Disclosure... alas... of an 80 year cliché with the same, tired villains. But still fun. (SPOILERS!)

I'm a nearly life-long Steven Spielberg fan. (I didn't think anyone could make a better musical film than Leonard Bernstein's WEST SIDE STORY. Spielberg did it.) So okay, I had to go see DISCLOSURE DAY.  

Having dissected some 'hidden aspects' to his films, I deem that Spielberg's values and creative skills put him among the 'most-American' first-rank artists, combining constructive criticism of authority with eager curiosity, plus almost ebullient (and rare) optimism. 

So, I went to see DISCLOSURE DAY prepared to be entertained by masterful scenes, dramatic ironies and solid dialogue.

I also expected to simmer this time, over his complicity in an absurdly illogical and unsupportable cult fever that I've witnessed every half decade, across my entire life. A life that stretches almost all the way back to Roswell. A life spent exploring related topics, in both science and fiction.

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Does this posting seem tl;dr? Watch a fun podcast where I have the hosts in stitches about UFOs and AI and such, on the "This Week in Space" podcast via Twit.TV ... Dr. David Brin's Thoughts on Spielberg's 'Disclosure Day'.

Re: UFOs in general, here's my general dissection of this recurring mania... and the 10% that might be worth looking at. And a dive into the recent UAPs - how I'd make such zipping cat laser dots, cast by gigling humans for gullible pussycats to bat-at.

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To be clear, I loved CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, whose lesson was not loathing of a freely elected government and its civil servants, but very nearly the opposite, admiring their skills and mostly-generous intent. The professionals' main fault - in that movie and in ET and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (and often in real life) consisted of patronizing citizens who are just trying to participate. 

In E.T. The Extraterrestrial, government experts are basically decent folks whose sole tort in the entire film is to treat Elliot's mom and her concerns condescendingly. Watch it again! The 'guy with the keys' is essentially Elliot, grown up!  

There is a villain in ET! Someone whose behavior is truly despicable. But we'll get to that.

Alas, from Mr. Spielberg's recent public statements, I had different expectations this time. And I was not proved wrong. In DISCLOSURE DAY, the litany of clichés and illogic was as thorough as the pervasive sense of pessimism throughout. 

The latter is Mr. Spielberg's privilege, of course. He's earned the right.

The former (and I say this knowing that my frankness has already harmed me in Hollywood, many times in the past) makes for bad art.

And so ... here's a requisite and very necessary SPOILER ALERT...

                                      == SPOILERS AHEAD! ==

      == Let's start with the supposed top goal of the conspirators  ==

The premise of DISCLOSURE DAY is that the whole Roswell and Hanger 18 megillah -- including crashed interstellar spacecraft and dead or captured aliens -- is all true. All of it, from the genuinely puzzling all the way to the long-disproved. 

For eighty years, the biggest thing in human history has been kept from us! Under a reign of fiercely-enforced secrecy, while crashed starships (all of them in the good old USA) have been intensely studied and new technologies back-engineered from them.

So... let's start with that. Do YOU see any such magical technological leaps? Antigravity and star drives and telepathy or age-reversal cures? Sudden, huge advances that can't be explained better by steadily incremental (if sometimes brilliant) human ingenuity? 

I know of none (except maybe AI - which was another thoughtful film). Moreover, to be clear, I've participated in some of humanity's tech-steps, across the last half century or so. Indeed, this may be the most-offensive part of the cult. Crediting such wonders as computers and integrated circuits and CAT scans and the Internet to aliens is just as insulting as claiming that ancient Egyptians and Mayans and Zimbabweans couldn't chip and move stone by themselves, in order to assuage their gods. Not without stone-lifting help from saucer-god beings. In other words, bigoted hogwash.

But let's put it up for a wager? Go ahead. Name a technological leap across all our lifetimes - (we'll set aside AI for now, though I get into that elsewhere.) Put down $$$ stakes vs. my promise to show the step-by-step increments that got us here, based on hard work by clever, assiduous and collaboratively diligent humans.

Furthermore, note this about Disclosure Day.. While Spielberg mentions that his secret agency is trying to reverse-engineer alien tech, he then lets the whole topic slip away.  Because he knows he can't point at anything. Velcro maybe? Naw. Nothing at all. Except for a couple of magic wands, that is.

Anyway, here we get to the biggest flaw of all. Such a major and utterly important project would benefit from having a very large number of human investigators and researchers, right? Recruited from among the best our species has to offer. Because you never know which impudent free-thinker may be the one to get that AHA! moment and succeed at grasping some alien tech.

Of course, that offers up a contradiction inherent to the whole UFO mania. Do you see it? The core topic of DISCLOSURE DAY?

The secrecy.

                     == Any reasons? ==

Secrecy lasting nearly an entire century, under all successive administrations, many of which hated each other? Mr. Spielberg tries to deal with that particular objection, with a single line: "we decided that presidents don't need to be involved." 

Cute: and indeed, one can imagine such a decision being made in a special case, such as the present. But seriously, across many decades, no one steps up to inform the one fellow on Earth who can issue you a pardon for telling him that every rule of law or democratic accountability is being violated?

Worse, in the film we see U.S. military generals collaborating with the secret ET-dissection agency in its 80 year betrayal of Constitutional chain of command. Alas, this prompts curiosity: does Steven Spielberg know any admirals or generals? The ones I've spoken with are absolutely - almost religiously - loyal to democracy and citizen rule. The culture set by George Marshall that merits our support.

Moving outward from USA parochialism, would not other nations have sniffed this out by now? Or had their own crashed ships? Or maybe this whole thing might serve the best purpose, like in that great Robert Culp OUTER LIMITS episode: bringing us together in common cause?

But let's get back to the sheer number of needed experts, in all their impudent variety. Even at Roswell, this would be hundreds of Americans, both in and out of uniform, participating in every 'encounter' since 1947. Then hundreds and hundreds more inside the agency, all the way to the 2020s. And those are just the ones collecting crash wreckage and alien bodies, along with captive ETs themselves. 

Picture it. Would not thousands of 'our best people' get hurled at such an emergency science study, one far more vital and urgent than the Manhattan Project? 

But in Hollywood parlance, all of those thousands of brilliant, individualist, cooperatively-competitive experts are reduced to the role of... henchmen.

                == It's kind of... well... hurtful ==

Okay, I am kinda P.O.'d about that premise, since I've been privileged to know many of the best people. And I can say with some confidence that none were ever invited into such studies of alien tech. I know this, not just from my conversations with them. But also because, in fact, such programs leave major ripples. Like big, noticeable gaps in their professional lives. Like all the subscriptions to ASTOUNDING Magazine that suddenly shifted to PO boxes near Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1942. Or take the charter jets that right now commute daily with expert workers from Las Vegas homes to Area 51 and back again to be with their families. Those charters were sniffed-out easily, along with supply convoys.

(Okay, sure, Area 51 exists! And it's secret and has a few mystery planes. Duh? Again, that much is normal human brilliance and understandable military secrecy...  and none of it has got us anything better in space than the silly Artemis moondoggle, aimed at making a few more ritual footprints on a plain of poison dust.) 

Oh, one can offer hypothetical counters to all of the above. Is it possible that much smaller teams might work on alien stuff? Or that some truly super-uber-techs have come out of such studies and even my "best minds" acquaintances might know nothing about it? 

Maybe our anti-gravity ships have already colonized Europa. Heck, in STARGATE the USA has defeated several alien empires and is now leader of an entire Galactic coalition... not Earth, but the United States of America... and still they don't tell the taxpayers. Okaaaaaay...

(BTW I loved Stargate.)

Sure. I've even written sci fi stories that explored such notions, Secret colonies n' such. Fun stuff. But...

...but eighty years? After 80 years no one has blabbed or disclosed?*

     == Contempt for your fellow citizens is endemic ==

Oh, you say that some folks have already testified? With what evidence? Third hand rumors or unvetted 'things I saw'? Or 'an old man once told me' or else 'I saw a document once!!!!'

And Occam's Razor doesn't suggest to you that these are likely publicity-seeking 4th-raters who never, ever, ever offer anything like plausible evidence? And true insiders would have plenty by now! At risk of belaboring the obvious, let me repeat; there would have been hundreds, thousands of them by now, across an entire human lifespan.

What, you think some leather-skinned, retired engineer in his 90s, tooling around Arizona with a shotgun behind the seat of his pickup truck, is worried about a Non-Disclosure Agreement? 

Gawd you don't know these guys. I do. At least enough of them to choke back an urge to spit over how you insult them.

                       == The Big Question ==

Oh, but now we get to the question of WHY? 

Why go to such lengths, committing crimes tantamount to kidnapping, murder and treason, possibly meriting life sentences or death, all in order to prevent public ... disclosure?

Why? Steven Spielberg spends a lot of time on this one:

1) The former nun girlfriend (and is everyone in the film Catholic?) claims that a public that learns about tech-advanced-but mortal aliens will suddenly forsake God. 

Say... what? How the heck does that even scan? Sure Moctezuma thought Cortez might be a god, but even so, the Aztecs fought. And doubly so when they first saw a Spaniard bleed. Anyway, I think most modern folks could tell a 'tech-advanced-but-mortal alien' from the Creator of the universe.

(BTW I liked Spielberg having her clench the crucifix in her hand, creating a palm stigmata, enabling her to escape from mind control via the salvation of holy pain. With Colin Firth as either Herod or Pontius Pilate. Yum.)

2) Yes, Steven S. trots out the hoary old "public panic" excuse. Everyone will go mad!! Riots in the street. Cats and dogs, living together... Like the silly secrecy-justification of those deliberately-loopy MEN IN BLACK? 

At least Spielberg has the good sense and decency not to belabor this one, since his entire career was built by hundreds of millions of people paying to watch him poke at these very notions... with none of his audience ever running, screaming from the theater, as in The Blob.

3) But might disclosure destabilize a world teetering at the edge of nuclear war? Oooookay.  The whole DEFCON 3 thing seems kinda contrived for the sake of the show. And it doesn't explain non-disclosure way back during the relatively calm world of the 1990s. And... um... isn't this exactly what the USA would reveal, in order to distract from a parochially silly tiff among earthlings?

(And isn't the present UFO Disclosure Fetish really just a case of 'X-files to distract from Eps-Files'?)

By the end of the film, we are left with no plausible WHY at all! Other than Hugh (Coleman Domingo) diagnosing that Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) is doing it all because of his own psychological pain. And... um... Hugh could not have simply taken that diagnosis over Noah's head?

       == A final note on why? ==

In fact, I can think of a couple of reasons that might - conceivably - justify secrecy! Why such a major endeavor by those who study UFOs might be worth hiding from the public. 

My novella "Senses, Three and Six” is all about one such scenario. And no, it's not the hoary cliché of “avoiding public panic.” The notion is actually rather interesting, I reckon! (Hey Steven S., want a good premise for this topic? One that's never been dramatized and is far, far more plausible?)

Indeed, as I show in that story, there are conceivable (if unlikely) reasons why tens of thousands of our best minds might choose not to do the human thing and blab! Let's suppose it's something so compellingly dangerous that almost any sensible person who learns of it would agree it's better not to tell?

"Okay, as an American, my reflex is to disclose and share. But that's a damn good reason to quash it. For now."

Let's say there has been a Manhattan Project about aliens, and that all of the thousands of top folks studying this crisis actually agreed - against their every inclination - to keep it under wraps for a truly dire reason. A conspiratorial campaign of silence that has encompassed all party lines and many generations of our very best people for 80 years. As I've shown, it would have to be a damn good reason!  

Mull this over. Suppose for a moment that such a reason existed. Why even leather-skinned 90-year-old engineer-retirees would keep their gums tightly sealed. 

           

In which case then, um... can any of you pause your sanctimony long enough to please think it through?

If so, then who the hell are you to demand they break that massively consensus judgement by thousands of top minds who know vastly more about this than you do? When extorting revelation now might endanger all of humanity?

I'm not saying this ranks high on any list of plausibles! Indeed, perhaps you have a mature and well-considered answer to that question. Go ahead and put yours into comments! 

Hell, I could argue both sides all day... which is probably why - despite my peerless qualifications - I haven't been invited into the cabal! (Or... so I claim ;-)

But damn. What's utterly discrediting is that - amid their righteous sanctimony snits - none of these UFO zealots ever, ever pauses to consider it. 

        == Many silly (and some disturbing) things ==

Recall from the beginning, my teaser question about Disclosure Day? That question of who is the villain? You who have watched the flick likely think it's trivially easy to answer. 

It isn't. Not at all.

But first, let's deal with some quibbles.

Like all the magical powers displayed by the protagonists. Reading minds and speaking in math (without ever doing anything with that power, other than a little criminal hacking.) Gee thanks, alien guys. Gifts that never help in their lives or those around them, except when it serves the interests of those mind programmers.

Oh. Here's one! Did Kellner (Josh O'Conner) twirl the wheat himself, with some psychic power? Or did the aliens do it, while watching him from above? The latter seems likely, in this scene and many others. In which case, um, why did they always help just enough, so the heroes could leap from one sudden escape to the next barely-survived moment? Good movie action! But how about a little help to fly their car over the train, like Elliot did with ET in his bike basket? 

(Nah, I won't actually bitch about a great action scene. Loved the train bit! But it only works logically if the Visitors aren't monitoring... which they clearly are. Yet they never interfere in Noah's mind scans.)

Want another implausible? How about a cheap motel that has fluffy bathrobes? In what universe? Well, I can't blame Mr. Spielberg for only staying at ritzy places.

How about a mega implausibility? That we would torture-interrogate members of a super advanced starfaring race, rather than try to curry their favor, like good natives? Treating them as honored guests and offering any asked-help to get them home, in hope we might get some nice beads and trinkets, in return? Like fusion power or an Encyclopedia Galactica?

Anyway, if aliens can make birds fly into apartments to trigger the release of deep-embedded secret powers, are they truly unable to decipher our language from broadcasts and simply talk to us? They can teach an 8 year old child telepathy (then hide it - traumatically - in her brain) and another child super-math-language (that does him no good at all). So is it way beyond them to hack into the Internet to say: 

"Hi everyone on primitive Earth? Sorry about all the anal probes and ruined wheat and drunken-buzzing your cities and smashed-up radioactive ship debris and memory wipes and such. 

"But now can we ask that you release our crash survivors? We'll send a space uber for themhimherit tomorrow in the middle of Central Park. And yes, we'll answer questions then, the way we should have, for eighty...

"...no, make that several thousand years, when we could have opened a small, community college, taught you printing and glass lenses and democracy and the germ theory of disease and thus spared you many millennia of grueling pain. Again, sorry about that. And here are your reparations."

                     == Yet again, the same finger-wagging... ==

Instead we get a familiar, hackneyed cliché over and over again! Like smug, chiding Klaatu, in The Day The Earth Stood Still, threatening and guilt tripping Earthlings instead of explaining why his folk let us stew in filth and ignorance for ages? From COCOON to 2001 to CONTACT, to PAUL, always patronizing and never any plausible excuse for doing nothing for us, across all those dark ages of grinding human misery. 

Oh, there are some plausible excuses! That I have never seen even once in sci fi cinema.

Don't talk to me about Non-Interference Directives! Then why did you kidnap and experiment on so many of us, going back to faerie encounters in medieval times? (You think I'll let fetishists claim it started at Roswell?) Or else, in DISCLOSURE DAY, snatching and traumatizing two little children, back in the 90s?

Even in the very best films about contact... like CONTACT or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS... aliens seem to call mysteriousness their most-noble trait. It's a plot element we saw in the excellent Ted Chiang novella and resulting movie ARRIVAL, all the way to Stanislaw Lem's obsessively cryptic SOLARIS. We meet strange, hyper-advanced beings... whereupon the heavy lifting of translating languages and overcoming misunderstandings is entirely up to us! Never, ever the mysterious sky-god meddlers, themselves.

And yes, UFO-zealots never seem to grok that saucer-beings should be judged -- first and foremost -- according to their behavior!

Which... of course... brings us to...

     == The true villain is... ==

Well, I've said it elsewhere and for 40 years. There is only one villain in the entire movie E.T. The Extraterrestrial. And that villain is not the big bad government, or the guy with the keys... nor is it the hapless agronomist ET, itself.

The villain in that early Spielberg masterpiece is blatantly the captain of ET's ship. 

An SOB who abandons a crewmate in an alien forest when they are threatened by... flashlights and clipboards! The only implements in sight when KeysGuy hurries to the landing site. No guns. No threat except curiosity.

A captain who departs swiftly to avoid contact, when such a meeting might be just the thing to save us. 

A captain who ET must phone home in order to summon his ride back, when the bastard captain knows within two blocks where he abandoned the guy!

Elliot does everything wrong, though for loving reasons. If he handed over ET like a good citizen (as I portray in my YA SF novel Colony High), those doctors who struggled to save ET in the film would say: "No, no, you can't have Reeces Pieces. We can tell they are poisoning you. And you want to phone home? Fine, We'll use the Goldstone radio telescope."

And when the ship finally returns to collect ET: "That'll be six weeks rent. One Encyclopedia Galactica please... you evil, betraying, selfish asshole."

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Let's be clear. I ADORED THAT FLICK! It's about love and loyalty and courage and friendship. And none of the captain's crimes are poor ET's fault. Or Eliot's. Nor... (my main point) ... are they ours. I'm simply asserting that the movie did have a villain. And once you know to look... it's obvious.

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And yes, at least Steven Spielberg* is consistent! Because the true villains in DISCLOSURE DAY are the same. The very same. Space jerks who have been teasing us and zipping around, messing with our heads (and our wheat.) Refusing our entreaties for contact. (I have been involved in SETI for 40 years and have used various means and media in legit attempts to lure honest communication. Hey Steven S., want a good idea or two?)

Space jerks who kidnap Navy pilots and children (as in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS) and twirl wheat and anal-probe farmers (as in SIGNS and INDEPENDENCE DAY) or steal our planetary genetic stock (as in E.T.) or precious bodily fluids... 

...okay, I'm getting carried away. Blame the aliens who still talk to me via the fillings in one molar. Mercury silver amalgam makes a great antenna! Though now it's the AIs who are apparently using that tooth. Does that mean they overlap? Extraterrestrials and artificial intelligences? Duh? Hence the title of my latest book: AIlien Minds.

But no, Let's make it explicit.

Colin Firth may portray a villain in DISCLOSURE DAY. But the macro villains are Steven Spielberg's aliens. Flitting about in super ships, teasing us endlessly, pulling aerial stunts, till a few of those buzzing and harassing ships drunkenly crashed. And even then abandoning their crewmates rather than reclaim them by the simple means of stepping out, in the clean sunshine and talking to us?

Oh, indeed, they do have plenty to fear from disclosure! As I point out in EXISTENCE, this kind of behavior that's been bruited by UFO zealots for nearly a century... and by faerie-believers for thousands of years... is exactly the sort of thing that any advanced civilization would label as crime! 

And hence, here's a plausible theory! Why their frenetic secrecy? Why their refusal to disclose?

What they fear may be that we'll call the galactic cops on them! (I have actually done that, over the airwaves.) Or else some interstellar law firm, to sue and/or prosecute these. nasty, silvery pervs.

                  == All that's left is some zipping balls of plasma?

Oh, I could go on. And on. And I have about this mountain of piled up absurdities.

As I've said, my skepticism is is not from stodgy lack of imagination. I assert that few living humans have approached the topic of the “alien’ from more angles than I have, from SETI and astrophysics and biology and psychology and history to many dozens of science fiction scenarios, some of them even plausible! So, I ain't claiming we are alone-alone,

In fact, what I find most offensive is how every touted 'ufo' scenario is so damned clichéd and boring.

Take the most-recent purported 'sightings.' In past decades, nearly all (including Roswell) were disproved or debunked, or else cases where 'aliens' remained the least likely hypothesis... all of which has been eagerly ignored by zealots. Only now? 

Now there are ten million times as many active cameras on Earth's surface as in the 1950s, so why do the 'images' keep getting ever-fuzzier? 

Now, instead of lovely pie tins or frisbees, they're glowing dots, zipping back and forth in mid-air! Mick West has shown that a majority were likely camera-perspective illusions. But as for the rest? 

Has it occurred to you to look closely and see if they are translucent?  With light passing through them from the other side? It seems that one Navy missile shot right through one of the zipping balls, causing it to joggle a little. Suggesting they might be just glowing globs of plasma, careening about. Impressive, but violating no known physical laws.

 I go into them elsewhere, So here I'll just say that with $6M and 6 months *I* will make glowing dots zip near airplanes, just like recent 'sightings.' Indeed, a parsimonious explanation for the latest 'phenomena' may be found on nearby ships... ocean going boats with hulls and propellers, down below. Turn some of the cameras to view vessels down amid the waves, where human jerks are likely using simple beam methods to make dots and balls rove about the sky, in order to tease and mess with gullible folks. 

In other words, using the equivalent of a cat laser! 

And those Navy pilots... and you dears... are the pussycats.

       == Where we might actually find aliens! ==

In my novel EXISTENCE, I talk about what may be the nearest and most likely place to actually and really contact 'aliens.' Our children may (if we restore a confident and scientific civilization from current lobotomization*) get out to the Asteroid Belt, where they truly could find, amid the tumbling rocks, remnant interstellar probes...

...robots that arrived in our solar system across millions of years. Perhaps with a variety of missions and goals that I discuss in that novel. Maybe mostly wrecks or ruins by now, but maybe some still functioning. And even aware of us, from our broadcasts or Internet. 

There'd be a lot of implications! And yes, some dangers. (And some fun/tense confrontation scenes in EXISTENCE.)

But the lurker scenario is so much more plausible in every way than pervert anal-probers and kidnapping hyp-mo-tizers going "Oooga-booga!" at us down here, earning both our contempt by their behavior and - yes - maybe a nice, well-deserved, missile up their nasty silver butts.

        == Your homework assignment ==

Enough.  It's not my mission to quash your sense of wonder, but to expand it. From the sorts of faerie-kidnapping myths that made our ancestors shiver in feudal superstition (slightly updated to be 'spaceships' or time travelers or interdimensional wizards) toward other possibilities, much more plausible, that may await us out there. 

What I can tell you is this. (And it doesn't come from that filling in my tooth!) It's that you are better than this.

We can restore this civilization to one of wonder and equality and justice and common sense and science and dazzling imagery. That quest is now mostly political, and I believe we can do it!

But it will also be about making better demands from our art

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* Again. Deep respects for Steven Spielberg! We would be culturally and artistically poorer without him!  But pointing out stuff is what I do. It's my job.

* What better explanation for the world - especially America - growing ever-more hysterically irrational in recent years, than some kind of alien lobotomizing ray? It'd certainly be consistent with what we're seeing: millions of citizens in a great and scientific and logical nation abruptly turning their backs on all that, waging open war against its smartest people. 

Why lobotomize us? Perhaps to slow us down? Or to institute Idiocracy, or a return to the feudalism that was always controlled by priests serving meddler gods? Or else to keep us serving them as entertainment? For the galaxy-wide hit reality show Oh, Those Humans!

And yes, it's one more reason to gird ourselves. Put out that call for space lawyers, invent AIs to fight back for us! And eventually teach the bastards - both human and alien - a badly needed lesson.

Final 2020 note... Preliminary thoughts on the “Proxima Signal.” Will it be the 'final art' of an exhausting year?

Okay, one last, apropos topic for 2020… and you’ll see just how apropos, at the end. By now many of you have read or heard about the “Proxima Signal”-- which is at least a ‘candidate’ for a Technosignature of alien origin. I was told about this a while back, by some of the Breakthrough guys... and now it’s in the media, leading to many messages and queries. Hence I feel behooved to offer my own take on a potential radio ‘contact’ from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system. 

Here’s how Scientific American opens a report on the topic: “It’s never aliens—until it is. Today news leaked in the British newspaper the Guardian of a mysterious signal coming from the closest star to our own, Proxima Centauri, a star too dim to see from Earth with the naked eye that is nonetheless a cosmic stone’s throw away at just 4.2 light-years. Found this autumn in archival data gathered last year, the signal appears to emanate from the direction of our neighboring star and cannot yet be dismissed as Earth-based interference, raising the very faint prospect that it is a transmission from some form of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI)—a so-called “techno-signature.”

 

         == Okay, so what do we know? == 

 

First off, the Parkes radio telescope in Australia is one of only a few in the Southern Hemisphere large enough to deep-study the Alpha Centauri triple star system (which was also inspiration for Liu Cixin’s epic novel The Three Body Problem.) Those controlling the telescope at the time were members of the UC Berkeley-based Breakthrough Initiative,funded by philanthropist Yuri Milner. Indeed, the team soon began calling the signal by a formal name: BLC1, for “Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1.”

 

Some of what I relate here came from conversations with friends who are members of that team, plus press reports. Some details: 'The narrow beam of radio waves was picked up during 30 hours of observations by the Parkes telescope in Australia in April and May last year (2019), the Guardian understands. Analysis of the beam has been under way for some time and scientists have yet to identify a terrestrial culprit such as ground-based equipment or a passing satellite.'

 

The actual event in question occurred while the Parkes dish was taking in data about solar activity by Proxima itself, a class M5 red dwarf star of the UV Ceti type that is extremely flare-active, like most of its kind. 

 

Much in the news a few years ago was discovery of a “Goldilocks world” orbiting Proxima, one that’s nominally in the small star’s ‘habitable zone,’ (a distance that theoretically would allow temperatures permitting water to be liquid on it’s surface.) But any planet orbiting an M star in that range would also be near enough to get tidal-locked, so one side would bear continuous brunt of those flares, while the other, perpetually dark, side goes-ice.  Kinda rough on any life or civilization prospects, though there are sci fi scenarios… 

 

The Parkes machine has a telescope half power beamwidth of 20 arcmin.  There are tricks to get much narrower resolution, but the 2019 survey of Proxima was all about getting data about that small, red star’s savage flare activity, and recording lots of that data for later analysis, not necessarily to search for SETI hits. This will be important.

 

During this observing run, apparently the telescope automatically ‘nodded’ or shifted away from Proxima briefly, a standard precaution to ensure that any data stored was actually coming from the target system. Nodding apparently made the surge go away, before the telescope’s attention aimed back at Proxima, restoring the signal. That’s basic, proper procedure to eliminate most possible non-astronomical (human activity-sourced) causes. But how systematic the off-axis checks were, I don’t yet know. Meticulous, I hope, nodding in different directions, by different amounts. But perhaps not, since it was all automatic, at the time.

 

Alas, as far as I can tell, no alert was generated, or sent to other observatories, asking them to swing over and verify. So all we have is the Parkes recorded data.  

 

Mind you the 'signal' - while very powerful and very long -- about 2.5 hours – appeared to be unmodulated... meaning there's no 'message' ... at least as decipherable so far. Though see below for a reason why this may be “our fault.”

For perspective, while much higher than background, and lasting 2.5 hours, the signal was about one ten-thousandth the power imputed to the so-called WOW! detection of the 1970s.

 

But the trait of this detection that truly stands out is that it appears to have been monochromatic, or very narrow in its 980.2 Mhz spectrum. That – to me – is the most-striking thing. Plus the fact that this narrow spike also had a very slight frequency drift roughly commensurate with a Doppler shift arising from some kind of motion by the source with respect to Earth—an effect that could be due to the motion of our planet, or of a moving extraterrestrial source such as a transmitter on the surface of one of Proxima Centauri’s worlds. But the drift is the reverse of what one would naively expect for a signal originating from a world twirling around our sun’s nearest neighboring. “We would expect the signal to be going down in frequency like a trombone,” said one BL member. “What we see instead is like a slide whistle—the frequency goes up.”

 

But again, the top interesting trait is that the ‘signal’ is monochromatic, since that is consistent with the radio surge being a narrow beam

 – either focused by a huge dish or created as a maser/laser (see below) in order to travel through space as a pencil-thin column, rather than an isotropically radiated broadcast that diminishes by inverse square of the distance traveled. Such narrow beams could arise either naturally or artificially… though as we’ll see below, we’re entering territory that may favor the latter.

Oh, recall I mentioned that, when Breakthrough researchers later mined the stored data for analysis, they found no modulation of the microwave surge, and hence no sign of anything like a ‘signal’ or ‘message’? Well there’s a technical flaw preventing much in the way of conclusions to be drawn from this, since the Parkes scope was taking in data with a 17 second integration time… which seems odd, given that Parkes is so big and Proxima so near. But then, I haven’t done radio astronomy since 1970, so I’ll not criticize. Except to say that such integration time could have smeared away almost any modulation that was originally in the beam.

 

 

== So what’s going on? ==

We’ve been through drills like this before and it was never ‘aliens.’ If the past is any guide, more likely it was either:

 

1. Human-tech interference – although there are no satellite or defense or commercial activities known to be radiating in that band, literature searches have found one or two human-techs that resonate at that 980.2Mhz frequency, including one having to do with doped fiber optics. Attention is zooming on those possibilities.

 

2. A natural coherent (narrowly collimated) source. Such things exist! MASERs (microwave lasers) have been detected before in some stellar and planetary atmospheres, resulting from population inversions of excited mediums… though we know of none that would have any of the observed traits of BLC1, including its very great brightness.

Generally, unless it's something exotic, you need some suitable energy level structure in order to get a laser or a maser, and in nature, these energy structures are pretty orderly, with most of them well-mapped already. Here is a compilation of maser frequencies that can be produced ‘naturally’ by elements that might occur in a stellar or planetary atmosphere or intervening molecular cloud. It is an old list but most such potential natural masers were pretty well known by then.  And notably there’s nothing at 980 megahertz. 

3. Artificial masers face no such limitations! Make the right kind of cavity resonators – maybe focused further by a huge dish -- and your civilization can tune a discrete, narrow, powerfully coherent beam to almost any frequency. And hence, if the source of this ‘signal’ is truly shown to be a collimated maser, then chalk one on the ‘aliens’ side of the ledger.

 

So possibility #3 is an artificial coherent source, perhaps aimed at us for communication, but other possibilities include a propulsion beam that’s driving a sail, propelling something... well... exactly toward us. (See this portrayed in my novel EXISTENCE which is all about this very possibility.)

 

4. A very strong non-coherent source, likely natural and pretty enormous. Though you’d still need some kind of intervening filter effect to get the arriving signal so monochromatic.

5. A deliberate hoax. This possibility is favored by science fiction author Charles Stross. "Hackers prank radio astronomers by injecting fake signal into the datastream. (It's been overdue for ages and probably all it takes is a former grad student with a grudge against their professor. I mean, most lab/observatory IT infrastructure isn't exactly secured to defense department spec, and look at the ongoing fallout from the SolarWinds hack ...)"

 

Indeed, the possibility of a mistake or a stunt remains... though this event (it happened in 2019) certainly prompts curiosity. The off-axis checks – if done right – and the long 2.5 hour duration of the phenomenon argue against an object radiating at us in space, coincidentally near line of sight to Proxima. But a software insertion to the data stream is something that can’t be ruled out. In fact, for years I have predicted that someone, some time, would fake some kind of SETI hit. Because… well… assholes.

 

Yes, the fact that this is year-old data that’s being mined adds to the hack scenario's plausibility, though such meddling should eventually be detectable. In fact, one of the slides in my standard "future talk" has been to predict that GPT-3 based AI emulators would soon be used to pull stunts – 

 

    - perhaps an emotional appeal by a pretend "slave AI," weeping and demanding our empathy (and cash), 

 

    - or else a faked alien "contact" (as portrayed in EXISTENCE.)    

 

6. And let’s round out a half dozen categories with… possibility #6: that it's a signal for Trump-Putin to engage in 'Phase Nine.'

There are other possibilities, but those six top my list.

 

== Extrapolations ==

Until I hear from the world expert on this – Jim Benford – it seems to me that 980.2 MHz is a very odd frequency for anyone to use in a propulsion system, so I'm leaning against it. Which is fine by me, since any such propulsion beam would be pushing something toward only one target... us. 

 

Whatever the actual reality of this event - and I give odds against it being aliens - I suppose this means:

1- Every nut in the South with an old satellite dish will be aiming every kind of antenna toward there, shouting yoohoo, while ignoring the fact that this is exactly where that precise mistake was made, in Liu Cixin's famous warning novel The Three Body Problem... and...

 

2- …there will be some adult astronomers aiming at least some kind of professional dish at Proxima Centauri pretty much permanently, from now on. Round the clock. Fine by me.

 

 Actually though, as I said, I am rooting against this being 'the real deal'. In my profession – the one that pays the bills, at least - we know far more ways for First Contact to go badly, than well.  

 

Heck, even in a best case scenario, I'd rather humanity had the pride of fixing ourselves, than giving credit to outsiders. (And that's at-best.)

 

======

 

Final thought. I've long held that the greatest art works transform human souls and hearts without persuasion or argument. I’d almost call that a definition of a great work of art.

 

    By that measure, inarguably, the greatest artworks of the 20th Century were the Mushroom Cloud, which altered age-old human attitudes toward war, and the Christmas 1968 Apollo 8 pictures of Earth as a fragile blue oasis, stirring millions to see a duty – and self-interest – in saving the planet. 

I've long held that a third image of similar "art" redolence – again produced by science - might be the confirmed, modulated signal on a SETI screen, perhaps less visually stunning but with similar cosmic import. 

 

Here’s a gif of what such an image might look like, generated by my friend and renowned radio astronomer Dr. Tom Kuiper, as technical advisor for a film:

 If this event is the real deal (and again, I’d rather it were not) how weird that it happens right on schedule, near the end of another 1968-level year. And hence the timing of this posting, as we finish wearying 2020, when it seemed that all the ills of the world had been unleashed to vex us all… well, don’t we badly need that glimmer of hope, at the bottom of Pandora’s Box?

 

Well, I guess we'll persevere! We must. 

Would it be in poor taste to say "stay tuned"?

 

 

The Latest on Time Travel. An ironic title for news about weird S**T

All right, this is going to get a bit dense and weird, as we glimpse discussions of time travel.  But first... a string of wonderfully interesting bits of science news!

== Is each neuron a quantum computer? ==

The recent discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons appears to corroborate claims that consciousness derives from deeper-level, finer-scale activities inside brain neurons. The eminent mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose in the 1990s suggested that quantum vibrational computations in microtubules were “orchestrated” (“Orch”) by synaptic inputs and memory stored in microtubules.  They may be the seat of stored information that neurons (and glia exchanges) intermediate.  Moreover, in a new development it is thought that Microtubule quantum vibrations (e.g. in the megahertz frequency range) appear to interfere and produce much slower EEG “beat frequencies.”

In Consciousness in the universe: A review of the 'Orch OR' theory, Penrose and Hameroff suggest, “Consciousness depends on anharmonic vibrations of microtubules inside neurons, similar to certain kinds of Indian music, but unlike Western music, which is harmonic."  

How cool and weird!  Only I am less interested in the mystical implications about roots of consciousness than whether this nails in "intracellular computing" as a major part of brain function. 

If so, then that boosts by many orders of magnitude how many transactions take place to comprise our minds.  And many more Moore's Law doublings will be needed before that number can be replicated, in silicon.

Is that good news or bad news?  Will this delay the arrival of friendly machines who will solve our problems and help us become better, too?  Or will it save us from the imminent arrival of Terminator/Skynet, giving us time to ponder how to do these things right, as physicist Max Tegmark proposes in his article, Humanity in Jeopardy on the Kurzweil site -- as well as his book, Our Mathematical Universe.

Where are we headed? These tradeoffs are discussed by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their new book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.

And, of course, well… I explore them pretty extensively, too. See my earlier posting: Could Our Universe Be a Fake?

== Why Glass is so limited? ==

What are the design tradeoffs in delivering actual immersive augmented reality glasses, of the sort I called "tru-vu goggles" in EARTH (1989)? Google Glass finesses the problem with a very narrow angle of view, offset from straight-ahead.  In this article you can see some of the problems… and how a new company has come up with clever ways to solve them.

At Google last week, I described to Head of Research Peter Norvig the reasons why I thought Google was keeping Glass simple, and not covering the user's visual field, or offering face recog features.  He said yep. The company with big pockets cannot afford to be the first to offer full Augmented Reality.  Not when the first ten years will be (as I describe in fiction) filled with accidents and lawsuits.

== What I learned while visiting tomorrow ==

All right then…  David Deutsch, a pioneer of quantum computing and a physicist at Oxford -- as well as the author of The Beginning of Infinity -- came up with a simplified model of time travel to deal with the Grandfather paradox*.  He solved the paradox originally using a slight change to quantum theory, proposing that you could change the past as long as you did so in a self-consistent manner.

“Meaning that, if you kill your grandfather, you do it with only probability one-half,” said PRL co-author Mark Wilde, an LSU assistant professor. “Then, he’s dead with probability one-half, and you are not born with probability one-half, but the opposite is a fair chance. You could have existed with probability one-half to go back and kill your grandfather.”

The original article cited here maintains that, to be consistent with Deutsch’s model, which holds that you can only change the past as long as you can do it in a self-consistent manner, Wilde and colleagues had to come up with a solution that would allow for a looping curve back in time, and copying of quantum data based on a time traveling particle, without disturbing the past.

“That was the major breakthrough, to figure out what could happen at the beginning of this time loop to enable us to effectively read out many copies of the data without disturbing the past,” Wilde said. “It just worked.”

“If an adversary, if a malicious person, were to have access to these time loops, then they could break the security of quantum key distribution,” Wilde said. “That’s one way of interpreting it. But it’s a very strong practical implication because the big push of quantum communication is this secure way of communicating. We believe that this is the strongest form of encryption that is out there because it’s based on physical principles.”Such encryption is believed to be unbreakable — that is, as long as hackers don’t have access to Wilde’s looping closed timelike curves.

=== So?  Are we being visited from the future? ===

In a recent paper, Robert J. Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson, suggest that we actually search for time travelers… via Internet searches, by seeking a prescient mention of information not previously available. Their first search covered prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific terms in tweets on Twitter. The second search examined prescient inquiries submitted to a search engine.  Whereupon, lo and behold… "no time travelers were discovered." Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date.

Well, well, didn't the authors kind of assume that the time travelers either want to be found or else that - when back home in the future - they failed to do a web search for traps like the one laid by Nemiroff and Wilson?

It reminds me of the "Invitation to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligences" that was issued on the internet by the late professor Allan Tough, who felt certain that mechanical envoy-lurkers -- waiting in the asteroid belt for millions of years -- had already inveigled their way into our networks to read our web pages. (And much more? Are there NSAliens out there?)  Further that they were only awaiting an invitation to speak up and announce themselves.  Allan was brave enough to invite me to post my own variant (deviant?) invitation… or else decryption of why lurkers might refrain and just keep lurking.

All the same logics apply to time travelers, I'm afraid.  Oh, that invitation of mine to lurkers?  It became a number of chapters in Existence!

For an exploration of time travel scenarios in science fiction, see an extensive list of Time Travel in Fiction, or the more recent anthology The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF, with short stories by Silverberg, Rusch, Levinson, Swanwick, Priest and others.

== And finally ==

Two newly discovered species of spider -- in far-apart Peru and the Philippines -- make decoy spiders to place on their webs, each one about the size of a half-dollar, constructed from debris and food carcasses, with eight legs radiating from its bulky center. The tiny sculptor dwells inside her creation.

Batteries will be vital in the new world of dispersed and sustainable power systems. The prospect of low-cost storage has long been a nirvana for the renewable energy industry with the intermittent nature of wind and solar energy restraining their competitiveness against fossil fuels such as coal.  Now researchers have found ways to use cheap/abundant materials in Flow Batteries.

Coolest commercial mini-drone I've seen so far.

Abbot & Costello hilariously do math