Stephen Hawking to Collaborate in Private Funded Search for Extraterrestrial Life

[Pericles21 submitted this piece in response to a request for comment at 'quora.com', July 22, 2015]

First, I feel it is good that Private Money will back the project because I expect Private Money will (potentially?) protect the project from non-scientific interference (belief orthodoxy and political pressures). Second, I feel there isn't a better project principal (designer/partner/adviser) than Stephen Hawking. His overall contributions can be 'earth changing'. should he let loose all his inner genius, i.e., the knowledge and intuition that lies within himself still unformed, unuttered. I hope to see exotic new concepts in astrophysics and astrobiology from Hawking, especially in the development and application of new mathematics formalisms and applications.

However, I am not wholly confident that Hawking personally is free from bias, i.e., I am made less confident of his objectivity by his openly (and frequently) stated warnings against naively reaching out and making contact with superior Aliens whose motives or psychology, in his words, 'might be harmful to humanity'.

(I don't fully share Hawking's apparent paranoia here.)

On the other hand, I hope the project will employ only passive detection methods and instruments, guided (and controlled) by a truly innovative search protocol with new design features for enhanced-performance detection instruments. In this context, I have full faith that Hawking's contribution to the project will be startling for the resulting protocol, improved instrumentation (in components and concept, i.e, #nano-scale-photometry) and results.

I pose the following topics for Mr Hawking to think on and develop or rule out:
- What kind of galaxy might have the greatest stability?
- How close to a central (massive) Black Hole might lie stable sol systems, dwarf galaxies and other space groups and bodies? How plentiful are Rogue Planets and rogue sol systems?
- What form(s) of energy (not currently conceived of on earth) might be used
by an advanced civilization? What might be the 'leakage' factor (radiation to space) for each? Would't an advanced civ develop 'non-leaking' energy?
- What other forms of detectable markers might there be other than energy and atmosphere? What markers miht not be detectable by current methods?
- Wouldn't a developed Alien disguise their civilization's location and state of advancement? How? Still, what markers might be leaked, detected and and deciphered?
- Wouldn't an advanced civ leave markers throughout it's home galaxy? What kind?
- What kind of 'code' might Aliens employ in their signals to 'externals'?
- Can 'entangled' communication be detected/hacked?
- What markers might hint at Alien tinkering with a Black Hole for energy tapping or signal modulation?
- Is it possible to develop (if not already) an advanced algorithm that might generate a matrix of possibilities, based on home planet astro-biological factors, for Alien features - language (yes!), mathematics, behavioral modes, ethics, cross-species prejudice and aggression, physical morphology, technology type...?
- What kinds of statistics might apply to this search? What new statistical tools or uses might be required?
- What kind of 'weaponry' might an Alien have? Personal? 'Battle craft'? Interstellar? Kinetic and/or energy?
- What form of energy intake might an advanced Alien require? Physical food? Abstracted energy (tablets, fluids devoid of origin identification)? Radiation?
- what morphology (or mix) might an Alien have? Physical? 'Gone cyber'?
- What might be Alien psychology types? What might be their significance to human safety?
- Overall, considering what we so far know about the distribution of 'habitable' planets, what radius segments might be best to search? I don't mean to seem uneducated about 'Habitable Zones' but what about non-water based life? Non-liquid based life (solid, gaseous, plasma, other states?)
- What innovative detection instruments might be developed? New wavelengths? New electronics? New modulation detection schemas - i.e., Alien Fourier signals, new algorithmic mixes, innovative exo-math series groupings, etc?
- How far might Alien employment of math series go? 5th or 6th order? 10th or above? What other radiative/dimensional relationships (ala Maxwell-Gauss) might Aliens have?
- How valid might be earth-based manifold theory applied to Alien technology? How might maths for 'extra-earth level' manifolds be formatted, codified and utilized?
- When in advanced tech might an Alien develop extra-Newtonian space propulsion? Beyond plasma? Space warping? Black Hole hopping? What signs might there be of Black Hole manipulation/control for inter-galaxy travel?

These are just some ideas.

Perusal on Our Search for Life: Questioning and Suggesting

Why are Earth’s scientific agencies and minds, or at least most that are popularly heard about/from, so focused on limiting our official searches for extraterrestrial life to “sweet zones” and “metal abundances” and such life-limiting scenarios? Do they know something they are not telling us? Are they that caught in such a deep human-centric paradigm trap? And why are uber-world class minds such as Mr. Hawking sounding the flight alarm that a super advanced life species might use their esoteric technologies to look throughout the universe to feed themselves, as if in their super-advancement of physics and space travel they had forgotten all about solving the food and waste disposal problem and we would be the prime roast, sushi, Tabuli or Muktuk on their ideal dinner menu? What is happening, or has happened, to promote such limited perspectives?

Has any one or body called for a scientific/common sense interdisciplinary team to hash out a set of prerequisites for ET life in any form? And how shall or do we define "life", exactly or broadly. A personal perspective is that our scientific communities should greatly expand the definition of life and consequently the physico-chemical settings for the creation and evolution of life. Likewise, as Feynman pointed the great range of magnitudes spanning the nano-to-galactic scales, advanced life could be several orders of magnitude different in scale from humans and still have enough manipulative distance in scale to develop technologies - and why exactly are thumbs needed when on earth we have such outstanding natural nano-scale engineering forms such as the the exuded, lacy exosceletal forms in the seas and soil, and even the many magnitudes smaller viruses?

What does seem universally required is a source of some kind of POTENTIAL (in the physico-mechanico-chemical sense, or in some other sense we are not yet advanced to be aware of), to drive the ORGANIZATION of life, i.e. to combat the natural drift of entropy which means a mechanism to counteract the normal, disruptive drift of ENTROPY, i.e. decay. This requirement does not self-define Goldilockian “sweet zones”, earth-chemistry or even species large enough for us to see (or a species might be too large to for us to notice its “organization”). Supra-large organization of SENTIENCE (life?) could exist with scaled up densities that might look to us at our scales to be mist, fog, dust, near-vcuum but actually might be equivalent to flesh and blood in function - which perhaps represents another requisite of life, a MEDIUM to support functions such as signal (INFORMATION) TRANSPORT? And what about maintaining a state of negative entropy (SURVIVABILITY and REPLICATION). These capitalized words seem part of the descriptive matrix representing life and are not limited to earth-like settings.

In retrospect, such a possible life form would not be interested in us and probably would not notice us as pertinent to its interests of survival, enjoyment of life or whatever other activities dwell in the realm of its activities. Perhaps we would be viewed as we view Nematodes in our soil.

With such an expanded view, the issues we seem terribly concerned about such as “ethics” or predation have little or no meaning. Finally the Drake expression which is in danger of becoming a sacred cow: the observed frequency of supernovas which are galaxy-wide scourings (life-ending) by immense gamma ray explosions seem to reset the time-for-evolution every 4.5 billion years or so, and perhaps the Drake expression needs to be reviewed with this thought.