Aliens in the Focus
Claudio Maccone, co-chair of the "SETI Permanent Study Group" on research about extraterrestrial civilizations in Europe and elsewhere
Working for the Italian space company Alenio Spazio for 20 years Claudio Maccone contributed to several space missions. He became especially known, though, for a mission that hasn‘t yet left the ground: In May 1993 he made a formal proposal to the European Space Agency (ESA) for a mission called „Focal“, that should take advantage of the concentration of electromagnetic waves by the solar gravitational lens at a distance of 550 astronomical units (AU). Like any big concentration of mass the Sun is bending electromagnetic waves by its gravity and concentrates it at a certain distance, similar to an optical lens. That effect has helped astronomers to identify objects at the edge of the Universe beyond the limits of direct observation and determine the mass of invisible galaxies.
Focal is a very ambitious project: One AU equals the mean distance between Earth and Sun, which is about 150 million kilometres. To bridge the distance of 550 AU light needs more than three days. Voyager 1, the spacecraft that has traveled farther than any other since its launch in the summer of 1977, is currently a little bit more than 100 AU away. The technology to send a probe to the focal area of the solar gravitational lens within a reasonalbe time span is not available yet. But the vision alone convinced the International Astronomical Union to honour Maccone in a special way: On September 2, 2001, it named the Asteroid 11264 Clauciomaccone and mentioned especially the proposal for the Focal mission.
Since October 2000 Maccone serves as vice-chair of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Permanent Study Group at the International Academy of Astronautics, which coordinates the search for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence. After retirement at Alenio Spazio at the end of 2004 he concentrates mainly on this research and is probably the most prominent SETI researcher in Europe.
When Maccone presented a paper at the Bremen conference To Moon and beyond on radar observations of the Moon in the framework of the Smart-1 mission, he also mentioned SETI, although somehow defensive.
Mr. Maccone, when you mentioned SETI in your presentation about radio observations of the Moon, I sensed some hesitation. Is that correct?
Claudio Maccone: The hesitation is due to the fact that the vast majority of scientists does not regard SETI as particularly interesting. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is accepted as a serious scientific project, but presently there are only very few researchers who are doing it actively. Only ten or twenty years ago there were quite more of them.
Do you have an explanation for this lack of interest?
Claudio Maccone: SETI requires very long perspectives in many different disciplines. It touches on structures of galaxies, on planetary science, conditions for the development of life and much more. Many scientist concentrate on very specialized areas of research, especially in the engineering sciences. They don‘t think much about other civilizations. But you shouldn‘t forget that the Earth is transmitting radio waves for about 100 years. Our signals are filling a sphere with a radius of 100 light years. Within this sphere there are thousands of stars. One of them might harbour a civilization that can detect our signals. So why don‘t we turn it the other way round and search with our radio telescopes for signs of other civilizations? That is the idea of SETI.
This search and connected activities are performed mainly by the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Is there other research being done elsewhere?
Claudio Maccone: Yes, there is. Of course, the privately funded SETI Institute is still the first address, after the SETI program of NASA had been terminated by a resolution of US Congress in 1993. But research is being done in other countries, too. Australia has a very good SETI program, which is using the 64-meter radio telescope in Parkes. On the southern hemisphere Argentina is also searching for extraterrestrial intelligence with a radio telescope near Buenos Aires. Paul Horowitz from Harvard University is leading this project „Beta“ (Billion-channel Extraterrestrial Array) which is funded by the Planetary Society. For the northern hemisphere it uses the 26-meter antenna at Boston.
How is the situation in Europe?
Claudio Maccone: In Europe only Italy is actively searching. That is quite surprising, since we have very good radio telescopes in other countries, too. The fantastic German 100-meter telescope in Effelsberg near Bonn has never been used for SETI! France has a magnificent instrument at Nancy, but has stopped the search after a short time when the leading scientist died. The famous British Jodrell Bank Observatory once supported an American SETI project when it cross-checked signals received by the Arecibo telescope to see if they were transmitted by artificial Earth satellites. There has never been an own search campaign. In Russia you find more interest for SETI, but the money is lacking. A few times Russian radio telescopes have been rented for broadcasting messages to nearby stars.
Extraterrestrials should be of special interest to anthropologists and philosophers
A few months ago the European tv-station Arte also broadcasted a program on SETI in the direction of Gamma Cephei. Isn‘t there quite some dispute in the SETI community whether to do such active SETI?
Claudio Maccone: Yes, many think we should confine ourselves to listening, since we don‘t know if possible other civilizations are friendly or not. On the other hand we can be quite sure that they are technologically very much advanced. You come to that conclusion when you consider that we have the technology for interstellar communication for only 50 years now. On a galactic timescale that is just a blink of an eye.
Do you fear, we could attract the attention of murderous monsters?
Claudio Maccone: No, personally I believe they wouldn‘t care much. Just like there is not much of an exchange between humans and insects. But that is just an opinion. We simply don‘t know. Yet I came to the conclusion that we should transmit. It puts a greater pressure on us to think about the consequences and thereby shifts the possible existence of other civilizations more into consciousness.
If Aliens are possibly more advanced than us, thinking about them always means thinking about a possible human future, too. Sounds like an exciting field for research in the humanities. But they don‘t seem to care much about SETI.
Claudio Maccone: Extraterrestrials should be of special interest to anthropologists and philosophers. It is about the place of humans in the Universe. Are we unique, rare, or quite common in the Cosmos? There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about habitable zones in planetary systems. Essentially that means areas in which planets have to orbit their stars to give life the chance to develop. You can make similar considerations for galaxies. It is the theory of a „Galactic Belt of Life“ of which I heard for the first time in Russia at the end of the Eighties. It says that the sun is a very lucky star, because it orbits the center of the galaxy in the co-rotation circle. So it keeps a constant distance to the spiral arms with more hostile conditions for life. We are still far away from being able to prove such theories. For the time being that is philosophy.
Do you have a personal estimate for the number of civilizations in our galaxy?
Claudio Maccone: That is a difficult question. These estimations usually are based on the famous Drake equation, which I consider, with all due respect for Frank Drake, a rather rough mathematical approach to the problem. It assumes an equal distribution of civilizations in a galaxy, for instance. As we have just seen, a questionable assumption. So we need a refined version of this equation, but nobody has found it so far.
In his recently published book „Contact with Alien Civilizations“ Michael A. G. Michaud criticizes the SETI community for paying too little attention to the possibilities of direct contact with alien probes or space ships. This field, says Michaud, had been left to science fiction almost entirely.
Claudio Maccone: I agree. It is a very difficult terrain, though, where you meet a lot of UFO maniacs and conspiration experts. Interstellar space travel is quite a young field of research, it is only since Einstein that we begin to understand it. Relativity is the key. Special Relativity has been proven very well, but with General Relativity there are still a lot of open questions with direct implications for interstellar space travel. NASA has funded the six-year program BPP (Breakthrough Propulsion Physics) led by Marc Millis to deal with these questions. Personally I think, we won‘t have an answer to the questions raised by Michaud before we have a unified theory that reconciles relativity and quantum theory.
But I would like to mention another aspect. If there were alien space ships in the vicinity of the solar system they probably would communicate with their home world. If they used electromagnetic waves, they would need huge antennas for direct transmissions. Therefore they might place a relais station at the focal distance of the solar gravitational lens, on one line with their home star which also amplifies the broadcast with its gravity. When we want to look for alien artefacts we should do it here.