Iosif Shklovsky's and Carl Sagan's Intelligent Life in the Universe

[lpetrich]

Intelligent Life in the Universe : Carl Sagan : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Intelligent Life in the Universe is a translation of Iosif Shklovsky's Universe, Life, Mind with Carl Sagan's additions. It was published in 1966, meaning that much of it is rather dated.

The only direct evidence of exoplanets cited in it is Peter van de Kamp's purported detection of planets around Barnard's Star. I say "purported", because some decades later, it was discredited from lack of independent conformation and from the largest observed effects being the result of telescope maintenance. But the real ones detected turned out to be very different from what everybody expected, it seems.

Nevertheless, the book has some nice discussion of the controversy around Mars's canals and how some astronomers failed to see them. On the best occasions, they could see a lot of very fine detail -- but no canals. That book also discusses the hypothesis that Mars's moon Phobos is hollow.

In that book, Carl Sagan discusses some of his ancient-alien speculations. He seems very cautious, however.

He also described his first public appearance in that book, his run-in with a UFO contactee that he called Helmut Winckler, most likely Reinhold O. Schmidt. That "gentleman" claimed that he was contacted by human(oid) inhabitants of planet Saturn, and CS testified that Saturn was too inhospitable for organisms like us -- it's too cold. CS then discussed contactees in general, and he seems to find their stories to be too good to be true.

 

[lpetrich]

One of my favorite parts of that book is near its beginning:

The possibility of extraterrestrial life has caused some ideological embarrassment in the Soviet Union. There used to be, at Alma Ata, in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, an Institute of Astrobotany, some of whose members argued that the existence of extraterrestrial life was required by dialectical materialism, and implied strongly that the absence of life on Mars, or even on Jupiter, would be a clear disproof of the philosophical basis of Communism. This dangerous situation prompted an article in the September-October 1958 issue of the Soviet astronomical journal Astronomicheskii Zhurnal, called "Concerning the 'Philosophical Foundation' of One Question," by I. G. Perel', in which Perel' points out that both the materialist and the idealist philosophical schools seem to strongly support the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. He argues that dialectical materialism is a method, not a body of knowledge, much as Shklovskii does on p. 136 of this book; and in particular, that even if Mars or Jupiter is lifeless, dialectical materialism is not disproved. This debate has been echoed by other discussions in the United States, which, while on a different ideological basis, turn out to have very similar content.

Alma Ata is now Almaty, and the Kazakh SSR is now an independent nation, Kazakhstan

 Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov was the founder of that institute.

 

[BH]

When did telescopes become powerful enough and we had tools accurate enough to deduce planets were around stars based on the "wobble" of the planet tugging the star and dimming effect the planets had on the star when passing in front of the star? I've read that you can go back to the 1800's and see astronomers announce probable planets based on the "wobble". i do not know about the science behind detecting planets through the star dimming though.

 

[Jokodo]

When did telescopes become powerful enough and we had tools accurate enough to deduce planets were around stars based on the "wobble" of the planet tugging the star and dimming effect the planets had on the star when passing in front of the star? I've read that you can go back to the 1800's and see astronomers announce probable planets based on the "wobble". i do not know about the science behind detecting planets through the star dimming though.

No way that was detectible in the 1800s. The only wobble that was detectible in the 1800s is the (apparent) wobble caused by earth's own motion through space. That's a wobble of two astronomical units, and that was hard to measure. The (actual) wobble caused by a planet is orders of magnitude smaller. For example, to take our own solar system, the displacement of the sun caused by its orbit around the sun-jupiter barycenter is about 0.005 astronomical units, or 1/200 the apparent wobble on which its superimposed when you are looking at it from earth. So it's not even enough to measure that a star is 0.005 au off from where it was - it's moving all the time anyway, and you have to notice that, in all that movement, it's 0.005au off from where it should be.

Astrometry isn't actually all that much of a method even these days because of the enormous observation spans required. The method only really works for objects in large orbits, that's when the displacement is largest, so the periods will be long. We don't have a scope doing that that has been doing it for long enough. To quote Wikipedia:

The space-based observatory Gaia, launched in 2013, is expected to find thousands of planets via astrometry, but prior to the launch of Gaia, no planet detected by astrometry had been confirmed.

SIM PlanetQuest was a US project (cancelled in 2010) that would have had similar exoplanet finding capabilities to Gaia.

One potential advantage of the astrometric method is that it is most sensitive to planets with large orbits. This makes it complementary to other methods that are most sensitive to planets with small orbits. However, very long observation times will be required — years, and possibly decades, as planets far enough from their star to allow detection via astrometry also take a long time to complete an orbit.

.

When the wobble is used to detect planets, it's through measuring radial velocity: As the star moves to and fro us in its orbit around the barycenter, its light is ever so slightly redshifted or blueshifted, and this effect, unlike the displacement itself, is more detectable with near and rapidly orbiting bodies. To base the example losely on our solar system again, with jupiter in a mercury-like orbit the sun's displacement would be 4.435×10^-4 astronomical units or less than a fifth the moon's average distance. Undetectable even today, but the sun's redshift and blueshift might be detectable.

tl;dr: In the 1990s

 

[lpetrich]

I don't know for sure about exactly when. Why not hunt down the details of these claimed discoveries? Like how big their claimed observed effects were.

There are several methods that have been used to detect exoplanets.

• Direct detection
• Indirect detection
  • Obstruction of starlight: transits
  • Gravity
    • Orbit: effect on planet's star
      • Position offset: Astrometry
      • Position offset: Pulsar Timing
      • Radial Velocity
    • Perturbations by another planet: transit timing variations
    • Deflection of light: gravitational microlensing

Peter van de Kamp used astrometry on Barnard's Star, looking for wiggles in the star's apparent path across the sky. As I'd mentioned, his results are now discredited.

 

[BH]

I remember back in the mid-80's it floated around the newspapers that there was a planet around Barnanrd's Star that had been discovered. I even remember what it was called. VB8B. Maybe one day a little planet will be detected around Barnard's Star and they'll call it VB8B.

 

[steve_bank]

I was never a fan of Sagan. I remember way back a film clip where he expresses belief in life on Venus and what Venusians looked like.

Tyson is a much better face for science.It is all probabilities based on a set of assumptions. Earth may be unique or the universe t may be crowded with life.

There is a series on History Channel called Ancient Aliens. It goes through all records that could possibly be interpreted as interfering ET. There is a biblical passage that some think describes a vehicle.

Spectrum of stars lead to classes of stars, commonalities. If stars form by the same processes given the number of stars planets are a given.

I renumber something about a fuzzy disk being resolved optically.

 

[lpetrich]

I remember back in the mid-80's it floated around the newspapers that there was a planet around Barnanrd's Star that had been discovered. I even remember what it was called. VB8B. Maybe one day a little planet will be detected around Barnard's Star and they'll call it VB8B.

You are mixing up two purported exoplanets. Van Biesbroeck 8 != Barnard's star. Instead, VB8 is in  V1054 Ophiuchi. "In 1984, the apparent detection of an infrared source near vB 8 suggested it had a low mass companion. The low mass of this candidate led to speculation that it may be a brown dwarf; the first such to be detected. This discovery was later found to be spurious, but it produced much interest in this class of astronomical object." So that purported planet was a false alarm.

 

[lpetrich]

I was never a fan of Sagan. I remember way back a film clip where he expresses belief in life on Venus and what Venusians looked like.

That I'd like to see. Are you sure that it wasn't inhabitants of Mars or Jupiter or Titan?

Tyson is a much better face for science.It is all probabilities based on a set of assumptions. Earth may be unique or the universe t may be crowded with life.

Or anything in between.

There is a series on History Channel called Ancient Aliens. It goes through all records that could possibly be interpreted as interfering ET. There is a biblical passage that some think describes a vehicle.

Ezekiel's flying saucer?

Spectrum of stars lead to classes of stars, commonalities. If stars form by the same processes given the number of stars planets are a given.

I renumber something about a fuzzy disk being resolved optically.

 Proplyd -- a protoplanetary disk. Some 180 of them have been found in the Orion Nebula.

 

[Malintent]

I was never a fan of Sagan. I remember way back a film clip where he expresses belief in life on Venus and what Venusians looked like.

Tyson is a much better face for science.It is all probabilities based on a set of assumptions. Earth may be unique or the universe t may be crowded with life.

There is a series on History Channel called Ancient Aliens. It goes through all records that could possibly be interpreted as interfering ET. There is a biblical passage that some think describes a vehicle.

Spectrum of stars lead to classes of stars, commonalities. If stars form by the same processes given the number of stars planets are a given.

I renumber something about a fuzzy disk being resolved optically.

You may be confusing memories. In 1963, Sagan responded to radio telescope readings that implied the surface of Venus was over 600F. Sagan said that IF those high temperatures were at high altitudes within Venus' Ionosphere, THEN Earth-like life might be possible.

I never heard Sagan describing aliens from any other planet, though... apart from just saying that life arising on another planet may not be recognizable at first to us as being life... and gave examples of creatures that are not carbon-based.. or even solid-matter-based.

 

[bilby]

I remember back in the mid-80's it floated around the newspapers that there was a planet around Barnanrd's Star that had been discovered. I even remember what it was called. VB8B. Maybe one day a little planet will be detected around Barnard's Star and they'll call it VB8B.

You are mixing up two purported exoplanets. Van Biesbroeck 8 != Barnard's star. Instead, VB8 is in  V1054 Ophiuchi. "In 1984, the apparent detection of an infrared source near vB 8 suggested it had a low mass companion. The low mass of this candidate led to speculation that it may be a brown dwarf; the first such to be detected. This discovery was later found to be spurious, but it produced much interest in this class of astronomical object." So that purported planet was a false alarm.

I thought VB8 was the droid from Star Wars VII and VIII.

 

[steve_bank]

It was black and white TV. Keep in mind Sagan freely admitted later on he made regular use of pot for inspiration. I remember him talking in that hazy spacey way of his.

I may be conflating memories, admittedly.

There was a show a few years ago on exoplanet detection. Of course it is all circumstantial, but the observational data and interpret ion seems strong that something is in a regular orbit around distant stars.To me it was bit of a stretch. A claim of water on an object was made from spectral analysis.