Pusha - Part I

Pusha the Cat

The most intelligent Cat on Earth. No doubt exists that he is an extraterrestrial agent controlling what happens on the planet and if the mankind is not damaging this part of the Galaxy.

All the Pusha's picture have been taken by Elena.

Pusha's official portrait.

Pusha said he liked this picture more.

Pusha walking and looking for violators of the order.

Pusha the child

Although unrelated to cats, the name itself of famous American writer Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and the derivative 1958 drama film, are just one example among many.

Pusha, a beautiful, purebred (Persian Silver Shaded) white cat.

The wihte lion Pusha posing as domestic cat (felis catus).

Find the Cat!

Pusha, the last day of his life on the planet Earth.

Cats being revered as deities in Ancient Egypt represent an additional classic illustration.

Serious Caracal looking directly at camera.

Pusha Is a Very Clean Cat.

Pusha as Controller of What Happens on Earth.

Pusha's Profile.

A very serious cat, Pusha.

See you in the next series - Pusha - Part II.

Captain’s Log

Captain’s Log

If the Voyager missions were manned, the captain would keep a ship’s log, and the log, a combination of the events of Voyagers 1 and 2, might read something like this:

Day 1: After much concerns about provisions and instruments, which seemed to be malfunctioning, we successfully lifted off from Cap Canaveral on our long journey to the planets and the stars.

Day 2: A problem in the deployment of the boom that supports the science scan platform. If the problem is not solved, we will lose most of our pictures and other scientific data.

Day 13: We have looked back and taken the first photograph ever obtained of the Earth and Moon as worlds together in space. A pretty fair.

Day 150: Engines fired nominally for a mid course trajectory correction.

Day 170: Routine housekeeping functions. An uneventful few months.

Day 185: Successful calibration images taken of Jupiter.

Day 207: Boom problem solved, but failure of main radio transmitter. We have moved to back-up transmitter. If it fails, no one on Earth will ever hear from us again.

Day 215: We cross the orbit of Mars. That planet itself is on the other side of the Sun.

Day 295: We enter the asteroids belt. There are many large, tumbling boulders here, the shoals and reefs of space. Most of them are uncharted. Lookouts posted. We hope to avoid a collision.

Day 475: We safely emerge from the moon asteroid belt, happy to have survived.

Fantasy World. The Real Voyager's Mission is Much Interesting Than the Journey of a Fictious Ship. Because we will never know the end of story. Image:Alternate Reality, Fantasy World, Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Day 570: Jupiter is becoming prominent in the sky. We can now make out finer detail on it than the largest telescopes on Earth have ever obtained.

Day 615: The colossal weather systems and changing clouds of Jupiter, spinning in space before us, have us hypnotized. The planet is immense. It is more than twice more massive as all the other planets put together. There are no mountains, valleys, volcanoes, rivers; no boundaries between land and air; just a vast ocean of dense gas and floating clouds – a world without a surface. Everything we can see on Jupiter is floating in the sky.

Day 630: The weather on Jupiter continues to be spectacular. This ponderous world spins on its axis in less than ten hours. Its atmospheric motions are driven by the rapid rotation, by sunlight and by the heat bubbling and welling up from its interior.

Day 640: The cloud patterns are distinctive and gorgeous. They remind us a little of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, or works by William Blake or Edvard Munch. But only a little. No artist ever painted like this because none of them ever left our planet. No painter trapped on Earth ever imagined a world so strange and lovely.

We observe the multicolored belts and bands of Jupiter close up. The white bands are thought to be high clouds, probably ammonia crystals; the brownish-colored belts, deeper and hotter places where the atmosphere is sinking. The blue places are apparently deep holes in the overlying clouds through which we see clear sky.

We do not know the reason for the reddish-brown color of Jupiter. Perhaps it is due to the chemistry of phosphorus or sulfur. Perhaps it is due to complex brightly colored organic molecules produces when ultraviolet light from the Sun breaks down the methane, ammonia, and water in the Jovian atmosphere and the molecular fragments recombine. In that case, the colors of Jupiter speak to us of chemical events that four billion years ago back on Earth led to the origin of life.

Day 647: The Great Red Spot. A great column of gas reaching high above the adjacent clouds. So large that it could hold half a dozen Earths. Perhaps it is red because it is carrying up to view the complex molecules produced or concentrated at great depth. It may be a great storm system a million years old.

Day 650: Encounter. A day of wonders. We successfully negotiate the treacherous radiation belts of Jupiter with only one instrument, the photopolarimeter, damaged. We accomplish the ring plane crossing and suffer no collisions with the particles and boulders of the newly discovered rings of Jupiter. And wonderful images of Amalthea, a tiny, red, oblong world that lives in the heart of the radiation belt; of multicolored Io; of the linear markings on Europa; the cobwebby features of Ganymede; the great multi-ringed basin on Callisto. We round Callisto and pass the orbit of Jupiter 13, the outermost of the planet’s known moons. We are outward bound.

Day 662: Our particle and field detectors indicate that we have left the Jovian radiation belts. The planet’s gravity has boosted our speed. We are free of Jupiter at last and sail again the sea of space.

Day 874: A loss of the ship’s lock on the star Canopus – in the lore of constellations the rudder of a sailing vessel. It is our rudder too, essential for the ship’s orientation in the dark of space, to find our way through this unexplored part of the cosmic ocean. Canopus lock reacquired. The optical sensors seem to have mistaken Alpha and Beta Centauri for Canopus. Next port of call, two years hence: The Saturn system.

Antikythera Mechanism

Antikythera Mechanism

The first-known computer in the world, designed and constructed in 205 BC.

The Antikythera very complex clockwork mechanism is an ancient analog computer used to calculate and predict astronomical positions of the five known planets and our Sun, as well as solar and lunar eclipses for calendrical and astrological purposes. It was also used to calculate as well as the Olympiads, the cycles of the ancient Olympic Games. Supposedly, it was also used for astrological purposes, as it contains zodiac inscriptions.

This incredible device is composed of at least thirty meshing bronze gears, but we cannot be sure about the exact number of gears as the remains of the artifact were found in 1901, in a wooden box, as one lump, later separated in three main fragments. Each of the fragments was later divided into small pieces and now, after the completion of the conservation works, the scientists have 82 small parts to continue their research. Four of the fragments contain gears, and many other fragments contain inscriptions, most of them being guidelines for the use of this first-known analog computer.

The Antikythera mechanism is believed to have been designed and manufactured by Greeks somewhere between 150 and 100 BC. According to a new study, its origins are even more distant, and it comes from 205 BC. Its construction relied upon theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by Greek astronomers. In 2016, findings of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project suggest the concept for the mechanism originated in the colonies of Corinth. However, another theory suggests that its origin may have been from the ancient Greek city of Pergamon, home of the Library of Pergamum.

Antikithera Machine. Photo in public domain

After the Ancient World was gone forever, the knowledge of this incredible technology was lost. In fact, technological artifacts approaching complexity and workmanship of the Antikythera mechanism did not appear again for about two thousand years!

Today all known fragments of the Antikythera mechanism are kept at the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

On the front face of the mechanism there is a fixed ring dial representing the ecliptic, the twelve zodiacal signs marked off with 30 degree sectors. Outside of that dial is another ring which is rotatable, marked off with the months and days of the Sothic Egyptian calendar, twelve months of 30 days plus five intercalary days. The months are marked with the Egyptian names for the months transcribed into the Greek alphabet.

This analog computer was operated by turning a small hand crank which was linked via a crown gear to the four-spoked gear. This moved the date pointer on the front dial, which would be set to the correct Egyptian calendar day. The year is not selectable, and the user must know the year currently set, or by looking up the cycles indicated by the various calendar cycle indicators on the back in the Babylonian ephemeris tables for the day of the year currently set. The crank moves the date pointer about 78 days per full rotation, so hitting a particular day on the dial would be easily possible if the mechanism were in good working condition. The action of turning the hand crank would also cause all interlocked gears within the mechanism to rotate, resulting in the simultaneous calculation of the position of the Sun and Moon, the moon phase, eclipse, and calendar cycles, and perhaps the locations of planets.

The pointer had a “follower” that tracked the spiral incisions in the metal as the dials incorporated four and five full rotations of the pointers.

The zodiac dial is no less complex and it has a few more functions, such as marking of the locations of longitudes on the ecliptic for specific stars and more.

At least two pointers indicated positions of bodies upon the ecliptic. A lunar pointer indicated the position of the moon, and a mean sun pointer also was shown, perhaps doubling as the current date pointer.

On the back of the mechanism, there are five dials: the two large displays, the Metonic and the Saros, and three smaller indicators, the Olympiad, the Callippic, and the Exeligmos.

The Antikythera mecanism also tracked the precission of the elliptical orbit around the ecliptic in a 8.88 year cycle. It also calculated the timing of the Ancient Olympic Games and had some other complex functions which calculated movements of the planets, for instance.

The whole device is remarkable for the level of miniaturisation and the complexity of its parts, as well as accuracy of computation.

New Horizons

New Horizons

By NASA, 42 pages US Government Printing Office

This latest NASA pamphlet is reminiscent of the colorful “Report to Stockholders” booklets which corporations distribute annually to prove that they are good investment. All taxpayers are stockholders in the United State Space program; any who read this report will become convinced that NASA is a good investment.

With more than 50 color photos (many of them full page) the pamphlet describes the many varied activities of NASA in 1974-1975. Flights to the planets, development of the Space Shuttle, plans for Viking on Mars, and another current topics are all discussed. A six page summary of the Skylab Space Station project is also included.

Early in the report the authors make the paradoxical claim that, “The Greatest discovery of the space age is the planet Earth”. Page after page of new discoveries about our land, our water, our air, and the ecosphere and general prove out that assertion. Studies of the Venusian and Martian atmospheres have improved the understanding of the complex weather patterns on Earth. Examining planets in different stages of geological development has given new insights into terrestrial geology. There are other things about Earth which can best be observed (or only observed) from space.

New Horizons. Artwork by Elena

The extent of international space cooperation is hard to appreciate, even after the Apollo/Soyuz flight last summer. For example, five out of six scientific satellites launched by NASA in 1974 were built by other countries: Italy, Holland, England, Spain and Germany. NASA also wants to remind Americans about its research on aeronautics (new airplane wings and engines) and energy (pollution free power, new auto engines and vehicle stream-lining).

No deep insights are offered, but an excellent overall view is presented. This is obviously one sided, but it is a side that is not heard often enough. General audiences who want to know what they are buying in space, and younger readers who like beautiful pictures and simple prose, will all enjoy this pamphlet

(James E. Oberg)

(Stock number 033000-00651-4; available from Superintendent of Documents, Washington, D.C. 20402.

(Astronomy reviews, August 1976)

Extraterrestrial Life and Physical Reality

Extraterrestrial Life and Physical Reality

Audrey has always thought about extraterrestrial intelligence, abbreviated ETI, harder and more carefully than anyone else. As she grew to know better the science, she saw that ETI provided a romance, a fascination, a dramatic contrast with the humdrum business of her personal life and the life of everyone who surrounded her, with their carnivorous plants, something called transcendental meditation or topless bars.

This thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence was not work for her, but play. Her imagination soared.

It was like entering the Emerald City or Wonderland. Actually, it was better, because at the end of all her ruminations there was the thought that maybe this could really be true, could really happen.

Someday, she mused, there might in fact and not just in fantasy be a message received by one of the great radio telescopes. But she repeatedly stressed for herself that speculation must be confronted with sober physical reality. It was a kind of sieve that separated the rare useful speculation from torrents of nonsense. In fact, the extraterrestrials and their technologies had to confirm strictly to the laws of nature, a fact that severely crimped many a charming prospect. But what emerged from this sieve, and survived the most skeptical physical and astronomical analyses, might even be true. You couldn’t be sure, of course. There were bound to be possibilities that you had missed, that people cleverer than you would one day figure out.

The scholars and linguists will be given the job of reading every available Extraterrestrial newspaper and magazine. If they have ones, obviously (Quotations from M. Jorgensen). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

We are trapped by our time and our culture and our biology… we are limited, by definition, in imagining fundamentally different creatures or civilisations.

Separately evolved on very different worlds, they would have to be very different from us. It is possible that beings much more advanced than we might have unimaginable technologies – this is almost guaranteed – and even new laws of physics.

Here we are, just beginning to stand up on our two feet, discovering fire last Wednesday, and only yesterday stumbling on Newtonian dynamics, Maxwell’s equations, radio telescopes, and hints of Superunification of the laws of physics.

Looking for Dominant Intelligences

Looking for the Dominant Intelligences

On those millions worlds inhabited by advanced intelligences, consider a rare planet, the only one in its system with a surface ocean of liquid water. In this rich aquatic environment, many relatively intelligent creature live – some with eight appendages for grasping; others that communicate among themselves by changing an intricate pattern of bright and dark mottling on their bodies; even clever little creatures from the land who make brief forays into the ocean in vessels of wood and metal.

But we seek the dominant intelligences, the grandest creatures on the planet, the sentient and graceful masters of the deep ocean, the great whales.

Some sequoia trees are both larger and more massive than any whale. Illustration, artwork by © Megan Jorgensen

In fact the great whales are the largest animals ever to evolve on the planet Earth, larger by far than the dinosaurs. An adult blue whale can be thirty meters long and weigh 150 tons. Many, especially the baleen whales, are placid browsers, straining through vast volumes of ocean for the small animals on which they graze; others eat fish and krill.

The whales are recent arrivals in the ocean. Only seventy million years ago their ancestors were carnivorous mammals who migrated in slow steps from the land into the ocean. Among the whales, mothers suckle and care tenderly for their offspring. There is a long childhood in which the adults teach the young. Play is a typical pastime. These are all mammalian characteristics, all important for the development of intelligent beings.

Big Bang Event

Big Bang Event That Began Our Universe

Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery we know. That it happened is reasonably clear. All the matter and energy now in the universe was concentrated at extremely high density – a kind of cosmic egg, reminiscent of the creation myths of many cultures – perhaps into a mathematical point with no dimension at all. It was not that all the matter and energy were squeezed into a minor corner of the present universe; rather, the entire universe, matter and energy, and the space they fill, occupied a very small volume. There was not much room for events to happen in.

The Big Bang as inception… © Image Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased. It is misleading to describe the expansion of the universe as a sort of distending bubble viewed from the outside. By definition, nothing we can ever know, was outside. It is better to think of it from the inside, perhaps with grid lines – imagine to adhere to the moving fabric of space – expanding uniformly in all directions. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions.

The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe space was brilliantly illuminated. As time passed, the fabric of space continued to expand, the radiation cooled, and, in ordinary visible light, for the first time, space became dark, as it is today.

Cosmic Fugue

Cosmic Fugue

For a long time, the varieties of organisms could arise only from the accumulation of random mutations – the selection of changes, letter by letter, in the organic codes. Sex seems have been invented around two billion years ago. Before then evolution must have been agonizingly slow, but with the invention of sex could whole paragraphs, pages and books of their DNA instructions, producing new varieties ready for the sieve of selection.

Today organisms are selected to engage in sex and those who find it uninteresting quickly became extinct. And this is true not only of the microbes of two billion year ago, as we, humans also have a palpable devotion to exchanging segments of DNA.

Celestial Worlds. Celestial Worlds. Image : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

We may mount from this dull Earth, and viewing it from on high, consider whether Nature has laid out all her cost and finery upon this small speck of Dirt. So, like Travellers into other distant countries, we shall be better able to judge of what’s done at home, know how to make a true estimate of, and set its own value upon every thing. We shall be less apt to admire what this World calls great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their Affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorned as well as our own. 

(Christian Huygens, the Celestial Worlds Discovered, c. 1690).

Heavens and National Flags

Heavens and National Flags

There is something curious about the national flags of the planet Earth. Almost half of our national flags exhibit astronomical symbols. The phenomenon is transcultural, non-sectarian, worldwide. It is also not restricted to our time: Sumerian cylinder seals from the third millennium B.C. and Taoist flags in pre-revolutionary Chine displayed constellations.

The flag of the United States has fifty stars; the Soviet Union had one and Israel has one as well. Burma has fourteen, Grenada and Venezuela, seven; Chine, five; Iraq, three; Sao Tome e Principe, two; aJapan, Uruguay, Malawi, Bangladesh and Taiwan, the Sun; Brazin, a celestiall sphere; Australia, Western Samoa, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, the Constellation of the Southern Cross; Bhutan, the dragon pearl, symbol of the Earth; Cambodia, the Angkor Wat astronomical observatory; India, South Korea and the Mongolian Peoples’ Republic, cosmological symbols. Many socialist countries displayed stars and many Islamic countries display crescent symbols.

We are connected to the Earth and to the Cosmos inn the deepest ways, involving destiny of the human species. Photo by Elena

Nation wish thus to embrace something of the power and credibility of the heavens. We seek a connection with the Cosmos. We want to count in the grand scale of things. And it turns out we are connected – not in the personal, small-scale unimaginative fashion that the astrologers pretend, but in the deepest ways, involving the origin of matter, the habitability of the Earth, the evolution and destiny of the human species, themes to which we currently return in our life.

Viking Lander

Viking Lander

The Viking lander extends human capabilities to other and alien landscapes. By some standards, it is about as smart as a grasshopper; by others, only as intelligent as a bacterium. There is nothing demeaning in these comparisons. It took nature hundreds of millions of years to evolve a bacterium, and billions to make a grasshopper. With only a little experience in this sort of business, we are becoming fairly skilful at it. Viking has two eyes as we do, but they also work in the infrared, as our do not; a sample arm that can push rocks, dig and acquire soil samples; a kind of finger that it puts up to measure wind speed and direction; a nose and taste buds, of a sort, with which it senses, to a much higher precision than we can, the presence of trace molecules; an interior ear with which it can detect the rumbling of marsquakes and the gentler wind-driven jiggling of the spacecraft; and a means of detecting microbes. The spacecraft has its own self-contained radioactive power source. It radios all the scientific information it acquires back to Earth. It receives instructions from Earth, so human beings can ponder the significance of the Viking results and tell the spacecraft to do something new.

But what is the optimum way, given severe constraints on size, cost and power requirements, to search for microbes on Mars? We cannot – at least as yet – send microbiologists there. Carl Sagan once had a friend, an extraordinary microbiologist named Wolf Vishniac, of the University or Rochester, in New York. In the late 1950’s, when they were just beginning to think seriously about looking for life on Mars, he found himself at a scientific meeting where an astronomer expressed amazement that the biologists had no simple, reliable, automated instrument capable of looking for microorganisms. Vishniac decided he would do something about the matter.

Small devices lead to great discoveries (quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

He developed a small device to be sent to the planets. His friends called it the Wolf Trap. It would carry a little vial of nutrient organic matter to Mars, arrange for a sample of Martian soil to be mixed with it, and observe the changing turbidity of cloudiness of the liquid as the Martian bugs (if there were any) grew (if they would).

The Wolf Trap was selected along with three other microbiology experiments to go aboard the Viking landers. Two of the other three experiments also choose to send food to the Martians. The success of the Wolf Trap required that Martian bugs like liquid water. There were those who thought that Vishniac would only drown the little Martians. But the advantage of the Wolf Trap was that it laid no requirements on what the Martian microbes must do with their food. They had only to grow. As the other experiments made specific assumptions about gases that would be given off if taken in by the microbes, assumptions that were little less than gossips.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which runs the United States planetary space program, is subject to frequent and unpredictable budget cuts. Only rarely are there unanticipated budget increases. NASA scientific activities have very little effective support in the government, and so science is most often the target when money needs to be taken away from NASA. In 1971 it was decided that one of the four microbiology experiments must be removed, and the Wolf Trapp was off loaded. It was a crushing disappointment for Vishniac, who had invested 12 years in its development.

Ventures Into Space

Ventures Into Space

The cost of major ventures into space –permanent bases on the Moon or human exploration of Mars, say – is so large that they will not be mustered in the very near future unless we make dramatic progress in nuclear and “conventional” disarmament.  Even then there are probably more pressing needs here on Earth. But we have no doubt that, if we avoid self-destruction, we will sooner or later perform such missions. It is almost impossible to maintain a static society. There is a kind of psychological compound interest: even a small tendency toward retrenchment, a turning away from the Cosmos, adds up over many generations to a significant decline. And conversely, even a slight commitment to ventures beyond the Earth – to what we might call, after Colombus, “the enterprise of the stars” – builds over many generations to a significant human presence on other worlds, a rejoicing in our participation in the Cosmos.

Some 3,6 million years ago, in what is now northern Tanzania, a volcano erupted, the resulting cloud of ash covering the surrounding savannahs. In 1979, the paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey found in that ash footprints – the footprints of en early hominid, perhaps an ancestor of all the people on the Earth today. And 380,000 kilometers away, in a flat dray plain that humans have in a moment of optimism called the Sea of Tranquility, there is another footprint, left by the first human to walk another world. We have come far in 3,6 million years, and in 4,6 billion and in 15 billion.

Galaxy is cultivated. Illustration: Elena

For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos ancient and vast, from which we spring.

If we survive we’ll perform major missions in Space. Image : © Megan Jorgensen.

No One May Travel Faster Than Light

No One May Travel Faster Than Light

If the world is to be understood, if we are to avoid many logical paradoxes when traveling at high speeds, there are some rules, commandments of Nature, that must be obeyed. Einstein codified these rules in the special theory of relativity. Light (reflected or emitted) from an object travels at the same velocity whether the object is moving or stationary: Thou shalt not add thy speed to the speed of light.

Also, no material object may move faster than light: Thou shalt not travel at or beyond the speed of light. Nothing in physics prevents you from traveling as close to the speed of light as you like; 99, 9% percent of the speed of light would be just fine. But no matter how hard you try, you can never gain that last decimal point. For the world to be logically consistent, there must be a cosmic speed limit. Otherwise, you could get to any speed you wanted by adding velocities on a moving platform.

Thou shalt not add thy speed to the speed of light. Image: © Megan Jorgesen (Elena)

The social and political application of the ideas of Aristarchus and Copernicus was rejected or ignored around the turn of the XIXth Century. The young Einstein rebelled against the notion of privileged frames of reference in physics as much as he did in politics. In a universe filled with stars rushing helter-skelter in all directions, there was no place that was “at rest”, no framework from which to view the universe that was superior to any other framework.

This is what the word relativity means. The idea is very simple, despite its magical trapping: in viewing the universe, every place is as good as every other place.

The laws of Nature must be identical no matter who is describing the, If this is to be true – and it would be stunning if there if there were something special about our significant location in the Cosmos – then it follows that no one may travel faster than light.

Pictures in the Sky

Pictures in the Sky

I have wondered about the possibility of life elsewhere. What would it be? Of what would it be made?

If we were randomly inserted into the Cosmos, the chance that we would find ourselves on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion, a one followed by 33 zeroes. In everyday life such odds are called compelling. Worlds are really precious.

Form an intergalactic vantage point we would see, strewn like sea froth on the waves of space, innumerable faint, wispy tendrils of light. These are the galaxies. Some are solitary wanderers; most inhabit communal clusters, huddling together, drifting endlessly in the great cosmic dark. Before us is the Cosmos on the grandest scale we know. We are in the realm of the nebulae, eight billion light-years from Earth, halfway to the edge of the known universe.

Like the Sun and the Moon, stars always rise in the east and set in the west, taking the whole night to cross the sky if they pass overhead. There are different constellations in different seasons. The same constellations always rise at the beginning of autumn, say. It never happens that a new constellation suddenly rises out of the east. There is an order, a predictability, a permanence about the stars. In a way, they are almost comforting.

If the constellations had been named in the 20th century, I suppose we would see bicycles and refrigerators in the sky, rock-and-roll stars and perhaps even mushroom clouds – a new set of human hopes and fears placed among the stars. Image © Elena

Occasionally our ancestors would see a very bright star with a tail, glimpsed for just a moment, hurtling across the sky. They called it a falling star, but it is not a good name: the old stars are still there after the falling star falls. In some seasons there are many falling stars; in others very few. There is a kind of regularity here as well.

There are constellations. They are like pictures in the sky. These pictures are not, of course, really in the night sky; we put them there ourselves. We were hunter folk, and we saw hunters and dogs, bears and young women, all manner of thing of interest to us.

When 17th Century European sailors first saw the southern skies, they put objects of 17th century interest in the heavens: toucans and peacocks, telescopes and microscopes, compasses and the sterns of ships.

Travelers’ Tales

Travelers’ Tales

This is the time when humans have begun to sail the sea of space. The modern ships that ply the Keplerain trajectories to the planets are unmanned. They are beautifully constructed, semi-intelligent robots exploring unknown worlds. Voyages to the outer solar system are controlled from a single place on the planet Earth, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the National Aeronatics and Space Administration in Pasadena, California.

On July 9, 1979, a spacecraft called Voyager 2 encountered the Jupiter system. It had been almost two years sailing through interplanetary space. The ship is made of millions of separate parts assembled redundantly, so that if some component fails, others will take over its responsibilities. The spacecraft weighs 0,9 tons and would fill a large living room. It mission takes it so far from the sun that it cannot be powered by solar energy, as other spacecraft are. Instead, Voyager relies on a small nuclear power plant, drawing hundreds of watts from the radioactive decay of a pellet of plutonium. Its three integrated computers and most of its house-keeping functions – for example, its temperature-control system – are localized in its middle. It receives commands from Earth and radios its findings back to Earth through a large antenna, 3,7 meters in diameter. Most of its scientific instruments are on a scan platform, which tracks Jupiter or one of its moons as the spacecraft hurtles past. There are many scientific instruments – ultraviolet …

Do there exist many worlds, or is there but a single world? This is one of the most noble and exalted questions in the study of Nature (Albertus Magnus, thirteenth century). Image : Elena

Understanding the Interstellar Message

Because we will share scientific and mathematical insights with any other civilization, I believe that understanding the interstellar message will be the easiest part of the problem. Convincing the governments to fund a search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the hard part.

In fact, it may be that civilizations can be divided into two great categories: one in which the scientists are unable to convince non-scientists no authorize a search for extraplanetary intelligence, in which energies are directed exclusively inward, in which conventional perceptions remain unchallenged and society falters and retreats from the stars; and another category in which the grand vision of contact with other civilizations is shared widely, and a major search us undertaken.

This is one of the few human endeavors where even a failure is a success. If we were to carry out a rigorous search for extraterrestrial radio signals encompassing millions of stars and heard nothing, we would conclude that galactic civilizations were at best extremely rare, a calibration of our place in the universe. It would speak eloquently of how rare are the living things of our planet, and would underscore, as nothing else in human history has, the individual worth of every human being. If we were to succeed, the history of our species and our planet would be change forever.

It would be easy for extraterrestrials to make and unambiguously artificial interstellar message. For example, the first ten prime numbers – numbers divisible only by themselves and by one – are 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 19, 23. It is extremely unlikely that any natural physical process could transmit radio messages containing prime numbers only. If we received such a message we would deduce a civilization out there that was at least fond of prime numbers. But the most likely case is that interstellar communication will be a kind of palimpsest, like the palimpsests of ancient writers short of papyrus or stone who superimposed their messages on top of pre-existing messages.

Another World. Artwork by Elena

Perhaps at an adjacent frequency or a faster timing, there would be another message, which would turn out to be a primer, an introduction to the language of interstellar discourse. The primer would be repeated again and again because the transmitting civilization would have no way to know when we tuned in on the message. And then, deeper in the palimpsest, underneath the announcement signal and the primer, would be the real message. Radio technology permits that message to be inconceivably rich. Perhaps when we tuned in, we would find ourselves in the midst of Volume 3,267 of the Encyclopaedia Galactica.

Any messages transmitted from outer space are the responsibility of the BBC and the Post office. It is their responsibility to track down illegal broadcasts (pronouncement from a British Defense Department, the London Observer, February 26, 1978).

(Carl Sagan, Cosmos)

Technical Civilizations

Technical Civilizations

There is evidence that planets are a frequent accompaniment of star formation; in the satellite systems of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, which are like miniature solar systems; in theories of the origin of the planets; in studies of double stars; in observation of accretion disks around stars; and in some preliminary investigations of gravitational perturbations of nearby stars. Many, perhaps even most stars may have planets.

We take the fraction of stars that have planets, f(p), as roughly equal to 1/3. Then the total number of planetary systems in the Galaxy would be Nxf(p) =1.3 x 10(11) – the symbol = means here “approximately equal to”). If each system were to have about ten planets, as ours does, the total number of worlds in the Galaxy would be more than a trillion, a vas arena for the cosmic drama.

In our own solar system there are several bodies that may be suitable for life of some art: the Earth certainly, and perhaps Mars, Titan and Jupiter. Once life originates, it tends to be very adaptable and tenacious. There must be many different environments suitable for life in a given planetary system. But conservatively we choose n€=2. Then the number of planets in the Galaxy suitable for life becomes N f(p) n(e) – 3 x10(11).

Sun and planets. There may be a billion planets on which technical civilizations now exist only in our Galaxy. Image © Elena

Experiments show that under the most common cosmic conditions the molecular basis of life is readily made, the building blocks of molecules able to make copies of themselves. We are now on less certain ground; there may, for example, be impediments in the evolution of the genetic code, although we think this unlikely over billions of years of primeval chemistry. We choose f(1)- 1/3, implying a total number of planets in the Milky Way on which life has arisen at least once as N f(p) n(e), f(1) = 1x 10(11), a hundred billion inhabited worlds. That in itself is a remarkable conclusion. But we are not yet finished.

The choices of f(1), and f(e) are more difficult. On the one hand, many individually unlikely steps had to occur in biological evolution and human history for our present intelligence and technology to develop. On the other hand, there must be many quite different pathways to an advanced civilization of specified capabilities. Considering the apparent difficulty in the evolution of large organisms represented by the Cambrian explosion,, let us choose f(1) x f(e) = 1/100, meaning that only 1 percent of planets on which life arises eventually produce a technical civilization. This estimate represents some middle ground among the varying scientific opinions. Some think that the equivalent of the step from the emergence of trilobites to the domestication of fire gores like a shot in all planetary systems; other think that even given ten of fifteen billion years, the evolution of technical civilizations is unlikely. This is not a subject on which we can do much experimentation as long as our investigations are limited to a single planet. Multiplying these factors together, we find a billion planets on which technical civilizations have arisen at least once. But that is very different from saying that there are a billion planets on which technical civilizations now exist. For this, we must also estimate all the factors.

Number of Civilizations

Number of Civilizations

It is possible to explore the great issue and make a crude estimate of N, the number of advanced technical civilizations in the Galaxy. We define an advanced civilization as one capable of radio astronomy. This is, of course, a parochial if essential definition. There may be countless worlds on which the inhabitants are accomplished linguists or superb poets but indifferent radio astronomers. We will not hear from them. N can be written as the product or multiplication of a number of factors, each a kind of filter, every one of which must be sizable for there to be a large number of civilizations:

N – the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy;

F(p) – the fraction of stars that have planetary systems;

N(e) – the number of planets in a given system that are ecologically suitable for life;

F(1) – the fraction of otherwise suitable planets on which life actually arises;

F(2) – the fraction of inhabited planets on which an intelligent form of life evolves;

F(3) – the fraction of planets inhabited by intelligent beings on which a communicative technical civilization develops; and

F(l) the fraction of a planetary lifetime graced by a technical civilization.

Written out, the equation reads N= N,f(p), n(e), f(1), f(2), f(3), f(l). All the f’s are fractions, having values between 0 and 1; they will park down the large value of N.

Stars. Much of the Cosmos is in the span of Drake equation. Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

To derive N we must estimate each of these quantities. We know a fair amount about the early factors in the equation, the numbers of stars and planetary systems. We know very little about the later factors, concerning the evolution of intelligence or the lifetime of technical societies. In these cases our estimates will be little better than guesses. I invite you if you disagree with my estimates below, to make your own choices and see what implications your alternative suggestions have for the number of advanced civilizations in our Galaxy. One of the great virtues of this equation, due originally to frank Drake of Cornell, is that it involves subjects ranging from stellar and planetary astronomy to organic chemistry, evolutionary biology, history, politics and abnormal psychology. Much of the Cosmos is in the span of Drake equation.

We know N, the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, fairly well, by careful counts of stars in small but representative regions of the sky. It is a few hundred billion; some recent estimates place it at 4 x 10(11). Very few of these stars are of the massive short-lived variety that squander their reserves of thermonuclear fuel. The great majority have lifetimes of billions or more years in which they are shining stably, providing a suitable energy source for the origin and evolution of life on nearby planets.

Familiar Chemical Elements

Familiar Chemical Elements

Two stars of roughly the same mass will evolve roughly in parallel. But a more massif star will spend its nuclear fuel faster, become a red giant sooner, and be first to enter the final white dwarf decline. There should therefore be, as they are, many cases of binary stars, one component a red giant, the other a white dwarf. Some such pairs are so close together that they touch, and the glowing stellar atmosphere flows from the distended red giant to the compact white dwarf, tending to fall on a particular province of the surface of the white dwarf.

The hydrogen accumulates, compressed to higher and higher pressures and temperatures by the intense gravity of the white dwarf, until the stolen atmosphere of the red giant undergoes thermonuclear reactions, and the white dwarf briefly flares into brilliance. Such a binary is called a nova and has quite a different origin from a supernova. Novae occur only in binary systems and are powered by hydrogen fusion; supernovae occur in single stars and are powered by silicon fusion.

Atoms synthesized in the interiors of stars are commonly returned to the interstellar gas. Red giants find their outer atmospheres blowing away into space; planetary neubulae are the final stages of Sunlike stars blowing their tops. Supernovae violently eject much of their stellar mass into space. The atoms returned are, naturally, those most readily made in the thermonuclear reactions in stellar interiors: Hydrogen fuses into helium, helium into carbon, carbon into oxygen and thereafter, in massive stars, by the successive addition of further helium nuclei, neon, magnesium, silicon, sulfur, and so on are built – additions by stages, two protons and two neutrons per stage, all the way to iron. Direct fusion of silicon also generates iron, a pair of silicon atoms, each with twenty-eight protons and neutrons, joining, at a temperature of billions of degrees, to make an atom of iron with fifty-six protons and neutrons.

The Light. Illustration : Elena

These are all familiar chemical elements. We recognize their names. Such stellar nuclear reactions do not readily generate erbium, dysprosium, hafnium, praseodymium or yttrium, but rather the elements we know in everyday life, elements returned to the interstellar gas, where they are swept up in a subsequent generation of cloud collapse and star and planet formation.

All the elements of the Erath except hydrogen and some helium have been cooked by a kind of stellar alchemy billions of years ago in stars, some of which are today inconspicuous white dwarfs on the other side of the Milky Way Galaxy. The nitrogen of our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars.

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.

Records of Voyager

Records of Voyager

The two Voyager spacecraft are bound for the stars. Affixed to each is a gold-plated copper phonograph record with a cartridge and stylus and, on the aluminum record jacket, instructions for use. We sent something about our genes, something about our brains, and something about our libraries to other beings who might sail the sea of interstellar space. But we did not want to send primarily scientific information. Any civilization able to intercept Voyager in the depths of interstellar space, its transmitters long dead, would know far more science than we do.

Instead we wanted to tell those other beings something about what seems unique about ourselves. The interests of the cerebral cortex and limbic system are well represented; the R-complex less so. Although the recipients may not know any languages of the Earth, we included greetings in sixty human tongues, as well as the hellos of the humpback whales. We sent photographs of humans from all over the world caring for one another, learning, fabricating tools and art and responding to challenges.

We have sent our messages because it is important to try. Image: ©  Elena

There is an hour and a half of exquisite music from many cultures, some of it expressing our sense of cosmic loneliness, our wish to end our isolation, our longing to make contact with other beings in the Cosmos. And we have sent recordings of the sounds that would have been heard on our planet from the earliest days before the origin of life to the evolution of the human species and our most recent burgeoning technology. It is, as much as the sounds of any baleen whale, a love song cast upon the vastness of the deep. Many, perhaps most, of our messages will be indecipherable. But we have sent them because it is important to try.

In this spirit we included on the Voyager spacecraft the thoughts and feelings of one person, the electrical activity of her brain, heart, eyes and muscles, which were recorded for an hour, transcribed into sound, compressed in time and incorporated into the record.

In one sense we have launched into the Cosmos a direct transcription of the thoughts and feelings of a single human being in the month of June in the year 1977 on the planet Earth. Perhaps the recipients will make nothing of it, or think it is a recording of a pulsar, which in some superficial sense it resembles. Or perhaps a civilization unimaginably more advanced than ours will be able to decipher such recorded thoughts and feelings and appreciate our efforts to share ourselves with them.

Cosmic Glory

Cosmic Glory

The sciences of classical antiquity had been silenced more than a thousand years before, but in the late Middle Ages, some faint echoes of those voices, preserved by Arab scholars, began to insinuate themselves into the European educational curriculum. In Maulbronn, Johannes Kepler heard their reverberations, studying, besides theology, Greek and Latin, music and mathematics. In the geometry of Euclid he thought he glimpsed an image of perfection and cosmic glory. He was later to write: “Geometry existed before the Creation. It is co-eternal with the mind of God… Geometry provided God with a model for Creation… Geometry is God Himself”.

In the midst of Kepler’s mathematical ruptures, and despite his sequestered life, the imperfections of the outside world must also have moulded his character. Superstition was widely available nostrum for people powerless against the miseries of famine, pestilence and deadly doctrinal conflict. For many, the only certainty was the stars, and the ancient astrological conceit prospered in the courtyyards and taverns of fear-haunted Europe. Kepler, whose attitude toward astrology remained ambiguous all his life, wondered whether there might be hidden patterns underlying the apparent chaos of daily life. If the world was crafted by God, should it not be examined closely? Was not all of Creation an expression of the harmonies in the mind of God? The book of Nature had waited more than a millennium for a reader.

Space Ships. “God provides for every animal his means of sustenance. For the Astronomer, He had provided the astrology” (Johannes Kepler). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

In 1589, Kepler left Maulbronn to study for the clergy at the great university in Tübingen and found it a liberation. Confronted by the most vital intellectual currents of the time, his genius was immediately recognized by his teachers – one of whom introduced the young man to the dangerous mysteries of the Copernican hypothesis.

A heliocentric universe resonated with Kepler’s religious sense, and he embraced it with fervor. The Sun was metaphor for God around Whom all else revolves. Before he was to be ordained, he was made an attractive offer of secular employment, which, – perhaps he felt himself indifferently suited to an ecclesiastical career – he found himself accepting. He was summoned to Graz, in Austria, to teach secondary school mathematic s, and began a little later to prepare astronomical and meteorological almanacs and to cast horoscopes.

Kepler was a brilliant thinker and a lucid writer, but he was a disaster as a classroom teacher. He mumbled, he digressed. He was at time utterly incomprehensible. He draw only a handful of students his first year at Graz; the next year there were none. He was distracted by an incessant interior clamor of associations and speculations vying for his attention. And one pleasant summer afternoon, deep in the interstices of one of his interminable lectures, he was visited by a revelation that was to alter radically the future of the astronomy. Perhaps he stopped at mid-sentence. His inattentive students, longing for the end of the day, took little notice (I suspect) of the historical moment.

A space ship traveling near a star. Illustration by Elena

Understanding the Cosmos

The Humans have discovered an elegant and powerful way to understand the Cosmos, a method called science; it was revealed to us a universe so vast and so ancient that human affairs seem at first sight to be of little consequence.

We must admit that we have grown distant from the Universe and the Cosmos has seemed remote and irrelevant to our everyday concerns.

The science has found not only that the Cosmos is accessible to human reeling and ecstatic grandeur, not only that it is equally accessible to human understanding, but also that we are, in a very real and profound sense, a part of the Cosmos. We are born from it and our fate is deeply connected with it. The most basic human events and the most trivial actions trace back to the universe and its origins.

We are positive from our own experience that an enormous global interest exists in the exploration of the planets and in many kindred scientific topics – the origin of life, the Earth, the Cosmos… the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, our connection with the universe.