Origin of Life

Origin of Life

Beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, on the other side of the sky, is a universe teeming with radio emission. By studying radio waves you can learn about planets and stars and galaxies, about the composition of great clouds of organic molecules that drift between the stars, about the origin and evolution and fate of the universe.But all these radio emissions are natural – caused by physical processes, electrons spiraling in the galactic magnetic field, or interstellar molecules colliding with one another, or the remote echoes of the Big Bang red-shifted from gamma rays at the origin if the universe to the tame and chill radio waves that fill all of space in our speech.

In the scant few decades in which humans have pursued radio astronomy, there has been a real signal from the depths of space, something manufactured, something artificial, something contrived by an alien mind.

There have been false alarms. The regular time variation of the radio emission from quasars and, especially, pulsars had at first been thought, tentatively, tremulously, to be a kind of announcement signal from someone else, or perhaps a radio navigation beacon for exotic ships that plied the spaces between the stars.

Ice Watch. Argus had been in full operation for many years. There had been glitches, bogeys, intimations, false alarms. But no messages. Image : © Megan Jorgensen

But they had turned out to be something else – equally exotic, perhaps, as a signal from beings in the night sky. Quasars seemed to be stupendous sources of energy, perhaps connected with massive black holes at the centers of galaxies, many of them observed more than halfway back in time to the origin of the universe.

Pulsars are rapidly spinning atomic nuclei the size of a city. And there had been other rich and mysterious messages that had turned out to be intelligent after a fashion but not very extraterrestrial. The skies are now peppered with secret military radar systems and radio communication satellites that were beyond the entreaty of a few civilian radio astronomers. Sometimes they were real outlaws, ignoring international telecommunications agreement. There were no recourses and no penalties. Occasionally, all nations denied responsibility. But there had never been a clear-cut alien signal.

And yet the origin of life now seem to be so easy – and there are so many planetary systems, so many worlds and so many billions of years available for biological evolution – that it is hard to believe the Galaxy is not teeming with life and intelligence.

Project Argus was the largest facility in the world dedicated to the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Radio waves travel with the speed of light, faster than which nothing it seem, could go. They are easy to generate and easy to detect. Even very backward technological civilizations, like that on Earth, would stumble on radio early in their exploration of the physical world.

Even with  the rudimentary radio technology available – now, only a few decades after the invention of the radio telescope – it is nearly possibly to communicate with an identical civilization at the center of the Galaxy.

There are so many places in the sky to examine, and so many frequencies on which an alien civilisation might be broadcasting, that it requires a systematic and patient observing program.