Alien Encounters

If aliens existed, would they look like us? Simon Conway Morris takes some educated guesses. The Science of Aliens, a new exhibition at the Science Museum, reveals that the answer to the perennial question “Are we alone?� may be closer than we thought. While many will be drawn to a presentation of the Daleks and androids that have fuelled the world of sci-fi, and some interesting insights into the more “alien� habitats within the Earth’s crust itself, the real meat lies in the exhibition’s third area. Taking impetus from a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary, Aliens, and working with the producer Nick Stringer, I was part of a team of scientists throwntogether to brainstorm new biospheres into existence.

We imagined a world with an atmosphere much thicker than that of the Earth. How would life evolve? We can be pretty sure that there will be plants, but here on the satellite we called Blue Moon the forests are gigantic — trees a kilometre high. Swooping through the dense canopy are the stalkers, flying horrors that are vaguely wasp-like but much larger. Highly social and predatory, they hunt immense flyers, creatures that we dub the sky-whales. The other planet we nick-name Aurelia — it is roughly Earth-sized, but orbiting a much smaller and dimmer star than our Sun. It is different in another important way: gravitational forces have locked Aurelia so that one side is permanently insunlight, the other in perpetual and icy darkness. Life again adapts, and here we conjure up umbrella-like forests, aquatic foragers known as mudpods, and ostrich-like hunters, the gulphogs. In some ways this is a very stable world, but actually danger is never far away. From lethal predators to the star’s sudden and intense ultraviolet flares, we envisage a dynamic alien ecology. The Science of Aliens is a thought-provoking exhibition, stretching and entertaining the minds of both children and adults. In the last section, a “communication zone� poses the question: what happens when we do make contact? Is there any way that we can we talk to them? What would we say? The search is already on, and while radio telescopes comb the skies, newstrategies are. ...

Eavesdropping on alien radio transmissions may be close to impossible, says a team of researchers who think alien signals would be indistinguishable from interstellar noise. The problem, as first pointed out by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, is that any sort of optimally efficient encoded message has too much in common with background noise. Researchers at the University of Michigan, Max Plank Institute and the University of New Mexico took another look at Shannon's work and found that the problem is particularly bad if you're looking at radio waves, the type of waves generally studied for signs of alien communication. "If youare communicating with maximum efficiency, your signal looks like black body radiation," said physicist Mark Newman of the University of Michigan, referring to theoretical dark, warm heavenly bodies that transmit light in radio and infrared wavelengths.

Efficiently encoded messages look a lot like noise in the same way that email spam mimics real email — by containing strings of words that appear to contain a message, but are actually random jumbles. On the other hand, if something is non-random, it might contain a predictable string of symbols, like ... ~~~~~~~~~ ..., but contain little or no information. "If something is non-random, then you can predict what's coming next," said Newman. Such a signal would bepassed over as well since it lacks information, he said. The problem is a familiar one to researchers involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), says SETI's Seth Shostak. The SETI project scans the cosmos for radio signals that could be messages from extraterrestrials, using primarily the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico. "SETI assumes that the aliens will be as efficient as they want to be," said Shostak. They would likely have more than our mere 80 years of experience making radio transmissions and would be much better at encoding messages, making their transmissions very hard to detect, he said. "But if they have a signal that they want to be found they would put a flag on it,"said. ...

Investigators from a UFO network are interviewing people who claims to have seen an unusual aircraft flying over the Southland this summer. More than a dozen people reported to the National UFO Reporting Center at www.nuforc.org that they saw strange lights above Tinley Park, Orland Park and Matteson on Aug. 21. The sightings have a featured spot on the Web site. David Schultz, a self-described skeptic, said he's not sure what he saw, but he knows he's never seen anything like it before. About 10 p.m., the Chicago man was outside a restaurant on Oak Park Avenue in Tinley Park when he noticed four red lights in the sky. "Each light had two separate lights that were really close together," he said.

"They moved very slowly, and then they just stopped." Schultz said he heard no noise, like one would associate with an airplane flying overhead. Then, one by one, the lights went out. "I just figured they were satellites or something," he said. Schultz said he didn't think much of the incident until he saw reports on the Internet from people who had seen the same thing. "People all over that town had to have seen it," he said. Samuel Maranto, an investigator with the Mutual UFO Network, an international UFO reporting group, said he has heard from many people who saw the lights and wondered whatthey were. "It was seen over quite a bit of the southwest region," he said. Most accounts on the Web site describe three red lights, but other details differ. Some say the lights moved or changed formation, and some say they stayed still. Maranto, who has an office at Orland Square mall, said one person provided a video of the incident. "It was a large, triangular craft," he said. "Another object came in and displayed lights that were spinning around and disappeared. I believe that object went into the larger object." Maranto said he's not convinced what he saw was extraterrestrial, but he's not ruling out the possibility. "When we see this kind of thing, we have to say, is it ours oris it. ...

A radio signal picked up by a search for extraterrestrial intelligence marks the best candidate yet for "first contact" by aliens. The signal was traced to a point between the constellations Pisces and Aires, according to New Scientist. Astronomers who have been scanning the universe for years seeking contact with intelligent life said it stood out as being "unusual". The signal has been observed for only about a minute, not long enough to allow astronomers to analyse it in detail. It is unlikely to be the result of any obvious radio interference or noise, and does not bear the hallmark of any known astronomicalobject.

Although it is the best candidate yet for contact with an alien life form, the astronomers say that it may turn out to be an unknown astronomical phenomenon, or simply a blemish produced by the telescope. For six years, the SETI@home project (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), has used programs running as screensavers on millions of PCs worldwide to sift signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope, in Puerto Rico. David Anderson, the project's director, said he was intrigued by the signal but sceptical. According to a new paper in Nature, we might be more successful searching our own backyard for clues to other life forms.The article by Dr Gregory Wright and Christopher Rose, the professor of electrical andcomputer engineering at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, suggests that to discover if we are alone, we should look for signs in our planetary backyard, akin to the monolith in Arthur C Clarke's 2001.They calculate that inscribing information and physically sending it to some location in deep space is more energy-efficient than using radio waves, which disperse."Think of a flashlight beam," says Prof Rose. "Its intensity decreases as it gets farther from its source." The same goes for radio waves.However, a physical message stays where it lands. As for the form of alien messages, he speculates that it could be anything from text in a real language to, more likely, organic material embedded in anasteroid or in a. ...