Is Being Human Preventing Us From Finding E.T? Probably.


Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech 

Inside the Occator crater of the dwarf planet Ceres appears
a strange structure, looking like a square inside a triangle.
One of my favorite quotes is by J.B.S. Haldane, the evolutionary biologist and mathematician of the first half of the 20th centuries.  He said,

"Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only 
queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

.Take for example the number of dimensions in which we live.  Physicists will tell you eleven even though our senses only comprehend four.  Does that mean we are incapable of sensing the other seven?  Or comprehending them?  Probably, yes it does.

Or, some physicists assert there are an infinite number of universes.  Fun stuff for writers of SciFi, but is it reality?  I can vaguely imagine a circumstance of one  or two universes, but comprehend an infinite number spontaneously emerging each time one of us makes a decision?  Not even.

Finally, some physicists hypothesize that our reality is a two dimensional projection that appears four dimensional but isn't.  Don't even get into that eleven dimension idea.  A few even say that black holes serve as the projectors.  To quote Hairy Monster from Sesame Street, "Brain hurt."

The only conclusion we can make is that reality is in the eye of the beholder, limited strictly by the physical capacities of our organs of sight, sound, touch, taste and mind.  Which in our case, are very, very limited, constrained from having evolved in this universe on this planet under these sets of circumstances.  Had we needed to see in the ultraviolet spectrum of light to survive, we would.  Ditto sonar as with dolphins and bats.  Or magnetic north as with the birds and bees.  And so on.

So getting back to the Haldane quote, this universe is queerer that we can even imagine.  And it could be preventing us from contacting the E.T. right in front of us.  Even if he phones collect.

Sound like a great story to develop? It's already been done - but really needs to be done again.  By you? 

Here's the story:
*  *  *  *  *

A cosmic gorilla effect could blind the detection of aliens

A well-known experiment with young people bouncing a ball showed that when an observer focuses on counting the passes, he does not detect if someone crosses the stage disguised as a gorilla. According to researchers at the University of Cádiz (Spain), something similar could be happening to us when we try to discover intelligent non-earthly signals, which perhaps manifest themselves in dimensions that escape our perception, such as the unknown dark matter and energy.

One of the problems that have long intrigued experts in cosmology is how to detect possible extraterrestrial signals. Are we really looking in the right direction? Maybe not, according to the study that the neuropsychologists Gabriel de la Torre and Manuel García, from the University of Cádiz, publish in the journal Acta Astronautica.

"When we think of other intelligent beings, we tend to see them from our perceptive and conscience sieve; however we are limited by our sui generis vision of the world, and it's hard for us to admit it," says De la Torre, who prefers to avoid the terms 'extraterrestrial' or aliens by its Hollywood connotations and use another more generic, as 'non-terrestrial'.

"What we are trying to do with this differentiation is to contemplate other possibilities -- he says-, for example, beings of dimensions that our mind cannot grasp; or intelligences based on dark matter or energy forms, which make up almost 95% of the universe and which we are only beginning to glimpse. There is even the possibility that other universes exist, as the texts of Stephen Hawking and other scientists indicate."

The authors state that our own neurophysiology, psychology and consciousness can play an important role in the search for non-terrestrial civilizations; an aspect that they consider has been neglected until now.

In relation to this, they conducted an experiment with 137 people, who had to distinguish aerial photographs with artificial structures (buildings, roads ...) from others with natural elements (mountains, rivers ...). In one of the images, a tiny character disguised as a gorilla was inserted to see if the participants noticed.

Image result for selective attention test
So, the question is, what is the selective
attention test? An example is the scene
above.  Count how many times the team
in white passes the ball. The correct 
answer is fifteen - and what gorilla?
This test was inspired by the one carried out by the researchers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in the 90s to show the inattention blindness of the human being. A boy in a gorilla costume could walk in front of a scene, gesticulating, while the observers were busy in something else (counting the ball passes of players in white shirts), and more than half did not notice.

"It is very striking, but very significant and representative at the same time, how our brain works," says De la Torre, who explains how the results were similar in the case of his experiment with the images. "In addition, our surprise was greater," he adds, "since before doing the test to see the inattentional blindness we assessed the participants with a series of questions to determine their cognitive style (if they were more intuitive or rational), and it turned out that the intuitive individuals identified the gorilla of our photo more times than those more rational and methodical."

"If we transfer this to the problem of searching for other non-terrestrial intelligences, the question arises about whether our current strategy may result in us not perceiving the gorilla," stresses the researcher, who insists: "Our traditional conception of space is limited by our brain, and we may have the signs above and be unable to see them. Maybe we're not looking in the right direction."

Another example presented in the article is an apparently geometric structure that can be seen in the images of Occator, a crater of the dwarf planet Ceres famous for its bright spots. "Our structured mind tells us that this structure looks like a triangle with a square inside, something that theoretically is not possible in Ceres," says De la Torre, "but maybe we are seeing things where there are none, what in psychology is called pareidolia."

However, the neuropsychologist points out another possibility: "The opposite could also be true. We can have the signal in front of us and not perceive it or be unable to identify it. If this happened, it would be an example of the cosmic gorilla effect. In fact, it could have happened in the past or it could be happening right now."

Three types of intelligent civilizations
In their study, the authors also pose how different classes of intelligent civilizations could be. They present a classification with three types based on five factors: biology, longevity, psychosocial aspects, technological progress and distribution in space.

An example of Type 1 civilizations is ours, which could be ephemeral if it mishandles technology or planetary resources, or if it does not survive a cataclysm. But it could also evolve into a Type 2 civilization, characterized by the long longevity of its members, who control quantum and gravitational energy, manage space-time and are able to explore galaxies.
Image result for Star Trek energy beings
Source: ENTFX
The first Star Trek movie introduced
us to the life form known as V'Ger, 
a giant cloud of immense energy
that could destroy anything it came
across.  Screenplay by Harold 
Livingston, Story by Alan Dean Foster

"We were well aware that the existing classifications are too simplistic and are generally only based on the energy aspect. The fact that we use radio signals does not necessarily mean that other civilizations also use them, or that the use of energy resources and their dependence are the same as we have," the researchers point out, recalling the theoretical nature of their proposals.

The third type of intelligent civilization, the most advanced, would be constituted by exotic beings, with an eternal life, capable of creating in multidimensional and multiverse spaces, and with an absolute dominion of dark energy and matter.

Story Source:  Materials provided by FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology. Gabriel G. De la Torre, Manuel A. Garcia. The cosmic gorilla effect or the problem of undetected non terrestrial intelligent signals. Acta Astronautica, 2018

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Greek Bronze Age ended 100 years earlier than thought

Image
Source: www.shef.ac.uk The charred remains of Assiros Toumba in Greece. Writing historical fiction set in the Greek Bronze Age?  Or simply enjoy reading this genre'?  Here's a study you may find interesting. C onventional estimates for the collapse of the Aegean civilization may be incorrect by up to a century, according to new radiocarbon analyses. While historical chronologies traditionally place the end of the Greek Bronze Age at around 1025 BCE, this latest research suggests a date 70 to 100 years earlier. www.weather-forecast.com Archaeologists from the University of Birmingham selected 60 samples of animal bones, plant remains and building timbers, excavated at Assiros in northern Greece, to be radiocarbon dated and correlated with 95.4% accuracy using Bayesian statistical methodology at the University of Oxford and the Akademie der Wissenschaften Heidelberg, Germany. Researcher Dr Ken Wardle says, 'These new results tell a story that is totall
Read more

How the lives of Georgian gaolbirds and highwaymen shaped modern Britain

Image
Writing historical fiction requires solid research of available materials and databases.  The key word here is available.   So news of a new publicly accessible database that allows an author to research a very interesting past era is priceless almost beyond words.   I expect some exciting fiction to come out of this announcement. Here's the story, with a link to the source in the attribution. *  *  *  *  * London Lives, a landmark project led by Professor Bob Shoemaker from the University of Sheffield and Professor Tim Hitchcock from the University of Sussex, has uncovered a mass of extraordinary new evidence which reveals how the lives of thousands of 18th-century poor and criminal Londoners helped shape modern Britain. Based on evidence made available in a publicly available database, the study sheds new light on the everyday lives of thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, highwaymen, con-men, paupers and jailbirds, revealing how their daily fight for survival led to t
Read more

Mood Instability and Your Characters

Image
You're putting together a character who's mood simply bounces all over the place, happy one moment, in a fit of rage the next.  Researchers at King's College London note that this sort of mood instability is part of a number of mental health disorders.  So how do you structure the personality and behavior of a character like this?  Below is the King's College report, along with a brief description from mentalhealth.com, of typical behavior, sometimes in the extreme, of a person who is very emotionally unstable.  This is offered strictly as a guide for crafting character in fiction - and NOT for the amateur diagnosis of the state of someone's mental health.  That is always best left to trained professionals. Another note about emotionally unstable behavior:  as any parent will tell you, this is how adolescents and teen-agers often behave.  It's a normal part of growing up - but it is a matter of degree .  In the extreme, however, this behavior can be diag
Read more

SciFi: Introducing "Technofossils" the legacy of modern humans for future generations to explore

Image
Source:  blogs.miaminewtimes.com  Daniel Fiorda's "Nostalgic Hardware" Techno-Fossil Art Imagine what a future archaeologist would think finding any of the myriad bits and pieces of technology we bury in modern middens, aka garbage dumps.  So now we have a name for it:  Technofossils, coined recently to describe the stuff humanity tosses out. T he fossil impact humans make on the planet is vast and unprecedented in nature -- there's been nothing remotely like it since the Earth formed over four and half billion years ago. The researchers argue that, like dinosaurs, who left their bones and footprints behind for future generations to discover, humans will also leave a footprint behind -- one made up of material goods unique to humankind that are so different from anything else produced by animals in the history of Earth that they deserve their own name: technofossils. Dr Zalasiewicz said: "Palaeontologists call preserved animal-made structures trace f
Read more

Remember faces but not names? You got it wrong.

Image
Source:   Daily Excelsior So, you think you're good at remembering faces, but terrible with names? New research has revealed we are actually better at remembering names than faces The cringe-worthy experience of not being able to remember an acquaintance's name leads many of us to believe we are terrible with names. However, new research has revealed this intuition is misleading; we are actually better at remembering names than faces. With the Christmas party season fast approaching, there will be plenty of opportunity to re-live the familiar, and excruciatingly-awkward, social situation of not being able to remember an acquaintance's name. This cringe-worthy experience leads many of us to believe we are terrible at remembering names. However, new research has revealed this intuition is misleading; we are actually better at remembering names than faces. The authors of the study, from the University of York, suggest that when we castigate ourselves f
Read more