Back in October, a team of astronomers reported that a star called KIC 8462852 was sporadically dimming, apparently at random, like no star they’d ever seen before.
While the researchers proposed that the strange phenomenon could be caused by a family of comets sweeping past the star and blocking some of its light, in conversations with colleagues, they submitted a second, even more speculative explanation: maybe the light was being obscured by a swarm of megastructures built by an advanced alien civilization.
A few weeks after the first paper came out, scientists from the SETI Institute hopped on the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) to monitor for signals potentially coming from that hypothetical super-civilization.
For for 12 hours a day, every day, for more than two weeks, they trained 20 of the ATA’s 42 radio telescopes on KIC 8462852, listening for two different kinds of radio waves: intentional “hailing signals” that, like radio stations, occupy just a narrow slice of the radio band, and broader radio noise that, they speculated, might come from beamed microwave spacecraft propulsion systems.
Have I mentioned yet that this was all very speculative? Let me say it again.
But if you’ve ever bought a $2 ticket for a $300 million lottery pot, you’ll understand why it was worth looking: the risk was so small, and the potential reward so great.
And just as you’re let down when you don’t win the jackpot, even though you knew all along that the odds were almost 300 million to one, it was a disappointment when the SETI Institute experiment found no evidence of any deliberate radio signals coming from KIC 8462852.
Longshot or not, I was rooting for aliens.
And I don’t think I’m alone.
We never seem to get tired of reading the latest news in the search for alien civilizations, even though the news never changes. We go to the movies and turn on the TV to watch E.T. (friendly or not); more than 5 million people have even donated their computer time to help search for alien signals via the distributed computing project SETI@home.
And while federal science agencies are largely out of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) game, individuals, foundations and corporations have stepped up to keep the search alive.
Last summer, billionaire Yuri Milner announced a $100 million, 10-year campaign called Breakthrough Listen, which he promises will be the most comprehensive search ever for extraterrestrial signals, including both radio wave and laser transmissions.
Why bother? You might say it’s mere curiosity. As Stephen Hawking put it, lending his support to the Breakthrough Listen project, “We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know.”
But I don’t think it’s about natural curiosity alone. Because when it comes to SETI, we are not impartial: We have a rooting interest.
Even as some (Hawking including) warn that advanced civilizations might be hostile, out to “conquer and colonize” our primitive world, we still want to pick up a signal. We long to find that we are not alone in the vastness of the universe.
But as I read the national headlines — refugees turned away, borders closed, an entire faith under suspicion — this craving for contact is suddenly startling.
At the same time that we look up into the sky, yearning for connection, we choose to close ourselves off from other human beings here on Earth. Because we are frightened. Because we think they are alien.
Yet, somewhere within us, there is a desire to connect, across homelands, across cultures, across billions and even trillions of miles. Where does that desire live, and how can we rediscover it when fear threatens to silence it?
Perhaps by looking to the sky, we can remind ourselves of how very much we all have in common. After all, we don’t need SETI to discover that we are not alone. We just need to become a little more human.
Kate Becker is a science writer living in Boston. Contact her at spacecrafty.com, or connect via facebook.com/katembecker or twitter.com/kmbecker.