The ALCAIDE’S CAFE

We’ve been looking for “life out there” for 3 or 4 decades, now. And, essentially, that search has followed either one of two themes: looking for water, or electro magnetically (radio, x-ray, or light, mostly) broadcast information.

The search for water, regarded as a proxy for life by many, is relatively boring, to my thinking. It’s the establishment, respectable thing with a very long history, in the mainstream of modern science. And why not? Everything we’ve ever seen, all life-as-we-know-it here on earth, in all its possibilities, is always 90 to 99 percent water in its composition, and is always found with water in its environment. For every form of life that exists on earth, water is a necessity. In recent years, in fact, we’ve discovered an even more tight connection. For the past decade or so, scientists have been looking in the most unusual, unpromising, unbelievable places, looking in places no one though life could have a chance, and they’ve been surprised to discover that almost (if not absolutely) everywhere there is water there is life! If you want to check that our, go on a web-search through voluminous literature and websites on “extremophiles” and biogenetics, environmental microbiology, and such (see the end of this post for a couple of leads, good places to start), and you’ll see that life is far more adaptable and widespread than we’d previously assumed. Life has been found thriving thousands of feet underground, miles down underwater, deep under the arctic ice and clustered around super-hot hydrothermal/volcanic-like vents in the ocean bottom, in nasty chemical soups and oil slicks and sulphur pits – essentially everywhere just so long as it is wet! Looking for water, if earth is to be our role model, is a good start. A reasonable way to go.

The other major theme in the reach fo compatriot life in the extended reaches of the universe, is the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) theme. I think SETI is far more adventurous, imaginative, and interesting. SETI, of course, is not looking just for any life, but “intelligent” life. The water hunters are looking for anything, and will settle for anything – virus, bacterium, plant or beast. So their basic requirement, their threshold clue is obviously rather basic. But SETI looks for some sort of extraterrestrial version of you or me (probably more you than me – I’m pretty “normal” [J]), or perhaps something even better. If, perchance, they do find what they are looking for beyond the local neighborhood (our solar system), something “out there” in a distant galaxy, then because of the long time it will have taken for the “signs of life” to reach earth, it will necessarily be thousands of years ahead of us and our scientific/technological development.

SETI used to be pretty unrespectable, the province of kooks, sci-fi addicts, and fringe-science folks. Carl Sagan probably did the most to get SETI going and legitimize its thesis – and even he was walking a tightrope for most of his career, tottering on the edge of scientific suicide. But in the end he made his case and won a large part of the scientific establishment over to his cause. So much that there is now a major observatory (the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico) dedicated to the SETI search. And now, utilizing internet technology, SETI has millions of people joining their own PCs together for the analysis of the almost-unbounded pool of “data” that those observatories have gathered.

But there is a very big and profound irony in the SETI program, and its ardent followers. It is this: (1) most of the SETI folks are atheist, anti-biblical, anti-creationist, and very dedicated evolutionists; (2) yet the paradigm they use is essentially the same as that of the deists, creationists, and oft anti-evolutionist “Intelligent Design” theorists! SETI uses the “intelligent design” hypothesis.

The “Intelligent Design” theory, while it is much more sophisticated and intellectually complex than this, can still be pretty well represented by the “watchmaker hypothesis”. That is, the argument, at its simplest, goes like this: if you found a watch lying in the forest (or the surface of Mars) you would immediately conclude that there was a watchmaker, an intelligent creator, a craftsman who made the watch! Chance alone could not produce the metals and glass and paint and mechanisms and system that resulted in a watch. In the same logic, the Intelligent Design theorists assume that a universe that is extraordinarily complex and perfectly ordered and fine-tuned to support life, and that life which is complex and perfect it its design beyond your imagination, must be the product of an Intelligent Designer/Creator, not dumb and blind chance.

Well, the SETI search is operating on the same paradigm. SETI searchers hope to find their watch … or any patterned, mathematically or linguistically or informationally rich radio or light, or other electromagnetic, radiation from out in space. Their thesis is Intelligent Design: any such information/pattern rich electromagnetic radiation (signal) betrays an intelligent (SETI) source!

Interesting, isn’t it, that two groups of scientists, and their groupies, are almost intractable foes and disparage each other’s positions, conclusions, and worse, yet using the same paradigm in their pursuits!

A few sites about life in all the wrong places (just to get you started):
Extreme Animals
Bacteria: Survival in Siberia
Eukaryotes in extreme environments
The Search for Extremophiles on Earth and Beyond
The Liquid Biomarker Laboratory

and one regarding the “anthropic principle”, that underlies much of the interest in Intelligent Design:
Star Physics Prove the Delicacy of Life
Posted January 10, 2004 08:07 PM