- If ET is trying to contact us, he won't
be phoning - he will use the powerful flashlights that are lasers to draw
our attention. Like lighthouses on the unexplored seas of space, these
unique flashes of laser light, which astronomers can detect with simple
equipment, will soon tell us whether any stars are harbouring advanced
civilisations.
-
-
- That is the startling claim of the American
inventor of the laser, Charles Townes, who has long urged his colleagues
to look for such tell-tale signs of alien intelligence. All scientific
searches to date have involved listening for radio signals from alien civilisations;
now a team from the University of California at Berkeley will use a simple,
antiquated telescope to try to spot the laser flashes.
-
- At 83, Professor Townes, a Nobel prizewinner,
is delighted to be vindicated. "I proposed this idea in the Sixties,"
he says. "Now a group of astronomers will start to make a search this
autumn. I am very pleased."
-
- This attempt is the start of a new era
of astronomy. The method is, according to the astronomer in charge, "embarrassingly
simple". Embarrassing because it could have been undertaken at any
time in the past four decades, but Professor Townes's notion of looking,
rather than listening, was largely ignored.
-
- "If there are aliens sending us
messages by laser, we will see them," says Dan Werthimer, the director
of Berkeley's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme.
-
- Unlike the aliens in movies, who frequently
speak English, the real ones would probably not use Morse code. "They
would send very short, powerful pulses of laser light that would be unmistakable.
It doesn't require that much energy to do," Dr Werthimer says.
-
- Later this autumn, he and his colleagues
will use a 30in telescope - modest by professional standards - at Mount
Leuschner, about 20 miles east of Berkeley, to look for laser flashes.
Light captured by the telescope will be split into two and fall on to photo-multiplier
tubes, which will amplify the signal. If both see unusual flashes at specific
wavelengths -lasting perhaps a few billionths of a second, with a power
output greater than that of the stars they are looking at - they will have
hit the jackpot.
-
- Seeing signals in the two separate halves
of the beam means that they could not be artefacts of the detection process.
-
- Lasers are the only way that bursts of
light could be sufficiently concentrated. As with the powerful search beams
of a lighthouse, they could be directed to specific stars such as our Sun.
Lasers work by exciting gas atoms and forcing them to give up their energy
in the form of an intense flash of light.
-
- "We could easily send a message
into space to other civilisations," Professor Townes says. His Berkeley
colleagues agree. According to Dr Werthimer, you could attach a simple
laser to an optical telescope and direct it to nearby stars and send messages.
"You could do that with a laser that transmits one megawatt,"
Dr Werthimer says. "That's about the same power as a television station."
-
- But that is far into the future. For
the moment, the Berkeley team is starting its own modest search; improbably,
this optical work will cost just $20,000 (£11,400) a year, a sign
of the times for SETI research. Searching for aliens has been criticised
by some as a kind of wishful thinking, a subject without a science. And
American legislators certainly agree: Nasa's ambitious program of SETI
research using radio telescopes was cancelled in 1993.
-
- However, with private funding from supporters
such as the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke and the film director
Steven Spielberg, SETI struggles on.
-
- Others have said that finding evidence
for alien civilisation will be impossible. A similar thing was said to
Professor Townes during the late 1940s after he proposed the forerunner
of the laser, the maser (which produces microwave radiation rather than
light). As a researcher at Bell Labs in New Jersey, he was a world expert
on microwave spectroscopy, the probing of gases using radio waves. He realised
that by using molecules to amplify signals, he could generate a powerful
source of radiation. After he discussed the method in a scientific journal
50 years ago, "more than one Nobel laureate said it would never work.
It was viewed as a crazy, cute idea and there wasn't much to it."
-
- Early one spring morning in 1951, while
sitting on a park bench in Washington, Professor Townes had what he calls
"divine inspiration" of how to make a maser work and its possible
applications. "I recognised that it could be a sensitive amplifier
or atomic clock," he says.
-
- Throughout the 1950s, the wavelengths
used to probe gases were made progressively shorter - so much so that he
could get down to optical wavelengths. Together with his brother-in-law,
Arthur Schawlow, he developed the laser. Accordingly, Townes won the Nobel
Prize in 1964 (along with two Russians who had independently come across
the same principle). Lasers can now be found everywhere, from supermarkets
to home CD players to hospitals.
-
- "It comes home to me when I hear
of friends who have had their sight restored," Professor Townes says.
"To me, it was clear that the most important uses would come from
connecting up optics and electronics."
-
-
- Proof positive comes from the telescope
now being used by Dr Werthimer's team (it is normally used to train Berkeley
undergraduates). In 1959 - the same year in which a workable maser was
developed - two radio astronomers declared that detecting radio signals
would be the only way to find aliens. As a result, the scientific community
tended to dismiss any other wavelengths that could be used to send messages.
-
- By the mid-1960s, Professor Townes had
moved to Berkeley and was working at the Space Science lab. By then, his
idea was bolstered by the discovery of naturally existing masers in space.
There are vast clouds of gas between the stars which can act as masers.
Their constituent molecules are naturally excited to such an extent that
they amplify microwaves across the vast firmament of the heavens.
-
- Any sufficiently advanced alien civilisation
would be well aware of that and could emulate the process. Professor Townes
points out that these clouds have been emitting intense radiation in all
directions, but it was only recently that humanity has acknowledged their
existence.
-
- "If we'd have found them earlier,
then we could have developed the laser sooner," Professor Townes says.
"We didn't look. Other civilisations might have taken their cue from
natural masers in space."
-
- This autumn, the Berkeley group will
systematically look at 2,500 nearby stars. The criterion is fairly simple:
they will be Sun-like stars, around which planets like ours - and corresponding
civilisations - could have evolved.
-
- All involved agree that the search is
a long shot, with truly astronomical odds against it.
-
- But the final word goes to Professor
Townes, who insists that, as with the invention of the laser, the discovery
of life in space is simply a matter of looking hard enough.
-
- "We don't know what we will find,
so we must keep looking."
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- - - - - - - - - - Gerry Lovell / Far Shores |http://www.farshore.force9.co.uk
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