been looking out of Earth’s window since (our) time began. Incessantly searching for something. Ancient Egyptians pulled measurements in from the stars to accurately align their pyramids and sun temples.

Indigenous cultures instinctively embrace their connection to the night sky. We supersize our telescopes. We swing them around to probe every possiblity. Do aliens swing theirs too? And if they sent a sign, would we even catch it? What’s the alien tech scene like? Dangerous to ask? These are now serious questions that scientists and astronomers seek answers to. Stigma slightly fades and if anything, our nosiness into the night sky is growing. There’s a reason, find out why…

‘Oumuamua – The Alien Asteroid

We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars. —Oscar Wilde

Above is a favorite quote of Avi Loeb, the longest serving chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011-2020). He’s the founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative and one of the most prolific voices on ‘Oumuamua, the extremely unidentified object that powered past Earth in October 2017.

‘Oumuamua was the very first object discovered close to earth from outside of our solar system. Pronounced oh-moo-uh-moo-uh, which is Hawaiian for "a messenger from afar arriving first," it left as quickly as it arrived. The object was already charging away from Earth by the time it was spotted by astronomer Robert Weryk, at the Haleakalā Observatory, of Maui Hawaii.

Putting The “Missed” Into “Mystery”

Everyone assumed that it must be a piece of rock, an asteroid perhaps, or a comet. Both were often seen from within the Solar System, but it didn’t look like anything like them. And it was acting kind of funny.

‘It was kind of like a guest arriving for dinner and then by the time that we realize it’s weird, the guest is already out of the front door and into the street,’ Loeb, who is director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told the Lex Fridman Podcast.

The fact that this object accelerated was the first strange thing. Natural rocks in space rarely increase pace independently and ‘Oumuamua swung around the Sun at speeds of 196,000 miles per hour, with no trace of acting like a comet. Then there was its size and shape. Measurement that didn't seem physically possible, for an asteroid at least. By some estimates, ‘Oumuamua was 10 times as long as it was wide, compared to an elongated cigar. Was it one of ours, they wondered? Well, nothing NASA sent into space is shaped like a football pitch let’s put it that way.

Catch Me If You Can

Then all eyes were on the freaky behavior. By the time it was spotted, ‘Oumuamua had already flown past the Sun, performed a tight hairpin turn, and sped off out of our Solar System. Never to be seen again. In Loeb’s book, ‘Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,’ (2021), he writes that ‘the excess push away from the sun — that was the thing that broke the camel's back.’ ‘We would like to find an object like it approaching us because then we could send a camera irrespective of how fast it moves,’ Loeb told Fridman.

There have been other theories but most are batted away. The ‘pure water iceberg’ theory was dismissed because it couldn’t provide the full acceleration of ‘Oumuamua either. Loeb calculated in 2018 that ‘Oumuamua could be a thin membrane, pushed by sunlight. Since nature does not make light sails, he controversially proposed in follow-up papers that `Oumuamua was possibly produced by an extraterrestrial technological civilization.’

Well that certainly rocked the boat. Excitement mounted in the space community, as did theories that this might not be a comet. It could be an alien artifact…from another civilization!

Stranger Things

‘When I walk on vacation on the beach I often see natural objects like seashells that are beautiful and every now and then I stumble on a plastic bottle that was artificially produced,’ Loeb tells Fridman. ‘My point is that maybe ‘Oumuamua was a message in a bottle and this is simply another window into searching for artifacts from other civilizations.’

In 2023, scientists Jennifer Bergner and Darryl Seligman published a paper in Nature, suggesting that what has become known as ‘Oumuamua’s “rocket effect” can be explained away. They say that the acceleration makes sense if `Oumuamua was made of water ice, which was partly dissociated into hydrogen by cosmic-rays along its interstellar journey.

A 2020 paper by Seligman had already proposed that ‘Oumuamua was a hydrogen iceberg, which Loeb argued away. Alongside Thiem Hoang, Loeb said this theory didn’t work as heating by interstellar starlight would destroy hydrogen icebergs too quickly and not allow them to reach our Solar System in the first place.

Loeb again is ambivalent. ‘Since Bergner and Seligman admit that a pure water iceberg or a pure hydrogen iceberg are not viable models for `Oumuamua,’ he writes on Medium. ‘It is unclear how mixing two failing models would make a successful solution.’ (Loeb’s new book ‘Interstellar,’ arrives in August.)

Scientists can’t quite decide whether to park or embark on this potential spaceship idea. And here’s why…

The genesis

And whether of not it is clear to you, no doubt the Universe is unfolding as it should – writer Max Ehrmann, Desiderata

Do we need a little grounding? Let’s step this back to when academic scientists tell the story of life on Earth. They usually call on the theory of abiogenesis, where life emerges from non-life. British scientist, J.B.S. Haldane said in the 1920’s that simple organic molecules formed first, and in the presence of ultraviolet light became increasingly complex, ultimately forming cells. These cells self-replicated, creating form and function, evolving from non-living matter.

Another theory has evolved called “panspermia.” Sounds like a magical Disney film right? It’s better than all of that.

Panspermia Labyrinth

Panspermia is the theory that from somewhere ‘out there’ complex amino acids or small microorganisms hitched a ride to Earth on dust particles or micrometeorites. In research, astronauts aboard the International Space Station test the theory that suggests alien microorganisms could have survived space travel, which then led to the origin of life on earth.

How so? It assumes that the molecules of amino acids combined to form proteins, which led to the birth of organisms. Supporting the panspermia theory, NASA has discovered amino acids in molecular clouds, nearby young stars, and inside meteorites and cosmic dust. This theory can only be confirmed, however, if these molecules can actually survive harsh outer space conditions. Enter “Tanpopo” and “Tanpopo 2”, the Astrobiology Exposure and Micrometeoroid Capture Experiments. More on them later.

Could life on Earth be descended from alien spores?

It’s an idea spurred on since the fifth century BCE. The seeds were first planted by the Greek Anaxagoras, who twice mentions spermata (Greek for “seeds”) as part of the cosmos within his cosmological writings. His meaning is unclear but some scholars interpret it to mean that life came to Earth from elsewhere.

In modern science, panspermia was first flagged by British mathematician and astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe, and British astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle. Hoyle famously coined the ‘Big Bang’ term on BBC radio in 1949 and spent decades researching cosmological theories still in play today. The theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, for example, which proposes that the nuclear reactions taking place in stars build elements that are then incorporated in other stars and planets when that star dies. The new stars that start off with these elements can pass them on in turn when they die.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe collaborated on the theory of panspermia in the 1980’s, as the origin of life on Earth. They proposed that a steady influx of viral cells traveled from space via comets to Earth. Since Hoyle’s death in 2001, Wickramasinghe fleshed out the theories further. In his book, “Our Cosmic Ancestry in the Stars: The Panspermia Revolution and the Origins of Humanity,” (2019) co-authored by Kamala Wickramasinghe and Gensuke Tokoro, they explore the philosophical, psychological, cultural, and environmental ramifications of the acceptance of panspermia. They compare the potential shift to be on par with the Copernican Revolution - when it was finally accepted that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

Back to The Tanpopos 1 and 2

Conducted by astronauts approximately 400 kilometers above Earth, several types of amino acids were exposed to space environment outside of the station to observe how these molecules reacted to the conditions. Researchers say in a paper that complex amino acid precursors may have been more robust than simple precursors and could have survived a space trip to Earth billions of years ago.

Tanpopo 2 in 2018, saw astronauts again expose additional microbes and organic compounds to the space environment and captured microparticles from space. ‘Organic compounds accumulated on primitive Earth prior to the generation of life, and it is not yet clear whether they were formed in primitive terrestrial or extraterrestrial environments or both,’ the researchers noted in their paper. ‘Many experiments have been conducted since the 1950s to simulate methods of possible organic compound formation, particularly with respect to bioorganic compounds such as amino acids.’ Now that the tests are completed, the results will soon be published answering if life on Earth came from outer space.

Star Stories

‘You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here,’ Ehrmann wrote in Desiderata, in the early1920’s. But did you know, such poetic thought has long been lauded by Aboriginal traditions, who see the planets as children of the Sun and Moon? They represent ancestor spirits walking across the sky. The Milky Way, known as “Jiibay Kona,” is seen as a terrestrial roadway for the dead and leads back to Ishpiming, the Spirit World.

The night sky ‘holds the cultural psyche and worldview of a people,’ Sandra Laronde tells Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. ‘It contains our stories. We are imprinted up there.’ Laronde is the founder of Red Sky Performance, a Toronto-based company that creates dance formed from these cosmic roots.

Jacques Vallée, a French scientist and technologist who has spent his lifetime investigating extraterrestrial activity, also returns to the mystic. “Vallée suspects that it may be knotted up with the secret of consciousness itself,” Chantal Tattoli writes in Wired interviewing Vallée in 2022. “The thing that philosophers call qualia—the conscious experience each human has—seems to be more than the sum of our physical parts. There’s an unsolved x there.” Vallée is the man who helped NASA map Mars. He worked on Arpanet, the first Internet, and developed networking software that was adopted by the US National Security Agency, and 72 global nuclear power plants. Steven Spielberg consulted Vallée for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and he has worked as an astronomer for the French government. “Vallée’s friend, Federico Faggin, for one, argues that consciousness is a basic property of nature, that the dimensions we call spacetime are in fact byproducts of some deeper reality,” Tattoli continues. “Maybe UFOs, Vallée suggests, are that reality welling up into ours.”

What else we are wondering

🔍 Bright Time, Right Place
So observing something like ‘Oumuamua was the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, until it wasn’t. Just two years after ‘Oumuamua, came the second observed interstellar interloper.

Using his homemade telescope, Russian engineer Gennady Borisov spotted an object in the predawn Crimean sky on August 30^th, 2019. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a supernova? No, it’s a rogue comet from a red dwarf! – (Most likely) - and confirmed as our first interstellar comet. Borisov, an amateur astronomer, immediately noticed it was travelling in a different direction to the comets that inhabit the main asteroid belt that straddles the Solar System. ‘21/Borisov’ has since been spotted on the Hubble Space Telescope and by analyzing its composition, is found to contain much more carbon monoxide than our Solar System’s comets. Studies therefore suggest it came from a far cooler star than our sun, reckoned to be a red dwarf.

Hundreds of telescopes have been sweeping the sky for decades. In fact, Loeb and colleagues had calculated in 2009 that the probability of Earth’s most powerful telescope spotting an interstellar object in its lifetime was between one in a 1,000 and one in 100,000. But by 2019, two were spotted!

🔍 👁‍🗨 The Curious Incident?
In Brazil, 1996, United States Air Forces shot down a UFO, so the story goes. It crashed six miles from a town called Varginha in the southeast and is the focus of a 2021 documentary called “Moment of Contact,” directed by James Fox. The UFO, described as the size of a school bus but shaped like a submarine, was spotted by college professor and amateur ultralight pilot, Carlos de Sousa. He compared it to a malfunctioning washing machine, rocking and jerking around in the sky. The documentary describes hairless “aliens” spotted by three local girls. The extraterrestrials had oily skin and red eyes three times bigger than ours. Round footprints were found with three long toes, two “aliens” were allegedly scooped away by the US Air Force and a third got away…

🔍 The Search Continues…
"NASA is trying to bring science to the study of unidentified anomalous phenomena. A panel of top scientists and academics is trying to figure out how to systematically study UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenome)" via NPR.

"NASA Panel Says Data Problems Make Explaining U.F.O.s Difficult" via The New York Times.

🔍 The Alien in the Room
Are aliens sentient beings? What about alien rights? Time to address the alien in the room. Despite culture playing with the idea of alien visitations on screen, with E.T. (1982), and Contact (1997), there’s still no global agreement as to how humanity would handle such guests. How would we screen them? We’ve had an Outer Space Treaty since 1967 (created due to development of intercontinental ballistic missiles able to reach targets in space), but 55 years later and still no aliens on the agenda.

Would they be treated humanely, and offered protection by a version of the existing Human Rights Treaty? Or, as ethicist Peter Singer suggests, does it depend on the cognitive capabilities of the extraterrestrials? Writing on the subject of inalienable rights for extraterrestrials as well as animals, Singer says that sentience - possibly greater than that of dolphins or humans - could be key. “When it comes to aliens, we have to ask: what kind of intelligence do they have?” Susan Blackmore, a British writer and professor who researches consciousness, told the BBC. “Why do they have it? I think we must assume these aliens would have evolved by Darwinian evolutionary processes, because that's the only process we know that will produce living intelligent things.”

🔍 👁‍🗨Are We Ants On The Sidewalk?
In the sci-fi film Arrival (2016), Amy Adams plays a linguistics expert rushed in to interpret the language of landed aliens. Unrealistic? Perhaps, but the panic and alarm of officials in the film, could be how the situation with no plan plays out.

The film’s theme was used to springboard a 2022 discussion sponsored by Harvard’s Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. Panelists Avi Loeb and Jesse Snedeker, Harvard Professor of Psychology and expert in language comprehension, discussed how to interpret alien intelligence and what we would say. Earth’s inhabitants have to be mindful of the ‘technological gap’ that will probably exist between the human race and a messenger from beyond the solar system, said Loeb, and acknowledge that humans are ‘somewhere in the middle of the distribution of intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy.’ Loeb also compared humans to potentially being as insignificant to extraterrestrials as ants on the sidewalk.

🔍 Wishing On a Star
Jill Stuart, a specialist in outer space law at the London School of Economics, doesn't think that humans will make contact with extraterrestrials within our lifetimes. But that considering what we would do is productive. ”We search the Universe to discover ourselves, because it forces us to reflect back on how we relate to each other, how we relate to our environment, and how we relate to other species and people," she told the BBC. "These future-focused scenarios may never happen, but the whole process has value in and of itself."

🔍 Alien Rights?
First up, what are human rights? They are universal rights legally guaranteed to all people, since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, following World War Two. In recent decades, we have afforded animals “rights” and this is based on sentience, their ability to feel and be aware of feeling. Would we be able to show aliens the same respect?

Depends on the threat. There’s already debate over whether we should be attempting to contact extraterrestrials for exactly that reason. Realistically, if they reach us before we find them, we might not have a choice to make. "What are you going to do if they're aggressive?" Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer for the Seti Institute, told the BBC. "It'd be like Neanderthals trying to meet with the US Air Force: the Neanderthals could have all the policies they want, but it wouldn't matter.”

But there’s no plan anyway.

‘The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes.’

Does it even have to be said? For humans, it is sadly so. This is one of the space laws within the Outer Space Treaty that has fleshed out with time, as new concerns around space arise. Other principles include, ‘astronauts shall be regarded as the envoys of mankind,’ and ‘States shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects.’ It’s not your everyday reading - it bans weaponizing spaceships, for example – but still only spotlights human behavior.

Should any detection of a signal from “out there” ever show up, we do have one solid suggestion. In 2010, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence group at the International Academy of Astronautics recommended the creation of a forum for international coordination through the UN and its Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. It didn’t happen.

So as it stands – or allow me, hovers – if a flying saucer were to land in Finland, that country alone, could start the conversation. "There wouldn't be any precedent or legal background for there to be responsibility,” Jill Stuart, a specialist in outer space law at the London School of Economics, told the BBC, adding that if a UFO had been shot down and landed in a nation state, there may be a case that the country should take responsibility for the fallout.

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