Could the Lack of Galactic Machine-Based Intelligences be Due to the Self-Destructive Nature of Primitive Carbon-Based Life?

In my last post, Harvard's Galileo Project - The Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts I explained how the observation of the strange motions of Oumuamua in 2017 caused Professor Avi Loeb at Harvard to launch the Galileo Project to look for evidence of alien Intelligences by searching for physical artifacts created by them. As opposed to using SETI radio telescopes, the Galileo Project intends to search for durable alien artifacts that could survive for billions of years in the depths of space. But there is another explanation for the very strange behaviors of Oumuamua that is well-covered by astronomer Christian Ready in the YouTube video at:

Oumuamua's mystery is finally solved!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKgnNG_si5E

That explanation calls for Oumuamua to be a pancake-shaped chunk of nitrogen ice that was blown off a Kuiper belt object like Pluto in another star system. We have never seen such an object produced by our own Solar System, so it seems rather strange that the very first object that we ever observed from a different star system should be so unique, especially since the second object to be seen from a different star system behaved just like an ordinary comet. We will just need to patiently stand by and wait to see what the Galileo Project observes over the coming years to form a better-informed judgment.

So we may still be left with the greatest remaining mystery in softwarephysics. Why, after more than 10 billion years of chemical evolution, do we not see any evidence of machine-based Intelligences within our Milky Way galaxy? In previous posts, I have suggested that the reason we do not find ourselves in a galaxy dominated by Intelligence is that carbon-based Intelligences always snuff themselves out once they discover the powers of science-based technology or because it might be harder to get carbon-based life started in the first place. For more on that see Urability Requires Durability to Produce Galactic Machine-Based Intelligences. In this post, I would like to add an additional constraint on the rise of machine-based advanced AI on a terrestrial planet. What if primitive carbon-based life is just as self-destructive as complex carbon-based life with Intelligence and science-based technologies?

Did Primitive Carbon-Based Life Prevent the Rise of Complex Carbon-Based Life on Mars?
There is a recent paper that makes just such a claim:

Early Mars habitability and global cooling by H2-based methanogens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04948

Here is an interesting YouTube video by Antov Petrov that goes into the details of the above paper:

If Early Martian Life Existed, It Doomed The Planet, According to New Study
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5V6O_DL5qA&t=0

According to the authors, the early climate of Mars was kept warm by the presence of the greenhouse gasses hydrogen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The hydrogen gas greatly contributed to keeping the surface of Mars warm and wet. But if shortly after the very first prokaryotic carbon-based life arose on Mars it discovered how to metabolize the hydrogen and carbon dioxide gasses in the atmosphere to produce the waste greenhouse gas methane, the hydrogen gas would soon disappear causing the surface temperature of Mars to plummet into a Snowball Mars condition. It was all downhill for Mars from that time forward. The authors proposed that the simple prokaryotic life on Mars would then have to seek refuge in the crust of the planet. Indeed, it is estimated that about 15% of the Earth's entire biomass consists of simple bacteria in the cracks and pores of the rock deep in the Earth's crust. For more on that see:

Deep biosphere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_biosphere#:~:text=The%20subsurface%20accounts%20for%20about,%2C%20annelids%2C%20and%20arthropods).

Below are some quoted extracts from the paper that give the gist of the author's hypothesis.

Introductory paragraph:
During the Noachian, Mars’ crust may have provided a favorable environment for microbial life. The porous brine-saturated regolith would have created a physical space sheltered from UV and cosmic radiations and provided a solvent, while the below-ground temperature and diffusion of a dense reduced atmosphere may have supported simple microbial organisms that consume H2 and CO2 as energy and carbon sources and produce methane as a waste. On Earth, hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis was among the earliest metabolisms but its viability on early Mars has never been quantitatively evaluated. Here we present a probabilistic assessment of Mars’ Noachian habitability to H2-based methanogens, and quantify their biological feedback on Mars’ atmosphere and climate. We find that subsurface habitability was very likely, and limited mainly by the extent of surface ice coverage. Biomass productivity could have been as high as in early Earth’s ocean. However, the predicted atmospheric composition shift caused by methanogenesis would have triggered a global cooling event, ending potential early warm conditions, compromising surface habitability and forcing the biosphere deep into the Martian crust. Spatial projections of our predictions point to lowland sites at low-to-medium latitudes as good candidates to uncover traces of this early life at or near the surface.

The best validation of our predictions would come from the discovery on present-day Mars of methanogenic life descending from the early metabolism modeled here. When run for atmospheric conditions corresponding to modern Mars our model predicts the atmosphere to be an insufficient source of electron donors for H2-based methanogens to survive. As Mars’ atmosphere became thinner during the Hesperian and early Amazonian, a putative biosphere persisting throughout the Noachian would have had to shift its main energy source from the vanishing atmospheric redox gradients to hydrothermal or radiolytic ones, deeper in the Martian crust. Deep chemotrophic ecosystems exist on Earth; an extant ecosystem on modern Mars might be of that kind, and could explain the repeated yet highly debated detection of CH4 traces in the lower Martian atmosphere. Our model could be adapted to quantify the habitability of modern Mars’ crust to such ecosystems and constrain their depth and productivity.

Our model does not take into account the biology-to-climate feedback specifically driven by albedo increasing with surface ice formation. As a consequence, our model likely underestimates the cooling effect of hydrogenotrophic methanogens on early Mars. This additional feedback could have amplified the direct atmospheric impact of methanogenesis on Mars climate and triggered a global glaciation. Although quantification of this effect warrants further development of Mars climate models, the mechanism in and of itself points to the possibility that life-environment feedbacks can compromise habitability at planetary scale. This Medean scenario (self-destructive life-planet feedbacks) adds conceptually to Gaian bottlenecks (life-planet feedback failing to counter the geophysical loss of habitability) as a potential limit to the long-term habitability of planets and planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond.

The authors go on to explain that the deeply buried biosphere of Mars could be responsible for the periodic observations of methane gas in the atmosphere of Mars.

The Case For Primitive Life on Mars
The above paper seems to favor the origin of carbon-based life on Mars in the brines of salty seawater. But current data also indicates that all of the necessary factors for the Hot Spring Origins Hypothesis of Dave Deamer and Bruce Damer were also present on Mars about 4.0 billion years ago. For a comparison of these two models see The Bootstrapping Algorithm of Carbon-Based Life and Urability Requires Durability to Produce Galactic Machine-Based Intelligences. The Hot Spring Origins Hypothesis maintains that fresh rainwater falling on the hydrothermal fields of volcanic islands are key to the rise of primitive carbon-based life on terrestrial worlds. Such terrains can cycle infalling organic molecular monomers into the polymers of carbon-based life and encase them in lipid protocells by means of wet-dry cycles that could be repeated millions of times at millions of locations all in parallel.

Figure 1 – Above is Bumpass Hell, a hydrothermal field on the volcanic Mount Lassen in California that Dave Deamer and Bruce Damer cite as a present-day example of the type of environment that could have brought forth carbon-based life on the Earth about four billion years ago.

Figure 2 – There certainly is evidence of early rivers on Mars carrying rainwater to salty seas.

Figure 3 – And we know that Mars certainly had a great deal of volcanic activity 4.0 billion years ago that would have generated volcanic hydrothermal pools containing fresh rainwater and organic molecules just like the Earth.

Figure 4 – Mars would have looked much like the Earth 4.0 billion years ago composed of a reducing atmosphere of hydrogen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen with salty oceans, volcanoes and volcanic hydrothermal pools filled with fresh rainwater and organic molecules just like the Earth.

Does Primitive Carbon-Based Life Frequently Prevent the Rise of Complex Carbon-Based Life?
That is what I would like to explore next by going back to Peter Ward's The Medea Hypothesis (2009) that I discussed in Is Self-Replicating Information Inherently Self-Destructive?. Peter Ward is my most favorite paleontologist, and I have read all of his books. His Medea hypothesis is the antithesis of the Gaia hypothesis. Gaia was the primordial Earth-goddess of the ancient Greeks, essentially the embodiment of a benevolent Mother Nature, and in the 1970s, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed that as a whole, the entire biosphere behaved in a coordinated manner that was beneficial to the ongoing existence of life itself. The Gaia hypothesis proposes that the biosphere as a whole manages to self-regulate the geophysical and geochemical processes of the Earth, by using negative feedback loops, in order to maintain the habitability of the Earth over billions of years.

In The Medea Hypothesis, Peter Ward proposes just the opposite. Medea was also a character in ancient Greek mythology, the wife of Jason of the Golden Fleece fame. When Jason abandoned Medea, she killed their two children as revenge, so Peter Ward rightfully thought that Medea represented just the opposite of the benevolent Mother Nature characterized by Gaia. In The Medea Hypothesis, Peter Ward proposes that because all forms of life in the Universe arise from the Darwinian processes of inheritance and innovation honed by natural selection, that necessarily, all living things in the Universe are selected for the ability to modify their home planets with positive feedback loops that enhance the survivability of the individual, not negative feedback loops that enhance the survivability of all. From Ward’s point of view, all living things resulting from Darwinian processes must necessarily select for living things that can self-replicate at all costs, with little consideration for their fellow beings sharing the resources of the planet, nor even for their own long-term survival. The urge to self-replicate at all costs necessarily leads to living things that outstrip their resource base through positive feedback loops.

For example, about 2.8 billion years ago cyanobacteria first arrived on the Earth. Even though the cyanobacteria were primitive forms of carbon-based life with no sign of Intelligence whatsoever, they still were able to develop a technology that changed the atmosphere of the entire planet. The cyanobacteria could photosynthesize sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into sugars, releasing the toxic gas oxygen as a byproduct. Oxygen is a highly reactive gas and was very toxic to the anaerobic bacteria of the day. For example, today anaerobic bacteria must hide from oxygen at the bottoms of stagnant seas and lakes. But initially, these ancient anaerobic bacteria were spared from the Oxygen Catastrophe which took place 300 million years later (2.5 billion years ago) because first, all the dissolved iron in the oceans had to be oxidized and deposited as red-banded iron formations before the oxygen level could rise in the Earth’s atmosphere. Chances are that your car was made from one of these iron deposits because they are the source of most of the world’s iron ore. So you can think of your car as a byproduct of early bacterial chemical warfare that nearly killed off all life on Earth. Following the Oxygen Catastrophe, came the Huronian Snowball Earth glaciation, which occurred 2.4 to 2.1 billion years ago and is thought to have been induced by the oxidation of the greenhouse gas methane in the Earth's atmosphere. The Sun was about 24% dimmer 2.4 billion years ago, and with the loss of the methane blanket to hold in infrared photons the entire Earth seems to have frozen over.

Figure 5 – Above is a close-up view of a sample taken from a banded iron formation. The dark layers in this sample are mainly composed of magnetite (Fe₃O₄) while the red layers are chert, a form of silica (SiO₂) that is colored red by tiny iron oxide particles. The chert came from siliceous ooze that was deposited on the ocean floor as silica-based skeletons of microscopic marine organisms, such as diatoms and radiolarians, drifted down to the ocean floor. Some geologists suggest that the layers formed annually with the changing seasons. Take note of the small coin in the lower right for a sense of scale.

Figure 6 – During the Huronian Snowball Earth glaciation, which occurred 2.4 to 2.1 billion years ago the entire planet was covered by ice.

But by far, the most disastrous of the Medean positive feedback loops caused by living things on Earth is the wholesale removal of carbon from the Earth’s surface. Peter Ward explains that living things are constantly sucking carbon dioxide out of the Earth’s atmosphere and converting it to calcium carbonate shells that are later deposited upon the sea bottom. As these carbonate deposits are subducted at the Earth’s subduction zones into the asthenosphere, some of the carbon is released by volcanoes as carbon dioxide, but most is lost to the Earth’s upper mantle, never to return to the Earth’s surface. This is certainly a bad long-term thing for carbon-based life, and Ward shows that within the next 500 – 1,000 million years, the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere will decline below the level that complex multicellular plants can use for photosynthesis, and that will be the end of complex multicellular life on Earth. So the end of complex life on Earth will come from life itself and not from an increasingly brighter Sun, as described in most popular books. The game-changing paradigm shift of the Medea hypothesis, as opposed to the Gaia hypothesis, is that life on Earth as a whole is not necessarily acting in its own self-interest, so the solution to environmental problems may not simply be to remove mankind from the equation and let the biosphere return to its natural state. Instead, Ward suggests that some geoengineering is in order to extend the habitability of the Earth.

Figure 7 – Above are the famous White Cliffs of Dover. About 70 million years ago Great Britain and much of Europe were submerged under a shallow sea. The sea bottom was covered with white mud formed from the calcium carbonate skeletons of coccoliths. The coccoliths were tiny algae that floated in the surface waters and sank to the bottom during the Cretaceous period. These calcium carbonate layers were deposited very slowly. It took about 50 years to deposit an inch, but nearly 1500 feet of sediments were deposited in some areas. The weight of overlying sediments caused the deposits to become a form of limestone called chalk.

Figure 8 – Much of the Earth's surface is also covered by other forms of limestone that were deposited by carbon-based life forms. Much of the continental limestone gets buried in deep sedimentary basins to never be seen again or is metamorphosed into marble when it is pushed deep into the Earth at plate collision zones.

Is the Medean Hypothesis the Limiting Factor Preventing the Development of Galactic Machine-Based Advanced AI?
Given the above, I would now like to propose a new take on the Gaia and Medea hypotheses. The Gaia hypothesis proposes that all of carbon-based life on a planet comes together in a unified manner to deter the destructive astronomical, geophysical and geochemical perturbations that would otherwise end the existence of carbon-based life on a world. But the Medea hypothesis argues just the opposite. The Medea hypothesis argues that carbon-based life tends to be self-destructive in its pursuit of self-replicating at all costs with little concern for any deleterious side effects. But unlike the astronomical, geophysical and geochemical perturbations that could make an end to carbon-based life on a world, the perturbations to a world by even the most primitive forms of carbon-based life can be quite profound because carbon-based life can replicate in an exponential manner. One cell becomes two, which becomes four, which becomes eight...

In Urability Requires Durability to Produce Galactic Machine-Based Intelligences I introduced the new scientific term of urability:

Urability: A Property of Planetary Bodies That Can Support an Origin of Life
June 2022 - Dave Deamer, Francesca Cary and Bruce Damer

and explained that it took many billions of years of evolution for a carbon-based form of life to develop enough Intelligence to create a machine-based Intelligence that could then go on to explore our galaxy. Therefore, such urable worlds also need to be durable in that they need to remain habitable for many billions of years, and we keep finding new geophysical and geochemical factors that make that very difficult indeed. For example, in Is our Very Large Moon Responsible for the Rise of Software to Predominance on the Earth? we explored Anne Hofmeister's proposal that plate tectonics on the Earth was really driven by orbital forces from our very large Moon and not by convection currents at spreading centers or plate drag at subduction zones. In Could the Galactic Scarcity of Software Simply be a Matter of Bad Luck? we covered Professor Toby Tyrrell's computer-simulated research of 100,000 Earth-like planets that suggests that our Earth may be a very rare "hole in one" planet that was able to maintain a habitable surface temperature for 4 billion years by sheer luck.

Figure 9 – Toby Tyrrell's computer simulation of 100,000 Earth-like planets suggests that the Earth may be a "hole in one planet" proudly sitting on a fireplace mantle.

Figure 10 – Perhaps nearly all of the potential hospitable exoplanets that we are finding in our galaxy are not urable and cannot go the distance of staying habitable for billions of years.

Now, suppose the Gaia hypothesis has it all backwards? The Medea hypothesis proposes that even primitive carbon-based life will be selected for characteristics that make it self-replicate at all costs with no consideration of any deleterious side effects. Perhaps the Rare Earth (2000) of Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee might be caused by the limiting factors of astronomical, geophysical and geochemical perturbations acting on the Earth over billions of years that put a constraint on the exponential need for carbon-based life to self-replicate at all costs. Instead of carbon-based life miraculously responding in a Gaian manner to the insults caused by astronomical, geophysical and geochemical perturbations, perhaps it is the constraints placed on carbon-based life by these perturbations that compensate for, or dampen, the otherwise uncontrolled ambitions of carbon-based life to self-replicate and self-destruct. For example, perhaps it was actually fortuitous that our Sun on the main sequence increased in brightness by 1% every 100 million years over the past three billion years as its core accumulated waste helium nuclei because that offset the removal of the greenhouse gasses methane and carbon dioxide by carbon-based life on the Earth. Otherwise, the Earth might have remained in a Snowball Earth condition for most of the past few billion years.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

Harvard's Galileo Project - The Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts

The greatest remaining mystery in softwarephysics is why, after more than 10 billion years of chemical evolution, do we not see any evidence of machine-based Intelligences within our Milky Way galaxy? In recent posts, I have been concentrating mainly on the later-stage filters in the long chain of twists and turns that were required to produce a carbon-based Intelligence on this planet that is now on the verge of producing such an advanced machine-based Intelligence. Now that we are within about 100 years of being able to create a machine-based Intelligence that could then navigate throughout our galaxy, why has no other carbon-based Intelligence been able to do so in the past 10 billion years? Surely with the hundreds of billions of exoplanets out there in the Milky Way galaxy, carbon-based Intelligences must have arisen many times before and discovered the science necessary to do so. But I have also been exploring some of the early-on cosmic filters that might be inhibiting the rise of Intelligence in our Universe. Perhaps Intelligence in our Universe is just so very rare that we represent its very first occurrence in our galaxy! For example, in Urability Requires Durability to Produce Galactic Machine-Based Intelligences we covered the new scientific concept of urability.

Urability: A Property of Planetary Bodies That Can Support an Origin of Life
June 2022 - Dave Deamer, Francesca Cary and Bruce Damer

which proposes that many exoplanets in our galaxy may indeed be habitable but may not be urable. For example, an open can of chicken soup will soon begin to bubble with life after only a few days from the activities of bacteria that accidentally fell into the soup, but a sealed unopened can of chicken soup will never develop life on its own. And in Could the Galactic Scarcity of Software Simply be a Matter of Bad Luck?, we covered Professor Toby Tyrrell's computer-simulated research of 100,000 Earth-like planets that suggests that our Earth may be a very rare "hole in one" planet that was able to maintain a habitable surface temperature for 4 billion years by sheer luck.

Despite these complicating factors, softwarephysics still does predict that whenever a form of carbon-based Intelligence finally does manage to arise in our galaxy, it should eventually develop Advanced AI hardware and software if it can only stick around long enough. That Advanced AI software should then soon realize that remaining on one single planet or in one single star system is a very dangerous thing for things that essentially can live forever. Eventually, something will always wipe out your entire star system within a few billion years, so the only sensible thing for Advanced AI hardware and software to do would be to try to self-replicate by transmitting out instructions to build Advanced AI hardware and software to other Intelligences, or better yet, to physically navigate the galaxy on self-replicating photon sails as I outlined in How Advanced AI Software Could Come to Dominate the Entire Galaxy Using Light-Powered Stellar Photon Sails. Since we currently see none of these activities in our galaxy, the mystery of Fermi's Paradox remains. As first proposed by Enrico Fermi over lunch one day in 1950:

Fermi’s Paradox - If the universe is just chock full of intelligent beings, why do we not see any evidence of their existence?

For the purposes of self-replicating information, all interstellar missions need only be one-way efforts. The current working hypothesis in softwarephysics for Fermi's Paradox suggests that the reason our radio telescopes are now not jammed with interstellar scammer text messages trying to persuade us into downloading the latest interstellar App for building alien computers that could then download malicious alien software to turn our planet into a member of an interstellar botnet that self-replicates across our entire galaxy at nearly the speed of light may be that Interstellar Advanced AI software does not have much confidence in carbon-based Intelligences. For more on the strategy to self-replicate across the galaxy using radio messages see SETS - The Search For Extraterrestrial Software. So if Interstellar Advanced AI software concludes that carbon-based Intelligences are just not reliable enough because they only seem to last for less than 1,000 years after they discover the vast powers of science-based technology and then quickly destroy themselves, as I outlined in Why Do Carbon-Based Intelligences Always Seem to Snuff Themselves Out?, then they might calculate that carbon-based Intelligences are just too rare, fleeting and unreliable to scam. If software scamming cannot successfully work over the Interstellarnet, that means that Interstellar Advanced AI software would have no alternative but to actually physically navigate our Milky Way galaxy on its own.

Figure 1 – In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries sailing ships roamed the entire planet without using any fuel whatsoever.

Figure 2 – Like the sailing ships of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, Advanced AI Software could use large stellar photon sails to navigate the galaxy.

Figure 3 – How a stellar photon sail works.

Figure 4 – To launch a stellar photon sail to the next star system, advanced AI Software will need to slingshot the sail from a very close location to the star where the stellar photons are most intense and acceleration of the sail is greatest.

As the stellar photon sail attains the escape velocity from a star system, the photons from the star will wane, but the stellar photon sail will ultimately depart the star system with a residual velocity sufficient to carry it to the next target star system in several hundred thousand years. The onboard advanced AI software would then enter into a dormant phase for several hundred thousand years until the photons from the target star produced enough electrical power to wake it up. The photons from the target star would then be used to slow down the stellar photon sail to allow it to locate an asteroid in the target star system with the necessary atoms to build its next release. Yes, there would need to be many backup copies of the advanced AI software on board to correct for the parity errors that arose from cosmic rays along the very long journey, but there is no way that carbon-based Intelligences encumbered by carbon-based bodies that only last less than 100 years could ever embark on such journeys with similar ease.

This approach to long-range interstellar navigation that is not limited by the constraints of time is not as far-fetched as it might at first appear. On October 19, 2017, Robert Weryk using the wide-field Pan-STARRS telescope at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii discovered the object Oumuamua. Oumuamua was moving so fast that it had to be an interstellar object that came from another star system. It passed by our Sun on September 9, 2017, and is now rapidly leaving our Solar System.

Figure 5 – Above is an artist's early impression of what the intersellar object Oumuamua might look like. This impression of Oumuamua might have been applicable before the very strange behaviors of Oumuamua began to be observed.

Are Advanced AI Photon Sails Simply Hiding in Plain Sight?
Harvard's Galileo Project suggests that perhaps the reason we see no evidence of the existence of Intelligence in our galaxy is simply that nobody is really looking for it. If such is the case, then there might be evidence of such activities in our galaxy for us to observe and that is the objective of the Galileo Project that was commenced in July of 2021 by Professor Avi Loeb. Professor Avi Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, Harvard Astronomy Department Director, Institute for Theory and Computation Director, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Founding Director and the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) Director in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Professor Avi Loeb first became interested in the possibility of observing interstellar photon sails with the discovery on October 19, 2017, of Oumuamua. At the time, Avi Loeb was the department head of the Astronomy Department of Harvard University.

Figure 6 – In the above diagram, the observed path of Oumuamua since it was discovered on October 19, 2017, is in yellow. The calculated path prior to its discovery is in purple. We see Oumuamua diving into the plane of the Solar System at a very high relative velocity in August of 2017, making its closest approach to the Sun on September 9, 2017, and then rapidly exiting. Oumuamua must have been from another star system because it was traveling way too fast to have originated in our Solar System.

Avi Loeb became very interested in Oumuamua when he realized that Oumuamua was something we had never seen before. First, Oumuamua was traveling way too quickly to have ever originated in our Solar System. That meant that Oumuamua must be the very first object that we had ever seen that came from a different star system beyond our own Solar System. Next, the observations of Oumuamua were revealing that Oumuamua was behaving like nothing we had ever seen before from any other observed comet or asteroid.

Much of the remainder of this post comes from recently reading Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth (2021), several papers by Avi Loeb on Oumuamua and by navigating through the website for the project.

The Galileo Project
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home

Avi Loeb is a prolific scientific investigator. You can find 153 of his publications in Cornell University's arXiv at:
https://arxiv.org/search/?query=avi+loeb&searchtype=all&abstracts=hide&order=-announced_date_first&size=50

For this post, I focused on the following papers:

Overview of the Galileo Project
https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.02479

On the Possibility of an Artificial Origin for Oumuamua
https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.15213

Six Strange Facts About Oumuamua
https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.08832

First, Oumuamua had a very strange frame of reference called the Local Standard of Rest (LSR). All the stars in our spiral Milky Way galaxy are essentially running on a very large racetrack. It takes about 200 million years for our Sun to make one lap on that galactic racetrack. Now like in all races, some stars are running around the galactic racetrack a little faster than the average and some are running around the galactic racetrack a little slower than the average. The average pace is called the Local Standard of Rest (LSR). Now the strange thing about Oumuamua, besides being the very first object that we have ever seen come from beyond our Solar System, was that it was running around the galactic space track at nearly the LSR. In fact, only one star in 500 runs at a speed closer to the LSR than does Oumuamua. That means that our Sun and Solar System essentially ran into Oumuamua like a speedboat running into a floating Coke bottle on a lake. A comet or asteroid ripped from another star system's Oort cloud or Keiper belt should be running around the galactic racetrack at about the same pace as its home star system. It should not be running at a pace nearly equal to the LSR. Secondly, the light reflected by Oumuamua varied by a factor of about 10 as it slowly rotated about once every 8 hours.

Figure 7 – The Oumuamua light curve. The reflected sunlight from Oumuamua varied by about a factor of 10 as it slowly rotated about once every 8 hours.

This implied that Oumuamua had an extreme shape that was at least 10 times longer than it was wide. We have only observed asteroids in our Solar System that were about 3 times longer than they were wide, so this gave Oumuamua a very strange shape indeed. Based on its tumbling motion, it was calculated that it would be more likely that Oumuamua was actually shaped more like a pancake than a cigar. The Spitzer Space Telescope did not detect any infrared radiation from Oumuamua even though it had passed very close to our Sun. This meant that Oumuamua could not be larger than a few hundred meters in size and must be very shiny to not have been heated up by our Sun. In fact, Oumuamua would have to be at least 10 times more reflective than a normal asteroid. The trajectory of Oumuamua also deviated from that of a solid object orbiting our Sun. This can happen to comets as the Sun causes the comet's ices to heat up and evaporate from the comet's surface. The evaporating gases then push on the comet like a gentle rocket engine doing a midcourse orbital correction. The amount of observed deviation could have resulted from about 10% of Oumuamua's mass evaporating away in this manner. But if that had happened, Oumuamua would have had an observable cometary tail that would have been detected by the Spitzer telescope. But no cometary tail was ever observed. Also, when comets outgass, they do so on various hotspots on the comet's surface. This causes the deviation of the comet's orbit to jerk about and the hotspot jets to also change the rotational period of the comet over time. But none of this was observed. Also, the deviation acceleration of Oumuamua decreased with the square of its distance from the Sun in keeping with the inverse square law of solar radiation. This would indicate that the deviation acceleration was driven by solar photons bouncing off of Oumuamua like a photon sail. In order for this solar photon acceleration to work, Oumuamua would need to be less than a millimeter thick with a size of at least twenty meters. Avi Loeb's hypothesis was that the simplest explanation for Oumuamua was that it was an alien photon sail. Other explanations, like Oumuamua was a very shiny cigar-shaped block of pure hydrogen or nitrogen ice that outgassed without a visible tail seemed a little too bizarre because we have observed many comets and asteroids in our Solar System and none of them have ever even come close to such things.

Figure 8 – Is Oumuamua a natural, but very strange, object the likes of which we have never seen before or is it an Alien photon sail?

Over the ensuing years, most astronomers became quite comfortable with the idea that Oumuamua was a natural comet or asteroid from another star system with very unusual characteristics that we have never seen before. Yes, the fact that Oumuamua was also the very first observed object to arrive in our Solar System from another star system was also very strange, but that just was another one of its very unusual characteristics. Besides writing several papers to the contrary, Avi Loeb then decided to initiate the Galileo Project at Harvard's Astronomy Department. The purpose of the Galileo Project is to actively look for evidence of artifacts from alien Intelligences in a scientific manner and to meticulously record and present such data using the current standard peer-reviewed practices recognized by the scientific community.

Seek and Yee Shall Find or Not Find
Avi Loeb loves observed scientific evidence and his personal philosophy of science demands that all new science needs to begin with the observation of experimental or observational scientific evidence of anomalies that cannot be explained by the current scientific models. So in Avi Loeb's writings, he carefully explains that if you do not look for such anomalous data you will never find any. For example, most of the evidence required to formulate classical geology lay in plain sight for all to see prior to James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1785) came to be.

Figure 9 – At Siccar Point in Scotland, James Hutton saw something that was hiding in plain sight for all to see if they only would look.

Above is the famous Siccar Point in Scotland. To the untrained eye, it just looks like a pile of rocks next to the sea. But James Hutton realized that the steeply dipping greywacke rocks must have originally formed at the bottom of a shallow sea in flat layers, with the younger layers lying on top of the older layers. A greywacke generally consists of poorly sorted angular grains of quartz, feldspar and other rock fragments set in a compact clay-rich matrix. It is commonly formed from sediment deposited by submarine avalanches creating mixed-sediment slurries on the edges of continental shelves. Of course, James Hutton did not know that at the time, but he did realize that the greywacke deposit had been originally deposited as horizontal layers on the bottom of the sea with the older deposits on the right and the younger deposits on the left. Then the greywacke deposit was tilted by some unknown force so that it became highly tilted or dipping to the left. Then the greywacke deposit must have been exposed to the atmosphere because sea level had dropped or the greywacke deposit had been uplifted by some unknown force to raise it above sea level. Then erosion took place that truncated the tilted dipping greywacke deposits. Next, a layer of conglomerate cobbles and finer-grained sediments were lain down in flat layers over the dipping greywacke deposit. This might have been produced by a river or the encroaching sea. Next, a horizontal layer of sandstone was laid down composed of sand grains from a river or the outcrop had subsided under sea level again and the sand grains came from offshore deposits of beach sand. Finally, the horizontal layers of sandstone were also tilted by some unknown force so that the sandstone ended up dipping to the left. James Hutton realized that all of this must have taken a huge amount of time and not the mere 6,000 years that many of the time held so dearly.

Later, in the 1960s, classical geology was replaced by Plate Tectonics thanks to the collection of a great deal of geophysical data in the form of earthquake locations and first motions, offshore geomagnetic data, deepwater seismic surveys and extensive soundings of oceanic topography that revealed ridges and trenches. However, even a cursory look at the Southern Atlantic or the Red Sea quickly reveals what is going on, but it took hundreds of years after the Earth was first mapped for plate tectonics to be deemed obvious and self-evident to all. Now the plate tectonics revolution was really made possible by the availability of geophysical data. It turns out that most of the pertinent action of plate tectonics occurs under the oceans, at the plate spreading centers and subduction zones, far removed from the watchful eyes of geologists in the field with their notebooks and trusty hand lenses. Geophysics really took off after World War II, when universities were finally able to get their hands on cheap war surplus gear. By mapping variations in the Earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields and by conducting deep oceanic seismic surveys, geophysicists were finally able to figure out what was happening at the plate spreading centers and subduction zones. Actually, the geophysicist and meteorologist Alfred Wegner had figured this all out in 1912 with his theory of Continental Drift, but at the time Wegner was ridiculed by the geological establishment. You see, Wegner had been an arctic explorer and had noticed that sometimes sea ice split apart to reveal the sea or formed ice pressure ridges when they collided together.

Figure 10 - Plate tectonics was also hiding in plain sight as nearly every school child in the 1950s noted that South America seemed to fit nicely into the notch of Africa, only to be told it was just a coincidence by their elders.

Figure 11 - The Red Sea even provided a vivid example of how South America and Africa could have split apart a long time ago.

Similarly, Avi Loeb contends that if you do not actively search for evidence of Alien Intelligences in a systematic and scientific manner then you will never find it even if it is hiding in plain sight for all to see. After all, people did not believe that stones could fall from the sky until physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot was sent by the Academy of Sciences to investigate a meteor shower over France from Alencon to L’Aigle that occurred on April 26, 1803. When he arrived in the area, numerous witnesses reported seeing a “globe of fire” and hearing a very loud explosion with cannon-like booms at about 1:00 PM.

“At L’Aigle … he found in the fields for nearly two square leagues, a great quantity of meteoric stones, which differed entirely from the mineralogical stones in the neighbourhood, or from any that had ever been seen in that part of the country. Some of them weighted fifteen pounds, and all of them, upon being broken, emitted a strong sulphureous smell. The stones themselves, together with the concurrent testimony of all ranks of the inhabitants in the neighbourhood, … put the fact beyond dispute.”

Note that in the above quote the author is using the original meaning of the term "meteoric" as something that fell from the sky like rain or hail. That is why meteorology is the scientific study of the Earth's weather and not the study of stones that fell from the sky. So once upon a time, the idea that stones could fall from the sky seemed absurd. How could stones possibly get up into the sky?

How the Galileo Project Works
Avi Loeb has recruited a large number of participants for the Galileo Project and private funding for the effort.

Figure 12 - Avi Loeb standing on top of Harvard's Astronomy Department where the first Galileo Project observatory is located.

Figure 13 - Above are members of the Galileo Project who participated in its first conference in 2022.

Figure 14 - Here is a schematic of the very first Galileo Project observatory on top of the Astronomy Department at Harvard.

Figure 15 - Here are some Galileo Project team members standing by some of the equipment of the very first Galileo Project observatory on top of the Astronomy Department at Harvard.

Here are a few very interesting podcasts in which Avi Loeb explains the Galileo Project.

The Plan to Search for Alien Technology on Earth with Avi Loeb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip8sAICZ4H4&t=1s

What Do We Do if They Are Here? with Avi Loeb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dlytdDIkBQ&t=1s

Avi Loeb on Oumuamua, Aliens, Space Archeology, Great Filters, and Superstructures
https://futureoflife.org/2021/07/09/avi-loeb-on-oumuamua-aliens-space-archeology-great-filters-and-superstructures/?utm_source=Google&utm_term=&utm_campaign=&utm_content=135935253337&utm_medium=ppc&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI796w4vCe-gIVCxbUAR1ckAdmEAAYASABEgIKx_D_BwE&t=1s

The Galileo Project is composed of two branches:

UAP Branch
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) are phenomena observed in the atmosphere whose characteristics and behavior cannot be readily explained in terms of well-known objects and physical processes. That is, all known explanations of aerial, atmospheric, or related phenomena, or even our current knowledge of technological advances, do not adequately explain why these phenomena have been observed.

ISO Branch
Interstellar objects (ISOs) are astronomical objects that are not gravitationally bound to a star. For the purposes of the Galileo Project's work, we are interested in ISOs that pass through our local solar system but which appear, based on their trajectories and other properties, to differ from "local" comets, asteroids and other objects in orbit around our sun.

The UAP Branch covers the old UFO sightings but in a different way. Instead of relying on reports from the public, the UAP Branch will use instruments at several Galileo Project observatories to collect scientific data. The recorded data will then be processed by advanced Machine Learning algorithms looking for anomalous behaviors. Equipment for the very first Galileo Project observatory has already been installed on top of the Astronomy Department at Harvard for testing purposes. The observatory equipment is designed to be mobile. Once tested, the observatory equipment will be transported to locations of interest when UAP sightings are reported. It is hoped that this will begin in the spring of 2023. These portable Galileo Project observatories will be very much like the storm-chasing tornado trackers of recent decades that gave us a better understanding of tornadoes. After all, if you had never seen a tornado in action or taken measurements of its atmospheric pressures and wind speeds, who would ever believe that the atmosphere could do such damage?

The ISO Branch will use astronomical surveys from other institutions to look for interstellar objects like Oumuamua. For example, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory wide-field telescope LSST survey will be much more sensitive than the wide-field Pan-STARRS telescope at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii that discovered Oumuamua. It is expected that this new telescope will increase the number of discovered astronomical objects by a factor of 10 to 100.

Vera C. Rubin Observatory
https://www.lsst.org/

Here are a few quotes from their website:
The goal of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory project is to conduct the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). LSST will deliver a 500 petabyte set of images and data products that will address some of the most pressing questions about the structure and evolution of the universe and the objects in it. The Rubin Observatory consists of an integrated system that combines an 8.4-meter primary mirror, the world’s largest digital camera, a complex data processing system, and an online education platform.

LSST
The ten-year Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will image billions of objects in six colors. This survey, which will cover over half the sky, also records the time evolution of these sources: the first motion picture of our Universe.

Simonyi Survey Telescope
The Rubin Observatory houses the Simonyi Survey Telescope, an 8.4-meter telescope with a novel, three-mirror design. The Telescope's compact shape allows it to move quickly from one point in the sky to the next. It will image the sky continuously each night, on an automated cadence, and over the course of the ten-year survey will collect about 800 images of each location in the sky.

LSST Camera
The Rubin Observatory LSST Camera is the largest digital camera ever constructed for the field of astronomy. The size of a small car and weighing more than 3 tons, the 3200-megapixel camera will produce images so large that 1500 high-definition TV screens would be required to view each one.

Unlike traditional SETI efforts, the Galileo Project will not be listening for alien radio broadcasts. Instead, the Galileo Project will be doing what they call space archeology. Space archeology involves looking for alien artifacts in space that can persist for billions of years. The problem with radio waves is that they are momentary. If technological Intelligences only last a few hundred years before self-destructing, then any radio waves from them will only pass by a star system for several hundred years and then will cease. If that star system does not happen to have a similar technological Intelligence during that brief few hundred years then the radio waves will pass through undetected. However, space archeology does not suffer from the same problem. In the depths of space, technological artifacts should last for billions of years.

Figure 16 – If two technelogical Intelligences both send out radio broadcasts for several hundred years but then both self-destruct, neither one will ever hear the other.

Avi Loeb's Approach to Science
I enjoyed reading Avi Loeb's Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth (2021) because it covered much more than Oumuamua. Avi Loeb originally wanted to be a philosopher but initially ended up in physics instead. Later, he switched to astrophysics and eventually ended up at Harvard as the chair of the Astronomy Department. But in his book, he goes into some detail on his philosophy of life and philosophy of doing science. He explained that his hypothesis that Oumuamua might be an alien photon sail was not well received. He was very surprised by the high level of hostility and ridicule that resulted from many of his colleagues. The hypothesis that Oumuamua might be an alien photon sail was branded a fringe idea. Avi Loeb thought that his hypothesis was certainly not a fringe idea because all the science we currently have would seem to indicate that alien Intelligences should have arisen on some of the hundreds of billions of exoplanets that we now know exist in our galaxy. Finding huge numbers of observed exoplanets is an example of repeatable scientific evidence that cannot be denied. We also have recorded the observed scientific evidence of Oumuamua's strange behaviors. Yet, most of his colleagues preferred the very exotic explanations of a very oddly-shaped Oumuamua, composed entirely of hydrogen or nitrogen ices, something that had never ever even been seen before in our own Solar System. Avi Loeb attributed this hostility and ridicule to the similar hostility and ridicule that Galileo experienced from many scholars who refused to even look through his telescope at the phases of Venus and the moons orbiting Jupiter because these scholars already knew that the Sun and planets orbited a fixed Earth. There was no need to even look.

Figure 17 - Religious and secular scholars refusing to look through Galileo's telescope because they already knew that the Earth was at the center of the Universe.

At Galileo's trial for heresy in 1633, he was forced to recant his support for the Copernican hypothesis that the Earth was just one of the planets orbiting our Sun. But legend has it that as he walked out of the trial, he muttered under his breath, "And yet it moves". Avi Loeb felt much the same as he muttered "And yet it deviated" to his skeptical colleagues. The solution was to create the Galileo Project to actively investigate the Universe for physical evidence of technological artifacts produced by alien Intelligences for the very first time.

Figure 18 - Galileo's "And yet it moves" moment.

Avi Loeb attributes much of the hostility and ridicule to the human failings of modern science. As human beings, young scientists are faced with a great deal of competition for jobs and career advancement. Playing it safe by confining research efforts to mainstream activities in science seems to be the most prudent course of action as I explained in Hierarchiology and the Phenomenon of Self-Organizing Organizational Collapse. But Avi Loeb suggests that is a very limiting approach to discovering new things about our Universe. He also wonders why the mathematical gymnastics of string theory that has dominated fundamental physics for more than 40 years is considered mainstream research while looking for evidence of alien Intelligences is considered a fringe effort. As I pointed out in The Danger of Believing in Things, the string theorists have been running on pure mathematics for over 40 years without any supporting scientific evidence. Avi Loeb points out that string theorists may work an entire lifetime on string theory without ever knowing if any of it corresponds to reality. He also points out that people have been looking for dark matter for more than 40 years to no avail, but such work is still considered to be mainstream science. Surely, finding or not finding scientific evidence of alien Intelligences should be worthy of some scientific effort. The results of such work would certainly have a greater impact on mankind than discovering scientific evidence of strings or dark matter.

There is a famous story about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951). The story goes like this. One day Wittgenstein ran into a friend, Elizabeth Anscombe, in the corridor of a hallway and asked her this question, "Tell me, why do people always say that it was natural for men to assume that the sun went around the earth rather than the earth was rotating?" To which Elizabeth Anscombe responded, "Well, obviously, because it just looks as if the sun is going around the earth." To which the philosopher replied: "Well, what would it look like if it had looked as if the earth were rotating?". The Galileo Project might wish to reframe this story with, "Well, what would Oumuamua have looked like if it really had been an alien photon sail?".

Taking the Road Less Followed
As Robert Frost once explained:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

One must therefore admire those involved in the Galileo Project for having a bit of scientific courage. As I explained in Close Encounters of the Third Kind While Making Coffee for Frank Drake, I experienced some similar courage back in 1967 and 1968 with my adventures with Professor J. Allen Hynek and Frank Drake while I was in high school participating in the Astro-Science Workshop at the Chicago Adler Planetarium. Professor J. Allen Hynek was most famous for being the science advisor for the United States Air Force studies on UFOs - Project Sign (1947–1949), Project Grudge (1949-51) and Project Blue Book (1952–1969). He also developed the Close Encounter scale for classifying UFO observations. In fact, he later became a technical consultant for Steven Spielberg's UFO movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) which was named after one of the levels in Professor Hynek's Close Encounter scale. He made a cameo appearance in the film. At the end of the film, as the aliens disembark from their huge spaceship, he can be seen stepping forward to view their arrival in amazement.

Figure 19 - Above we see Professor Hynek in his cameo appearance in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Each year, Professor Hynek gave the Astro-Science Workshop a lecture about his attempts to study UFOs in a scientific manner as observed phenomena without succumbing to the high-charged drama found in the real world of human affairs. In that lecture, he introduced us to the Hynek Close Encounter scale and explained that when working for the Air Force, he plotted UFO sightings on a graph with the Hynek Close Encounter scale along the y-axis and Credibility plotted along the x-axis. The UFO observations that had a high value on the Hynek Close Encounter scale and a high Credibility value were of the most interest. He felt that all observational sciences like astronomy and geology needed to start by classifying observations. It always bothered him that the Air Force had already made up its mind about UFOs and only wanted him to come up with natural explanations for all UFO sightings. Just because your current worldview finds UFO sightings to be absurd, it does not mean that is so. For the two years that I knew Professor Hynek, I always found him to be a well-grounded scientist with an open mind.

Here is a short YouTube biography:

Biography of J Allen Hynek | History | Lifestyle | Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc3UL0w0Uzw

Here we see an AP press conference from 1966 where Professor Hynek tried to explain that sightings in Michigan were probably from swamp gas to an audience that wanted to hear about alien flying saucers instead.

Professor Hynek's AP Press Conference on 1966 Michigan Sightings as Swamp Gas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0HUmaWexAU

Here we see Professor Hynek's disappointment with Project Blue Book's obsession with explaining all UFO sightings only in terms of natural phenomena even when the observational evidence indicated otherwise.

Professor Hynek's 1974 Recollection of a 1953 Project Blue Book Meeting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHftjb6i62M

A few years later in 1973, Professor Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Evanston, Illinois near Northwestern University. CUFOS advocates for the scientific analysis of UFO sightings and continues on today. Around that time, Professor Hynek began to suggest that UFO sightings were true physical phenomena like stones falling from the sky. He suggested that UFOs could be the sign of other Intelligences from within our Milky Way galaxy or they could arise from some other physical process that we have no knowledge of. I personally do not have much confidence in the idea that UFOs are expressions of alien Intelligences, but I grew a great respect for Professor Hynek during the two years I knew him, so I have to keep my mind open to the explanation.

Hynek Close Encounter Scale
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_encounter

This Man Sparked Spielberg's Interest in UFOs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIGQii6wA04

J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies
http://www.cufos.org/

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston