Pat Kane: Could the latest discovery of space signals be aliens?

They are multiple-eyed, many-mouthed, tentacular or honeycombed. They fly into sprawling spaceports on their warp-driven ships, occupying bars and bordellos and bazaars. Implausibly, they hang out with flaccid and recognisable humans like ourselves.

The galaxy far, far away is, in fact, an environment all too familiar: somewhere between Marrakesh and Manhattan, a bustle of differences and purposes (threatened by the occasional authoritarian regime).

Whereas the truth of the aliens out there, for us? The occasional manic burst of signals from billions of light years away. The identification of planets that may share something of the same biospheric soup as Earth. But otherwise, a stony, inscrutable silence. Radio telescopes scraping away at the darkness and muteness.

Why should a thoughtful, civic and frankly earth-bound person even care about any of this? This week’s news of what the astrophysicists call an FRB – a fast-radio burst of electromagnetism, produced by a huge energy event – comes from a spiral galaxy only (only!) 500 million light years away. Other flashes are singular events—but FRB 180916 is the second one to have ever repeated itself.

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Most of the explanations suggest colliding stars, unstable black holes or “blitzars”. Some, however, do hold out for these patterned signals as evidence of a far-off civilisation.

Shouldn’t we first ensure the survival of the civilisation very “nearby” us? Indeed, under our feet? No doubt. But I’ve been fascinated for years by the disjunct between our earthly incompetence and our cosmic desires.

That is, between our inability to manage and steer “Spaceship Earth”, as Buckminster Fuller once called it – and our insatiable pop-cultural appetite for wars (and treks) through the stars and galaxies, engaging with odd-shaped others.

What a scene! We proliferate annihilating missiles, aiming them at ourselves, controlled by systems wide open to human caprice and error. With our heedless consumerism, we knowingly despoil the thin, 20km-deep zone of our life-giving biosphere on our home planet (it’s like the skin on an apple ... being blistered by a blowtorch).

And yet, the same citizens rock up to picture palaces, or flick through our networked devices, and there merrily cavort and joust their way through an agonistic, carnivalesque cosmos – where Republics (eventually and entertainingly) defeat Empires.

It’s as if we had already breezily figured out how to survive our own self-destructive tendencies. When, at least, that’s in the planetary balance.

I’d prefer not to think of humans as inherently delusional, amusing ourselves to death with our fantasies. So let’s try “aspirational”. As we imaginatively embrace the alien, what hopes and ideals are we expressing? And what could be built on those?

I’d want to distinguish the search for life (and even intelligent life) in the universe from the low-rent “space capitalism” of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. These cartoonish moguls plan their Moon or Mars-bases under the same old imperatives of extraction and colonisation.

This is literally capital running out of stuff to exploit on Earth, and turning its Sauron eye to the solar system.

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(And this isn’t just an American neoliberal tendency. The Corbyn scion Aaron Bastani wrote a book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which urged that asteroid mining for currently rare minerals was a collective imperative.) No, my great hope has always been that the moment of contact – whether it’s with a microbe, or an intelligence – produces a grand reset in human priorities. Does our culture and its stories, when anticipating this event, sustain such a hope?

Well ... if you see one scene of the visiting spaceship surrounded by bristling US army forces, where one nervous soldier triggers a pointless fusillade ... you’ll have seen them all. Even 2001: A Space Odyssey, the most transcendent and ambitious of all SF movies, still frames the alien encounter as a job that only a stern-faced, uniformed executive class can deal with.

And it matters whether it is a microbe or an intelligence. In our own backyard, there are chemically and thermally dense moons, orbiting around Saturn and Jupiter, that could potentially support basic forms of life. Discoveries of what are called “extremophiles” – earthbound micro-organisms that still survive at punishing extremes of heat, cold or pressure – gives hope that such entities could also thrive elsewhere in the solar system. If they’re not discovered, then the message could be that biological life in the universe is an absolute rarity. So we have a cosmic responsibility to survive as a species, in order that life may spread throughout a largely barren universe.

(Though our increasing ability to identify Earth-like planets moving around nearby suns is increasing the evidence base for these discoveries. Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2021, is designed to examine planets’ chemical make-ups, which can signal biological activity).

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However, if alien microbes are discovered locally, then immediately we will have to accept that we live in a universe potentially teeming with lifeforms. It will then be a reasonable bet that some of them will have taken the evolutionary journey towards a technologically advanced civilisation

Such are the overwhelming odds on this that we have to start to ask the famous question from the Nobel physicist Enrico Fermi: “So ... where is everybody?” Meaning, in such an enormously fecund universe, why haven’t we yet been contacted by a mature and exploring interstellar civilisation?

There are a number of benign and malign explanations on offer. It took the Earth more than four billion years to evolve intelligent life with off-worldly ambitions – and according to a 2015 Hubble Space Telescope study, our “habitable” planet is apparently a pretty early event in the history of the cosmos. With an estimated 92% of Earth-making materials still left in the universe, we could actually just be ... the first to arrive.

More depressing is the idea that alien civilisations might follow the same toxic patterns as human ones. That is, they develop their technology to the same levels of self-terminating lethality – economic, military, climatic, or all three. And then they blow themselves up, or poison/choke themselves to death, or both. Meaning, no possibility of glittering starship journeys of any kind whatsoever, anywhere. None of it lifts off the ground.

THERE is a sunny side to this thesis. If such an alien civilisation was able to transcend its evolutionary limitations, this means that if it ever did get to us, it would indeed be the wise and patient Klaatu from The Day The Earth Stood Still, or the philosophical octopuses of Arrival, or the playful and social child-humans of Close Encounters. Star Bores (ok, Star Scholars) rather than Star Wars. It’s something calm and gentle to hope for – and maybe something for us to aspire to?

But maybe it’s also that the universe is just an unimaginably large space, and it will take time and luck for us to meet someone. My favourite explanation for this week’s Fast Radio Burst comes from the Israeli-born Harvard professor Avi Loeb, who runs the Breakthrough Starshot Project.

In a 2017 paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Loeb hypothesizes that the peculiar energy intensity of these bursts could be artificial, and designed for two possible ends.

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It’s either a signalling beacon ... or it’s an enormous pulsar of light driving a solar sail, to such speeds that it could begin to explore the universe. (Loeb is ambitious that we Earthlings start building this too.)

So they’re shiplights on a far-off horizon: ones that may yet still miss us in the dark, but with inhabitants whose culture we may do well to meet, perhaps even emulate.

As we chew away relentlessly at the apple peel of this wee planet’s biosphere, it’s something to give us pause. We’ll never get to the Cantina on Mos Eisley if we just consume ourselves to dust.