Proof of Alien Life Coverup? "Scientific study" ignores evidence of it's own hypothesis

www.popsci.com...

"Just a week after NASA scientists announced their certainty of finding alien life within the next 20 years, a team of scientists say they've found no obvious signs of advanced extraterrestrial life after searching 100,000 galaxies".

Well, that seems like a disappointing headline. So, what was this study even about?

"The researchers used information from NASA’s WISE orbiting observatory to look for energy radiating away as heat. “The idea behind our research is that if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring civilization, the energy produced by that civilization’s technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths,” says Jason T. Wright, a Penn State University professor who initiated the Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies Survey.

Wright explains that when an advanced civilization uses large amounts of energy, this energy must be radiated away as heat. “This same basic physics causes your computer to radiate heat when it’s turned on.” Roger Griffith, a Penn State researcher and the paper’s lead author, combed through nearly 100 million satellite detection entries in search of galaxies emitting too much mid-infrared radiation".

O.k. Well, the study was never going to be able to rule out the existence of galaxy wide civilizations, as the hypothesis assumes that a sufficiently advanced civilization to pull such a thing off would be using technology that would shed a lot of waste heat. However, at least they have a hypothesis that might show evidence that some galaxies are inhabited by galaxy wide civilizations that don't mind reliance on tech that sheds a lot of waste heat. So, did they find any evidence that matched their hypothesis?

"He narrowed it down to 100,000 promising galaxies and found that about 50 of those have “unusually high levels of mid-infrared radiation.”

Woohoo, the study found evidence to support their hypothesis! 50:100,000 may be a sadly small ratio for those hoping the study might show evidence of galaxies teaming with artificially produced waste heat and the civilizations they would imply, but even 1:100,000 would be Earth shattering news. Right?

"Wright says this means that out of the galaxies they examined, there aren’t any galaxies absolutely crawling with aliens. “These galaxies are billions of years old, which should have been plenty of time for them to have been filled with alien civilizations, if they exist,” he says. “Either they don’t exist, or they don’t yet use enough energy for us to recognize them.”

So, ok. Looking at other articles on this story, almost all of which run headlines that imply the study found nothing, the anomalous galaxies that do support the original, testable hypothesis are being written off as "unexplained natural phenomena".

The study author does promise that they will continue to study the 50 standouts, in an effort to explain them away, I mean, to see if they might still show any obvious signs of alien civilizations. Cough.

The willingness of the study authors to write off any significance for the evidence that actually supported their testable hypothesis is troubling to me, and just provides more support for the idea that main stream "science" has such an overwhelmingly hard anti-ETH (Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis) bias that it clearly can't objectively be called Science. It seems apparent that the hypothesis and study were developed with the intent of presenting a testable hypothesis that was assumed would fail, and thus provide further "evidence" that we are alone in the universe.

The spin in the headlines and the vast majority of the articles where the significance of what they did find is ignored, and the study is actually presented as further evidence for the lack of intelligent life "out there" confirms the strong Anti-ETH bias in the mainstream media.

This isn't the first time this has happened. There is still compelling evidence that the infamous "martian meteorite" does indeed contain evidence of fossilized microbial life, but the waters have been so muddied with anti-life studies that the evidence is now pointless.

Surveys of the heavens looking for evidence of Dyson Spheres or Dyson Clouds, which would provide evidence of civilizations capable of harnessing most of the energy from a star, have actually produced a number of candidates that fit the hypothesis, but those findings have met with the same treatment as the study referenced in today's topic.

Just a couple weeks ago, we learned of burst radio transmissions that show a dispersion pattern that quite possible proves an intelligent origin. That one was first released on April Fools day, quite certainly as a means of providing further obfuscation of the significance. For those who did realize it wasn't a joke, the story still parallels the treatment of the study released today. The odds of it being coincidental are significantly under-represented, the idea that not enough data points exist to even begin to establish significance, on a phenomena observed ten times over a period of several years conveniently pushes off a period where significance might be established by decades. There was even an article about an observatory in Australia that was working with data corrupted by interference from the break room microwave, presented as it it had a relation to the radio burst study, which it did not.

We keep being smacked up side the head with further bits of actual evidence that supports the finding that we are not alone, while clearly biased "scientists", supported by clearly biased mainstream media, continue to not only dismiss such evidence, but are very happy to report that "nothing was found", when something indeed was found.

An awful lot of effort goes into protecting the status quo on this issue, with an apparent agenda to keep the human race secure in it's belief that we are alone, even when active evidence to the contrary, discovered by "main stream science", possibly shows otherwise.

BTW, the entire concept of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" has nothing to do with the scientific method. It's a creed that acknowledges a clearly defined bias and then demands that "scientists" give massive weight to said bias. Objectivity and the best possible elimination of observational bias is a cornerstone of the scientific method, but Sagan, sadly, leaves as his legacy a mantra for a pseudo-religion of bias heavy science, whether that was his intent or not.

“The idea behind our research is that if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring civilization, the energy produced by that civilization’s technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths,” says Jason T. Wright

The research proves nothing as it's based on an assumption that an entire Galaxy must be populated , I'd say that would rule out our Galaxy having intelligent space faring Aliens even though we are intelligent space faring Aliens.

It seems like silly science to me but then a research grant is a research grant.


Edit
Here's the paper , it seems to me they're looking for Galaxies populated with Aliens who build multiple Dyson spheres throughout that Galaxy.

We were looking for so-called Type III Kardashev civilizations, galaxy-spanning civilizations that command power equal to all of the stars in their galaxy. A true Type III civilization would be blocking a significant fraction of all of a galaxy’s starlight from leaving the galaxy, and harnessing it for its own purposes. Such a galaxy would be very faint in optical light — from all of the solar panels collecting the starlight — but very bright in the mid-infrared, where all of that energy would have to come out when the civilization was done using it.
sites.psu.edu...

While the idea is not new I think it's an interesting concept but hardly indicative of anything regarding intelligent life in other Galaxies.

They aren't even considering that the rest of the Universe may not Burn Fossil fuels or Waste Energy

Well you know what these studies turn out like..mostly inconclusive. It's like medicine, one week salt is bad for you, the next it's good, same goes for sugar while you need them both, even fat is getting a welcoming return. It's all about limitations to what they can do, and probably make things up statistically as a be all and end all.

a reply to: SPECULUM

They aren't even considering that the rest of the Universe may not Burn Fossil fuels or Waste Energy

If only that were true. Unfortunately, whatever kind of energy you use, it all ends up as heat when you've done with it. This is the same whether you use solar energy or any terrestrial source, however renewable. Free energy would be the death of humanity; we'd roast.

This study also assumes that these civilizations would be subject to runaway population growth necessitating the use of all inhabitable planets in the galaxy...

...I think that truly advanced civilizations would have worked out ways to keep population numbers stable above a certain point - all it would take is good family planning services, including free birth control...well, and their scientists 'not' discovering the keys to immortality...

Whether or not the experiment is flawed in concept, what the OP said is the most important part, isn't it?

So they get the results=large number of nothing to see here... tiny number=hmmm, not sure here.

And they disregard the hmmmm? When the whole idea was to find the hmmm!

Hmmm!!!

Thanks OP S&F

a reply to: Jonjonj

Whether or not the experiment is flawed in concept, what the OP said is the most important part, isn't it?

The op is giving the article / research more credence than it deserves , at best the research is speculative and based on assumptions of how a type 3 civilisation would generate it's power , all they're really saying is so far they've found no evidence that type 3 civilisations have built Galaxy wide Dyson sphere networks from the relatively small sample of Galaxies they've looked at.

They are not saying there are no Aliens out there so no , it isn't proof of an Alien Life Cover up.

we have been searching alien galaxies with our low tech technology. As one who believe in life everywhere and lots of life way more advanced than we, our methods are primitive. Also, 100,000 galaxies is just a drop in the bucket to the estimated 100 BILLION galaxies, and possibly more....out there, so this effort really doesn't mean a whole lot in my eyes..

originally posted by: Jonjonj
Whether or not the experiment is flawed in concept, what the OP said is the most important part, isn't it?

So they get the results=large number of nothing to see here... tiny number=hmmm, not sure here.

And they disregard the hmmmm? When the whole idea was to find the hmmm!

Hmmm!!!

Thanks OP S&F

Exactly.

I know that the findings alone aren't conclusive proof that those Galaxies are inhabited by heat polluting galactic civilizations, but they propose a reasonable hypothesis, find results that support the hypothesis and actually raise the very real possibility that they have detected such galactic civilizations and we just get "move along, nothing to see here".

The completely subjective, overpowering bias against intelligent life "out there" pollutes what science is done on the subject to the point that interesting data gets essentially nullified by the bias. It's really going to make us look very silly as a species if intelligent life isn't as rare as the bias insists it is. Eventually, history will probably look back at this era of "science" and put it in the same context as the insistence that the world was flat and that the Sun and Planets revolved around the Earth.

The truth is that our technology is still primitive enough that there could be millions of advanced civilizations in our galaxy and we could still be oblivious. Objectively, given the vastness of space and prevalence of stars and planets, the truly extraordinary claim would be that we are special or unique, residing at the center of the population plot of intelligent life in the universe. However, our current scientific bias assumes just that and requires extraordinary evidence to the contrary.

originally posted by: lostgirl
This study also assumes that these civilizations would be subject to runaway population growth necessitating the use of all inhabitable planets in the galaxy...

...I think that truly advanced civilizations would have worked out ways to keep population numbers stable above a certain point - all it would take is good family planning services, including free birth control...well, and their scientists 'not' discovering the keys to immortality...

That's a really good point that I haven't given much thought to previously. Why the assumption that an intelligent civilization MUST continue growing and expanding indefinitely in order to survive? After all, we've figured out birth control. We just don't utilize it effectively to keep our population under control. I see no reason why intelligent civilizations would necessarily leave a remarkably large cosmic footprint, much less the specific kind of footprint that we've decided is worth looking for.

originally posted by: gortex
a reply to: Jonjonj

Whether or not the experiment is flawed in concept, what the OP said is the most important part, isn't it?

The op is giving the article / research more credence than it deserves , at best the research is speculative and based on assumptions of how a type 3 civilisation would generate it's power , all they're really saying is so far they've found no evidence that type 3 civilisations have built Galaxy wide Dyson sphere networks from the relatively small sample of Galaxies they've looked at.

They are not saying there are no Aliens out there so no , it isn't proof of an Alien Life Cover up.

I disagree. The original hypothesis has merit, because detection of excess infrared energy in a specific frequency range has no natural explanation that would fit with our current science. It was also important because it was a testable hypothesis using our current technology.

It's pretty clear that the intent was to find nothing and support the current scientific bias, allowing us to cross one more possibility off the list. That doesn't mean the hypothesis was flawed, but it does make the willingness to completely right off evidence found that supports the hypothesis significant. What is the purpose of testing a hypothesis if one is then willing to dismiss it entirely when the results are contrary to what one expects due to per-existing bias?

In many areas of research, bias is considered contrary to good science and great efforts are made to remove bias from the experiment or study. When it comes to the ETH, a bias with the figurative mass of a Black Hole pollutes every attempt to apply the scientific method to the search for extra-terrestrial life. Absence of proof is not proof of absence. There are no tested and established scientific understandings that run contrary to the presence of life, we just live in an era where are ability to actually look for said life is entering it's infancy. There is a big difference.

a reply to: Totemic

There are no tested and established scientific understandings that run contrary to the presence of life, we just live in an era where are ability to actually look for said life is entering it's infancy.

From my understanding they are looking for evidence of type 3 civilisations who have populated their Galaxies and harnessed the power of stars in those Galaxies , they are not saying there is no Alien life in those Galaxies just that they have not yet found what they think they should find to prove their hypothesis.

We aren't even a type 1 civilisation so it is pure guess work for us to envisage how a type 3 civilisation would go about harnessing the power of their Galaxy , the hypothesis is based on Human understanding of physics and energy creation.

"Just a week after NASA scientists announced their certainty of finding alien life within the next 20 years, a team of scientists say they've found no obvious signs of advanced extraterrestrial life after searching 100,000 galaxies". Nor have they located any signs of advanced terrestrial life . They will continue searching the universe until they find advanced life somewhere .

a reply to: Totemic

Hell, they did the same trick with the 1977 Viking mission lander's "Search for Life" experiments on the surface of Mars.
Officially, they quickly poo-pooed the positive but puzzling results that were obtained. The designer of those experiments, a fellow named Levin, has argued for decades that his results were intentionally misinterpreted by NASA.

What happened in my estimation is that they also discovered on that mission that the Viking orbiters found disturbing discoveries about Phobos that changed the whole picture of every thing we thought we knew about out nearest neighbor. To have acknowledged a finding of even primitive life forms or evidence of such would had spurred the Soviets even more in their efforts. The Viking lander's findings had to be dismissed and that mysterious body of Phobos with the unexplained grooves that silently shows evidence of intelligent action continually has been given a deep six when it comes to NASA and even the ESA talking or showing us much about Phobos.

Great thread OP! S&F!

I agree the study was somewhat flawed from the beginning:

“The idea behind our research is that if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring civilization, the energy produced by that civilization’s technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths,”

Wright explains that when an advanced civilization uses large amounts of energy, this energy must be radiated away as heat. “This same basic physics causes your computer to radiate heat when it’s turned on.”

Basically they looked through 100,000 Galaxies to find a MASSIVE SPACESHIP?! Like a GALAXY SIZED spaceship? Umm ok...sounds like a fun job...

Or in other words, the technology that exists to search for extra terrestrial life, requires every single planet, moon, all solar systems, in the entire galaxy to all be technologically advanced at the same time? Giving off a signal?

Can you imagine that announcement if they did discover an entire Galaxy sprawling with super advanced aliens? That would be quite a big jump from what I was expecting. I thought we're looking for a signal a little more specific like from an exoplanet...or star system...not requiring a whole galaxy to be switched on...

Might not be a cover up, unless they did discover a galaxy full of intelligent life and kept it from the public. Just a bad headline and poor technology on our end. They picked the easiest thing imaginable to observe/look for in the Universe if something so massive exists. Much harder to observe an exoplanet and see if it's technologically advanced. I just realized it has been mentioned many times that we have not yet launched telescopes to search for intelligent life on our known exoplanets. I think those are set to launch sometime in the 2020's.

originally posted by: gortex
a reply to: Totemic

There are no tested and established scientific understandings that run contrary to the presence of life, we just live in an era where are ability to actually look for said life is entering it's infancy.

From my understanding they are looking for evidence of type 3 civilisations who have populated their Galaxies and harnessed the power of stars in those Galaxies , they are not saying there is no Alien life in those Galaxies just that they have not yet found what they think they should find to prove their hypothesis.

We aren't even a type 1 civilisation so it is pure guess work for us to envisage how a type 3 civilisation would go about harnessing the power of their Galaxy , the hypothesis is based on Human understanding of physics and energy creation.

Well said; plus there are somewhere between 350 and 450 billion galaxies in this universe alone.. looking at 100,000 is like a fart on a windy day.. It might feel good but it is almost undetectable to those outside your underwear.

Also primitive human theories of how some advanced society might work are actually almost totally laughable for we know what we know based on the science of a couple of hundred years.. There are red dwarf stars (and supposedly planets around them) that were in their main sequence before our sun was even a grain of sand and will continue to burn long after our sun is no more.

A true galactic empire may not even need a planet (with all the bugs and everything that comes with a lively planet) to survive and be fruitful.

This universe is so large I doubt over population for a universal empire or even a galactic empire is a consideration... Quite the opposite IMO.. They would need sentient beings to go forth create and multiply. That is what Sentients do unless they are bed slugs..!

So at least we do not have to worry about, "The invasion of the BED SLUGS"! One down and billions to go IMO!

Also why would anyone want to invade when the universe is full of material where no Sentient lays claim ? Unless they like human meat ? Which would have to be an acquired taste no doubt.. besides a little Star Trek food processor would take care of that anyway... "Human arm, medium rare, hair removed please". Nom Nom Nom crunch !

originally posted by: Totemic
www.popsci.com...

"Just a week after NASA scientists announced their certainty of finding alien life within the next 20 years, a team of scientists say they've found no obvious signs of advanced extraterrestrial life after searching 100,000 galaxies".

Well, that seems like a disappointing headline. So, what was this study even about?

The two statements are not mutually exclusive.

The study with WISE was looking for a very specific thing. The excess of infrared light due to galaxies full of Dyson Spheres.

We found no galaxies full of Dyson Spheres so this places a limit on the frequency of either a) civilizations which build Dyson Spheres and/or b) the amount of space within a galaxy that is occupied by civilizations which do build Dyson Spheres.

The study using data from WISE does not address anything other than that.


The media mischaracterizes that and dumbs it down to saying scientists found no obvious signs of advanced extraterrestrial life after searching 100,000 galaxies when instead it should have said scientists found no obvious signs the widespread use of Dyson Spheres after searching 100,000 galaxies.

This dumbing down is typical of mainstream media science reporting.


BTW: Some of you may remember that over the last year or so, I have posted a couple of videos about this study featuring the people involved prior to the study being published this week and the subsequent media attention it has received.

Here they are again. The first is a Google Hangout and very general, the 2nd is more science oriented lecture:






If you have any other questions about this study, feel free to let me know. I am very familiar with it and I know someone who was involved with it if there is anything I can't answer.

originally posted by: game over man
Great thread OP! S&F!

I agree the study was somewhat flawed from the beginning:

“The idea behind our research is that if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring civilization, the energy produced by that civilization’s technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths,”

Wright explains that when an advanced civilization uses large amounts of energy, this energy must be radiated away as heat. “This same basic physics causes your computer to radiate heat when it’s turned on.”

Basically they looked through 100,000 Galaxies to find a MASSIVE SPACESHIP?! Like a GALAXY SIZED spaceship? Umm ok...sounds like a fun job...

Not a spaceship.

A galaxy full of civilizations (or one galaxy-wide civilization) which harnesses most of the energy from each star by surrounding the stars with a shell called a Dyson Sphere.

Some of you may remember this scene from Star Trek TNG:



In reality a Dyson Sphere would probably not be solid at all but rather it would be like millions of small objects with solar collectors each orbiting separately in a large sphere around a star.

Also we wouldn't need the Starship Enterprise to find one, we could find one in infrared space telescope data like that from WISE. There have been other searches for them (mostly within our Milky Way) using older data from the IRAS satellite and I think from the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) but this to my knowledge is the largest search for galactic wide, Type III civilizations which surrounded just about every star with a Dyson Sphere, Dyson Swarm or Dyson Shell.



See also: What is a Dyson Sphere

There's nothing flawed about looking for them. It scientifically constrains the question of what's out there.

Freeman Dyson, the mathematician and theoretical physicist who came up with the concept of the Dyson Sphere once coined a phrase anyone who is interested in the questions of what may be out there should keep in mind while setting up experiments to find ET:

"Don't just look for what is 'likely', look for what is detectable."

He said this, because nature likes to surprise us and often science should not simply look for what we think exists but what we can actually detect.

A good example of how a scientist missed out on a discovery by looking at what he thought likely was astronomer Geoffrey Marcy, the man who has found more exoplanets (planets around other stars) than anyone else but who did NOT discover the first one.

The reason why he didn't is because his experiment was looking for a Jupiter sized planet in a Jupiter-like orbit because most planet formation models at the time predicted that planets like Jupiter would only be in long period orbits lasting many years.

Jupiter takes around 12 years to orbit the Sun so he collected data he had no intention of looking at for like a decade or so.

One of the stars he collected data on called 51 Pegasus had a Jupiter sized planet but it orbited the star not in 12 years but in a little over 4 days but he did not discover it.

A team in Switzerland didn't look for what they thought was likely, they looked for what was detectable and found the planet 51 Pegasi b, the first known planet around a star like our Sun.

The Swiss team got to make a new discovery, while Geoffrey Marcy was just left to confirm it.

Science works best when it follows Freeman Dyson's quote.

originally posted by: SPECULUM
They aren't even considering that the rest of the Universe may not Burn Fossil fuels or Waste Energy

Actually that's exactly what they were considering.

Stars do not burn fossil fuels. They burn hydrogen and helium as part of nuclear fusion.

And building a Dyson Sphere, Shell or Swarm around a star to capture as much of its energy as possible, would be a civilization's ultimate energy-saving move so it made sense to see if any galaxies were full of them.

The data was already gathered for other more mundane astronomical purposes, this team just analyzed for signs of a TYPE III civilization which is defined as one which has access to and has harnessed the entire energy output of a galaxy.