no ufos
Pardon me, but I feel a rant coming on.
So I’m at a party and in the normal course of chitchat about the weather and the Red Sox and the sorry state of politics, it comes up that I’m a writer. Several utterly predictable questions will follow. “What do you write?” Answer: Science fiction and fantasy. “Have you been published?” Answer: Yes. “Have I read your work?” Answer: Probably not. “Do you make a living at it?” Answer: Sort of. Then comes a significant pause. The next question might well be, “How weird are you?” except that most people are far too polite to ask outright. Instead what they will often ask is, “So, do you believe in UFOs?”
Answer: NO, I DO NOT BELIEVE IN UFOS. I HAVE NEVER SEEN A UFO AND NEITHER HAVE YOU. IF YOU DID SEE SOMETHING THAT YOU THOUGHT WAS A UFO, YOU WERE EITHER MISTAKEN, DELUSIONAL, OR HIGHER THAN THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION.
There. I feel much better now, thank you.
Except that according to a Roper Poll <http://www.scifi.com/ufo/roper> taken in 2002, almost half of America believes that we earthlings have been visited by UFOs. And in 1997 a CNN/Time Poll <http://www.cnn.com/US/9706/15/ufo.poll> found that “80 percent of Americans think the government is hiding knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life forms.”
So yes, I fully expect to get hate mail.
This isn’t to say that I don’t believe that there’s life on other planets, because I do. And it may well be that there is intelligent life in the universe — in fact, I would be really, really disappointed if someone somehow proved that there wasn’t. Luckily for me, such a proof, if it ever comes, isn’t likely to occur in my lifetime. But as we saw when we considered Faster-than-light travel <http://www.jimkelly.net/pages/ftl.htm> several installments ago, zipping from star to star is a very tall order indeed. It boggles my mind to think that any thinking entity would go to all that trouble just to lurk—and lurk ineptly, as the UFO apologists would have it. But if you do see a silver pie plate hurtling through the sky, feel free to notify The National UFO Reporting Center <http://www.nuforc.org>. Just don’t tell them that Jim sent you.
the equation
In 1961 Dr. Frank Drake <http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=178943> proposed his famous equation N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L <http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=179073> as a tool to estimate the number (N) of advanced alien civilizations in the Milky Way. For those who are still a bit fuzzy on the Drake variables, here’s a quick recap: (R*) is the rate of formation of stars capable of supporting intelligent life times the fraction (fp) of those stars that have planets times the number (ne) of planets per star capable of supporting life times the fraction (fl) of those planets where life evolves times the fraction (fi) of those livable planets where intelligence evolves times the fraction (fc) of intelligent species that bother to communicate times the longevity (L) of those chatty civilizations. For an accessible overview of the thinking behind the equation, try The Chance of Finding Aliens <http://skyandtelescope.com/resources/seti/article_244_1.asp> by Alan M. MacRobert and Govert Schilling.
Now typing “Drake Equation” into Google <http://www.google.com> yields almost half a million hits, which is certainly one measure of fame in this age of the internet. Many of these sites allow you to play with Drake’s variables to come up with your own estimate of the number of communicating civilizations in our galactic neighborhood. For example, try this one at the Extrasolar Planetary Foundation <http://www.planetarysystems.org/drake_equation.html>. However, the problem with the Drake Equation is that we have no clue as to what numbers we should plug in for some of the key variables, since we have but one example of intelligent life—ourselves. For example, how often does intelligence arise? And what is the lifespan of the average communicating civilization? Given our woeful lack of understanding of these matters, what the Drake Equation actually calculates is one’s optimism—or pessimism—about the chances of finding intelligence elsewhere in the universe.
searching
About the same time that Frank Drake was developing his equation, Phillip Morrison <http://web.mit.edu/physics/facultyandstaff/faculty/philip_morrison.html > and Giuseppe Cocconi <http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/C/Cocconi.html> were writing their seminal paper “Searching for Interstellar Communications” <http://www.coseti.org/morris_0.htm> published in Nature <http://www.nature.com/index.html> in 1959. Morrison and Cocconi proposed to search for signals from alien civilizations in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, specifically around 1420 MHz, the spectral frequency of hydrogen. Most regard this paper as the true beginning of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Morrison and Cocconi knew their ideas would be controversial; at the conclusion of their paper they wrote: “The reader may seek to consign these speculations wholly to the domain of science-fiction. We submit, rather, that the foregoing line of argument demonstrates that the presence of interstellar signals is entirely consistent with all we now know, and that if signals are present the means of detecting them is now at hand. Few will deny the profound importance, practical and philosophical, which the detection of interstellar communications would have.”
Controversy has dogged SETI from its very earliest days, in part because it appears to many as goofy as ufology. Indeed, some scientists regard it as an utter waste of time. Perhaps this was why NASA <http://www.nasa.gov/home> was so slow to embrace the idea, participating at first only in some low level programs. However, in 1992 the space agency initiated the ambitious High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS) <http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/H/HRMS.html>, which included both an all sky survey and a targeted search for signals. A year later, Congress canceled HRMS and NASA was forced out of SETI. For more about SETI’s vicissitudes, click over to Amir Alexander’s The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: A Short History <http://www.planetary.org/html/UPDATES/seti/history/History00.htm>.
For better or for worse, SETI and science fiction have been linked over the years. In 1982, for example, Steven Spielberg <http://www.spielbergfilms.com> released ET <http://www.etfansite.com>, which was the most profitable film of its time. Later that year, Carl Sagan <http://www.carlsagan.com> and his wife, Ann Druyan http://www.csicop.org/si/2003-11/ann-druyan.html, were having dinner with Spielberg and the conversation turned to SETI. The story goes that at one point Druyan looked pointedly at Spielberg and told him that he “could give Columbus his three ships.” Whether true or not, Spielberg donated one hundred thousand dollars to fund the Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay <http://www.planetary.org/html/UPDATES/seti/BETA/BETA-story-1.html> and has continued to be a strong SETI supporter. And in 1998 David Anderson <http://www.astrobio.net/news/article773.html>, and Dan Werthimer <http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763/print.php?page=interview03&tqskip=1> proposed to assemble the largest virtual supercomputer on earth, which they named SETI@home <http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu>. SETI@home was to analyze data from Project Serendip <http://www.planetary.org/html/UPDATES/seti/SERENDIP/default.html>, SERENDIP being the acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations. But funding SETI@home was a hard sell. The Planetary Society <http://www.planetary.org> offered to pick up part of the tab, but needed a partner with deep pockets. At that time, Paramount Pictures <http://www.paramount.com> was about to launch Star Trek: Insurrection <http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/MOV/009/index.html> (one of the better installments of the hallowed but now defunct franchise, it says here), and decided to provide SETI@home with the rest of its funding as a publicity stunt. The PR hacks spun it thus: “For the first time in Star Trek history, Planet Earth is invited to help the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise in a real search to seek out new life and new civilizations.”
Today two non-profits, The Planetary Society and The SETI Institute <http://www.seti.org>, carry on the search abandoned by NASA. Both their sites are well worth exploring. Over at The SETI Institute site, I can particularly recommend the articles on Interstellar Message Composition <http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=179195> and The Social Effects of a Detection <http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=179078> to budding (and experienced, for that matter) perpetrators of SF. The Planetary Society is more various than The SETI Institute and there is a bit of sprawl to the site; it bills itself as “The largest nonprofit, nongovernmental space advocacy group on Earth.” But The Learning Center <http://www.planetary.org/learn/index.html> is lively and accessible to the layperson and the News Archive <http://www.planetary.org/html/what-is-new.html> is up to date and comprehensive.
new worlds
Poking around The Planetary Society’s site, I came upon a set of pages that described the search for Extrasolar Planets <http://www.planetary.org/extrasolar/index.html>. Now if you’re at all like me, you take delight in all the marvels our exploration of space has revealed in the last few years, most recently from our rovers on Mars <http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home> and the Cassini-Huygens mission <http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm>. But what well and truly croggles my mind is the fact that we have increased the number of known planets from our own local nine to some 136 as of February 2005, according to the California Carnegie Planet Search <http://exoplanets.org>. And more are being added almost daily. Although there are no pretty photographs to look at, since these objects are all light years away, research into extrasolar planets has already led many to revise estimates upward for the (fp) variable in the Drake equation, that is, the fraction of stars that have planets.
Long before astronomers confirmed the existence of extrasolar planets, science fiction writers were booking excursions to them. It must be admitted that all too many of these planets were shoddily constructed, but there is a long and honored tradition of trying to get world-building right. I remember as a pup writer poring over the late great Poul Anderson’s <http://www.catch22.com/SF/ARB/SFA/Anderson,Poul.php3> essay “How to Build a Planet” in the 1976 edition of the SFWA Handbook. That version of the handbook is long out of print,* but if you want to peruse God’s own handbook on planet construction, check out World Builders Home Page <http://curriculum.calstatela.edu/courses/builders>. This incomparable resource collects materials for a course taught by Elizabeth Anne Viau at California State University, Los Angeles.
With the advent of the computer, software has been written to assist do-it-yourself worldbuilders. My current favorite is StarGen—Solar System Generator <http://home.comcast.net/~brons/NerdCorner/StarGen/StarGen.html>. Constructed by Jim Burrows, “it’s a program for creating moderately believable planetary systems around stars other than our own.” I don’t know if it’s the best, but it certainly the prettiest. StarGen runs under the Mac OS or Unix; in order to get it up in Windows you need Visual C. But just visiting the examples page may be enough for many.
exit
I was an English major in college and am pretty much an autodidact with regards to science and technology. Worldbuilding is still a serious stretch for me. But it’s one of my favorite parts of the job of being a skiffy writer. Why? I think that, in part, it’s because of the erector set <http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/erectorset.htm> I played with as a boy. Many of you are too young to remember erector sets, which were the mid-twentieth century version of LEGOS <http://www.lego.com> but I certainly enjoyed mine back in the day. I loved building stuff and making up stories about it. And if a grown-up Jim Kelly could go back in time and tell young Jimmy that someday, instead of building “Mysterious Walking Giant Robots,” he’d be using computers to design imaginary solar systems, the kid would have thought that he was bound for science fiction heaven.
And he was.
*Poul’s essay, “The Creation of Imaginary Worlds: The World Builder’s Handbook and Pocket Companion,” which was first published in Reginald Bretnor’s Today and Tomorrow (1974), is still available in print in Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy by the editors of Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction.—Ed.
