Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration

Last year the New Frontiers in Astronomy & Cosmology program, set up by the John Templeton Foundation as a grant-awarding organization, dispensed three grants with a bearing on what Clément Vidal calls ‘Zen SETI.’ The idea of looking into our astronomical data and making new observations to track possible signs of an extraterrestrial civilization at work is not new, and yesterday we looked at Freeman Dyson’s early contribution. Carl Sagan and Josif Shklovskii are also among those in a lineage we can extend back at least to the early 20th Century.

The recent grants show a gathering momentum for extending SETI in new directions. The team of Jason Wright (Pennsylvania State) and colleagues Steinn Sigurðsson and Matthew Povich is embarking on a hunt for Dyson spheres, which if observed in a distant galaxy colonized by a Kardashev Type III civilization, should throw an unmistakable signature in the infrared. Could we find such an object in our data from WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite?

Or how about Kepler? Lucianne Walkowicz at Princeton was a winner of one of the 2013 grants, looking for hints of technology — of artificiality — around distant stars. The third recipient was exoplanet hunter Geoff Marcy (UC-Berkeley), working with Andrew Howard (University of Hawaii) and John Johnson (Caltech) on data from Kepler. When Clément Vidal writes about SETI as an observing rather than a communications program (in The Beginning and the End (Springer, 2014), he gives a powerful boost to the principles behind such searches.

Vidal’s book is rich and densely textured, which is why what I’ve tried to do in the last few days is to extract a few core ideas in the area most related to what we do here on Centauri Dreams. The early chapters are primarily concerned with building a worldview that is consistent with the latest thinking in cosmology, and Vidal speculates as well not only on multiverse theories but on a role for life in the cosmos that includes cosmogenesis, the creation of new universes. Olaf Stapledon immediately comes to mind because Vidal’s ambitious lunge into new intellectual terrain reminds me so much of the British writer. He would be at home with Vidal’s ideas of a cosmological artificial selection, one that draws on and extends ideas originally put forward by another deeply creative thinker, Lee Smolin.

Black Holes and their Uses

What can we, for example, say about black holes in a SETI context? For one thing, they form what would surely be the most powerful gravitational lensing opportunity available. Claudio Maccone has written about the potential of the central black hole in galaxies like the Milky Way becoming surrounded by a swarm of observing stations aligned with targets throughout the universe. For that matter, the lensing of electromagnetic radiation around a black hole is so intense that a communications channel could be set up for intergalactic distances (waiting out the answer is a different problem).

But black holes offer more than this. As the densest known objects in the universe, they can meet the needs of a Type III civilization faced with a continuing demand to support its energy consumption. Vidal runs through the literature on the matter, starting with Roger Penrose, who imagined extraction of black hole rotational energy by injection of matter, and through other scientists (the bibliography is extensive and quite good) who worked out the specifics of drawing energy from rotating black holes. Another possibility: Collecting energy from gravitational waves generated when black holes collide, or actually manipulating the merger of smaller black holes. In recent days, Louis Crane has studied small black holes as a power source — these objects convert matter into energy (Hawking radiation) at high levels of efficiency.

There are computational uses for black holes that push us out to the boundaries of computer science in the form of theorized ‘hypercomputers’ that draw on relativistic effects to dilate time in the proximity of black holes. Vidal’s philosophical ideas of cosmological artificial selection draw on the prospect that a Type III civilization may learn how to use black holes to create entirely new universes. However we view such prospects, the idea here is that for a wide variety of reasons, black holes should be attractors for intelligence. Vidal wants to know what the observable manifestations of any of these uses might be. Would such things be detectable?

Energy Sources for Advanced Civilizations

But we don’t have to confine our search to black holes themselves. If extracting energy from the thin accretion disk around a rotating black hole may be one of the most efficient power sources we can imagine, we can also look for similar configurations around neutron stars or white dwarfs. A key question, then is this: Could a civilization harness its star’s energy with efficiencies that approach black hole densities? The interesting family of binary systems called X-ray binaries (because of their emissions in the X-ray electromagnetic spectrum) should, Vidal believes, intrigue us as one possible sign of an artificial astrophysical system.

Image: An artist’s impression of GRS 1915, which is thought to be an X-ray binary. The black hole sucks material off the companion star, which is heated by friction, emitting X-rays. Credit: Rob Hynes, from http://www.phys.lsu.edu/~rih/.

There are others, including a whole range of contact binaries where stars exchange matter and energy in complicated ways. Vidal’s assumption is that these binaries are natural objects, but he doesn’t want to rule out the possibility that in at least some, we may be seeing something else at work.

Let me quote the author on this:

Accretion is a ubiquitous astrophysical process in galaxy and planet formation, so we may object that all binaries may simply always be natural. But let me introduce an analogy. Fission can be found in natural processes, as well as fusion, which is one of the core energetic processes in stellar evolution. Yet humans seek to copy them, and would certainly benefit greatly from — always — controlling them. So it is not because a process is known to occur naturally that its use in a given case is not under intelligent control. In fact, the situation may even be more subtle. The formation of XRBs might be natural, but they may later be controlled or taken over by ETIs, just as a river flowing down a mountain is a natural gravitational energy source that humans can harness with hydroelectric power stations.

In other words, there is a wide variety of binary stars in which we find accretion disks forming that could provide useful sources of energy to an advanced civilization. Vidal creates the term starivore to describe a civilization that could ‘feed’ on stars. More specifically:

It is an extraterrestrial civilization using stellar energy (Type KII) in the configuration of a slow non-conservative transient accreting binary…, with the dense primary… being either a planet, a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole.

And indeed, Vidal quotes Stapledon’s novel Star Maker by way of showing that the idea of energy extraction from binary systems is not new. A speculative scenario that grows out of this is where our own civilization may one day go. As our technologies function on smaller and denser scales and we continue to move up the Kardashev ladder, thus using more and more energy, we run out of energy even if we cover the Earth with solar panels. So we bring Earth closer to the Sun (a Stapledon notion) to get more energy, with our descendants now living as postbiological beings. Still we need more energy, so stellar engineers create active accretion from, the Sun, transforming what had once been human life into a starivore civilization.

The density of the evolved Earth now approaches that of a white dwarf, and the new binary resembles what we see in our data as a cataclysmic variable, a binary system with white dwarf component. Vidal:

If such binary systems are starivores, then we should find that the primitive versions of them extract energy from a star paired with a planet that is not dense compared to WDs, NS, or BHs. This would happen at a low accretion rate, so planetary accretion is one of the concrete predictions from the starivore hypothesis (and indeed planet-star interactions have recently been discovered…)

Image: An artist’s concept of the accretion disk around the binary star system WZ Sge. P. Marenfeld and NOAO/AURA/NSF.

Vidal’s hypothesis of starivores lets us see high energy astrophysics from an astrobiological point of view. Speculative? Of course, but Vidal is a philosopher for whom the play of ideas is as entrancing as the flow of notes in a Bach fugue. Rather than claiming the existence of starivore civilizations, he offers data on the wide variety of binary systems and the possibilities for energy extraction, with predictions about what we might see if such civilizations exist. A high energy astrobiology agenda is presented containing proposals for specific research. I do not have time this morning to go through the wealth of supporting argument but the book is well worth extended study.

Ultimately, the starivore idea is Vidal’s way of describing SETI’s new direction, a concrete example of how we can study objects in our data that may show the signature of extraterrestrial engineering. Building a robust scientific structure for such inquiries is at the heart of The Beginning and the End, whose principles are being played out and refined in the ongoing SETI searches mentioned at the beginning of this post. As with the original SETI work back to the days of Project Ozma, we can’t know what we’re going to find until we mount the actual search. Finding a Type II or III culture — or its remnants — would show us what intelligent life is capable of, while raising the familiar question of how long any technological species can hope to survive.

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If we’re trying to extend the boundaries of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, how do we proceed? A speculative mind is essential, and one of the delights of science fiction is the ability to move through an unrestricted imaginative space, working out the ramifications of various scenarios. But we have to prioritize what we’re doing, which is why Freeman Dyson settled on the idea of looking for conspicuous examples of intelligence using technology. It’s no surprise that the term ‘Dysonian SETI’ has arisen to describe how such a search might proceed.

The Dyson sphere is a case in point. We can imagine a civilization vastly more ancient and technologically adept than our own deciding to maximize the amount of power it can draw from a star. Although Dyson spheres are sometimes pictured as shells completely surrounding a star, Dyson’s ideas are more readily thought of in terms of a ‘swarm’ of objects soaking up as much power as possible. Other configurations are in the mix, including the ‘ringworld’ envisioned by Larry Niven in the novel of the same name. Such engineering would throw a unique astronomical signature. Even a completely enclosed star could be detected by its radiation in the infrared, which is where previous searches for Dyson spheres have been conducted.

Image: Physicist Freeman Dyson, whose work has inspired not only SETI proponents but aerospace engineers, science fiction authors and philosophers of science. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Would a powerful civilization build such things? It’s a key question, and as Clément Vidal points out in The Beginning and the End (Springer, 2014), Dyson’s 1966 paper on the matter made the assumption that an alien intelligence would use a technology we can understand. The idea has been rightfully criticized as anthropocentric, even by Dyson himself, who called the notion ‘utterly unrealistic.’ But we have to start somewhere, acknowledging the very real prospect that a truly advanced civilization might operate in ways that mimic natural processes. Developing criteria based on what we do understand at least gives us an opening into studying things we see in our astronomical data that might flag the presence of astroengineering. We’re limited by but must employ our own level of scientific knowledge.

As I mentioned yesterday, Dysonian SETI (or Vidal’s ‘Zen SETI’) does not conflict with older radio and optical SETI methods. By looking for manifestations of technology at work in our astronomical data, Zen SETI largely abandons the idea of SETI as an attempt at receiving intentional communications, and looks instead to identify large-scale anomalies that show us another civilization at work. This form of SETI also pushes not only deep into our own galaxy but into any observable astronomical objects we can see with our telescopes. As I said yesterday, this is a bit like archaeology, with conceivable discoveries that are billions of years old.

Where Life Can Emerge

So while traditional SETI pushes on with its entirely valid search, newer forms of SETI widen the search space and cause us to question the philosophical bases of our assumptions. Should we, for example, assume we are looking for forms of life reliant on carbon and water? Vidal notes a 1980 definition of life by Gerald Feinberg and Robert Shapiro (in Life Beyond Earth, Morrow) that describes life as highly ordered systems of matter and energy ‘characterized by complex cycles that maintain or gradually increase the order of the system through the exchange of energy with the environment.’ Vidal comments:

It is important to notice the high generality of such a definition. There is no mention of carbon, water or DNA. What remains are energetic exchanges leading to an increase of order. Free from the limiting assumptions of [carbon and water], the two authors conceive possible beings living in lava flows, in Earth’s magma, or on the surface of neutron stars. The idea of life on neutron stars was explored not only in science fiction… but also by scientist [Frank] Drake.

The reference to science fiction takes in Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg (Ballantine, 1980), a punchy tale driven by the usual Forward gusto. Drake lesser known article is “Life on a Neutron Star,” which ran in Astronomy (Vol. 1, No. 5) in 1973, and which I still have buried in the stacks of old magazines that fill a cabinet here in my office. I remember the Drake with pleasure as one of those eye-opening things that make you look at the world a bit differently when you see how much you are a creature of your own environment. And then you start thinking about how many environments are out there…

The field for speculation is wide — Robert Freitas has even written about the possibility of metabolisms of living systems based on the four fundamental physical forces: the strong nuclear force, electromagnetism, the weak force, and gravitation. We should also consider the possibility (likelihood?) that an advanced civilization will be comprised largely of postbiological beings. Vidal reminds us of the many generations computers have gone through in our own lifetimes, with three-dimensional molecular computing as a possible follow-on to today’s integrated circuits. And he asks what a computer scientist from the 1940s would make of today’s digital world. Would he be able to find large parts of our technology, much less understand it? Vidal adds:

The moral of the story is that in SETI, matter doesn’t matter (much). What is important is the ability to manipulate matter-energy and information, not the material substrate itself. The case for postbiology is strong… Abandoning the hypothesis of ET using a biological substrate such as carbon, water, DNA molecules, or proteins makes us focus on the functional systems theory, which aims to be independent of a particular material substrate. This makes system theory the interdisciplinary research field par excellence and also an indispensable tool in astrobiology and SETI.

Image: Philosopher Clément Vidal approaches SETI with a multidisciplinary background that he uses to question underlying assumptions that affect the search. Credit: Sébastien Herrmann.

Maybe these extracts give some sense of how provocative this tightly written study is, and how often it questions the assumptions we bring to astrobiology. In fact, Vidal thinks a tight analysis of SETI can help us rid ourselves of those assumptions that apply only to terrestrial life so that we can try to uncover what the essential characteristics of all life must be. He’s looking for concepts of living systems and especially intelligence that can be generalized to extraterrestrial venues as we proceed to tighten our criteria for studying anomalous astronomical data.

What kind of things might we hope to find if there is such a thing as astroengineering on an interstellar scale? Beyond the aforementioned Dyson spheres, could we detect extensive mining in asteroid belts in exoplanetary systems? How about anomalous stars, far too young to be in the region we find them, or stars that display unusual spectra that may indicate a civilization trying to lengthen the hydrogen fusion burning cycle of its home sun? As I mentioned yesterday, you can see a summary of recent ideas on the matter in my essay Distant Ruins, which ran in Aeon.

Tomorrow I’ll wrap up this discussion of The Beginning and the End with Vidal’s own thinking on what may be a candidate for what we can call ‘high energy astrobiology,’ an astronomical phenomenon that is curious enough to provoke Dysonian SETI theorists. But I’ll argue in advance that the value of this book isn’t in a specific SETI candidate but in the far broader context Vidal brings to the human quest for other civilizations, a context that challenges readers to examine their own views of the place of intelligent beings in the universe.

The original Dyson paper covering a broadened search for ETI is “The Search for Extraterrestrial Technology,” in Marshak, R.E. (ed.) Perspectives in Modern Physics (Wiley, 1966), pp. 641-655.

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The SETI challenge has often been likened to archaeology, and for good reason. In both cases, we are trying to recover information about cultures from the past. When Heinrich Schliemann dug into the numerous layers of Troy — and in the process inadvertently damaged precious remnants of later eras — he and his team were exploring the heroic age of Homer. Any SETI detection will likewise deal with a signal from the past. Just how old it is will depend upon how far away the source world is, for this information travels at the speed of light.

The archaeology analogy is hardly perfect, because on Earth we are dealing with artifacts of our own species and are often working with linguistic remains we can decipher to aid our understanding. Figuring out Egyptian hieroglyphs wasn’t easy, but the stele known as the Rosetta Stone gave us a text in three scripts that helped us make sense of them. Even Linear B, the script of the Mycenaean Greeks before the emergence of the Greek alphabet, can be placed into context as the oldest Greek dialect, apparently borrowed as a script from the Minoan Linear A. But a SETI reception will be pure message, and absent the numerous cultural and linguistic cues we rely on to make sense of an undeciphered language, how will we approach it?

While we have significant problems with some ancient languages — the resolution of Mayan awaited seeing the glyphs in an entirely new context, looking at them phonemically and morphologically, and Etruscan is a challenge to this day — the problems with a genuinely alien message from another star dwarf these issues. Which brings me around to Clément Vidal, who has written a book that digs with gusto into the SETI question by way of asking what kind of detection we may expect to make. What we might call ‘traditional’ SETI by and large supposes that a distant civilization will be trying to get a message to us, for we’re highly unlikely to pick up radio signals not beamed in our direction.

The Beginning and the End (Springer, 2014) is subtitled ‘The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective,’ and SETI is only one aspect of its tripartite discussion. But its analysis of SETI and its application of a cosmological worldview help us see current SETI efforts as part of a larger picture. The communication assumption is sensible given SETI’s roots and the deliberate decision to look for signals in the most probable part of the spectrum, which early advocates saw as the region between the spectral lines of hydrogen and the hydroxyl radical — between 1420 and 1665 MHz. The ‘water hole’ for communication was quiet and presumably would attract cultures looking for other intelligent beings. But there are other ways to search for life that add valuable tools to our quest.

Vidal is a philosopher and, as his book attests, a polymath who delves into astrobiology, complexity science, cosmology and much else in the course of his discussion. Analyzing the weaknesses of our underlying assumptions is a key part of his argument. He believes we do not need to assume communication to conduct a SETI search, nor do we need to confine our efforts to our own galaxy. Radio methods offer us the hope of one day engaging in a two-way conversation with another species, putting the premium on nearby stars, but what I often call ‘interstellar archaeology’ — the science of looking for ETI in the data, and that data may be spread over numerous galaxies — yields on communications while stressing detection of civilizations that may be far more powerful than our own.

‘Zen SETI’ is the entertaining term Vidal coins for this approach, one that has been championed in recent years by Milan Ćirković, though analyzed by many scientists over the years, from Freeman Dyson to Nikolai Kardashev, James Annis, Richard Carrigan and current working groups like Penn State’s Jason Wright, Matthew Povich and Steinn Sigurðsson. I won’t go through a complete round-up here, but you can find current work discussed in my essay Distant Ruins, which ran in Aeon. The point is to think creatively about information that may already be in our astronomical data, and about new searches that put a premium on the signature that a Kardashev Type II or III civilization would leave.

Needless to say, Zen SETI makes no claim at being the only approach to the discipline, and indeed, these methods should be seen as complementary to ongoing radio and optical searches. When Richard Carrigan went to work searching infrared data from the IRAS satellite for the signature of possible Dyson spheres (see Toward an Interstellar Archaeology), he was broadening the effort to study SETI targets in places as distant as M51, the Whirlpool galaxy, pondering how a Kardashev Type III culture might begin turning stars en masse into a wavefront of such spheres as it maximized its energy resources.

Image: M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. If a Kardashev Type III culture were active here building Dyson spheres, would we be able to see its signature as a growing void in visible light? Credit: NASA/ESA.

Such a search doesn’t preclude communications from a much closer civilization, but it does ask a thoughtful question. We now peg the age of our universe at roughly 13.7-13.8 billion years. We also think that the oldest Sun-like stars formed as early as about 12.5 billion years ago, with rocky planets beginning to emerge at that time. Give life five billion years to emerge, as it did on Earth, and you have the possibility of the earliest intelligence appearing as early as six billion years after the Big Bang. Because the Milky Way is thought to have formed between 10 and 11 billion years ago, intelligence may have appeared in our galaxy as much as five billion years before we humans began turning radio telescope dishes toward the nearby stars.

Charles Lineweaver (Australian National University) is the go-to guy on these matters, with work showing that on average, Earth-like planets around other stars are 1.8 billion years older than our planet, give or take 0.9 billion years either way. Given Lineweaver’s findings, isn’t it likely that any civilization we do discover is going to be significantly advanced over our own? Milan Ćirković made the case in a 2006 paper:

Applying the Copernican assumption naively, we would expect that correspondingly complex life forms on those others to be on the average 1.8 Gyr older. Intelligent societies, therefore, should also be older than ours by the same amount. In fact, the situation is even worse, since this is just the average value, and it is reasonable to assume that there will be, somewhere in the Galaxy, an inhabitable planet (say) 3 Gyr older than Earth. Since the set of intelligent societies is likely to be dominated by a small number of oldest and most advanced members…we are likely to encounter a civilization actually more ancient than 1.8 Gyr (and probably significantly more).

All of which compels Vidal to argue that the terms of our SETI search must be flexible:

We need not be overcautious in our astrobiological speculations. Quite the contrary, we must push them to their extreme limits if we want to glimpse what such advanced civilizations could look like. Naturally, such an ambitious search should be balanced with considered conclusions. Furthermore, given our total ignorance of such civilizations, it remains wise to encourage and maintain a wide variety of search strategies. A commitment to observation, to the scientific method, and to the most general scientific theories remains our best touchstone.

Paul Davies makes much the same point and is quoted by Vidal as saying that “the universe is a rich and complex arena in which signs of alien intelligence might be buried amid a welter of data from natural processes, and unearthed only after some ingenious sifting.” Tomorrow I want to go further into our SETI assumptions and where they might be challenged, using Clément Vidal’s fine discussion of Zen SETI and its consequences for how we proceed.

The Ćirković paper is “Macroengineering in the Galactic Context” (full text). Charles Lineweaver’s study is “An Estimate of the Age Distribution of Terrestrial Planets in the Universe: Quantifying Metallicity as a Selection Effect,” Icarus Vol. 151, No. 2 (2001), pp. 307-313 (full text).

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