There is a realm the laws of physics forbid us from accessing, below the resolving power of our most powerful microscopes and beyond the reach of our most sensitive telescopes. Theres no telling what might exist thereperhaps entire universes.

Since the beginning of human inquiry, there have been limits to our observing abilities. Worldviews were restricted by the availability of tools and our own creativity. Over time, the size of our observable universe grew as our knowledge grewwe saw planets beyond Earth, stars beyond the Sun, and galaxies beyond our own, while we peered deeper into cells and atoms. And then, during the 20th century, mathematics emerged that can explain, shockingly welland, to a point, predictthe world we live in. The theories of special and general relativity describe exactly the motion of the planets, stars, and galaxies. Quantum mechanics and the Standard Model of Particle Physics have worked wonders at clarifying what goes on inside of atoms.

However, with each of these successful theories comes hard-and-fast limits to our observing abilities. Today, these limits seem to define true boundaries to our knowledge.

On the large end, there is a speed limit that caps what we can see. It hampers any hope for us to observe most of our universe first-hand.

The speed of light is approximately 300,000,000 meters per second (or 671,000,000 miles per hour, if thats how your brain works). The theory of special relativity, proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905, forbids anything from traveling faster than that. Massless things always travel this speed in a vacuum. Accelerating massive objects to this speed essentially introduces a divide-by-zero in one of special relativitys equations; it would take infinite energy to accelerate something with mass to the speed of light.

If, as a child, you hopped on a spaceship traveling out of the solar system at 99% the speed of light, you might be able to explore other parts of the galaxy before succumbing to age, but because time is relative, your friends and family would likely be long gone before you could report your observations back to Earth. But youd still have your limitsthe Milky Way galaxy is 105,700 light-years across, our neighboring galaxy Andromeda is 2.5 million light-years away, and the observable universe is around 93 billion light-years across. Any hope of exploring farther distances would require multigenerational missions or, if using a remote probe, accepting that youll be dead and humanity may be very different by the time the probes data returns to Earth.

The speed of light is more than just a speed limit, however. Since the light we see requires travel time to arrive at Earth, then we must contend with several horizons beyond which we cant interact, which exist due to Einsteins theory of general relativity. There is an event horizon, a moving boundary in space and time beyond which light and particles emitted now will never reach Earth, no matter how much time passesthose events we will never see. There is also the particle horizon, or a boundary beyond which we cannot observe light arriving from the pastthis defines the observable universe.

Theres a second kind of event horizon, one surrounding a black hole. Gravity is an effect caused by the presence of massive objects warping the shape of space, like a bowling ball on a trampoline. A massive-enough object might warp space such that no information can exit beyond a certain boundary.

These limits arent static. We will see further and further as time goes on, because the distance light travels outward gets bigger and bigger, said Tamara Davis, astrophysics professor who studies cosmology at the University of Queensland. But this expanding perspective wont be permanentsince our universe is also expanding (and that expansion is accelerating). If you fast-forward 100 billion years into the future, all of the galaxies that we can currently see will be so far, and accelerating so quickly away from us, that the light they emitted in the past will have faded from view. At that point, our observable universe would be just those nearby galaxies gravitationally bound to our own.

Another boundary lives on the other end of the scale. Zoom in between molecules, into the center of atoms, deep into their nuclei and into the quarks that make up their protons and neutrons. Here, another set of rules, mostly devised in the 20th century, governs how things work. In the rules of quantum mechanics, everything is quantized, meaning particles properties (their energy or their location around an atomic nucleus, for example) can only take on distinct values, like steps on a ladder, rather than a continuum, like places on a slide. However, quantum mechanics also demonstrates that particles arent just dots; they simultaneously act like waves, meaning that they can take on multiple values at the same time and experience a host of other wave-like effects, such as interference. Essentially, the quantum world is a noisy place, and our understanding of it is innately tied to probability and uncertainty.

This quantum-ness means that if you try to peer too closely, youll run into the observer effect: Attempting to see things this small requires bouncing light off of them, and the energy from this interaction can fundamentally change that which youre attempting to observe.

But theres an even more fundamental limit to what we can see. Werner Heisenberg discovered that the wonkiness of quantum mechanics introduces minimum accuracy with which you can measure certain pairs of mathematically related properties, such as a particles position and momentum. The more accurately you can measure one, the less accurately you can measure the other. And finally, even attempting to measure just one of those properties becomes impossible at a small enough scale, called the Planck scale, which comes with a shortest length, 10^-35 meters, and a shortest time interval, around 5 x 10^-44 seconds.

You take the constant numbers that describe naturea gravitational constant, the speed of light, and Plancks constant, and if I put these constants together, I get the Planck length, said James Beacham, physicist at the ATLAS experiment of the Large Hadron Collider. Mathematically, its nothing specialI can write down a smaller number like 10^-36 meters But quantum mechanics says that if I have a prediction to my theory that says structure exists at a smaller scale, then quantum has built-in uncertainty for it. Its a built-in limit to our understanding of the universethese are the smallest meaningful numbers that quantum mechanics allows us to define.

This is assuming that quantum mechanics is the correct way to think about the universe, of course. But time and time again, experiments have demonstrated theres no reason to think otherwise.

These fundamental limits, large and small, present clear barriers to our knowledge. Our theories tell us that we will never directly observe what lies beyond these cosmic horizons or what structures exist smaller than the Planck scale. However, the answers to some of the grandest questions we ask ourselves might exist beyond those very walls. Why and how did the universe begin? What lies beyond our universe? Why do things look and act the way that they do? Why do things exist?

The unobservable and untestable exist beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. Alls well and good to write down the math and say you can explain the universe, but if you have no way of testing the hypothesis, then thats getting outside the realm of what we consider science, said Nathan Musoke, a computational cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire. Exploring the unanswerable belongs to philosophy or religion. Its possible, however, that science-derived answers to these questions exist as visible imprints on these horizons that the scientific method can uncover.

That imprinting is literal. Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman first predicted in 1948 that some light left over from an early epoch in the universes history might still be observable here on Earth. Then, in 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were working as radio astronomers at Bell Labs in New Jersey, when they noticed a strange signal in their radio telescope. They went through every idea to figure out the source of the noiseperhaps it was background radiation from New York City, or even poop from pigeons nesting in the experiment? But they soon realized that the data matched Alpher and Hermans prediction.

Penzias and Wilson hadspotted the microwave radiation from just 400,000 years after the Big Bang called the cosmic microwave background, the oldest and most distant radiation observable to todays telescopes. During this era in the universes history, chemical reactions caused the previously opaque universe to allow light to travel through uninhibited. This light, stretched out by the expanding universe, now appears as faint microwave radiation coming from all directions in the sky.

Astronomers experiments since then, such as the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), and the Planck space observatory have attempted to map this cosmic microwave background, revealing several key takeaways. First, the temperature of these microwaves is eerily uniform across the skyaround 2.725 degrees above absolute zero, the universes minimum temperature. Second, despite its uniformity, there are small, direction-dependent temperature fluctuations; patches where the radiation is slightly warmer and patches where its slightly cooler. These fluctuations are a remnant of the structure of the early universe before it became transparent, produced by sound waves pulsing through it and gravitational wells, revealing how the earliest structures may have formed.

At least one theory has allowed for a scientific approach to probing this structure, with hypotheses that have been tested and supported by further observations of these fluctuations. This theory is called inflation. Inflation posits that the observable universe as we see it today would have once been contained in a space smaller than any known particle. Then, it underwent a burst of unthinkable expansion lasting just a small fraction of a second, governed by a field with dynamics determined by quantum mechanics. This era magnified tiny quantum-scale fluctuations into wells of gravity that eventually governed the large-scale structure of the observable universe, with those wells written into the cosmic microwave background data. You can think of inflation as part of the bang in the Big Bang theory.

Its a nice thought, that we can pull knowledge from beyond the cosmic microwave background. But this knowledge leads to more questions. I think theres a pretty broad consensus that inflation probably occurred, said Katie Mack, theoretical astrophysicist at North Carolina State University. Theres very little consensus as to how or why it occurred, what caused it, or what physics it obeyed when it happened.

Some of these new questions may be unanswerable. What happens at the very beginning, that information is obscured from us, said Mack. I find it frustrating that were always going to be lacking information. We can come up with models that explain what we see, and models that do better than others, but in terms of validating them, at some point were going to have to just accept that theres some unknowability.

At the cosmic microwave background and beyond, the large and the small intersect; the early universe seems to reflect quantum behaviors. Similar conversations are happening on the other end of the size spectrum, as physicists attempt to reconcile the behavior of the universe on the largest scale with the rules of quantum mechanics. Black holes exist in this scientific space, where gravity and quantum physics must play together, and where physical descriptions of whats going on sit below the Planck scale.

Here, physicists are also working to devise a mathematical theory that, while too small to observe directly, produces observable effects. Perhaps most famous among these ideas is string theory, which isnt really a theory but a mathematical framework based on the idea that fundamental particles like quarks and electrons arent just specks but one-dimensional strings whose behavior governs those particles properties. This theory attempts to explain the various forces of nature that particles experience, while gravity seems to be a natural result of thinking about the problem in this way. Like those studying any theory, string theorists hope that their framework will put forth testable predictions.

Finding ways to test these theories is a work in progress. Theres faith that one way or another we should be able to test these ideas, said David Gross, professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. It might be very indirectbut thats not something thats a pressing issue.

Searching for indirect ways to test string theory (and other theories of quantum gravity) is part of the search for the theory itself. Perhaps experiments producing small black holes could provide a laboratory to explore this domain, or perhaps string theory calculations will require particles that a particle accelerator could locate.

At these small timescales, our notion of what space and time really is might break down in profound ways, said Gross. The way physicists formulate questions in general often assumes various givens, like spacetime exists as a smooth, continuous manifold, he said. Those questions might be ill formulated. Often, very difficult problems in physics require profound jumps, revolutions, or different ways of thinking, and its only afterward when we realize that we were asking the question in the wrong way.

For example, some hope to know what happened at the beginning of the universeand what happened before time began. That, I believe, isnt the right way to ask the question, said Gross, as asking such a question might mean relying on an incorrect understanding of the nature of space and time. Not that we know the correct way, yet.

Walls that stop us from easily answering our deepest questions about the universe well, they dont feel very nice to think about. But offering some comfort is the fact that 93 billion light-years is very big, and 10^-35 meters is very small. Between the largest and the smallest is a staggering space full of things we dont but theoretically can know.

Todays best telescopes can look far into the distance (and remember, looking into the distance also means looking back in time). Hubble can see objects as they were just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and its successor, the Webb Space Telescope, will look farther still, perhaps 150 million years after the Big Bang. Existing galactic surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Dark Energy Survey have collected data on millions of galaxies, the latter having recently released a 3D map of the universe with 300 million galaxies. The upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will survey up to 10 billion galaxies across the sky.

From an astronomy point of view, we have so much data that we dont have enough people to analyze it, said Mikhail Ivanov, NASA Einstein Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. There are so many things we dont understand in astrophysicsand were overwhelmed with data. To question whether were hitting a limit is like trolling. Even then, these mind-boggling surveys represent only a small fraction of the universes estimated 200 billion galaxies that future telescopes might be able to map.

But as scientists attempt to play in these theoretically accessible spaces, some wonder whether the true limit is us.

Today, particle physics seems to be up against an issue of its own: Despite plenty of outstanding mysteries in need of answers, the physicists at the Large Hadron Collider have found no new fundamental particles since the Higgs Boson in 2012. This lack of discovery has physicists scratching their heads; its ruled out the simplest versions of some theories that had been guiding particle physicists previously, with few obvious signposts about where to look next (though there are some!).

Beacham thinks that these problems could be solved by searching for phenomena all the way down to the Planck scale. A vast, unknown chasm exists between the scale of todays particle physics experiments and the Planck scale, and theres no guarantee of anything new to discover in that space. Exploring the entirety of that chasm would take an immense amount of energy and increasingly powerful colliders. Quantum mechanics says that higher-momentum particles have smaller wavelengths, and thus are needed to probe smaller length scales. However, actually exploring the Planck scale may require a particle accelerator big enough to circle the Sunmaybe even one the size of the solar system.

Maybe its daunting to think of such a collider, but its inspiration for a way to get to the scaleand inspiration to figure out how to get there with a smaller device, he said. Beacham views it as particle physicists duty to explore whether any new physical phenomena might exist all the way down to the Planck scale, even if there currently isnt evidence theres anything to find. We need to think about going as high in energy as we can, building larger and larger colliders until we hit the limit. We dont get to choose what the discoveries are, he said.

Or, perhaps we can use artificial intelligence to create models that perfectly explain the behavior of our universe. Zooming back out, Fermilab and University of Chicago scientist Brian Nord has dreamed up a system that could model the universe with the help of artificial intelligence, constantly and automatically updating its mathematical model with new observations. Such a model could grow arbitrarily close to the model that actually describes our universeit could generate a theory of everything. But, as with other AI algorithms, it would be a black box to humans.

Such issues are already cropping up in fields where we use software-based tools to make accurate models, explained Taner Edis, physicist at Truman State University. Some software toolsmachine learning models, for examplemay accurately describe the world we live in but are too complex for any individual to completely understand. In other words, we know that these tools work, but not necessarily how. Maybe AI will take us farther down this path, where the knowledge we create will exist spread over a civilization and its technology, owned in bits and pieces by humanity and the algorithms we create to understand the universe. Together, wed have generated a complete picture, but one inaccessible to any single person.

Finally, these sorts of models may provide supreme predictive power, but they wouldnt necessarily offer comfortable answers to questions about why things work the way they do. Perhaps this sets up a dichotomy between what scientists can domake predictions based on initial conditionsand what they hope these predictions will allow them to dolead us to a better understanding of the universe we live in.

I have a hunch that well be able to effectively achieve full knowledge of the universe, but what form will it come in? said Nord. Will we be able to fully understand that knowledge, or will it be used merely as a tool to make predictions without caring about the meaning?

Thinking realistically, todays physicists are forced to think about what society cares about most and whether our systems and funding models permit us to fully examine what we can explore, before we can begin to worry about what we cant. U.S.legislators often discuss basic science research with the language of applied science or positive outcomesthe Department of Energy funds much particle physics research. The National Science Foundations mission is To promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; and to secure the national defense; and for other purposes.

Physicists hoping to receive funding must compete for resources in order to do research that promotes the missions of these organizations. While many labs, such as CERN, exist solely to fund peaceful research with no military applications, most still brag that indirectly solving bigger problems will lead to new techthe internet, or advances in data handling and AI, for example. Private funding organizations exist, but they, too, are either limited in their resources, driven by a mission, or both.

But what if answering these deep questions requires thinking that isnt driven by anything? How can scientists convince funders that we should build experiments, not with the hope of producing new technology or advancing society, but merely with the hope of answering deep questions? Echoing a sentiment expressed in an article by Vanessa A. Bee, what if our systems today (sorry, folks, Im talking about capitalism) are actually stifling innovation in favor of producing some short-term gain? What if answering these questions would require social policy and international collaboration deemed unacceptable by governments?

If this is indeed the world we live in, then the unknowable barrier is far closer than the limits of light speed and the Planck scale. It would exist because we collectivelythe governments we vote for, the institutions they funddont deem answering those questions important enough to devote resources to.

Prior to the 1500s, the universe was simply Earth; the Sun, Moon, and stars were small satellites that orbited us. By 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model of the universethe Sun sat at the center, and Earth orbited it. It was only in the 1920s that Edwin Hubble calculated the distance of Andromeda and proved the Milky Way wasnt the whole universe; it was just one of many, many galaxies in a larger universe. Scientists discovered most of the particles that make up todays Standard Model of particle physics in the second half of the 20th century. Sure, relativity and quantum theory seem to have established the size of the sandbox we have to play inbut precedent would suggest theres more to the sandbox, or even beyond the sandbox, that we havent considered. But then, maybe there isnt.

There are things that well never know, but thats not the right way to think about scientific discovery. We wont know unless we attempt to know, by asking questions, crafting hypotheses, and testing them with experiments. The vast unknown, both leading up to and beyond our boundaries, presents limitless opportunities to ask questions, uncover more knowledge, and even render previous limits obsolete. We cannot truly know the unknowable, then, since the unknowable is just what remains when we can no longer hypothesize and experiment. The unknowable isnt factits something we decide.

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What We Will Never Know - Gizmodo

Quantum computing could be the solution to the challenges that are faced by quantum physicists. It has the power to change our fundamental understanding of reality, and it could soon become a reality.

Quantum computing is an area of research in which engineers, scientists, and technologists are trying to build a computer where information is represented at the quantum level.

Quantum computers would be able to solve problems that are not possible with classical computers or solve them much more quickly. Today's silicon-based computer chips use binary digits (bits) with values of either 0 or 1 for storing information. These bits exist in two states at any given time and can't represent both 0 and 1 simultaneously like qubits which can represent all values at once thanks to the quantum mechanics principle called superpositioning.

Classical Computers VS Quantum ComputersTo understand how quantum computing works, it's important to know the difference between the old (classical) way of computing and the new (quantum) way.

On classical computers, information is encoded into binary digits called "bits." These bits can be in one of two states: 0 or 1. A qubit also has two possible states - 0, 1, or both at once (superposition). This means that it can encode much more information than a binary digit. The physical world behaves according to quantum mechanics. So theoretically, if we want to simulate physical phenomena on a computer, we should use quantum mechanical principles as well

Now that we have made the switching and memory units of computers, known as transistors, almost as small as an atom, we need to find an entirely new way of thinking about and building computers. Quantum computers are not intended to replace classical computers, they are expected to be a different tool we will use to solve complex problems that are beyond the capabilities of a classical computer. A problem that requires more power and time than today's computers can accommodate is called an intractable problem. These are the problems that quantum computers are predicted to solve.

When you enter the world of atomic and subatomic particles, things begin to behave in unexpected ways. It's this ability that quantum computers take advantage of. By entering into this quantum area of computing where the traditional laws of physics no longer apply, we will be able to create processors that are significantly faster than the ones we use today. Sounds fantastic, but the challenge is that quantum computing is also incredibly complex.

That's precisely why the computer industry is racing to make quantum computers work on a commercial scale.

Quantum computers are different from traditional computers because they use quantum bits (qubits) instead of binary bits. One qubit can be in two states at the same time, which solves many problems that current computers don't. Moreover, quantum computing can solve highly complex problems by using "parallelism" to process many calculations at the same time. The downside to this technology is that it needs an enormous amount of energy for operations to work properly. For instance, IBM has said that qubits need about 100 milliwatts of power per operation whereas regular processors need about 10 kilowatts

The Quantum Revolution

The practical uses of quantum computers are still being researched and tested. In the future, it is possible that quantum computers will be able to solve problems that have been impossible to solve before. For example, they have the potential to be used for modelling molecules or predicting how a molecule will behave under different conditions.

We should also remember that a quantum computer is not faster than a regular computer - it's just more powerful. That means that "running" a program on a quantum computer will take just as long as on a regular computer - but with much better results because of their increased power.Quantum computers will allow for the storage and processing of data in ways that we cannot even comprehend today. They also offer more complex calculations than traditional computers and therefore can easily solve problems that would take years to solve on a traditional computer.

Some experts believe that they could be used to calculate complex formulas with no time limit, which will make them an invaluable tool in medical science, AI technologies, aeronautical engineering and so on. So far, quantum computing has been used to solve optimization problems, which are too complex for traditional computer models. It's also been used to study protein folding and drug interactions within the body.

Quantum computers are powerful computers that work on the principles of quantum mechanics. They use qubits, not bits to represent data and they can access potentially more than two values at the same time. Quantum computers will be able to break all of the encoding and encryption we have today. Quantum computing is changing the world of cybersecurity. Quantum computers are capable of running sophisticated simulations in parallel, making them much faster than classical computers. The ability to run simulations in parallel means that quantum computers can quickly find solutions to difficult problems. Quantum computers will disrupt many industries like finance, healthcare, and education.

While it's still unclear how big of an impact quantum computing will have on marketing in the future, there are already some significant uses happening now. One example is in ad targeting where companies can analyze customer behaviour with astounding precision by processing large amounts.

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The Future of Quantum Computing - The Business Standard

Albert Einsteins handwritten notes on the theory of relativity fetched a record 11.6m (9.7m) at an auction in Paris on Tuesday.

The manuscript had been valued at about a quarter of the final sum, which is by far the highest ever paid for anything written by the genius scientist.

It contains preparatory work for the physicists signature achievement, the theory of general relativity, which he published in 1915.

Calling the notes without a doubt the most valuable Einstein manuscript ever to come to auction, Christies which handled the sale on behalf of the Aguttes auction house had estimated prior to the auction that it would fetch between 2m and 3m.

Previous records for Einsteins works were $2.8m for the so-called God letter in 2018, and $1.56m in 2017 for a letter about the secret to happiness.

The 54-page document was handwritten in 1913 and 1914 in Zurich, Switzerland, by Einstein and his colleague and confidant Michele Besso, a Swiss engineer.

Christies said it was thanks to Besso that the manuscript was preserved for posterity. This was almost like a miracle, it said, since Einstein would have been unlikely to hold on to what he considered to be a simple working document.

Today the paper offered a fascinating plunge into the mind of the 20th centurys greatest scientist, Christies said. It discusses his theory of general relativity, building on his theory of special relativity from 1905 that was encapsulated in the equation E=mc2.

Einstein died in 1955 aged 76, lauded as one of the greatest theoretical physicists of all time. His theories of relativity revolutionised his field by introducing new ways of looking at the movement of objects in space and time.

In 1913 Besso and Einstein attacked one of the problems that had been troubling the scientific community for decades: the anomaly of the planet Mercurys orbit, Christies said.

This initial manuscript contains a certain number of unnoticed errors, it added. Once Einstein spotted them, he let the paper drop, and it was taken away by Besso.

Scientific documents by Einstein in this period, and before 1919 generally, are extremely rare, Christies said. Being one of only two working manuscripts documenting the genesis of the theory of general relativity that we know about, it is an extraordinary witness to Einsteins work.

Einstein also made major contributions to quantum mechanics theory and won the Nobel physics prize in 1921. He became a pop culture icon thanks to his dry witticisms and trademark unruly hair, moustache and bushy eyebrows.

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Einsteins notes on theory of relativity fetch record 11.6m at auction - The Guardian

Over lunch one day in 1950, the Nobel Prize winning nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question that would reverberate through parts of astronomy for decades.

Where is everybody? he mused.

He and a few other physicists had been discussing technological extraterrestrials, and Fermi appeared to be making the innocuous argument that since no aliens had landed on Earth, interstellar travel must be a tall order.

Seventy years later, his question has morphed into something else a case against the very existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and an implication that astronomers are wasting their time looking the infamous Fermi Paradox. Its continued occupation of the popular consciousness tends to make the researchers doing this work salty.

There is no Fermi Paradox, says Sofia Sheikh, a postdoctoral researcher at the Berkeley SETI Research Center . You cant say something about why there isnt something there if you havent searched for it. (Others point out that the academic argument does not actually belong to Fermi, and is not a paradox.)

Despite decades of talk, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been a field of comparatively little action largely starved of federal funding due in part to Fermi Paradox-influenced thinking. SETI pioneer Frank Drake spent four months in 1960 scanning two stars for radio signals. More than a half century later, SETI researchers have made only modest progress. The privately funded Breakthrough Listen project is currently conducting one of the most exhaustive searches to date, listening to nearby stars for roughly fifteen minutes each. Preliminary results suggest that of our closest couple hundred neighbors, no star system harbors a civilization that broadcasts a powerful radio signal in our direction all the time. That leaves a couple hundred billion stars in the galaxy yet to be searched.

In 2012, Jill Tartar, a foundational SETI astronomer and inspiration for Carl Sagans novel Contact, likened the search for signals that could arrive from any direction at any time to hunting for marine creatures in a volume as vast as the Earths oceans. She estimated that SETI efforts had, collectively, sampled roughly one glass of water. An academic calculation suggested that, as of last year, SETI astronomers were up to perhaps a large hot tub of water.

To speed the cosmic trawl, researchers are increasingly leaning on a concept first articulated in of all places economics. Due to the current limits of technology, the modern SETI enterprise is mainly a search for potential civilizations that want to be found. Extraterrestrial intelligences would, by definition, be rational agents, and might intentionally beam out signals indicating their presence, shouting We are here! into the void. If so, astronomers could turn our common intelligence to their advantage, working out how to cooperate even without communicating. All they need to do is think like aliens.

This is clearly the way we should think about how to design things, says James Davenport, an astronomer at the University of Washington. Its a natural framework to think about how you might communicate with an unknown actor.

A galactic game of seek and dont hide

Stripped of its science-fiction trappings, the challenge of making contact looks like a special kind of game in economic theory: two players share one goal, but they cant communicate as they attempt to achieve it.

While such an exercise might initially seem futile, Thomas Schelling, an iconoclastic and Nobel prize winning economist who popularized the Cold War concept of Mutual Assured Destruction, realized that games where players cant communicate are still games. They may lack sure-fire paths to victory, but some strategies beat others. In Schellings 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict, he described how to identify such focal or Schelling points; focus on what you suppose your counterpart might know and what your counterpart supposes you might know.

A classic example is two strangers tasked with finding each other in Manhattan. An organized, but rather hopeless plan might be to walk the streets in a grid from Battery Park to Inwood, from the Hudson to the East River. Rather, Schelling reasoned, canny players might consider unique places and times that jump out to both parties as special, such as Grand Central Terminal at noon. Schellings theory has been born out in real demonstrations. In 2006, ABC staged just such a game, dropping off six pairs of people at random spots in the city. Within hours, the teams converged on two spots: Time Square and the observation deck of the Empire State Building. All six groups independently choose noon as their meeting time.

As technology improves and bigger astronomical data sets become available, SETI astronomers are rolling out a wide variety of novel searches based on the same principle. But its easier said than done. What, if anything, can SETI researchers hope to have in common with alien civilizations? What do we know extraterrestrials know, and what do they know we know?

Weve got to pick some signal strategy or signal reception strategy that will match with what someone else comes up with, Sheikh says. Otherwise, the task is hopeless.

Special frequencies

Human astronomy remains, for the time being, firmly attached to Earth. Presumably, other civilizations have a home base from which they broadcast too. In SETI, the question of where to meet often becomes a question of what frequency to chat on. After all, even just here on Earth humans reach each other on a dizzying array of radio channels, microwaves, and with beams of visible and infrared light.

In a foundational SETI publication appearing in Nature in 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison proposed that 1420 MHz or thereabouts would be a good place to start the conversation. Hydrogen gas buzzes at precisely this radio frequency, and since hydrogen is the most common element in the galaxy (and the universe), this channel might be of particular interest. Schelling himself called out the frequency as an example of a Schelling point the next year in The Strategy of Conflict, writing in a footnote, In the most favored radio region there lies a unique, objective standard of frequency, which must be known to every observer in the universe.

The hydrogen line has since fallen out of favor in SETI, partially because all that hydrogen makes the channel rather noisy, and partially because astronomers no longer need to spend months turning the radio dial by hand as Drake did. In the first SETI searches youd look at a channel at a time, Sheikh says. Now we're doing billions of times that with a single observation with a single instrument.

Yet researchers continue to think about special frequencies. When analyzing a billion signals at once, there are a billion chances for the algorithm to mistakenly flag one channel as artificial. Identifying the most promising candidates ahead of time could lend confidence to future detections.

Jason Wright, a Penn State astrophysicist, described a novel set of Schelling point frequencies last year in the International Journal of Astrobiology. Using base ten numbers and the units of Hertz to measure radio frequencies are merely conventions of human culture, so Wright sought culture-independent frequencies in fundamental physics. He found inspiration in research from the pioneer quantum physicist, Max Planck, who in 1900 wrote about physical quantities that remain meaningful for all times, and also for extraterrestrial and non-human cultures, and therefore can be understood as natural units.

These fundamental constants of nature describe the speed of light, the strength of gravity, and the relationship between a photons energy and its frequency. Any civilization capable of building a radio beacon would likely be able to measure these numbers as humans have, and by mixing them together could find a particular frequency a universal frequency specified by fundamental physics. If you know those three things, you say huh, something funny happens at that frequency, Wright says.

Plancks constant, the gravitational constant, and the speed of light define a unique duration of time the Planck time which Wright used to build up a set of universal frequencies.

Electromagnetic radiation with the fundamental frequency would be impossible to detect, so Wright added the fundamental charge of atomic particles to the mix and used the four constants to construct a base like we use the number 10 as a base to formulate a list of more reasonable frequencies in both radio waves and visible light, a frequency comb, that SETI researchers could use to sift through the haystack of radio channels.

Special times

As some SETI researchers ponder how aliens might reach out, others wonder when. Transmitting beacons take energy, and civilizations may not transmit all the time. (We certainly dont. Our highest profile message lasted for three minutes in 1974, a powerful blast from the recently ruined Arecibo radio dish in Puerto Rico.)

To get picked up during Breakthrough Listens 15-minute scans, for instance, our nearest neighbors would need to be beaming out an all-directional signal using around a trillion watts of power, according to Wright, or about five percent of humanitys total energy consumption. Thats an expensive porch light to leave on all the time. To hear from cultures on a budget, researchers may need to work out the cosmic equivalent of noon a universal hailing time.

Sheikh reasons that any civilizations engaged in sending interstellar messages are likely to be at least as good at astronomy as we are. In recent decades, astronomers have spotted thousands of exoplanets, often by looking for stars that regularly dim as planets pass in front of them. Any aliens doing the same could already know Earth is here.

That knowledge could focus their efforts to make contact by specifying a unique time to say hello the moment when Earth eclipses the sun, dimming our star and revealing our presence. Sheikh is moving to the SETI Institute in California in January, and for her first project there she plans to use the institutes Allen Telescope Array to sweep the night sky directly overhead when the sun is positioned behind the Earth from the perspective of any inhabitants of star systems in view.

The Arecibo Radiotelescope in Puerto Rico, before its destruction

Via Wikimedia

She estimates that the survey will be sensitive to radio broadcasts from an extraterrestrial dish analogous to Arecibo transmitting within about 220 light years. Weaker signals, or signals coming from deeper in the galaxy which spans 100,000 light years would go unnoticed.

Sheikh admits that her plan might seem like a long shot, but argues that it beats scanning the sky from one side to the other the celestial equivalent of wandering Manhattan south to north. You have to start somewhere, she says. Why not start somewhere you think is more likely?

Another Schelling-inspired lesson is to test out as many Schelling points as possible. If your counterpart doesnt show up at Grand Central at noon, try Times Square at midnight. In that spirit, Sheikh is collaborating with Davenport, at the University of Washington to study another temporal landmark.

Nearly 35 years ago, astronomers witnessed a star just outside the Milky Way explode like a bomb. SN 1987a quickly became the subject of more academic papers than any other supernova. Its the only supernova thats gone off in our neighborhood in the last 100 years, Davenport says. Its kind of a big event. Its rare, visible, and outshone the entire galaxy.

If any civilizations were poised, waiting for a special galactic moment to announce their presence, SN 1987a would have been a great opportunity, suggested Argentinian astrophysicist Guillermo Lemarchand in 1994. Now Sheikh and Davenport, together with undergraduate physics and astronomy student Brbara Cabrales at Smith College, are working out the math to look for signals that would just be reaching Earth now, had they been sent in response to SN 1987a.

As light from the supernova reaches new stars, and potential signals from those stars ripple out through space, the zone of the sky to search changes. Using data from NASAs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which watches for stars being eclipsed by exoplanets, the group is developing an algorithm to look for stars that dim or flash at precisely the right moment. They dont expect to find a smoking gun with TESS, which keeps tabs on hundreds of thousands of stars. Their main goal is to get the software tools ready for the upcoming Vera Rubin Telescope, which will monitor 10 to 20 billion stars on a weekly basis.

Further down the line, other SETI researchers could tweak the software to search for radio signals, rather than looking only for civilizations with the technology to make their star flicker. Were looking at signals now in [visible light] because thats where the data is, Davenport says. Were scavengers. Were taking what is already available to us. Astronomers have to be crafty.

Shy Civilizations

The central conceit of seeking Schelling points in modern SETI is the assumption that both sides are playing the same game. But with more powerful instruments, researchers might be able to start looking for more bashful civilizations. In that case too, crafty astronomers are already thinking about what common behaviors might give an inhabited planet away, even if its not actively broadcasting.

Humanity, for instance, has benefited from putting television, radio, and weather satellites in high enough orbits that they continuously face the same part of the Earth. These spacecraft in geosynchronous orbits form an artificial ring around our planet roughly 22,000 miles above the ground. If another planet sported a thick enough artificial ring, it might block the light from its star in a peculiar way that astronomers could spot.

Our ring is sparse today but gets slightly denser every year. In 200 years, the satellite belt would become notable enough to be seen by extraterrestrial astronomers at a distance of ten light years using current telescopes, astrophysicist Hector Socas-Navarro calculated in 2018.

Another proposal assumes that civilizations have a vested interest in their long-term survival and may develop the technology to watch out for catastrophic asteroid collisions. As Carl Sagan reportedly quipped, If the dinosaurs had had a space program, they would not be extinct."

Some of the loudest radio pulses humanity has sent out into space have been for exactly this purpose, with much of the responsibility of monitoring the trajectories of asteroids falling to Arecibos 2.5-million-watt radar beam, before its destruction. Most of that radio signal bounced back to Earth carrying vital information about its target, but some would spill past the asteroid into the galaxy. Similar signals from another world would come sporadically. But since the orbits of asteroids and planets form a flat disk, any radar signals originating from a planet and directed toward an asteroid would always spill outward from the plane of the disk. Future eavesdropping attempts could use this fact to prioritize systems that are oriented edge on to Earth, rather than top down.

Some researchers recoil from efforts to get into the heads of extraterrestrial beings, considering them too outlandish, and Sheikh understands the instinct to avoid assumptions. Nevertheless, since coming to view SETI through a Schelling-tinted lens, she has realized that every project assumes some shared attributes between humanity and whomever else could be out there. Even the fact that many SETI searches target stars betrays a presumption that other lifeforms, like us, are more likely to live on planets than in deep space.

Everything is a Schelling point, Sheikh says. You can't get away from it.

Seeking universality

The more Schelling-inclined researchers can intuit commonalities between terrestrials and hypothetical extraterrestrials, the better their odds of success. And the only commonalities likely to span light years are going to be potential universalities, like knowing how fast sunbeams travel, or not wanting to be taken out by an asteroid. In the interest of ferreting out such universalities, some researchers point out that Earth might hold more than just one example to learn from.

Human cultures have risen and fallen for millennia,and have a long history of misinterpreting each others legacies. Spanish conquistadors, for instance, mistook the Great Pyramid of Cholula (the worlds largest pyramid by volume) for a hill and built a church on it. . Looking at the full sweep of human behaviors, anthropology-style, is useful for shaking us out of our own cultural biases, Kathryn Denning, an anthropologist at York University in Toronto.

She goes even farther, suggesting that observing how dolphins, whales, birds, and other social animals interact while sharing or dividing up territory would be a good way to broaden our thinking beyond the human.

Penn States Wright conceives of Schelling points in a similar way. The goal isnt to get into an aliens head per se, but rather to decipher the essential behaviors of all intelligent beings, starting with animals here on Earth. They have to use energy. They have to move around. At some point they have to interact with each other. They have to eat. And so, we hope that there are similar fundamental things the alien species out there might be doing, he says.

Perhaps in another 70 years, equipped with more sensitive instruments and smarter searching algorithms, SETI astronomers will have checked enough galactic Schelling points to start to answer Fermis question. If we show up at enough interesting landmarks at enough unique times and fail to connect, well have to conclude that no one else is trying to meet up. Or, if they are, theyre going about it in a way thats truly alien.

More:

To find extraterrestrials, we have to think like extraterrestrials - Massive Science

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Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Seizing the multiverse opportunities the hybrid way - The Times of India Blog