Isaac Was Wrong (Maybe)
Bombs are bursting in air over Baghdad as I write this, so I’m a bit preoccupied. Don’t worry–this isn’t going to be a column about the war. At the current rate of progress, the war will be old news long before this column sees print.
Catching up on my Analog reading has served as a distraction from the news. It has also given me a chance to provide an actual "alternate view" to something that has appeared in these pages.
I am referring to the fact article by Ben Bova in the April, 2003 issue, "Isaac Was Right: N Equals One," and Stan’s April editorial, "Still Guessing After All these Years," which was prompted by Bova’s piece.
Now, I do not disagree with very much of what either of them had to say. Like Ben Bova, I too have found the invoking of the Drake equation to prove that lots of intelligent alien species must be out there to be little more than, as he put it, numerology.
You know what the Drake equation is, right? That’s the one where you start with the estimated number of stars in the Universe, multiply that by the fraction of those stars that might have planets, times the number of planet-bearing stars that might have planets that can support life as we know it, and so on until you finally arrive at that fraction of intelligent species which could conceivably communicate with us. (I’ve always thought they should add a factor for that percentage of species culturally insane enough to broadcast their existence into the great unknown, but they haven’t.) We can probably get within a factor of ten of the number of stars in the observable Universe, but all of the other factors in the Drake equation require educated guesses. People enamored of the idea of using radio telescopes to search the skies for signals from aliens (the SETI folk) use the equation, with suitably optimistic educated guesses filling in the blanks, to show that such a search is not simply a fool’s errand. Indeed, we are often told that even with relatively pessimistic assumptions (relative to what, I don’t know) the Milky Way alone might be home to scores, hundreds, even thousands of alien species capable of communicating with us.
But you are never more than two educated guesses away from complete ignorance.
Bova’s piece, if you missed it, argued that the number of intelligent species in the Universe may, in fact, be one . . . us. I agree that there is no a priori reason known to science (yet) that says that intelligence must eventually evolve. After all, billions of species on our own Earth have never come within a country mile of an IQ of even 1, yet most of them have been around far longer than have we.
Bova also made a point of explaining why his opinion about the frequency of advanced civilizations differed from the opinion offered in an earlier Analog fact article, one by Dr. Robert Zubrin, "Galactic Society," in the April, 2002 issue. So Stan, ever the even-handed editor, having published both pieces, decided that he’d write an editorial explaining what the current Analog position is on the matter. Of course, he said that Analog doesn’t have a position on it. He, like I, sees so many unknowns that need to become knowns before we can ever hope to use the Drake equation, that he holds to the view that 1) we don’t know, and 2) nobody else knows, either.
So what’s my alternate view if I agree with so much that both Ben Bova and Stan Schmidt say? Well, use of the Drake equation to prove that there are other civilizations out there with whom we could communicate is predicated upon the idea that we have, as yet, seen no evidence for them here on Earth. Both Ben and Stan seem to take this as a given, and I’m not sure that’s fair. I think that maybe we have seen that evidence but that, by and large, the Authorities that Matter cannot or will not accept it as valid.
So, yeah, UFOs.
For many, perhaps even some of you, UFOs are seen only by freaks and weirdoes, or ordinary, largely ignorant folk who think they’re seeing a flying saucer when really they’re seeing Venus (because, you see, those country bumpkin sorts don’t get out at night much, and when they do, they don’t look at the sky). Never mind that some of those ordinary, ignorant folks are astronauts, and airline pilots, and engineers, and amateur astronomers, and meteorologists, and science fiction writers, and so on. Their simple claim that they’ve seen something in the sky that is genuinely unknown is tantamount to proving that they have some screws loose, and likely missing.
Granted, some people who think they’ve seen a flying saucer are, in fact, bumpkins. But to be honest, I haven’t met any genuine bumpkins that I know of. Even the least educated of people I’ve met are too skeptical to call some odd-looking thing in the sky a UFO, for poorly educated does not mean unsophisticated. True, some people with some other kind of problem may be prone to jump to the UFO explanation first, like chronic attention seekers, but you can’t fault the UFOs for that.
It seems unfair to me that the SETI folk are taken (reasonably) seriously when the UFO folk are not, because both use essentially identical arguments.
What I mean is that the UFO culture uses its own form of the Drake equation, even if not explicitly. That is, they multiply the number of reported sightings by the fraction of sightings made by credible observers, times the number of those sightings that resist conventional explanation, and so on until they arrive at a total number of sightings that seem explicable only by extraterrestrial visitation. And, just like with the Drake equation, the assumptions made to arrive at a number for most of those factors can be wildly far off the mark.
However, if anything, the factors in the "UFO-Drake equation" can be known with far more certainty than those in the original. It is simply a matter of data collection to find out how many reported UFO sightings there are. And of those, it is not at all optimistic to assert that we can certainly get to within a factor of two of the number of total sightings that are easily attributed to mundane circumstances.
In the ordinary Drake equation, the later factors like those for how frequently life appears, and for how frequently intelligent life appears, are nothing more than guesses. We can do much better than that in the UFO-Drake equation. For instance, the UFO-Drake equation might have a term for something like "that fraction of credible UFO reporters who have genuinely distinguished a bona fide mechanical flying contraption from something else." A pathological skeptic might say this factor equals zero because people who report UFOs are, by definition, unable "to genuinely distinguish bona fide . . . etc." But we know, for a fact, that this number cannot be zero.
In recent years, the CIA has admitted that some reported UFO sightings were actually sightings of secret aircraft of which the public had been kept in the dark. So some ordinary people can correctly identify a UFO as such. It may not be of alien manufacture, but it is a genuine UFO. If one wishes to do the legwork (someone may have already), correlating the flight histories of those secret craft with UFO sightings attributable to those flights will yield a UFO-Drake equation factor that is demonstrably more reliable than any of the factors in the ordinary Drake equation.
As an aside, the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) has performed a study which correlated sightings of triangular-shaped UFOs with proximity to various military airbases around the country and the flight corridors between them. Several strong correlations were found, which is to be expected if some fraction of UFO sightings are attributable to secret government programs (regardless of whether or not they’re flying home-grown stuff or Trek-tech reverse-engineered from crashed flying saucers). For more, see the website at http://www.nidsci.org.
At this point, some of you are no doubt screaming at the magazine, "Dammit, Kooistra! Everyone knows the government can’t keep a secret. They couldn’t possibly keep the lid on alien visitations. People would talk. We’d know!"
To which I reply, "What secret?" Oh, sure, there is no official acknowledgment of aliens visiting us. But people, some of them government insiders, have been spilling the beans about government UFO secrets for years. We just don’t believe them.
But let’s look at Roswell, the most famous purported UFO crash and cover-up story, to see what it says about how well the government can keep secrets.
As the story goes, a "flying disc" was reported by a military spokesman to have crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Headlines appeared; photographs were shown of debris. The next day the military denied that the crash involved a flying saucer, but rather said: "It was a weather balloon, now shut up and go away."
For years the UFO community has claimed that the first story was the correct one. Decades later, the military admitted that there had indeed been a cover-up. They said what had actually crashed was a balloon from something called Project Mogul, at the time a top-secret approach to detecting Soviet nuclear tests.
If this second explanation is true, then the military certainly was able to keep a secret. Indeed, they kept it so well that one of the scientists who actually worked on the project in the 1940s, one Charles B. Moore, didn’t even know it was called "Project Mogul" until he was told almost fifty years later. (See http://www.csicop.org/si/9507/roswell.html.) And one of the ways they kept it secret was by failing to convince people that it wasn’t really a flying saucer.
Sneaky little bastards, weren’t they?
On the other hand, if it really was a crashed alien spaceship . . . but I’m sure you can see where I’m going.
A skeptic might still assert that there is no reason why the government would keep alien visitation secret. But surely there is.
Instead of an alien spacecraft, let’s consider what would happen if a B2 stealth bomber flew through a time warp and crashed outside Roswell in 1947, dropping in the military’s lap a human weapon about fifty years beyond the state of their technological art.
If someone reports that a flying disc crashed, I can guarantee you that a higher up is going to change that report to a cover story and quick. The US being only two years past World War II, the military is going to be pretty anal about information concerning an unknown aircraft that managed to make its way undetected to within just miles of our single "nuclear" air base. Over time, stories would leak out that the craft was invisible to radar. That such a thing is possible is not something you’d want your enemies to know about.
So how would the military react if an alien spaceship with technology centuries ahead of ours crashed? Perhaps tell us it was a weather balloon?
Of course, none of the above tells us whether or not N = 1. But I do think I’ve made the case that the UFO-Drake equation should be taken at least as seriously as the SETI version.
And maybe someday Stan will tell us what the official Analog position is on UFOs.
