UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

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The science fiction movie "Arrival," which opened in theaters last weekend, poses tantalizing questions about how humans might make contact — and eventually communicate — with intelligent aliens. The much-hyped film has renewed people's interest in the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But what would happen if humans really did make contact with an intelligent alien civilization? If E.T. calls, is there a plan?

The answer is yes, and no, said astronomer Seth Shostak, who leads efforts to detect radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

"There are some protocols, but I think that's an unfortunate name, and it makes them sound more important than they are," Shostak told Live Science. [Greetings, Earthlings! 8 Ways Aliens Could Contact Us]

In the 1990s, Shostak chaired a committee of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) that prepared a revised version of the "post-detection protocols" for researchers who watch for possible alien transmissions using radio telescopes, a field known as SETI (short for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).

The protocols were first drawn up in the 1980s to help scientists in the United States and the Soviet Union share information about any potential SETI signals. But, Shostak explained, the SETI post-detection protocols are guidelines for governments and scientists, rather than a global action plan for dealing with alien contact.

"They say, 'If you pick up a signal, check it out ... tell everybody ... and don't broadcast any replies without international consultation,' whatever that means," he said. "But that's all that the protocols say, and they have no force of law. The United Nations took a copy of the early protocols and put them in a file drawer somewhere, and that's as official as they ever got."

"Men in Black"

In the movie "Arrival," spaceships land in several cities around the world, and a linguist (portrayed by actress Amy Adams) and a physicist (played by actor Jeremy Renner) are recruited as part of an international effort to try to communicate with the aliens and find out why they are here.

In real life, apart from the protocol dictating that researchers should share news about SETI signals with other astronomers around the world, Shostak said he is not aware of any government-level plans or established procedures in case of an alien contact, whatever form it might take.

And it seems there really are no "Men in Black," shadowy government investigators of UFO-lore, depicted in the comedy sci-fi movie series starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.

"If [the government] could afford the 'Men in Black,' then they could afford to support SETI," Shostak joked. [7 Huge Misconceptions about Aliens]

But the U.S. government has shown no interest in SETI research so far, he said. "It's not a government program, so they have nothing to do with it. I would love to see some interest from them, but I never have," he added.

After one early SETI "false alarm," which eventually turned out to be a signal from a European research satellite, the only response was from journalists.

"In 1997, we got a signal that looked pretty promising for most of the day. We thought it was possibly the real deal," Shostak said. "I kept waiting for the 'Men in Black' to show up — they didn't. I kept waiting for the Pentagon to call. I kept waiting for the White House to call. They didn't call. But The New York Times called."

Close encounters

In a review of the science and speculations about extraterrestrials, published as "Xenology: An Introduction to the Scientific Study of Extraterrestrial Life, Intelligence and Civilization" in 1979, the author and scientist Robert Freitas described a purported military briefing in Washington, D.C., in 1950 that outlined potential U.S. military responses to alien contact.

The supposed military plan, which became known as "Seven Phases to Contact," was first reported in a 1967 book on UFOs by the American broadcaster and UFO researcher Frank Edwards.

But Shostak said he has seen no sign of any extraterrestrial action plan for U.S. government agencies or the military. "As far as I know, there's nothing, and I think I would have heard something because of the [SETI] false alarms," he said.

While detecting an alien radio signal would be different from encountering spaceships that landed on Earth, Shostak doesn’t think protocols will play a big part in how we respond.

"Some people asked me at a conference last week, 'What plan does the military have to deal with aliens should they land?' And I said, 'I don’t know … but to the best of my knowledge, they don't have a plan.'"

Shostak noted that any aliens who could travel here in a spacecraft would need to be centuries or thousands of years more technologically advanced than humans are now, so it's almost impossible to imagine the consequences of contact between the species, let alone the thought of developing a plan to deal with them. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]

"It would be like the Neanderthals having a plan in case the U.S. Air Force showed up," he said.

Calling planet Earth

Although the aliens in "Arrival"helpfully travel to Earth in faster-than-light spaceships, willing and ready to talk, Shostak said a more likely "first contact" scenario would be the detection of a SETI radio signal, perhaps from a source hundreds or thousands of light-years away.

That means it could take centuries for the aliens to receive any reply transmitted from Earth in an effort to communicate with them, he said. As such, there might not be any real hurry to decide what to say.

And if E.T. does call, what should humans say in response? Some scientists, including British physicist Stephen Hawking, have expressed concern about "Active SETI" programs designed to transmit messages from Earth to any aliens that might be listening. Hawking warned of the potential threat posed by unknown extraterrestrials and their alien motivations.

There's also the difficult matter of making the right first impression in any extraterrestrial chat, Shostak said.

"I've been to several conferences where people discuss whether we should tell [aliens] all the bad things about humanity, or just the good things, and that sort of thing," he said. "But I think that is terribly overdrawn. To me, that would be like the indigenous people of Australia seeing Capt. Cook coming over the horizon in his ship, then saying, 'We're going to have a couple of conferences to discuss what we're going to talk to these guys about, and what language we'll use’ — [but] it doesn’t matter."

Shostak pointed out that humans have already been broadcasting news into space for decades, in the form of television and radio signals, and so it's probably too late to keep quiet.

"Those signals have been going out into space since the Second World War, so we've already told them we're here," he said.

Original article on Live Science.

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Producers pulled all the stops in the highly anticipated miniseries Mars, debuting Monday night on the National Geographic Channel. The $20 million, six-part television event pulled together an A-list team from the worlds of Hollywood and the scientific community: We’re talking about Oscar-winning producers Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, and Justin Wilkes sitting in the same room and talking about Mars with people like science writer Stephen Petranek, astronaut Mae Jemison, aeronautics engineer Bobby Braun, and many others.

The producers blend science fiction with reality to portray what a crewed mission to Mars will look like in the near-future mixed with real-world commentary and interviews from today’s leading space and engineering experts.

And in the interest of providing people with something that can still qualify as “entertainment,” Mars does not shy away from taking dramatic liberties that come at the price of scientific accuracy, interspersing a fake crewed mission with real-world commentary from leading engineers.

Two Inverse writers — Kastalia Medrano and Neel Patel — watched an advance screening of the first Mars episode. Warning: There are some spoilers.

NP: When I first heard about the concept for Mars, I was admittedly very skeptical about how this would turn out. Talking about traveling to Mars through a narrative of fiction almost never goes well. But I thought the first episode actually did a good job to bring to attention the types of obstacles and issues that are big for NASA, SpaceX, and other companies looking to get to the Red Planet — like the lack of Martian atmosphere that makes the descent to the planet such a dangerous move.

KM: It’s an interesting concept, treating the 2016 “flashbacks” as non-fiction, using cameos with the biggest names in the real-life journey to Mars like Elon Musk. I hope that they keep that balance with the rest of the episodes, because the future they’ve extrapolated can get a bit cheesy. I think in order to be successful as an academic tool and not just a source of entertainment, the series will have to be a little more economical with the “dramatic liberties,” as you put it.

Which isn’t to say the show by definition needs to be drier — Mars is cool! The reason the journey to Mars has captivated so many people is that the science is legit dramatic and high-risk, high-reward on its own terms, so I hope they can tap into that instead of just sensationalizing. One of the real-life challenges they touched on was the immense stress and degradation the astronauts’ bodies will face — but it was kind of just thrown in as an ominous bullet point to beef up a speech and make everything seem more dire while also making the characters seem more heroic. Granted, it was just the first episode, but I’d really like to see them work in some scientifically valid takes — not just on the more well-known narratives like loss of bone density, but on things like the challenges of organ regeneration in space, and how to cope in a vacuum without incoming medical resources. For instance, how do you hope they’ll handle the radiation issue?

NP: As you know, I’ve been harping on space radiation being the single biggest obstacle keeping us from sending people to Mars. It’s an issue that not even Elon Musk will fully address — and he and SpaceX are targeting to send the first humans to Mars by 2024 or 2025. How they’re going to keep those kinds of radiation levels from decimating the body is still a complete mystery. And it’s not just about the trip to Mars. Astronauts will need to be protected from the sun’s rays while they live and work on the Red Planet. If the goal is to establish a permanent human presence on Mars, it needs to be with the idea that we can live healthily and happily on the planet.

Speaking of health, that’s another issue I had with the premiere. The crew commander for the mission gets injured, but works to keep the extent of his injuries a secret from the rest of the crew and from ground control. Not only does this seem impossible — I would imagine the first astronauts to head to Mars would be completely wrapped in medical devices that measured vitals constantly — but it’s also impractical. Would an astronaut really work to keep problems with his/her health hidden from his team? Almost certainly not. Punting those problems down the road poses an enormous risk to the rest of the and forces them to potentially deal with much worse later on. I get putting forth something like this for the purposes of drama and suspense, but this does a disservice to astronauts as a whole and makes it seem the mental and physical prowess of those men and women are matched by a cavalier attitude.

KM: I felt the same way about the scene where they essentially begin hiking across Mars. I dunno what kind of rad spacesuits we’ll be working with in 2033, so I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it came off a bit cavalier. I did, however, appreciate the fact that they made it pretty clear that, whether or not the mission was successful, the team wasn’t really expecting to come back. The first generation of Mars colonists won’t be travelers who live there a few years and then go back and forth — when they leave Earth, they’ll need to do it with the understanding that they’re never coming back, since, even if they all survive, the distance and resources inherent to the whole thing makes a return journey just not feasible. So I was glad to not see a romanticized We’ll see you in X years!narrative, though of course the idea of leaving Earth never to return isn’t exactly lacking in drama either.

This probably won’t happen because it’s not the most scientific or animated thread in the plot, but I’d actually be interested in getting a bit more context about how the future supposedly arrived at the entity they call the International Mars Science Foundation (IMSF). Utopian organizations that have united all available civilizations are a pretty common optimistic sci-fi trope (see: Star Trek), but as of 2016, we already have the seeds of global cooperation — Russians and Americans coordinating on the International Space Station (well, sort of), new space laws meant to foster inter-country collaboration, private spaceflight companies working in tandem with NASA, and so on. I’d like to see them connect those dots to their 2033 timeline.

NP: For sure. I actually loved how they spent a bit of time explaining what SpaceX is currently doing by bringing rocket boosters back to Earth for a safe landing after a launch , and explaining why reusability is such an important part of making future space travel work.

It was especially clever how they let the footage of the June 2015 SpaceX explosion unfold — making it very clear that we have a long ways to go before we fully figure out how all of this is going to go.

Mars is fascinating, and it arrives at a time when the prospect of humans going to the Red Planet has transcended the realm of possibility to inevitability. I think the real thing will possess fewer histrionics, but will be no less an achievement of staggering proportions.

Photos via National Geographic

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