You, a sprawling and struggling working-class exurb of 160,000, may be located in the Antelope Valley, at the north end of Los Angeles County. But your civic head lives in outer space, where you endlessly formulate far-fetched schemes to make yourself a portal to the future.

I don’t know whether it’s your hot desert air, your elevation (2,657 feet above sea level), or all the psychedelically orange poppies that bloom in springtime. But you are always madly charging toward some grandiose goal—to host a new-age “intercontinental airport,” to become the central hub of a new Western high-speed rail system, or to lead a new era of space warfare—and never quite reaching it.

Though Peanuts creator Charles E. Schulz put his museum way up in Sonoma County, Palmdale is the real Charlie Brown of California cities, kicking at the dust but never connecting with the football.

Your latest face-plant speaks volume about the combination of space-age nostalgia and futuristic myopia that afflict you.

You just spent 18 months telling the world that you should be the new, permanent headquarters of the U.S. Space Command—which handles the space operations of all military branches, including the newly formed Space Force. You pursued Space Command even though the creation of Space Force, and the momentum for a new Space Command headquarters, came from President Trump, who hates California. Civic and business leaders across the Antelope Valley promoted this bid even though Palmdale did not appear on an initial 2019 list of the military’s top prospects.

This did not deter you, because you mistakenly believe that, because you were a pioneer in space generations ago, you have something special to offer now. Publicly, your people talked about the Antelope Valley’s 1950s development of an aerospace industry, about how the SR-71 Blackbird first flew in Palmdale in 1964, about the “Right Stuff” era that saw test pilots at nearby Edwards Air Force Base become astronauts, and about how the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger were built there 40 years ago.

The high desert does retain enough defense and space institutions to brand the Antelope Valley (the name comes from pronghorn who grazed there in the 19th century) “Aerospace Valley.” These include Plant 42, a classified Air Force aircraft manufacturing facility where NASA, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, and Boeing all have a presence. Thirty miles away is the Mojave Air & Space Port, which has been used by SpaceX and others in pursuit of private commercial space flight.

But despite all of that, you failed to earn a spot among the six finalists in the Space Command beauty pageant.

This should not have surprised or disappointed you. But you don’t seem to recognize that California long ago lost its dominance of aerospace, as the Department of Defense, playing politics, spread its defense contracts to every corner of the country. Today, if the aerospace industry can be said to have a headquarters, it’s in Northern Virginia, where companies flock for proximity to their biggest customer, the federal government.

If a California site were somehow to be chosen for Space Command, Vandenberg Air Force Base, in Santa Barbara County, would make far more sense, since it’s a proven center for space launches. Vandenberg even made the 2019 list of top prospects, but no California facility is on the new list of finalists. By most accounts, Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, already the Space Command’s interim headquarters, is a lock to keep it.

But none of that has stopped Palmdale, which may keep campaigning until a final decision is made in 2026. The idea of Space Command is simply irresistible. It gives city and business officials a chance to play booster, and it gives powerful real estate interests the chance to juice speculation in Antelope Valley land and homes from Rosamond to Ridgecrest.

Never mind that the relentless self-promotion is reminiscent of the deranged general played by Steve Carell in the recent Netflix spoof Space Force, who goads doubters of the new branch’s viability by asking, “Are you going to sit there like an idiot doing nothing, or are you going to shoot for the stars?”

Palmdale might do better to look down from the starry desert sky and figure out ways to improve its own position. It offers residents all the cost and regulatory headaches of being in California, with few of the benefits; its median household income is $10,000 under the state average, its poverty rate is 50 percent more than the statewide figure, and just 15 percent of its adults have bachelor’s degrees.

This Space Shuttle Modification Center patch belonged to NASA astronaut David Brown. Courtesy of Douglas R. Brown.

But the Antelope Valley’s leading politicians, rather than serve the poor, have often embraced Trumpian politics. And Palmdale’s civic leaders have often been distracted by a bitter feud—fueled by economic development competition over retailers and car dealerships—with neighboring Lancaster and its mayor, the high-profile lawyer Rex Parris. Palmdale’s aerospace obsession also produced a scandal: Longtime mayor Jim Ledford faces charges related to his acceptance of secret consultancy payments from the AERO Institute, a small nonprofit that contracted with the city to prepare more people for aerospace work.

Space is hardly the only windmill at which Palmdale has tilted. For more than a half-century, the Antelope Valley allowed L.A. to string it along with the promise that it might build a great new international airport in the high desert. And Palmdale has been waiting for more than two decades for the California High-Speed Rail Authority to deliver on its promise to bring its trains to a multimodal station that would be a hub for Metrolink, Amtrak, Greyhound buses, enhanced local transportation, and maybe, a private high-speed rail system to Las Vegas. But high-speed rail now seems likely to go no further south than Bakersfield, if it ever opens at all.

This devotion to big projects is rooted in an illogic: that the desert is full of space to do something big. But the Antelope Valley now has nearly 500,000 residents—comparable to the city of Sacramento. And these people, not square acreage, are actually its greatest assets.

Rather than seeking command over space, Palmdale and the Antelope Valley would be wise to invest in its people instead. Why not experiment with universal basic income, like in Stockton, or put more into job training and integrating prisoners into the workforce, or boost your healthcare economy to produce better health and higher-wage jobs? The region also needs to improve the dangerous and outdated highways—14 and 138—that link it to the rest of Southern California.

And if the Antelope Valley is going to lobby for outside help, its focus should be on higher education. The region needs more than a small satellite of CSU Bakersfield; it would be an ideal place to establish a third Cal Poly campus, which could help produce the more educated and technically skilled workforce that the region is lacking.

One irony of the contest for Space Command is that the military, in assessing potential homes, was looking for far more than proximity to an air force base or aerospace companies. It prioritized areas where Palmdale does not rank high: the quality of local schools, an affordable cost of housing and living, and plentiful jobs for military spouses.

It’s a Shakespearean irony that ought to echo around the high desert: The fastest way to the future lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

The post The High Desert City That’s Lost in Space appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I like to say, ‘Solving for space solves for Earth,’” said analog astronaut and geoscientist Sian Proctor, who has lived in a number of moon and Mars simulations on Earth. In such experiences, which can last from a few weeks to 500 days, participants conduct scientific research and also learn to live more cohesively. Analog missions advance human space exploration, and also, as Proctor pointed out, “all of that knowledge helps us become more sustainable here on Earth.”

Director of the ASU Interplanetary Initiative Lindy Elkins-Tanton agreed that working toward space exploration can lead to many different kinds of advancement—in terms of human inspiration, technology, and cooperation. Elkins-Tanton, who is also principal investigator of the NASA Psyche Mission—a multi-year, 800-person endeavor currently building the ship that is going to travel to a metal asteroid—said that preparing for such a mission helps us “see what we can do together and what we can achieve.”

One of the most pressing problems of this moment is ensuring the Earth’s survival. “How can thinking about space exploration make us live more sustainably?” asked the discussion’s moderator, Lisa Margonelli, senior editor of Issues in Science and Technology (and former Zócalo editor-in-chief).

Melodie Yashar, designer and co-founder of Space Exploration Architecture, is currently part of the Moon-to-Mars Planetary Autonomous Construction Technologies Project, a partnership working to establish a permanent and sustainable lunar outpost. “The only way to do that is to really think sustainably about the resources we launch, the materials we use that are local to the planet, and make the most of the resources that we have available to us,” she said. Yashar believes the work they’re doing in 3-D printing and manufacturing could disrupt construction on Earth as well. “The way we think about materials usage, the way homes and infrastructure here on Earth [are] built is a place where innovation should be fostered and is warranted,” she said.

But space remains the province of rich countries and people, said Margonelli. “How can something so elitist be used to address inequities?” she asked the panelists.

The dream of space continues to inspire people from around the world, said Elkins-Tanton. Plus, more and more countries are developing space agencies, which wealthier nations and organizations are assisting through programs like satellite ride-shares.

Pointing to the U.S. Space Force and Russia’s killer satellite, Margonelli pushed back: Can space be a place of cooperation or is it becoming increasingly “a lawless place of war and competition?”

“There are people all around the world and organizations springing up trying to ask this very question,” said Elkins-Tanton: “How do you create international cooperation in space when we haven’t really succeeded in that on Earth?” She added, “We don’t have a great system we can export; we have to create one.” But she’s optimistic that it’s possible, pointing to the Open Lunar Foundation and a recent TED Talk by a researcher there, Jessy Kate Schingler, on the subject of envisioning better rule of law on an interplanetary level.

The conversation shifted to address the responsibility of the private sector as it gets increasingly involved in the business of space.

Proctor believes that the private sector should follow NASA’s lead and keep research in the public domain—inspiring creativity and allowing “people to reuse, remix, revise, and develop the knowledge that’s being created.” Companies have to answer the question: “What are you giving back to humanity as you reach for the stars?”

Yashar wants to see collaboration and partnerships “represent the needs of many and not just a few,” she said, making a Star Trek reference. That means having “a very diverse group of people who are collaborating and who are having open and active dialogues” when it comes to the values that are carried and the priorities being pushed forward for space exploration.

The question of who is coming to the table is one of access—and education. “Do we need space philosophers and space lawyers and space poets and space engineers?” Margonelli asked the panelists.

Yashar said that it’s the engineers, by and large, who are the people deciding the future of interplanetary life—and they’re working alone. If that continues, she said, “we’re only going to end up with what we already know.” Making the conversation more interdisciplinary, with psychologists, anthropologists, artists, and others “can start to change that value system and really celebrate those other voices which from a traditional engineering workflow would not be recognized.”

The audience question-and-answer session asked the panelists to consider a number of worst-case scenarios, including whether we’ll be able to find another planet to live on if Earth becomes uninhabitable, what’s being done to keep space from becoming another war zone, and the implications of disturbing microbes on another planet.

The panelists were all adamant that we have to save Earth before we even consider making another planet habitable. As Proctor put it firmly: “Can you give birth on another planet? And if you can’t, sorry, humanity—you end here.”

“Right at this moment we can’t even send people to live temporarily on the moon, let alone find another planet and create generations,” said Elkins-Tanton. “We absolutely have to work on our beautiful Earth because that is the place.”

Before closing, Margonelli asked the panelists what questions they have about going into space that aren’t being talked about enough.

“As we achieve more and more in space exploration, how do we make sure the benefits accrue more evenly to those who are on Earth?” asked Elkins-Tanton.

Yashar wanted to know how we can ensure that the institutions contributing to the narrative of space exploration “are passing on knowledge in a way to ensure that younger generations can also contribute equally and in a fair way to what the future will bring?”

And Proctor voiced the question that the panelists grappled with throughout the night: “What does a just, equitable, and inclusive space look like?”

The post Can Earthlings Save Our Planet, Achieve World Peace—And Make a Home on the Moon? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

The post The Expansion of the Universe Raises Unnerving Questions appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Recently, NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, the Mars One Foundation and the Mars 2117 Project all have their eyes on transporting humans to the red planet. The future seems to be coming at us quickly, but the questions of whether we should go to Mars, and what we need to know before we make that decision, are big ones that don’t get nearly enough attention.

Our obsession with Mars-travel started in the 19th century. In the 1890s, astronomer Percival Lowell barnstormed the United States, telling audiences that intelligent Martians had built canals on Mars. In the same decade, H. G. Wells stoked the public’s fear with his Martian invaders in The War of the Worlds. A short time later, our infatuation with going to Mars began. In 1910, The Edison Production Company released the five-minute film A Trip to Mars, and two years later Edgar Rice Burroughs published his first John Carter on Mars stories as Under the Moons of Mars. Shortly after the dawn of the space age, NASA flew Mariner 4 past Mars in 1965. Only six years later, NASA put Mariner 9 in orbit around Mars, not long after Neil Armstrong took the first human footsteps on another world. Suddenly, Mars beckoned to us in a more realistic way.

Part of the appeal of Mars is that Mars is Earthlike in many ways. It rotates in just over 24 hours, so a day on Mars is almost identical to a day on Earth. Like Earth, Mars has seasons and polar caps, though each Martian season is almost twice as long as a season on Earth. Mars has a solid surface, a thin atmosphere, and sunrises and sunsets. Martian day would follow Martian sunrise. Martian spring would follow Martian winter. The rhythm of life on Mars would share the same pulsations and rhythms of life as back home on Earth. We could adjust to Mars. We very possibly could live on Mars. At the very least, we can imagine ourselves living on Mars.

Actually living on Mars would be challenging. All terrestrial life requires water and, fortunately, we now know that Mars has enormous amounts of water, albeit frozen at the polar caps, locked in permafrost or buried in aquifers deep underground. With effort, we probably could retrieve and then pipe that water to our Martian cities. Thus, the presence of great volumes of water, as much as any other attribute, makes Mars potentially habitable.

Because Mars is farther from the Sun than Earth, it receives fewer warming rays of light, and so the temperature on the surface is below freezing most of the time on most of the planet—but not everywhere all the time. The average cold temperature on Mars (minus 80 F) is just a bit below the average temperature at Earth’s south pole in southern winter (minus 57 F) and is hundreds of degrees warmer than the deep, lethal cold of Pluto (minus 400 F). Temperatures on the Martian surface have even been measured to be as warm as 68 F. Initially, we could take blankets, solar panels and nuclear power generators with us and find ways to stay warm. Then we could develop ways to warm up the atmosphere. We could, eventually, get comfortable on Mars.

Even if we managed to make these things work, we would have a more significant problem: oxygenating the atmosphere so that we could breathe. Mars currently has no free oxygen, but it has plenty of carbon dioxide that plants can use for photosynthesis and from which human engineers might extract breathable oxygen. Given enough time and ingenuity, one can imagine that we could find ways to solve this no-air-to-breathe problem. For the foreseeable future, Mars is at best a sanctuary for anaerobic life forms that can thrive at extremely cold temperatures.

Photo courtesy of NASA.

Even if we did solve all of these problems, living on a planet that lacks an ozone layer to protect life on the surface from dangerous solar ultraviolet light and X-rays would be no fun. Furthermore, the thin atmosphere of Mars offers no protection from the high-speed particles known as cosmic rays that come from the Sun and other stars in the Milky Way. Without the protection of a thick atmosphere and an ozone layer, the surface of Mars would be a terrific place to spend time if your goal is to develop radiation poisoning and cancer and then die.

Of course, scientists are working on solutions to these problems, too. We could start by living in caves or bunkers below the Martian surface. Or maybe we’ll figure out how to manufacture shelters made of special protective materials. Then, over a long period of time, we might engineer the Martian atmosphere to become more like that of Earth, a process known as terraforming.

Despite the potential of Mars to be a second home for humanity, or even our only home if we destroy the one we currently occupy, we’re just not ready to go to Mars yet.

Our most obvious problem is that, right now, a trip to Mars would be a one-way journey. SpaceX might be able to launch some potential colonists to Mars within a decade, and NASA soon thereafter, but with current rocket technology, neither SpaceX nor NASA can bring these spacefarers home. Whether potential Martian pioneers can survive, let alone prosper, on Mars is an open question, but the technology for a round-trip ticket to Mars simply does not exist yet, and the ethics of sending astronauts on a one-way journey to Mars are questionable.

Establishing a colony in a new, unknown world carries great risks. Those of us who send emissaries to another planet should make every effort to minimize those risks.

Chief among those potential risks is one aspect of colonizing Mars that has been ignored: Mars may already be inhabited. As Carl Sagan noted when peering at Mars through the eyes of the Viking landers’ cameras in 1976, Mars has no macrobes—no bears, no rabbits, no mice, no wasps. Mars could, however, be host to an underground world of microbes. Some scientists have interpreted their measurements of small levels of methane in the Martian atmosphere as evidence that Mars already is inhabited. This interpretation is controversial and by no means definitive, but it also may be right. The best we can say, today, is that we do not yet know for sure that Martians exist; however, we also do not know for sure that Mars is sterile. The jury is still out.

Before we begin to contaminate the red planet with our DNA, bacteria, and viruses, we need to establish whether Mars is biologically alive or dead. Pre-existing Martian life likely would have no defenses for the contamination we would insert into their world. And if Martian life exists and is related to terrestrial life through DNA or RNA molecules, we might have no defenses against the unintentional but inevitable contamination of Earth with Martian microbes.

That such elemental questions about the presence or absence of life itself on Mars have not yet been solved suggests that we do not know enough to consider living on Mars at this time.

Can we justify the risks to the lives of potential space travelers, when so many known problems related to surviving a trip to Mars remain unsolved? SpaceX’s plans to send the first crewed flights to Mars in 2024 may be premature. And if Mars is already the home of Martians, they have squatter’s rights. Perhaps we should leave them alone.

The post Before We Settle on Mars, Let’s Make Sure It’s Not Already Occupied appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As technologies of flight evolve, so do the descriptions of unidentified flying objects. The pattern has held in the 21st century as sightings of drone-like objects are reported, drawing concern from military and intelligence officials about possible security threats.

While puzzling over the appearance of curious things overhead may be a constant, how we have done so has changed over time, as the people doing the puzzling change. In every instance of reporting UFOs, observers have called on their personal experiences and prevailing knowledge of world events to make sense of these nebulous apparitions. In other words, affairs here on earth have consistently colored our perceptions of what is going on over our heads.

Reports of weird, wondrous, and worrying objects in the skies date to ancient times. Well into the 17th century, marvels such as comets and meteors were viewed through the prism of religion—as portents from the gods and, as such, interpreted as holy communications.

By the 19th century, however, “celestial wonders” had lost most of their miraculous aura. Instead, the age of industrialization transferred its awe onto products of human ingenuity. The steamboat, the locomotive, photography, telegraphy, and the ocean liner were all hailed as “modern wonders” by news outlets and advertisers. All instilled a widespread sense of progress—and opened the door to speculation about whether objects in the sky signaled more changes.

Yet nothing fueled the imagination more than the possibility of human flight. In the giddy atmosphere of the 19th century, the prospect of someone soon achieving it inspired newspapers to report on tinkerers and entrepreneurs boasting of their supposed successes.

The wave of mysterious airship sightings that began in 1896 did not trigger widespread fear. The accepted explanation for these aircraft was terrestrial and quaint: Some ingenious eccentric had built a device and was testing its capabilities.

But during the first two decades of the 20th century, things changed. As European powers expanded their militaries and nationalist movements sparked unrest, the likelihood of war prompted anxiety about invasion. The world saw Germany—home of the newly developed Zeppelin—as the likeliest aggressor. Military strategists, politicians, and newspapers in Great Britain warned of imminent attack by Zeppelins.

The result was a series of phantom Zeppelin sightings by panicked citizens throughout the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand in 1909, then again in 1912 and 1913. When war broke out in August 1914, it sparked a new, more intense wave of sightings. Wartime reports also came in from Canada, South Africa, and the United States. In England, rumors that German spies had established secret Zeppelin hangars on British soil led vigilantes to scour the countryside.

In the age of aviation, war and fear of war have consistently fueled reports of unidentified flying objects. A year after Nazi Germany’s surrender, Sweden was beset by at least a thousand accounts of peculiar, fast-moving objects in the sky. Starting in May 1946, residents described seeing missile- or rocket-like objects in flight, which were dubbed “ghost rockets” because of their fleeting nature. Rockets peppering Swedish skies was well within the realm of possibility—in 1943 and 1944, a number of V-1 and V-2 rockets launched from Germany had inadvertently crashed in the country.

At first, intelligence officials in Scandinavia, Britain, and the United States took the threat of ghost rockets seriously, suspecting that the Soviets might be experimenting with German rockets they had captured. By the autumn of 1946, however, they had concluded it was a case of postwar mass hysteria.

The following summer, a private pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen nine flat objects flying in close formation near Mt. Rainier. Looking back on the event years later, Arnold noted, “What startled me most at this point was the fact that I could not find any tails on them. I felt sure that, being jets, they had tails, but figured they must be camouflaged in some way so that my eyesight could not perceive them. I knew the Air Force was very artful in the knowledge and use of camouflage.”

Given the name “flying saucers” by an Associated Press correspondent, they quickly appeared throughout the United States. Over the following two weeks, newspapers covered hundreds of sightings.

News of these reports circled the globe. Soon, sightings occurred in Europe and South America. In the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic bomb tests, and tensions between the United States and the USSR, speculation ran rampant.

Finding themselves on the front line of the Cold War, Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain considered the United States the most likely culprit. West Germans thought the discs were experimental missiles or military aircraft, while Germans in the communist Eastern bloc considered it more likely that the whole thing was a hoax devised by the American defense industry to whip up support for a bloated budget.

Others had more elaborate theories. In 1950, former U.S. Marine Air Corps Major Donald Keyhoe published an article and book titled The Flying Saucers Are Real, in which he contended that aliens from another planet were behind the appearance of the UFOs. Based on information from his informants, Keyhoe contended that government authorities were aware of this, but wished to keep the matter a secret for fear of inciting a general panic.

Such a claim about UFOs was new. To be sure, at the turn of the century during the phantom airship waves, some had speculated that the vessels spotted might be from another planet. Already at that time, people were deeply interested in reports of prominent astronomers observing artificial “canals” and structures on Mars. Evidence of Martian civilizations made it seem conceivable that our interplanetary neighbors had finally decided to pay us a visit. Still, relatively few bought into this line of reasoning.

But by going further, Major Keyhoe struck a chord in a timely fashion. In the aftermath of World War II and over the course of the 1950s, it seemed that science and engineering were making remarkable strides. In particular, the development of guided rockets and missiles, jet airplanes, atomic and hydrogen bombs, nuclear energy, and satellites signaled to many that there were no limits—not even earth’s atmosphere—to technological progress. And if our planet were on the verge of conquering space, it would hardly be a stretch to imagine that more advanced civilizations elsewhere were capable of even greater feats.

But all this raised a question. Why were the extraterrestrials visiting us now?

Keyhoe believed that aliens had been keeping us under observation for a long time. Witnessing the recent explosions of atomic weapons, they had decided the inhabitants of planet Earth had finally reached an advanced enough stage to be scrutinized more closely. Still, there was no reason for alarm. “We have survived the stunning impact of the Atomic Age,” Keyhoe concluded. “We should be able to take the Interplanetary Age, when it comes, without hysteria.”

The flying saucer era had begun. Not everyone would remain as sanguine as Keyhoe. As concerns over global nuclear annihilation and environmental catastrophe grew during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, claims about UFOs took on ever more ominous tones.

Times changed. And so, again, did the UFO phenomenon.

The post How the Industrial Age Fuels Our Belief in UFOs appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The signal, which only came to public attention in late August, may be a product of interference from Earth or have some other non-alien origin—it’s only been observed once, for four seconds, at a single location. Even though the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence believes the signal to be from Earth and says the likelihood that it is an extraterrestrial attempt at contact “is not terribly promising,” the imagination runs wild—maybe aliens are reaching out to us, perhaps the Kremlin is in cahoots with them, or maybe this is more evidence of governmental cover-ups and conspiracies.

The lack of verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence forms the basis of the Fermi Paradox. Given the high probability of intelligent life elsewhere, based on the billions of sun-like stars in the Milky Way (not to mention other galaxies), and the likelihood that planets orbit at least some of these stars, and life exists on at least some of these planets, the silence seems strange. In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi reasoned that aliens should have already contacted Earth, leading him to ask, “Where is everybody?” Nicola Tesla suggested using radio waves to look for alien life in 1896 and we’ve been looking ever since. Perhaps intelligent life isn’t common in the cosmos or is still too far away. Perhaps aliens have visited Earth without our knowledge. Or perhaps aliens have intentionally kept their distance.

But what would happen if this signal were proven to come from intelligent aliens? To call it a game changer is an understatement. What would we do? How would we react? Regardless of what this signal turns out to be, it’s also worth thinking about why aliens might attempt to contact us and what they might have already picked up from our transmissions.

Science fiction offers countless thought experiments in response to these questions. In these stories, the knowledge that humans aren’t alone in the cosmos often causes society to unravel. The discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life would shift paradigms, particularly within certain religions, political systems, and cultures, and those shifts would be messy. Some people might flee or fight, while others welcome an alien species. Perhaps most of all, sci-fi suggests that a signal from an alien life may threaten humankind—not because of anything the ETs might do, but because of the way such a game-changing encounter would highlight and exacerbate existing divisions within humanity, forcing open those cracks. We can’t control what actions aliens might take or what motives might bring them to Earth, but three stories—two novels and one movie—offer compelling guidance about how humans themselves should react to signals from space.

In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, UFOs abduct people, cause electrical disturbances, and attempt to communicate with humans using via a five-note melody. Throughout most of the film, the government denies these occurrences, positioning itself as the voice of reason and authority in the midst of chaos. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Richard Dreyfuss’ character uses mashed potatoes to construct an image he can’t get out of his mind. His obsession alienates his family, but eventually leads him to Devils Tower, where the spaceship lands. The ship releases people who had been abducted or had gone missing years earlier, all of whom appear both unharmed and unaged, and the aliens appear peaceful and non-threatening.

While it’s never entirely clear why the aliens abduct humans, their benevolent nature suggests curiosity, and since it can no longer deny their existence, the government sends 12 officials to board the ship, but in the end, the aliens permit only Dreyfuss to accompany them to their home world. As in Spielberg’s subsequent film E.T., the aliens aren’t the villains—if anything, the government that chooses not to believe its citizens and to withhold the truth is. The aliens underscore this point by opening their doors only for a true believer, as though humans must prove themselves worthy of aliens, rather than the other way around.

In Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, humans receive from the star Vega a transmission consisting of prime numbers, which astronomers eventually decode into a visual message—Adolf Hitler commencing the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The Vegans had been monitoring adjacent planetary systems and sent back the image of Hitler—the first indication of intelligent life (oh, the irony) from Earth that the aliens were able to pick up. They beamed the message back in receipt. “What are they going to think of us?” wonders astronomer Ellie Arroway, worried about Hitler serving as Earth’s “ambassador.”

Later, one of the Vegans—a simulacra of Arroway’s father—explains why they made contact upon receiving the broadcast:

The picture, of course, was alarming. We could tell you were in deep trouble. But the music told us something else. The Beethoven told us there was hope. Marginal cases are our specialty. We thought you could use a little help. … You’ve got hardly any theory of social organization, astonishingly backward economic systems, no grasp of the machinery of historical prediction, and very little knowledge about yourselves. Considering how fast your world is changing, it’s amazing you haven’t blown yourselves to bits by now. That’s why we don’t want to write you off just yet.

Imagine what extra-terrestrials would discern about human civilization if they detected one of our transmissions. What would they pick up? BBC broadcasts? Talk shows? Fox News? Cartoons? What would they conclude about humanity based on those glimpses of our culture?

Before he wrote Contact, Carl Sagan chaired a committee tasked to decide what to include on the “Golden Record,” a copper disc carried by the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. (Voyager 1 is now beyond the solar system.) The Golden Record contains 115 images and sounds, including music, animal calls, greetings in 55 different languages, human brain waves, and images of DNA, the Solar System, maps, humans, and wildlife. This carefully curated time capsule could serve as a helpful introduction to the human race—depending on who or what receives it.

Might aliens determine, based on our signals, that they don’t want contact with earthlings? Might they see them as a call for help? In Liu Cixin’s 2008 book The Three-Body Problem, a disillusioned astrophysicist transmits a message into outer space asking for assistance. The message is picked up by the Trisolarans, aliens looking to settle a planet with a stable orbit. The responder warns that its race will invade Earth, but the astrophysicist figures nothing could be worse than the havoc humans have wrought on the planet, so she persists. Some humans plan defense strategies, while others welcome the alien overlords. These opposing factions spend centuries attempting to outwit one another, each trying to save Earth.

In Contact, Sagan also explores the fracturing of the human race in the aftermath of the discovery that humans aren’t alone. International politics become a free-for-all, as astronomers from around the world work to harness and decode the signals amid fears that countries with tepid relationships with the U.S. might withhold or alter data. America and Russia compete to build the spacecraft depicted in the transmitted blueprints. International debate rages over who will comprise the five-person crew and countries trade seats for other privileges. The heightened tensions culminate in the bombing of the first craft and crew, for which dozens of international political, religious, and military organizations take credit. The schism between science and religion manifests in distrust. Arroway consults a religious leader who asserts that the “scientists and the politicians and the bureaucrats are holding out” on and deceiving them. “Do you want people like that to decide the fate of the world? … Do you want a pack of unbelievers to do the talking to God?” he asks.

Sagan brings up a good and difficult question that could easily get lost in the furor over proving the origin of an extraterrestrial signal. Who should serve as ambassadors for the human race in the event that aliens want to communicate?

Close Encounters, Contact, and The Three-Body Problem offer answers here. They suggest that the curious and open-minded humans make the best liaisons. Our earthly ambassadors should be people who embrace the unknown, believe the impossible, and who don’t shy away from the crucible of alien contact despite its dangers. Perhaps it’s a moot point—we may have unwittingly picked our intergalactic liaisons already. The prospect of intelligent life requires that we consider our legacies not just on Earth, but throughout all space and time, just in case.

The post Who Should Be Our Alien Liaison? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My work starts on dark, black nights, when there is no moon or reflection from it. The telescopes I use have to be in places with three qualities: High, dry, and—you guessed it—very dark. And so, I search for planets atop the summit of the highest, driest, and darkest peak in Hawaii. Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano—where the world-famous Keck Observatory is located—minimizes the “noise” in the images from Earth’s constantly swirling atmosphere and the light drifting in from cities.

Because black is defined by the absence of light, you might not think there are different gradations of black—but there are when you are hunting for other planets in our galaxy. Every day, I am looking through images that appear, at first, like exposures devoid of any light. In reality, shades of black can hide amazing worlds—some of which could be habitable or inhabited by life forms.

Seeing the color black in fact is a comforting affirmation that I’m searching in the right direction, for a planet must be so faint as to appear to not be there at all. If an image has many bright dots of light, that means I am looking at a field full of stars. I am not interested in objects that emit their own light. A star is too extreme an environment for life as we know it—it’s an enormous ball of hot plasma and even if it had a solid surface to stand on, which it doesn’t, life forms like us would get crushed under the star’s tremendous gravitational pull.

What I’m trying to find are very faint objects that reflect and re-emit the light from a host star nearby. These planets outside our solar system—which are known as exoplanets—are companions to stars, swimming in their own sea of darkness. Finding these planets tells us about the architecture of planetary systems. It also lets us know how common exoplanets are in the habitable regions around stars, where the temperatures are not too hot and not too cold, where liquid water can exist, and complex molecules may have figured out the processes we call life.

Sample image of searching for a planet around a mature star, taken in March 2016 with the NIRC2 camera on Keck II telescope.

 
My research uses the newest planet-hunting technique—“direct imaging.” Put simply, we place a small piece of black film in the field of view of the telescope to dampen the light from the parent star. Then, astronomers like myself can make out the faint planet companions orbiting the star. We rotate the powerful Keck telescope, taking pictures in a time-lapsed sequence, and then apply an intensive mathematical data analysis procedure. Through this process, we can carefully distinguish the feeble signal of a planet from the overwhelming glow of the host star. The dark piece of film is called a coronagraph, and it is a key component of the direct imaging technique.

That’s right, I am actually trying to make the picture darker because the natural blackness of space is not enough to be able to see what we want to see. In order to extract the signal of a planet in an image, there is a lot of interference I have to take out: the random noise from the camera’s own electronics, the scattered light around the coronagraph, and the rotation of the individual exposures. The final image, a deeper tone of black, is the result of stacking cleaned-up exposures to reveal a clear signal from the planetary system. Galileo Galilei, the first observational astronomer, would be fascinated to see how we’ve progressed in the last 400 years. We are now seeing planets in the blackness around other stars, very much in the same way he discovered the faint moon companions around Jupiter.

I did not set out to stare at blackness all day long. I came to astronomy by way of mathematics, which is a great tool for designing ways to see very small perturbations in data. But as I learned more about how astronomy could help expand the boundaries of human knowledge, I became more and more interested in trying to see what the universe conceals in the darkness.

Ultimately, this is what all research is—seeking light in the darkness of the unknown. Our bodies are limited by the sensitivity of the human eye, but we have expanded our searches by manipulating the pixels of more sensitive cameras, and can thus capture evidence of real physical phenomena with our machines. If humans are to learn about how we came to be and search for life beyond ourselves, we must continue to look for answers in the deep blackness of space. And of course, we have to combine that with a little patience for staring into what may seem like a lot of nothingness.

The post Even in Deep Space, There Are Shades of Black appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Rays of light during monsoon rains over the Catalina Mountains outside Tucson, Arizona.

This obsession with desert rain also meant it was hard to resist dreaming about the possibility of rainstorms on Titan, my favorite moon of Saturn, which I was studying (and continue to study) through the NASA and European Space Agency Cassini-Huygens mission. But we knew from data gathered in 1980 by Voyager—the first spacecraft to visit the Saturn system close-up—that there was essentially no water in the moon’s nitrogen atmosphere because it was too cold.

So what would rain on Titan even be made of? Methane takes water’s place on the moon as cloud-forming gas, and thus would be the main ingredient of raindrops, if there were any. And because nitrogen is so soluble in methane, each droplet of rain would have to be 20 percent nitrogen, as opposed to Earth’s droplets, which carry carbon dioxide but essentially no nitrogen. How would these exotic methane rains behave? Would they be gentle and steady, or violent downpours like those in the desert?

First, to know if rain was even a possibility, we had to figure out where the methane on Titan was and wasn’t. Voyager told us that the lowermost part of the moon’s atmosphere was not saturated in methane; the “humidity” (which means the ratio of the methane in the air to the amount required for saturation) at the equator was about 50 percent. That’s not a desert—more like New York City or Chicago. Saturn is almost 10 times farther from the sun than Earth, so there is not as much solar energy to warm the air and push it upwards to the altitudes where clouds can form (and then release its moisture as rain when it cools). It seemed that for any rain to get going, special conditions—mountain ramparts to force moist air upward, and seasonal shifts in winds and sunlight—would be needed.

Armed with these ideas and my picture-window view of the desert mountains, I worked with Maria Awal, a master’s student in atmospheric sciences, to model what it would take for methane rainstorms to form on Titan. We found that a rising column, or “plume,” of methane-rich air that was buoyant compared to its surroundings would be needed, and that Titan’s atmosphere could in fact create one. But the distant sun could provide only enough energy to trigger one or two storms anywhere on Titan at a given time. In other words, Titan storms, if they existed, had to be sporadic but violent—gully washers of the true desert style.

What about the nature of the raindrops? Shortly before he arrived at our laboratory, the planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz speculated that they must be giant and flattened, falling so slowly that the storms that produced them might drift away before the drops even hit the ground. And those drops that evaporate in the dry air—which might be most of them—leave behind “ghost droplets” of ethane—a sister molecule made from methane’s destructive encounter with ultraviolet sunlight high up in the atmosphere.

With Lorenz and another scientist, Caitlin Griffith, who came to Arizona in 2002, our Tucson lab became a thundercloud of research on Titan’s storms as we awaited an up-close and personal view of the moon. That view would come from Cassini-Huygens, the Saturn-orbiting spacecraft launched in 1997 that carried a probe designed to land on Titan. The mission would tell us whether all our guesswork was right or wrong.

In 2004, Cassini-Huygens dropped into Saturn orbit. Early images of Titan showed a south pole bathed in early summer sun with masses of slow-moving convective clouds. Evidence of dark spots under the clouds led us to wonder: Could those be ponds of methane that collected after storms? When Huygens made its descent through Titan’s atmosphere the following year, one of its instruments measured the amount of methane at different altitudes in its descent, and found that it was quite a bit higher than typical cumulus clouds on the Earth.

Most striking were the pictures taken during descent. As the probe drifted over a rocky hill—the rocks on Titan are actually made of extremely chilled water ice—at roughly the cruising altitude of a jetliner, it captured a series of vein-like channels, carved into the hillside in just the way one would expect from rainfall. Bathed in the dim twilight from a distant sun, they had to be caused by streams of methane as they ran down to a dark plain—the signature of occasional and intense methane storms.

The Huygens probe captured this image of Titan’s landscape as it descended through the moon’s atmosphere.

As the seasons changed, Cassini saw vast clouds, covering thousands of miles of terrain, appearing and disappearing around Titan’s equator. They left behind a dramatically darkened surface, which then brightened again. We know that moist soils on Earth look dark in space when they are doused with rain, so why couldn’t Titan’s icy “soil” be darkened by intense methane rain?

What the spacecraft had found was an active methane weather pattern—yes, clouds and rain—on a moon a billion miles from the Earth. Mars has dust storms, Io has volcanic eruptions, and Pluto may have methane snow, but Titan is the only place we know of in the solar system that has liquid rainfall like we have on Earth. Only Titan has environments that allow clouds to make rain, which carves out gullies and valleys in the landscape, ultimately to find its way to the polar seas—seas, as Cassini has discovered, that are so vast that they contain hundreds of times more hydrocarbon in the form of methane than all the known oil and gas reserves on the Earth. What secrets do they hold?

Five years ago, I left the Sonoran desert for wetter and cooler climes back east. The snow outside my window in Ithaca, New York, has no analog on Titan—it’s too warm for methane snow anywhere there. But Titan’s methane cycle has almost everything else that Earth’s hydrological cycle has—clouds, rain, streams, rivers, and seas. (Titan just lacks the globe-girdling ocean.) Titan is our home world transcribed into a minor key. The only witnesses have been our robotic emissaries Cassini and Huygens. Will human eyes someday witness firsthand a Titan monsoon rainstorm?

As I think back to that Tucson office with the panorama of summer thunderstorms moving off the Catalina mountains, I conjure up a fantasy of the future: a lonely base halfway across the solar system with a picture-window view of methane rain falling on an icy hillside, perched next to the final resting place of the Huygens probe, an artifact from long ago.

The post What Do Raindrops Look Like in Outer Space? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Pluto was the farthest, coldest, and darkest thing a child could imagine. We guessed how long it would take to die if we stood on the surface of such a frozen place wearing only the clothes we had on. We tried to figure out how much colder Pluto was than Antarctica, or than the coldest day we had ever experienced in Pennsylvania. Did the surface of Pluto have mountains, frozen ponds like the ones we loved to skate on, or acres of snow to play in and build snowmen?

Pluto—which famously was demoted from a “major planet” to a “dwarf planet” in 2006—captured our imagination in a way that even Mars (a possible abode of life) and glorious, ringed Saturn couldn’t. It was a mystery that could complete our picture of what it was like at the most remote corners of our solar system.

Pluto’s underdog discovery story is part of what makes it so compelling. Clyde Tombaugh was a Kansas farm boy who built telescopes out of spare auto parts, old farm equipment, and self-ground lenses. In 1928, he sent drawings of Jupiter and Mars to Lowell Observatory, a premier observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, to ask for a job as an assistant. At first, the observatory rejected his request, but Clyde showed persistence, and eventually got a job.

The observatory’s founder, the astronomer Percival Lowell, believed there existed a planet beyond the orbit of Neptune, so Tombaugh’s task was to search among millions of stars for a moving point of light. He used a device called a blink comparator, which compared two photographs of the sky taken at different times, so that a moving target, such as a planet, could be seen flitting back and forth against a background of fixed stars.

Tombaugh and his telescope

On February 18, 1930, Tombaugh found Pluto. It was the first planet discovered by an American, and represented a moment of light in the midst of the Great Depression’s dark encroachment. The planet’s name, referencing the Greek god of the underworld, was suggested by an 11-year old British girl. (The cartoon dog was named later.)

For decades, Pluto thrived in its role as the ninth major planet of our solar system, even though it was tiny compared to the others (just one-fifth the diameter of Earth) and so far away (on average, about 3.6 billion miles from the sun and 1 billion miles from Neptune, its closest planetary “neighbor”).

But then, in 1992, two astronomers discovered another planet-like object beyond the orbit of Neptune. Six months later, they discovered a third object. It looked like Pluto might actually be a member of a sort of asteroid belt, similar to but way beyond one we’ve known about for a long time between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

At this point, the scientific community began to wonder whether the tiniest planet was going to keep its rarefied title. Would it suffer the same fate as Ceres, the first and largest asteroid discovered in 1801, which reigned as a planet for decades before it was demoted? Despite this concern, a core group of scientists and engineers, me included, was working on convincing NASA to send a probe to our solar system’s last unexplored planet.

By the turn of the millennium, dozens more objects beyond Neptune like Pluto had been discovered, including one that might even be larger than Pluto. So, in August 2006, the International Astronomical Union elected to demote the planet. It now shares its dwarf planet designation with Ceres and three other of the 1,200 bodies that have been located beyond Neptune today, collectively known as “Kuiper Belt Objects.”

This demotion came just seven months after we’d successfully launched the NASA New Horizons spacecraft. When I heard this sad announcement, I felt as if I’d lost an old childhood friend.

But Pluto’s scientific interest to those of us on the New Horizons team didn’t diminish. The Kuiper Belt is still an interesting place: It’s populated by icy bodies that are remnants of the solar system’s formation 4.6 billion years ago. These are the building blocks of planets, and they are still around for us to examine.

The few clues scientists have been able to gather about Pluto so far are tantalizing. We know its surface contains ices composed of methane, nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and other compounds familiar to us. It has some very dark regions, but it also seems to have a bright polar cap, like on Earth. Its atmosphere is very thin, but it’s composed largely of nitrogen, like our own. And we believe Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, was formed the same way as our moon, by coalescing from the debris left over from a massive impact by a rogue body.

So, all of us scientists are hoping that the close-up looks we are finally getting now of this dwarf planet can tell us how the chaos that reigned at the beginning of the solar system could have created objects so similar and yet so foreign as Earth and Pluto.

It’s taken nine years of travel, but we’ll finally get within 7,800 miles of Pluto today. Our spacecraft will enable us to see features as small as a football field. I’ve been painstakingly observing Pluto through a large telescope for over 15 years, seeing what I think is frost moving around on its surface with the seasons. I hope to see it more clearly as the data comes in.

Pluto, as seen from NASA’s New Horizons on July 11, 2015

As we bear down on Pluto, all of us scientists are just as curious as I was in my childhood bedroom, wondering what Pluto is like. Is its surface old and cratered, or does it have shifting polar caps like the Earth’s that indicate recent activity? Does it have volcanoes like Jupiter’s moon Io, plumes like Neptune’s moon Triton, or water geysers like Saturn’s moon Enceladus? Will it just be like the objects around it, or will it have some unique quality that earns back the special place it once had in everyone’s hearts?

Pluto is much more than something that is not a planet. It’s an underdog we’re still cheering for. It’s a reminder that there are many worlds out there beyond our own—that the sky isn’t the limit at all. We don’t know what kinds of fantastic variations on a theme nature is capable of making until we get out there to look.

The post Why Pluto Still Deserves Our Love appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It has taken us more than 400 years to get to this point, where we can make a dedicated and sustained examination of this intriguing moon. I couldn’t be more excited to be the project scientist of this mission, helping to determine what we want to know when we get there. It’ll be like getting an in-depth interview with a fascinating someone who you’ve only read about in a history book.

I first learned of Europa as a kid who made planets out of tennis and whiffle balls covered in construction paper and masking tape and hung them from my bedroom ceiling on Long Island. Wadded balls of tape stuck onto my model Jupiter represented its biggest moons. Back then, I didn’t pay much attention to the proper arrangement of the moons, their colors, or relative sizes. My fascination with the planets was a form of escapism, as these worlds represented perfect places, untouched by human foibles—wars, environmental pollution or confining boundaries. They were uncontaminated, except for the rare scar of a crashed or landed spacecraft.

Of course, scientists knew about Europa long before I encountered it. It was among the four largest moons of Jupiter that Galileo Galilei first spied in 1610, the first moons found to be orbiting another planet, which helped put to rest the idea of the Earth as the center of the universe. I was in high school in 1979, when the twin Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Jupiter and its moons, snapping the first close-up photos as they went. Though not the largest moon of Jupiter, Europa was the most enigmatic: Voyager’s somewhat fuzzy pictures showed a maze of dark lines marking the bright icy surface, like a cracked eggshell. Europa was completely unlike any world humans had previously seen.

Seeing the first Voyager 2 photos of Europa inspired the famous Carl Sagan to wonder whether the dark bands were mountain-like ridges, or valley-like troughs. What do they say about the history of this world? Do they have a connection to the plate tectonics that shaped Earth, which creates new crust and recycles old? I was fortunate enough to take Sagan’s seminar course called “Ices and Oceans in the Outer Solar System” at Cornell University in 1985, and I was fascinated by the possibility of a watery ocean within Jupiter’s moon Europa. It was uncertain whether such an ocean would have frozen solid over time or could persist today. But as a guest lecturer—Steve Squyres, the future scientific leader of the Opportunity and Spirit missions to Mars—led us to ponder: If there is water, could there be life?

To learn more, NASA sent a robotic spacecraft closer to Europa. So between 1996 and 2002, the Galileo spacecraft soared past Europa a dozen times while orbiting Jupiter.

Galileo images showed Europa’s surface to be criss-crossed by both mountain-like ridges and valley-like troughs. Some dark bands are streaked by a myriad of parallel ridges and grooves. The patterns of the ridges and cracks suggest an ocean below that permits the ice shell to flex and break. Giant bulls-eye-like scars tell of large comets that collided into the moon to create the biggest of the moon’s craters, the impacts penetrating through the icy shell to liquid water below. And, most intriguing of all, in places the surface is broken into city-sized chunks that resemble giant ice floes.

In addition to its strange geology, Europa shows an unusual magnetic signature. The Galileo spacecraft’s magnetic sensors detected a layer beneath Europa’s surface that conducts electricity, betraying an underground saltwater ocean.

While Galileo answered many of our early questions about Europa, the mission gave rise to many new ones. How thick is Europa’s ice? Does it melt and churn? How active is Europa today? Why is Europa so different from other moons of the outer solar system? What does Europa tell us about the history of our solar system, including Earth?

But it’s the saltwater ocean under a thin icy shell that makes Europa particularly fascinating because of the distinct possibility that there could be life in these lightless waters. We don’t expect whales or fish down there, but it is possible that alien single-celled microorganisms could exist.

In addition to the water, scientists studying Europa conclude that it could contain the two other “ingredients” that are critical to life: the elements needed to build organic molecules and chemical energy. Over the age of the solar system, comets and asteroids that crashed into Europa have brought the right elements. And the moon’s surface is constantly being pelted by radiation, which creates energy-rich molecules that could be dredged downward by geological stirring, to create a kind of chemical fuel that could power life when those molecules are dissolved in the ocean below.

An artist’s rendering of a future NASA mission to Europa in which a spacecraft would make multiple close flybys of the icy moon of Jupiter

So what makes Europa special, given that in recent years we’ve found that other icy moons may have oceans and seas as well? Other moons at Jupiter—Ganymede and Callisto—probably have oceans deep within. Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus spews water into space from geysers that emanate from an underground sea. Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has seas of organic goo on its surface. But I consider that Europa’s ocean provides the best case for life because it is the most likely to have all three ingredients for life, for long enough for life to have developed.

Of course, there is a huge difference between acknowledging the possibility of life, and actually finding it. Any life that exists on Europa probably would be completely different from life on Earth, and of independent origin. Finding life elsewhere would end our cosmic isolation: if there is other life in our own planetary backyard, then life is probably common throughout the universe.

These enticing possibilities are why I’ve worked for the past 17 years, along with colleagues who are similarly tantalized by Europa, to develop a spacecraft mission dedicated to understanding Europa. We will orbit Jupiter, as Galileo did, but this time, focusing in on Europa with dozens and dozens of very close flybys. The spacecraft will aim instruments specifically designed to divine and characterize Europa’s water and to uncover the secrets of its history.

It will take at least a decade to go from blueprints to getting actual data back. There’s a kid somewhere right now, hanging models of the planets from a bedroom ceiling, who will help to decipher whether Europa is everything I hope it is.

The post The Potential for Life on Jupiter’s Moon appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.