Alien contact has long been a staple of science fiction writing and I thought it might be a good idea to chat a bit about it with the readers of this blog.  Despite the fact that there are many, many movies, books, cartoons, comics and recordings about alien contact almost as soon as you start to discuss the subject seriously people start to get nervous and the easiest way to dismiss their fears is to switch off and call you a “nut” or something equally charming.

Photo by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.comFor a professional scientist to discuss the subject at all is usually a way to signal that you want your career to end.  For this reason I want to make clear that despite my disagreeing with Stephen Hawking about his recent pronouncements on alien life and our best ways of surviving alien contact, I admire his courage as a professional scientist in commenting on the subject at all.

The whole topic of aliens and alien species is seldom discussed seriously.  There is no reason to suspect that they will be “Greys” or otherwise.  People prefer to discuss the X-files, or their latest government conspiracy theory – “Yes, of course I believe in aliens, but we can’t discuss it as it is above top secret and the government will find out if we do…”

What?  Are you serious?

Until very recently we had a government in the UK that couldn’t hold onto secret documents already inside intelligence agencies, let alone act with enough efficiency to stop us noticing or talking about something as big as alien contact.

Maybe the new government will be more efficient, but the jury is still out on that one! 

Space Travel Requires Advanced Technology

To be serious for a second here, Arthur C Clarke once said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Photo by nasa1fan/MSFC

Let us take this a bit further.  As we are currently still developing the ability to launch a successful mission to Mars, how much more advanced would that technology be if it allowed interstellar flight and not just limited space flight in the solar system?

To assist in thinking about this, the distance from Earth to Mars is between 55 million kilometres and 400 million kilometres or so.  For aliens to arrive on Earth they would most likely need to have travelled from another solar system.  If we assume that it would be relatively as difficult for aliens to get to Earth from another solar system as it is for us to get to Mars, then we have a comparative measure of our technological levels.

Not perfect a perfect measure I grant you, but bear with me.

Travelling to Another Solar System

So how near is our nearest neighbour, galactically speaking?

Photo by MarkusramProxima Centauri is quite near at a mere 4.2 light years, or maybe Rigil Kentaurus at 4.3 light years.  No doubt those numbers don’t mean a lot if you have no interest in astronomy so here is an explanation.  (I will keep it brief, don’t go to sleep just yet!)

A light year is the distance light travels in one year.  Light travels at 186,000 miles per second or roughly 300,000 kilometres a second – whichever you prefer.  From this you can see a light year is a very long way indeed – about 10 trillion kilometres or 6 trillion miles.

Assuming that the trip to Mars from Earth will be taken at the shorter end of the spectrum (less than 60 million kilometres) we can compare this figure with the ability to get to Earth from our nearer stellar neighbours – for round figures lets go for 4.5 light years and include more than one star system.  This means that our alien visitors will have travelled 42,573,287,126,613.6km (4.5 light years). 

Photo by Markusram

This distance is 709,554 times further than the trip to Mars and is merely the distance to our nearest neighbours. Let us remember that star systems that scientists say could have Earth like planets are even further away.

If the distance travelled really is an indicator of the relative advancement in technology then you had better believe that any alien technology will look like magic to us!  At the very least we can safely assume that they will be well in advance of present day science and military technology.

Collecting Proof of Alien Contact

Personally, the question about alien contact is not really about whether or not the government are keeping secrets, or even whether or not we have had alien visitors already.  My question is really is, if aliens landed on Earth, would we even notice?

Photo by officer2975Humans have sufficiently advanced technology to watch animals without the animals being aware of our presence.  In fact we have technology that can spy on the average human without them being able to notice.  If an alien species arrived at Earth and wanted to survey the place; what reason is there to expect that we could even detect them?  Their travel technology would be many, many times more advanced than ours and most likely so would other aspects of their society and technology.

Anyone expecting the arrival of flying saucers and news channels showing alien footage will most likely be seriously disappointed.  The first alien sighting we know of might just be when one says “Hello Mr Obama” and shakes his hand on national television.

Yesterday I came across a Sky News reports about what Stephen Hawking had said regarding alien contact.  As I have a strong interest in science fiction as soon as I saw the title of the article I was hooked.  It isn’t everyday the eminent scientist comments on the subject of alien life publicly and it certainly isn’t common for them to comment on the activities of mankind in preparation for this contact.

A Brief History of Time

Those with strong fundamentalist religious belief may wish to look away now.

Alien Contact – Are We Right to Fear it?

Ever since science suggested that space is infinite there has been a related implication that there may well be other planets capable of supporting life.  After all, in a truly infinite universe the chances of such a planet existing have a probability of one, that is to say this is a certainty.  Of course some would argue that the planet capable of supporting life is Earth and we already live here!

As a teenager I remember watching a television programme featuring Carl Sagan.  In this program he systematically calculated the chances of life existing on other planets elsewhere in the galaxy.  I do not remember the exact details of how we arrived at the final figure, I do remember that the final figure was very large, in the order of tens of thousands of planets capable of supporting extraterrestrial  life.

Carl Sagan’s calculations were performed decades ago and science has moved on.  What I find interesting about his calculations however is that when compared with modern science today they were actually quite conservative.  Modern imaging techniques have proven that there may well be many, many, more planets in the universe than we originally anticipated.

Something I do not remember Carl Sagan discussing however is the relative age of our solar system compared to the universe at large.  The solar system, of which our Earth is a part, is very young in galactic terms.  Science currently tells us that life originated on Earth as primitive organisms approximately 3.8 billion years ago.  That same scientific theory also tells us that the universe is approximately 13.75 billion years old.  If life evolved on Earth by chance that it is also highly likely to have evolved by chance elsewhere in the universe.  As many of the solar system’s containing planets are much older than our own it stands to reason that if life evolved their it will be much more advanced than our own.

This type of reasoning is the basis of Stephen Hawking’s comments and I read them with interest.

I write science fiction and when I do so I often take what is known to be true and extrapolate it into what is merely possible.

So what was Stephen Hawking’s advice to humanity?

At its most succinct it could be described as “hide, be quiet and hope they don’t notice us”.

The reason he gives such cautionary advice is based upon a couple of premises.  The first is that aliens may well have used up all resources on their home planet and this fact is what has caused them to become expeditionary nomads in outer space.  His view is that aliens arriving at another planet will look at it merely for the resources it possesses.  Secondly, he compares the situation of humanity to that of the American Indians at the time of the arrival of Columbus.  He points out that the technological gap between Columbus and his men and the native Indians meant that things went badly for the Indians.

While I can see the wisdom in Stephen Hawking’s viewpoints, I do not share them.

Any alien life that has propulsion technology sufficiently advanced to arrive here is also pretty likely to have solved the problems of scarcity of resources.

Energy, in various forms, is much more common in the universe that many people suppose.  For example, the whole of life on Earth is supported by the energy this planet receives from the sun and yet this planet harnesses only a microscopic fraction of the energy output of that star.  If we could make use of even 0.1% of the energy output of the sun we would have more than enough energy for everyone on Earth to live with the North American lifestyle.

There is a similar situation when we look at rare minerals and the various elements that we commonly use on Earth.  We assume that certain elements are rare, because on Earth they are, but when we look across our solar system we see that in other areas they are plentiful.  Given sufficient time to develop appropriate space propulsion technology humans will no doubt be mining in the asteroid belt.  By the time humanity manages to reach this level it is very likely that we will have solved our energy problems as well.

These ideas are not just my own either.  There have been a number of books released over the years by top scientists that show that it is not just possible, but necessary that humanity develops a space faring culture and goes to the stars.

Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization

The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space: Apogee Books Space Series 12

Mining The Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets, And Planets (Helix Book)

Why Stephen Hawkings Advice on Alien Contact is Wrong

Stephen Hawkings concerns about alien contact may be well reasoned, but they seem to miss one important point.  If, when we made contact with an alien race, we were also a spacefaring culture there would be little to fear.  The reason for this is because, although a hostile alien life form might destroy individual colonies or spacecraft, the chances of them being able to destroy the whole of humanity, if humanity was widely spread across the stars, is much reduced.  Efforts to secure the future of humanity are therefore best met by being bold explorers of space and not by huddling quietly in the corner and hoping no alien life notices us.  The sooner we get into space and establish meaningful colonies there, the better.

So, thank you Stephen Hawking for your well meant advice, but when humanity makes alien contact for the first time I hope that we do it as space faring equals and not like scared schoolchildren.

Click here for more about Alien Contact

A few days ago I noticed a brief report on the evening news stating that the UK was to open a new government agency called “The United Kingdom Space Agency”, or UKSA for short.  At first I thought it must be April the 1^st (Aprils Fools Day) as Britain effectively cancelled any idea of space exploration back in the 1970’s when the space program was terminated.

After a bit of hunting on the BBC website I found out that no, this wasn’t a joke but was in fact an effort to “…bring more coherence to space policy – something critics say has been missing for years.”

Here is a link to the original BBC article:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8579270.stm

Let us be clear – I welcome the UK’s involvement in space.

Does the UK have the Will to “Boldly go” into Space?

There are indeed many things that we actually do quite well regarding space technology in the UK.  I only wish that we did more.  The problem is that we neither fund space technologies well ourselves, nor offer appreciable financial support to other agencies such as the European Space Agency (ESA).

The BBC article makes this lack of funding abundantly clear.  In 2005 Italy spent roughly three times more than the UK on space related technologies.  In the same year Germany spent roughly four times more and France spent seven times more.  This amount of financial input is in no way related to the relative size of the economies of these countries and does show the UK’s relative lack of interest in the area.

While I applaud the effort to unify our efforts relating to space technologies under one umbrella, I have to wonder what an agency with a budget of £240 million can achieve in this area.  Space exploration is notoriously expensive.  Maybe the several hundred billion or so we spent on bailing out the banks recently could have been spent more wisely on a high tech industry such as this?

The UKSA hopes to achieve the creation of 100,000 high tech jobs with its limited budget and I wish them well, but I really wonder if the political will is there?  I just hope that the date of creation of the agency;  1st April, 2010, is not an omen.

Dave Felton

Here is a test: walk into a real world bookstore, preferably a major chain like Waterstones, and stand by the door.  Look around carefully (hopefully avoiding being approached by the store detectives) and try to find the Science Fiction section without moving.

I will give you even odds that you cannot find it and I am not normally a betting man.

Of course, if you go into a specialty bookstore the case is different, but in a mainstream bookstore with active management of stock you are very unlikely to see a row of books marked Science Fiction (SF).  Why should this be so?  Have all science fiction writers suddenly acquired writers block, retired, died, or merely rebranded?

Rebranding of Science Fiction

Oh dear.  It seems that I might have hit on something.

Standing by that same doorway you may well be able to see “The Time Travellers Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger, or “Next” by Michael Crichton or maybe even “Oryx and Crake” by Margaret Atwood.  All of these books have solid SF themes but avoid the label or any of the usual symbols associated with the genre.  Even a modern hero of British SF, Iain Bank’s, steadfastly refuses to be classed as a science fiction writer.

The problem with SF appears to be that in large part it is about future technology and mostly that future is already here.

The Victory of Science Fact

Want to write about super computers, nanotechnology, gene alteration, atomic energy or space exploration?  Many of these technologies are now well-developed and the research currently happening in those fields easily surpasses the wild imaginings of SF writers of earlier decades.  If you doubt this, go read Scientific American or any other significant technology-based magazine.

The only one of those fields that present or near future technology does not appear to have fully developed is space exploration.  The fact still remains that man has not been past the moon and space programs are currently suffering large cutbacks.  There is scope to write about something fantastic, but will an audience educated in Einsteinian physics buy it?  Probably not.

Instead we see age old SF themes, such as time travel, being weaved into a romance plot and entering the best seller lists as “chick-lit”.  Michael Crichton’s “Next”, despite its heavy use of genetic technology, is often billed as a “techno-thriller”.  And finally, Margaret Atwood was once offended that “Oryx and Crake” was referred to as a science fiction novel, although she later amended this statement.  If professional writers of this stature seek to avoid the SF label, then maybe science fiction really is a failing genre, at least for the moment.

So, for the time being, science fiction writers will have to remain unseen and undercover.  Slowly, silently, plotting, making their plans against us…

Regards,

Dave Felton – wannabe science fiction writer and endangered species member.

The Time Traveler's Wife

Next

Oryx and Crake

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Most of the time, I tend to bypass the technology in SF in large measure.  I guess that my personal slant on SF isn’t so much the gadgets, but rather where we are going as a species.  For me the plot, or at least the effects of the technology on the characters is more important than the actual science.

These attitudes clearly place me in the “soft” SF category, but I want to resist this label vigorously.  Sometimes I do really feel the lack of a background in hard science.  Call it research if you like, or call it “loafing around on the internet” but I do try and improve my knowledge of science every day with the hope that it will deepen my fiction.

My current novel is about early space exploration and space tourism and the attitudes of people to the ever increasing space program.  As research for this I have been looking at semi-realistic methods of getting the mass into space, as this is probably our current number one restriction on space development.

While researching future possible methods of propulsion I came across this video and thought it was worth sharing.

Woohoo!  Methane rocket to the stars!

Methane is at least a realistic fuel for space travel as it is so common in space, but there are other contenders. 

Maybe I should just call the engines “Felton-drive” or something?

Dave Felton