Tag Archives: SETI

Taking in the garbage

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Reading Interstellar by Avi Loeb for New Scientist, 30 August 2023

On 8 January 2014, a meteor exploded above the Pacific just north of Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.

Five years later Amir Siraj, then a research assistant for Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, spotted it in an online catalogue at the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, part of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Partway through Interstellar, Loeb explains why he thinks the meteor comes from outside the solar system. This would make it one of only three objects so identified. The first was ‘Oumuamua, detected in 2017: a football-field size pancake-shaped anomaly and the subject of Loeb’s book Interplanetary, to which Interstellar is a repetitive, frenetic, grandiose extension.

Since Interstellar was sent to press, Loeb’s team have gathered particles from the crash site and packed them off to to labs at Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Bruker Corporation in Germany for further analysis. Metallic spherules from outside our solar system would be a considerable find in itself.

Meanwhile Loeb is publically airing a hypothesis which, thanks to an opinion piece on 10 February 2023, is already familiar to readers of New Scientist. He reckons this meteor might turn out to have been manufactured by extraterrestrials.

Already there has been some bad-tempered push-back, but Loeb does not care. He’s innoculated against other people’s opinions, he says in Interstellar, not least because “my first mentor in astrophysics… had a professional rival, and when my mentor died it was his rival that was asked to write his obituary in a prestigious journal.”

Loeb, who has spent a career writing about black holes, dark matter and the deep time of the universe, does not waste time arguing for the existence of spacefaring extraterrestrials. Rather, he argues that we should be looking for spacefaring extraterrestrials, or at any rate for their gear. Among the possible scenarios for First Contact, “a human-alien handshake in front of the White House” is the least likely. It’s far more likely we’ll run into some garbage or a probe of some sort, and only then, says Loeb, because we’ve taken the trouble to seek it out.

Until very recently, no astronomical instrument was built for such a purpose. But this is changing, says Loeb, who cites NASA’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena study, launched in December 2022, and the Legacy Survey of Space and Time — a 10-year-long high-resolution record of the entire southern sky, to be conducted on the brand-new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. Then there’s Loeb’s own brainchild, The Galileo Project, meant to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures “from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research.” The roof of the Harvard College Observatory boasts the project’s first sky-scanning apparatus.

There’s more than a whiff of Quixote about this project, but Loeb’s well within his rights to say that unless we go looking for extraterrestrials, we’re never going to find them. Loeb’s dating metaphor felt painfully hokey at first, but it grew on me: are we to be cosmic wallflowers, standing around on the off-chance that some stranger comes along? Or are we going to go looking for things we’ll never spot without a bit of effort?

Readers of grand speculations by the likes of Freeman Dyson and Stanislaw Lem will find nothing in Interstellar to make them blink, aside maybe from a rather cantankerous prose style. Can we be reassured by Loeb’s promise that he and his team work only with scientific data openly available for peer review, that they share their findings freely and only through traditional scientific channels, and will release no results except through scientifically accepted channels of publication?

I’m inclined to say yes, we should. Arguments from incredulity are always a bad idea, and sneering is never a good look.

A private search for extraterrestrial intelligence

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Watching John Was Trying to Contact Aliens for New Scientist, 27 August 2020

You have to admire Netflix’s ambition. As well as producing Oscar-winning short documentaries of its own (The White Helmets won in 2017; Period. End of Sentence. won in 2019), the streaming giant makes a regular effort to bring festival-winning factual films to a global audience.

The latest is John Was Trying to Contact Aliens by New York-based UK director Matthew Killip, which won the Jury Award for a non-fiction short film at this year’s Sundance festival in Utah. In little over 15 minutes, it manages to turn the story of John Shepherd, an eccentric inventor who spent 30 years trying to contact extraterrestrials by broadcasting music millions of kilometres into space, into a tear-jerker of epic (indeed, cosmological) proportions.

Never much cared for by his parents, Shepherd was brought up by adoptive grandparents in rural Michigan. A fan of classic science-fiction shows like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, Shepherd never could shake off the impression that a UFO sighting made on him as a child, and in 1972 the 21-year-old set about designing and constructing electronic equipment to launch a private search for extraterrestrial intelligence. His first set-up, built around an ultra-low frequency radio transmitter, soon expanded to fill over 100 square metres of his long-suffering grandparents’ home. It also acquired an acronym: Project STRAT – Special Telemetry Research And Tracking.

A two-storey high, 1000-watt, 60,000-volt, deep-space radio transmitter required a house extension – and all so Shepherd could beam jazz, reggae, Afro-pop and German electronica into the sky for hours every day, in the hope any passing aliens would be intrigued enough to come calling.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Killip to play up Shepherd’s eccentricity. Until now, Shepherd has been a folk hero in UFO-hunting circles. His photo portrait, surrounded by bizarre broadcasting kit of his own design, appears in Douglas Curren’s In Advance of the Landing: Folk concepts of outer space – the book TV producer Chris Carter says he raided for the first six episodes of his series The X-Files.

Instead, Killip listens closely to Shepherd, discovers the romance, courage and loneliness of his life, and shapes it into a paean to our ability to out-imagine our circumstances and overreach our abilities. There is something heartbreakingly sad, as well as inspiring, about the way Killip pairs Shepherd’s lonely travails in snow-bound Michigan with footage, assembled by teams of who knows how many hundreds, from the archives of NASA.

Shepherd ran out of money for his project in 1998, and having failed to make a connection with ET, quickly found a life-changing connection much closer to home.

I won’t spoil the moment, but I can’t help but notice that, as a film-maker, Killip likes these sorts of structures. In one of his earlier works, The Lichenologist, about Kerry Knudsen, curator of lichens at the University of California, Riverside, Knudsen spends most of the movie staring at very small things before we are treated to the money shot: Knudsen perched on top of a mountain, whipped by the wind and explaining how his youthful psychedelic experiences inspired a lifetime of intense visual study. It is a shot that changes the meaning of the whole film.

“Chuck one over here, Candy Man!”

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Watching Ad Astra for New Scientist, 18 September 2019

It is 2033. Astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is told that his father Clifford, the decorated space explorer, may still be alive, decades after he and the crew of his last mission fell silent in orbit around Neptune.

Clifford’s Lima mission was sent to the outer edges of the heliosphere – the region of the sun’s gravitational influence – the better to scan the galaxy’s exoplanets for intelligent life. Now the Lima’s station’s antimatter generator is triggering electrical storms on distant Earth, and all life in the solar system is threatened.

McBride sets off on a secret mission to Mars. Once there, he is handed a microphone. He reads out a message to his dad. When he finishes speaking, he and the sound engineers pause, as if awaiting an instant reply from Clifford, the message’s intended recipient, somewhere in orbit around Neptune. What?

Eventually a reply is received (ten days later, presumably, given that Mars and Neptune are on average more than four billion kilometres apart). No-one wants to tell McBride what his dad said except the woman responsible for the Mars base (the wonderful Ruth Negga, looking troubled here, as well she might). The truths she shares about Roy’s father convince the audience, if not Roy himself, that the authorities are quite right to fear Clifford, quite right to seek a way to neutralise him, and quite right in their efforts to park his unwitting son well out of the way.

But Roy, at great risk to himself, and with actions that will cost several lives, is determined on a course for Neptune, and a meeting with his dad.

Ad Astra is a psychodrama about solipsistic fathers and abandoned sons, conducted in large part through monologues and close-ups of Brad Pitt’s face. And this is as well, since Pitt’s performance is easily the most coherent and thrilling element in a film that is neither.

Not, to be fair, that Ad Astra ever aspired to be exciting in any straightforward way. Pirates and space monkeys aside (yes, you read that right) Ad Astra is a serious, slow-burn piece about our desire to explore the world, and our desire to make meaning and connection, and how these contrary imperatives tear us apart in the vastness of the cosmic vacuum.

It ought to have worked.

The fact that it’s serious should have worked: four out of five of writer-director James Gray’s previous films were nominated for Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. Ad Astra itself was inspired by a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poems by Tracy K. Smith, all about gazing up at the stars and grieving for her father.

The film’s visuals and sound design should have worked. It draws inspiration for its dizzying opening sequence from the well-documented space-parachuting adventures of Felix Baumgartner in 2012, adopts elsewhere the visual style and sound design of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 hit film Gravity, and, when we get to Mars, tips its hat to the massy, reinforced concrete interiors of Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 Blade Runner 2049. For all that, it still feels original: a fully realised world.

The incidental details ought to have worked. There’s much going on in this film to suggest that everyone is quietly, desperately attempting to stabilise their mood, so as not to fly off the handle in the cramped, dull, lifeless interiors beyond Earth. The whole off-world population is seen casually narcotising itself: “Chuck one over here, Candy Man!” Psychological evaluations are a near-daily routine for anyone whose routine brings them anywhere near an airlock, and these automated examinations (shades of Blade Runner 2049 again) seem to be welcomed, as one imagines Catholic confession would be welcomed by a hard-pressed believer.

Even the script, though a mess, might have worked. Pitt turns the dullest lines into understated character portraits with a well-judged pause and the tremor of one highly trained facial muscle. Few other cast members get a word in edgewise.

What sends Ad Astra spinning into the void is its voiceover. Grey is a proven writer and director, and he’s reduced Ad Astra’s plot down to seven-or-so strange, surreal, irreducible scenes, much in the manner of his cinematic hero Stanley Kubrick. Like Kubrick, he’s kept dialogue to the barest minimum. Like Kubrick, he’s not afraid of letting a good lead actor dominate the screen. And then someone – can it really have been Gray himself? – had the bright idea to vitiate all that good work by sticking Roy McBride’s internal monologue over every plot point, like a string of Elastoplasts.

Consequently, the audience are repeatedly kicked out of the state of enchantment they need to inhabit if they’re going to see past the plot holes to the movie’s melancholy heart.

The devil of this film is that it fails so badly, even as everyone is working so conspicuously hard to make a masterpiece. “Why go on?” Roy asks in voiceover, five minutes before the credits roll. “Why keep trying?”

Why indeed?