SOEs) UNIVERSITI ee others (Pioneer 10, Pioneer Il, and New are recorded as in artifacts like the Nazca Lines, in southern Peru. Horizons| hav s launched to explore the Milky Way’s outer regions in search of any hints of extrater so far there have bARGUMENT MAPPING CLAIM: ALIEN DOES EXIST CONTENTION 3: OBJECTIONS: The mankind aren't capable of exploring the Interstellar space. every single corner of the Receiving signals outside outer space. PREMISE: REFUTATION: \s for now, mankind technology does cept for the fact that they are ating from interstellar space, we are COO es no closer to knowing thei Many scientists speculate that they may have considering the massive univ are yet to discover, the signs of cel been created by a distant civilization using signals that we hardly comprehend,_———— “issue ALIEN j ‘There are numerous phenomena that cannot be explained by logic and facts. The Pentagon confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Kdentification Program existed in 2007 by senator Ted Stevens who reported being chased by a mysterious object CONCLUSION: We can conclude that aliens or what we can call. an, intelligent life do not exist as for now considering the OBJECTION 4: There is no intelligent life besides us. that Life may exist, but it could simply take the form of microbes or other animals. vast extent of the interstellar-space that we are yet to discover and incapable of mankind technologies. ant denied that there ed phenomena captured but all of them were mostly based on the: sand assumptions though it has to be proven with corCONTENTION I & PREMISE: ARTICLE 1 O n October 19, 2017, a Canadian astronomer named Robert > The telescope is situated atop Haleakala, a ten-thousand-foot volcanic peak on the island of Maui, and it scans the sky each night, recording the results with the world’s highest-definition camera. asteroids whose paths bring them into our planet’s astronomical neighborhood and which travel at an average velocity of some’ forty thousand miles an hour. The dot of light that caught Weryk’s attention was moving more than four times that speed, at, almost two hundred thousand miles per hour. — Weryk alerted colleagues, who began tracking the dot from other observatories. The more they looked, the more puzzling its behavior seemed. The object was small, with an area roughly that of a city block. As it tumbled through space, its brightness varied so much—by a factor of ten—that it had to have a very odd shape. Either it was long and skinny, like a cosmic cigar, or flat and round, like a celestial pizza. Instead of swinging around the sun on an elliptical path, it was zipping away more or less in a straight line. The bright dot, astronomers concluded, was something never before seen. It was an “interstellar object”—a visitor from far beyond the solar system that was just passing through. In the dry nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union, it became known as 11/2017 U1. More evocatively, it was dubbed ‘Oumuamua (pronounced “oh-mooah-mooah”), from the Hawaiian, meaning, roughly, “scout.”Even interstellar objects have to obey the law of gravity, but ‘Oumuamua raced along as if propelled by an extra force. Comets get an added kick thanks to the gases they throw off, which form their signature tails. ‘Oumuamua, though, didn’t have a tail. Nor did the telescopes trained on it find evidence of any of the by- products normally associated with outgassing, like water vapor or dust. “This is definitely an unusual object,” a video produced by Nasa observed. “And, unfortunately, no more new observations of ‘Oumuamua are possible because it’s already too dim and far away.” As astronomers pored over the data, they excluded one theory after another. ‘Oumuamua’s weird motion couldn't be accounted for by a collision with another object, or by interactions with the solar wind, or by a phenomenon that’s known, after a nineteenth- century Polish engineer, as the Yarkovsky effect. One group of researchers decided that the best explanation was that 11/2017 U1 was a “miniature comet” whose tail had gone undetected because of its “unusual chemical composition.” Another group argued that ‘Oumuamua was composed mostly of frozen hydrogen. This hypothesis—a variation on the mini-comet idea—had the advantage of explaining the object’s peculiar shape. By the time it reached our solar system, it had mostly melted away, like an ice cube on the sidewalk. y far the most spectacular account of 11/2017 U1 came from Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist. ‘Oumuamua didn’tliving things. At a public event a few years ago, Ellen Stofan, who at the time was Nasa’s chief scientist and is now the director of the National Air and Space Museum, said that she believed _ “definitive evidence” of “life beyond earth” would be found sometime in the next two decades. “It’s definitely not an ‘if, it’s a ‘when,’ ” Jeffrey Newmark, a Nasa astrophysicist, said at the same gathering. What will life on other planets look like, when—not if—it’s found? Arik Kershenbaum, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, takes up this question in “The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens—and Ourselves” (Penguin Press). “It’s a popular belief that alien life is too alien to imagine,” he writes. “I don't agree.” Kershenbaum argues that the key to understanding cosmic zoology is natural selection. This, he maintains, is the “inevitable mechanism” by which life develops, and therefore it’s “not just restricted to the planet Earth” or even to carbon-based organisms. However alien biochemistry functions, “natural selection will be behind it.” From this premise, Kershenbaum says, it follows that life on other planets will have evolved, if not along the same lines as life on this planet, then at least along lines that are generally recognizable. On Earth, for instance, where the atmosphere is mostly made of nitrogen and oxygen, feathers are a useful feature. Ona planet — _ where clouds are made of ammonia, feathers probably wouldn't © cesses nao person toctheeeraeyOBJECTION 1 & REFUTATION: ARTICLE 1 large body could be found so close to its parent star and had to invent a whole new category to contain it; it became known as a “hot Jupiter.” Mayor and Queloz had detected Dimidium by measuring its gravitational tug on 51 Pegasi. In 2009, nasa launched the Kepler “ space telescope, which was designed to search for exoplanets using a different method. When a planet passes in front of its star, it reduces the star’s brightness very slightly. (During the last transit of Venus, in 2012, viewers on Earth could watch a small black dot creep across the sun.) Kepler measured variations in the brightness of more than a hundred and fifty thousand stars in the vicinity of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. By 2015, it had revealed the existence of a thousand exoplanets. By the time it stopped operating, in 2018, it had revealed sixteen hundred more. ‘sult Lf fi known as eta-Earth, or 1. This is the average number of rocky, oughly Earth-size planets that can be found orbiting an average _ -sunlike star at a distance that might, conceivably, render them — habitable. After spending two years analyzing the data from Kepler, researchers recently concluded that n@ has a value somewhere between .37 and .6. Since there are at least four billion _ sunlike stars in the Milky Way, this means that somewhere between 1.5 billion and 2.4 billion planets in our galaxy could, in theory, harbor life. No one knows what fraction of potentially habitable planets are, in fact, inhabited, but, even if the proportion is trivial, we're still talking about millions—perhaps tens of _ millions—of planets in the galaxy that might be teeming with"functions (ic. fight) that we observe here.” Similarly, Kershenbaum writes, alien organisms are apt to evolve some form of land-based locomotion—“Life on alien planets is very likely to have legs’—as well as some form of reproduction analogous to sex and some way of exchanging information: “Aliens in the dark will click like bats and dolphins, and aliens in the clear skies will flash their colours at each other.” Assuming that there is, in fact, alien life out there, most of it seems likely to be microscopic. “We are not talking about little green men” is how Stofan put it when she said we were soon going to find it. “We are talking about little microbes.” But Kershenbaum, who studies animal communication, jumps straight to complex organisms, which propels him pretty quickly into Loebian territory. On Earth, many animals possess what we would broadly refer to as “intelligence.” Kershenbaum argues that, given the advantages that this quality confers, natural selection all across the galaxy will favor its emergence, in which case there should be loads of life- forms out there that are as smart as we are, and some that are a whole lot smarter. This, in his view, opens up quite a can of interstellar worms. Are we going to accord aliens “human rights”? Will they accord us whatever rights, if any, they grant their little green (or silver or blue) brethren? Such questions, Kershenbaum acknowledges, are difficult to answer in advance, “without any evidence of what kind of legal system or system of ethics the aliens themselves might have.”PETC Es 3. Scientists Are Suddenly Much More Bullish About the Possibility of Life Out There The universe is really big, people. Just 30 years ago, we had not discovered a single planet outside our solar system. Now we know of more than 8,000 of them, and we know nearly every star in the night sky has at least one planet in its orbit. “Even people who are not terribly interested in science know that we've found that planets are as common as fire hydrants — they’re everywhere,’ says Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. “One in five or one in six might be a — Planet similar to the Barth: That doesn’t mean we'll ever find an exact replica of Earth, but maybe we don’t have to. Our study of other planets and moons in the solar system shows us many worlds possess the ingredients necessary for life — an atmosphere, organic compounds, liquid water, and other necessities. (The moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, for example, feature whole subsurface oceans.)CONTENTION 2 & PREMISE: ARTICLE1 professor, argued that aliens had landed on Earth sometime in the misty past. Traces of their visits were recorded in legends and also anntiieenii dienes Pers Wi Ghssitien I figured that von Daniken would be interested in the first official interstellar object, and so I got in touch with him. Now eighty- five, he lives near Interlaken, not far from a theme park he designed, which was originally called Mystery Park and then later, after a series of financial mishaps, rebranded as Jungfrau Park. The park boasts seven pavilions, one shaped like a pyramid, another like an Aztec temple. Von Diniken told me that he had, indeed, been following the controversy over ‘Oumuamua. He tended to side with Loeb, who, he thought, was very brave. “He needs courage and obviously he had courage,” he said. “No scientist wants to be ridiculed, and whenever they deal with U.F.O.s or extraterrestrials, they are ridiculed by the media.” But, he predicted, “the situation will change.”OBJECTION 2 & REFUTATION: ARTICLE 3 used on Earth for refrigeration and other industrial processes, or nitrogen dioxide, produced on Earth as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels. Both of these, says Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center, could be detectable in the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets with near-future telescopes and a few hundred hours’ viewing time.Other scientists havejnoted thatitmightalso be/possible to detect heimpecisofierning, Read also: [faliens are out there, they're staying awfully quiet But the most interesting thing is the possibility that the aliens might actually be visiting us — not in the up-close-and-personal sense posited by UFO enthusiasts or the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind - but via interstellar probes from distant stars. If that sounds unlikely, Kopparapu says; think/again/ Already, he notes; the two Voyager possible effort to sendone to another star'systemi“So, if we can do this at this time, other civilisations, if they exist, are or may be thinking to do this,” he says. The fact that) adds, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. “If | go toa bus stop and wait for two seconds and haven't seen a single bus,” he says, “[that doesn’t mean] there are no buses.”CONTENTION 3 & PREMISE: ARTICLE 2 n the good old days, the arrival of UFOs on the front page of America’s paper of record might have seemed like a loose- thread tear right through the fabric of reality — the closest that secular, space-race America could have gotten to a Second Coming. Two decades ago, or three, or six, we would've also felt we knew the script in advance, thanks to the endless variations pop culture had played for us already: civilizational conflicts to mirror the real-world ones Americans had been imagining in terror since the beginning of the Cold War. But when, in December, the New York Times published an undisputed account of what might once have sounded like crackpot conspiracy theory — that the Pentagon had. _ spent five years investigating “unexplained _ i ”” — the response among the paper's mostly liberal readers, exhausted and beaten down by “recent events,” was markedly different from the one in those movies. The news that aliens might actually be visiting us, regularly and recently, didn’t provoke terror about a coming space-opera conflict butARTICLE 2 n 1952, a CIA group called the Psychological Strategy Board concluded that, when it came to UFOs, the American public was dangerously gullible and prone to “hysterical mass behavior.” The group recommended “debunking” campaigns to tamper the public's interest in unexplained phenomena. But the government seems to have been interested, too: In December, the _ Stevens (who reported being chased bya i , Daniel Inouye, and then- Majority Leader Harry Reid, and funded with $22 million of “black money” from the Department of Defense's budget, the program investigated and evaluated reports of UFO sightings, many of which came from AmericanARTICLE 2 analyzed supposedly occurred near nuclear facilities like power plants or battleships. In November 2004, the USS Princeton, a Navy cruiser escorting the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz on oo coast ui San Diego, a two Qlayuinahbeemtackinetoamesks meaning things most often blamed for unexplained | aerial phenomena). When the jets arrived at the location, one of the pilots, Commander David Fravor, saw a disturbance just below the ocean’s surface causing the water to roil around it. Then, suddenly, he saw a white, 40-foot Tic _ Tac-shaped craft moving like a Ping-Pong ball | above the water. The vehicle began mirroring his plane’s movements, but when Fravor dove directly at the object, the Tic Tac zipped away.OBJECTION 3 & REFUTATION ARTICLE 1 functions (i.e, flight) that we observe here.” Similarly, Kershenbaum writes, alien organisms are apt to evolve some form of land-based locomotion—‘Life on alien planets is very likely to have legs”—as well as some form of reproduction analogous to sex and some way of exchanging information: “Aliens in the dark will click like bats and dolphins, and aliens in the clear skies will flash their colours at each other.” Assuming that there is, in fact, alien life out there, most of it i is ic, “We are not talking about little green men” is how Stofan put it when she said we were soon going to find it. “We are talking about little microbes.” But Kershenbaum, who studies animal communication, jumps straight to complex organisms, which propels him pretty quickly into Loebian territory. On Earth, many animals possess what we would broadly refer to as “intelligence.” Kershenbaum argues that, given the advantages that this quality confers, natural selection all across the galaxy will favor its emergence, in which case there should be loads of life- forms out there that are as smart as we are, and some that are a whole lot smarter. This, in his view, opens up quite a can of interstellar worms. Are we going to accord aliens “human rights”? Will they accord us whatever rights, if any, they grant their little green (or silver or blue) brethren? Such questions, Kershenbaum acknowledges, are difficult to answer in advance, “without any evidence of what kind of legal system or system of ethics the aliens themselves might have.”dis i ing intelli iens would be, Piste fac arguably, even more so. Why this is the case is a question that’s become known as the Fermi paradox. One day in 1950, while lunching at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the physicist Enrico Fermi turned to some colleagues and asked, “Where are they?” (At least, this is how one version of the story goes; according to another version, he asked, “But where is everybody?”) This was decades before Pan-sTarrs1 and the Kepler mission. Still, Fermi reckoned that Earth was a fairly typical planet revolving around a fairly typical star. There ought, he reasoned, to be civilizations out there far older and more advanced than our own, some of which should have already mastered interstellar travel. Yet, strangely enough, no one had shown up. Much human intelligence has since been devoted to grappling with Fermi’s question. In the nineteen-sixties, an astronomer named Frank Drake came up with the eponymous Drake equation, which offers a way to estimate—or, if you prefer, guesstimate—how many alien cultures exist with which we might hope to;communicate. Key terms in the equation include: how many potentially habitable planets are out there, what fraction of life-hosting planets will develop sophisticated technology, and how long technologically sophisticated civilizations endure. As the list of potentially habitable planets has grown, the “Where are they?” mystery has only deepened. At a workshop on the subject held in Paris in 2019, a French researcher named Jean-PierreCONTENTION 4 & PREMISE: ARTICLE 3 Many of these “pollutants” are simply byproducts of an organism’s biology. Some, such as the carbon dioxide breathed out by earthly animals, might not stand out among natural background levels, but others, such as the oxygen produced by plants, are unsustainable without something, such as life, producing them continuously. “You have to have this constant source in order to maintain the levels that are observed,” Batalha says. “So, if you notice molecules in combinations that should not exist unless you have that constant feed, you know something interesting is going on.” The Holy Grail, however, would be detecting a technosignature. Technosignatures are signs of not just microbial (or pre-cellular) life, but of technologically advanced civilisations, such as ours - Star Trek aliens we could actually talk to, even if they turn out to be so biologically alien that the processes that keep them alive verge on the incomprehensible. What types of things might we be able to detect?ARTICLE 2 “ ” : ipiervapten.e 7dstecondhurbobsound. that, _ space, which could be a sign of extraterrestrial _ communication. The anomaly measured 1,420 megahertz, a frequency in the “water hole,’ the term for a radio-emission range thought ideal for intergalactic messages because it’s unusually quiet. Jerry Ehman, the astronomer who spotted it, was so excited that he scribbled a giant “Wow!” on his printout. Astronomy’s explanations for the bizarre phenomenon include secret spy satellites and a passing comet nobody knew about in 1977. But many admit nothing explains it adequately, and even if the signal doesn’t prove aliens exist, it’s still a “tug on the cosmic fishing line.” To date, it remains the best evidence of alien communication ever obtained.OBJECTION 4 & REFUTATION: ARTICLE 3 single-celled microbes into humans. Maybe we just happened to evolve faster and earlier than everyone else. an See ONC OPT —_—_ The Aliens Are Already Here This is where the conspiracy theorists get to go nuts. Yes, maybe the aliens are already here and we just haven't figured it out yet. They might be taking some time to study us before unveiling themselves, or maybe they have already let themselves be known to certain groups. The truth isn’t out there — it’s here. —N.P.