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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/27/aliens-exist-survival-universe-jim-alkhalili #1: Aliens may not exist – but that’s good news for our survival By Jim Al-Khalili The Guardian June 27, 2018 In 1950 Enrico Fermi, an Italian-born American Nobel prize-winning physicist, posed a very simple question with profound implications for one of the most important scientific puzzles: whether or not life exists beyond Earth. The story goes that during a lunchtime chat with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the issue of flying saucers came up. The conversation was lighthearted, and it doesn’t appear that any of the scientists at that particular gathering believed in aliens. But Fermi merely wanted to know: “Where is everybody?” His point was that, since the age of the universe is so great and its size so vast, with hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way alone, then unless the Earth is astonishingly special, the universe should be teeming with life. This might include intelligent species advanced enough to have the knowledge and technology necessary for space travel. They ought to have colonized the entire galaxy by now. So where are they all? More recently, the late Stephen Hawking argued along similar lines. He said. “To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational.” Hawking was articulating the same popular argument as Fermi—that the sheer vastness of the universe all but guarantees we have company. In recent years, scientists have begun to take the subject more seriously again. One of the most exciting areas of research in astronomy has been the discovery of extra-solar planets, worlds orbiting starts other than our sun. Many of them even appear to be Earth-like in size and climate. Astronomers now believe there are billions of these other worlds, many of which will have conditions suitable for life. The probability of life, maybe even intelligent life, existing on at least one of them must surely, therefore, be overwhelming. Now, however, scientists at the wonderfully named Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford have poured cold water on Hawking’s and others’ optimism. They have carried out a thoughtful statistical analysis by dissecting a mathematical relation known as the Drake equation, which allows us to calculate the probability of extraterrestrial life based on the combined probabilities of all the ingredients for life being in place. Let me make clear at the outset that the Drake equation is not very scientific, for the sole reason that some of the factors that need to be fed into it are pure guesswork at this stage. Not the least of these is the big question: given all things we believe are necessary for life (a source of energy, liquid water and organic molecules), how likely is it that life will emerge? The authors of the new study offer two insights, one pessimistic and the other more cheery. The first is that Fermi’s paradox is easy to resolve. The reason we have not had any messages from ET is because, well, there is no ET out there. They calculate the probability we are alone in the universe to be in the range of 39%-85% and the probability that we are alone in our own galaxy to be between 53% and 99.6%. Basically, don’t hold your breath. Biologists, of course, hate all this silly speculation. They quite rightly point out that we still do not properly understand how life originated here on Earth, so how can we possibly have any confidence in anticipating its existence or nonexistence elsewhere? There are some who argue that life on Earth appeared pretty quickly after the right conditions emerged almost 4bn years ago, which was when our planet had cooled sufficiently for liquid water to exist. Doesn’t that mean it could easily appear elsewhere too? Actually, no. A statistical sample of one tells us nothing. It is quite possible that biology is a freak local aberration, the product of a chemical fluke so improbable that it didn’t happen anywhere else in the observable universe. So where do we stand? Well, there are reasons to believe that we may have an answer in the coming decade or two, one way or the other. Astrobiologists are about to search exoplanets for the gases produced by microbial life using sophisticated next-generation space telescopes. There is also the possibility of finding microbial life closer to home, under the ice of several of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I did say that the study also provided some cheer. Some have claimed we have not found ET yet because intelligent life (including us) always annihilates itself before it can successfully develop the technology for interstellar travel or communication. But maybe the silence is simply because no such alien civilizations exist. So, as the authors puts it, pessimism about our own future is therefore unfounded. We may be alone, but we may just survive. The author, Jim Al-Khalili, is a professor of physics and professor of the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/but-seriously-where-iseverybody/563498/ #2: But, Seriously, Where Are the Aliens? By Derek Thompson The Atlantic June 22, 2018 Enrico Fermi was an architect of the atomic bomb, a father of radioactivity research, and a Nobel Prize–winning scientist who contributed to breakthroughs in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. But in the popular imagination, his name is most commonly associated with one simple, three-word question, originally meant as a throwaway joke to amuse a group of scientists discussing UFOs at the Los Alamos lab in 1950: Where is everybody? Fermi wasn’t the first person to ask a variant of this question about alien intelligence. But he owns it. The query is known around the world as the Fermi paradox. It’s typically summarized like this: If the universe is unfathomably large, the probability of intelligent alien life seems almost certain. But since the universe is also 14 billion years old, it would seem to afford plenty of time for these beings to make themselves known to humanity. So, well, where is everybody? In the seventh episode of Crazy/Genius, a new podcast from The Atlantic on tech, science, and culture, we put the question to several experts, including Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist of NASA and current director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Adam Frank, a writer and astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; Anders Sandberg, a scientist and futurist at the University of Oxford; and Tim Urban, the science essayist at Wait But Why. Proposed solutions to Fermi’s Paradox fit into three broad categories. One: They’re nowhere—and no-when. Aliens don’t exist, and they never have. This scenario might have seemed more likely in the universe imagined by Aristotle and Ptolemy—a small assortment of celestial orbs spinning around a singular Earth. But that isn’t the universe anybody lives in. After searching the skies for Earthlike planets for centuries, cosmologists have, in the last two decades, broken open the cosmic piñata. Today they estimate as many as 500 billion billion sunlike stars, with 100 billion billion Earthlike planets. The more we learn about the universe, the more absurd it would seem if all but one of those bodies were bereft of life. To my mind, this is both the least likely answer to Fermi’s Paradox and the only one that fits all the evidence currently available to astrophysicists. Two: Life is out there—but intelligence isn’t. Ellen Stofan predicts that we’ll find evidence of simple life on Mars or a faraway moon within the next 10 to 30 years. But she’s imagining something more like microbes or algae, not underwater cities in the liquid-methane lakes of Titan. This shifts the question from “Where is everybody?” to a more sophisticated query: What precisely is keeping an infinitude of dumb molecules from assembling to form an abundance of intelligent life? Think about all the factors that add up to the creation of a human. First the spark of life, followed by the creation of simple cells, then complex multicellular organisms, then the formation of organs like brains. If humanlike intelligence is rare, one of these steps must be quite insurmountable. For example, it’s notable that Earth has several million species of life, but only one has produced a civilization—that we know of. The relative silence of the universe suggests some kind of “Great Filter” that is restricting the creation of more intelligent beings. More ominously, some scientists think it’s possible that this Great Filter isn’t in our distant past, but rather in our future; so, it’s not that intelligent life is rare, but rather that it pops into existence for a few thousand years before getting wiped out of existence for mysterious reasons. Three: Intelligent life is abundant—but quiet. This possibility, known as the zoo hypothesis, invites some of the strangest speculation. Maybe humanity is still so basic and primitive that advanced civilizations don’t think we’re worth talking to. Or maybe those other civilizations have learned that broadcasting their existence leads to extermination at the hands of violent, intergalactic colonizers. Or maybe our solar system just happens to be located in a quiet, exurban cul-de-sac of the universe, an accident of cosmic geography. But none of these theories hold a candle to my favorite conjecture of all: slumbering digital aliens. To understand why intelligent life might prefer to be based in a computer or cat-napping through the Anthropocene, check out the episode. The author, Derek Thompson, is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics, labor markets, and the media. He is the author of Hit Makers. https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/04/opinions/alien-life-opinion-lincoln/index.html #3: Does alien life exist? By Don Lincoln CNN January 4, 2018 Last month, The New York Times published an article describing a secret government program investigating reports by military pilots of unidentified flying objects they encountered in the course of their daily duties. The media was awash with stories of flying saucers and extraterrestrial encounters, with scientists downplaying the likelihood of alien visitation and UFO enthusiasts exclaiming their excitement. While I sit very firmly on the side that believes these reports more likely have an unremarkable and terrestrial explanation, whether alien life exists is a very real and credible scientific question. What is the possibility that life—and even intelligent life— exists around a star other than our own? And how can we find out? In 1961, Frank Drake wrote down what is now called the Drake Equation, which is frequently used to help guide thinking about extraterrestrial life. The equation multiplies a string of probabilities—such as the fraction of stars with planets, the fractions of planets that are habitable, and the percentage of times intelligent life forms—to give an estimate of the likelihood that we are not alone in the universe. When Drake wrote down his equation, very little was known about any of these probabilities. They were all pretty much guesses. However, using the best guesses of the day, he estimated there were 10 planets in the Milky Way galaxy emitting radio waves and thereby detectable in principle by Earth-based radio telescopes. A lot has changed in the last half-century and we now have a much better understanding of some of these numbers. So, what do we know for sure? While the universe is vast, let's restrict our investigation to only our own Milky Way, as other galaxies are very far away and the idea of traveling between them is even more daunting than interstellar travel. So, I'll only talk about our celestial neighbors. The Milky Way has about a hundred billion stars in it, with some estimates four times larger than that. In 2009, NASA launched the Kepler spacecraft to search for planets around distant stars. What the Kepler mission found was nothing short of astounding. We know that most stars have planets (over 80%). About a quarter of those planetary systems have a planet at a distance from the star that would allow for liquid water. And, of those, 10% to 20% of the time those planets are around the same size as Earth. Combining those numbers, we can estimate with some accuracy that the number of possibly habitable planets in our galaxy is in the neighborhood of 2 billion. While there is some uncertainty in this estimate, it is relatively firm. We are far less certain in our estimation of whether life will be created, if it will survive, and if intelligence will evolve. If these life-related probabilities are high, say above 50%, then life should be extremely common in our galaxy. If those numbers are low, we could be alone. For all these factors, we only have our own Earth to guide us. And, of course, generalizing from a single instance is not a wise thing to do. However, we are not completely ignorant even with just our single planet to study. The Earth is about 4.55 billion years old. However, the early Earth was molten and inimical to life. However, by about 4.4 billion years ago, the Earth cooled enough for water to exist on it. We are not certain exactly when life formed on Earth, but conservative estimates suggest that it was no later than 3.8 billion years ago, with some estimates suggesting the earlier date of 4.29 billion years ago. No matter the estimate, it is clear that life formed on Earth very soon after the planet cooled enough to have liquid water. This suggests that the formation of life is easy. Were it difficult, one would expect that it would have taken longer. This is not an airtight argument, to be sure. But it is a reasonable one. Although life formed very early in the life of our planet, multicellular life came much later. It wasn't until oxygen permeated the atmosphere that more complex life could be supported. It was about 540 million years ago that life from which humans evolved came into existence. The fact that it took 3-4 billion years for "our" kind of cells to evolve suggests this process is slow and not at all guaranteed. It requires an abundant supply of a volatile chemical like oxygen to happen at all. However, we also know that life has survived for about 4 billion years, no matter how many times the universe has tried to snuff it out. The impact 65 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs was a dramatic event in the history of Earth, but it was dwarfed by the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, when 90% of the species on the planet went extinct. Yet life survived. Under Earth-like conditions, life is hardy. The evolution of intelligence seems to be rarer. Until humans evolved, no other forms of comparable intelligence existed. It is somewhat arbitrary where to draw the line, but our own species, Homo sapiens, came into existence perhaps 200,000 years ago. The earliest species of the genus Homo was Homo Habilis and they first evolved around 2 million years ago. By either definition, humanlike intelligence took a long time to appear. Further, if humanity were to go extinct tomorrow, there are no species around that are likely to quickly evolve intelligence. Granted, there are species that are more intelligent than others, but their path to humanlike intelligence is by no means assured. From this, it is possible to provisionally conclude that the evolution of intelligence is rare. Thus, from what we know and can infer from observation, planets are common, life is probably common and intelligence is rare. We can also conclude that life is hardy on Earth, but Earth may exist in an unusual environment. After all, for life to exist, its host star must be stable and it must not be too close to other stars that could go supernova and bathe the Earth with sterilizing radiation. Indeed, some calculations predict that stars near the center of our galaxy -- a relatively hostile environment -- are not good candidates for life to flourish. Some predictions say that only about 2% of stars exist in benign portions of the galaxy, which means that there are maybe 40 million Earth-like planets in our galaxy. So, what's the answer? Are we alone in the universe? The honest answer is that we don't know. We know that planets that could support liquid water are common. But we don't know much about the origin of life and the probability that it will evolve as it did on Earth. From what we have seen on Earth, it seems that the creation of life is relatively easy, but the evolution of intelligence is hard. Taken in aggregate, it does seem that extraterrestrial life should exist and there may be planets where our cosmic cousins also look at the sky and dream. Nobody can tell you for sure what those Navy pilots saw (although I'd bet real money that it was something ordinary). But it's a big universe and it seems that life could very well be common. There may come a day when an alien craft lands on the White House lawn like in the 1950s movie "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers," or, more likely, we hear the first signals in our giant radio telescopes. Then we would know, once and for all, that we are not alone. The author, Dr. Don Lincoln, is a physics researcher who studies the laws of nature. He is the author of Alien Universe: Extraterrestrial Life in Our Minds and in the Cosmos. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/12/19/the-aliens-are-coming-and-no-onecares/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4c82aecaed09 #4: The Aliens are coming, and no one cares By Molly Roberts The Washington Post December 19, 2017 Hold on to your tinfoil hats. The New York Times reported this weekend that the Pentagon houses a program devoted to the study of unidentified flying objects. The Defense Department claims the 10-year-old initiative has been shut down, but others say the funding ended and the work went on — between officials’ other duties, in the shadows, as mysterious as its extraterrestrial subjects. The government, apparently, thinks those subjects are real enough to have spent $22 million per year on probing their whereabouts. (Skeptics point out that then-Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Democrat-Nevada) requested much of the initial funding and that most of it went to an aerospace research company run by a longtime billionaire friend of his.) The program gathered recordings of reported UFO sightings, including military footage of a glowing ship shooting through the sky. It also collected metal alloys of, well, alien composition. Its director declared in a 2009 briefing summary that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact.” And we don’t care. Well, some of us do. The extraterrestrial exposé has prompted some commentators to raise a digital eyebrow. But mostly, the possibility of alien invasion has not managed to break through the Trump bubble. It’s not prompting columnists to columnize, or even that many tweeters to tweet. We’re too busy placing bets on whether special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation will meet an early end, or crying out against misbegotten votes by moderates for a bad tax bill. We have no time to contemplate the cosmos. This makes some sense. The aliens might be coming, but they’re probably not coming anytime soon. Rate hikes and health-care collapses and an unopen Internet, on the other hand, may all be here to ring in the new year. It’s hard to worry about a threat that might not even exist when there are so many threats that do, right here, right now. And it’s even harder to think about extraterrestrial life not as a threat but just as a thing, or as an idea. It’s too distant. What’s the point? I don’t know much about what lives beyond our solar system, or even what lives beyond Earth. Scientists, as far as I can tell, think statistics say that aliens are out there somewhere, but whether we can reach them or they us is far less certain. I definitely don’t know the proper price tag to put on finding out more. But I do remember the eclipse. It says something that it took the sun disappearing for us to tear our eyes away from Trump and look somewhere else for a second. But however disheartening the allconsuming chaos of today’s politics may be, this summer’s astronomical rarity was a reprieve, and a comfort. A total solar eclipse, those who have seen one all seem to say, reminds you that the universe is very big and you are very small. On one level, that’s terrifying. No one likes to hear they don’t matter. On another level, it’s reassuring to think that each of us is connected to some transcendental community. Even if we don’t matter alone, we matter together — as a collective piece of something much, much larger. Extraterrestrial life tells us the same story. It’s less tangible than the eclipse, and it will take more than dark glasses to get a good look. But it also situates us in a vast universe that makes us feel both tiny and tremendous at the same time. It tells us there’s a lot we don’t understand, and a lot we never will, but that we’re all striving, seeking and sometimes finding together. So we should talk about aliens this holiday season. Not only because it’s important, and our ho-hum response so far belies the striking reality that the Defense Department believes they’re closer than we knew, but also because the continued hunt for nonhuman intelligent life, amid all the uncertainty, is part of what makes us human. The author, Molly Roberts, is a Harvard graduate with a BA in English and is an editorial writer for The Washington Post. https://slate.com/technology/2017/12/2017-was-a-banner-year-for-searching-for-aliens.html #5: We Wanted to Believe Why 2017 was a banner year for discussing, searching for, and panicking over aliens. By Neel V. Patel Slate December 29, 2017 If you wanted to believe, 2017 was the year to do it. Thanks to an explosion of new discoveries of potentially habitable planets outside our solar system, a better understanding of how life might evolve on other worlds, and not inconsequentially a shift in the culture, aliens are no longer regarded as just another realm of paranormal craziness. We now have a modern-dayNASA that is explicitly directed to look for life, billionaires pouring money into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and a Department of Defense that admits it was studying UFO sightings for some time. Sandwiched between the 10th and 11th seasons of The X-Files, 2017 felt like the year aliens finally, actually, for real this time went mainstream. Nearly 61 percent of the world’s population believes alien life exists somewhere in the universe. That’s little surprise when you think about how much happened this year. For starters, NASA scientists began the year with the announced discovery of seven potentially habitable exoplanets in the TRAPPIST-1 star system, 40 light-years away. It’s going to take more some powerful instruments to really determine whether any of those planets possess the essentials for life (liquid water, an atmosphere that keeps things warm and fuzzy, a star that isn’t spewing out violent radiation in every direction), and the system is way too far for anyone to even dream about sending a spacecraft there before we’re all dead and gone. But the system’s discovery is a critical sign that potentially habitable worlds are probably much more common—and closer—than we had ever imagined. Let’s not forget some of the other exoplanets that stoked our hopes of finding extraterrestrial neighbors. Ross 128 b, 11 light-years away, is probably our best chance at finding living aliens thanks to its quiet host star (the detection of strange radio signals fed hopes that an alien civilization was living nearby). GJ 237 b, a little over 12 light-years away, is a “super-Earth” that could support life as well (SETI scientists actually beamed a musical message over to the system to make contact with any intelligent lifeforms in the neighborhood). And 39 light-years away, astronomers found evidence that an Earth-sized bugger called GJ 1132 b had an atmosphere to potentially allow life on the surface to thrive. Within our own solar system, NASA found new hopes that aliens might actually just be a quick hop away, living on worlds like Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus. These rocks possess underground liquid oceans that could be the perfect mixing pots for the evolution of extraterrestrial life. The knowledge that even Earthbound life can withstand extreme environments is spurring the potential greenlight for missions to Saturn’s moon Titan or to a nearby comet to look for life or the ingredients for life— part of what looks like the agency’s new emphasis of astrobiology missions. Could we one day find lifeforms that are as smart or smarter than our own species? There’s no shortage of sharp minds pondering the question. New theories are being pitched that maybe the aliens aren’t actually all dead—they’re just in a deep sleep. Maybe it’s actually better off this way? Movies like Alien: Covenant and Life were good reminders that not all lifeforms are peaceful. Maybe we should just count our blessings and stay quiet until we figure out how we might be able to defend ourselves from a hostile alien invasion. There’s little chance of that actually happening. A strange interstellar asteroid decided to stop by the solar system for a visit, and one of the first things scientists decided to do was see whether it was actually an alien ship. It wasn’t, of course, but it just goes to show you that even the most implausible explanation wouldn’t go uninvestigated in 2017. In the future, however, we’ll probably just let the intelligent machines handle the hard work. But all of these developments were at least grounded in the processes and logic that define scientific research. There was another facet to this year’s obsession with aliens that hewed closer to what most of us have heard before: UFOs and government involvement. Hacking collective Anonymous got things heated in the middle of the summer when it claimed NASA was about to reveal the existence of aliens. That didn’t happen—perhaps because the agency decided it to hold off on such a bombshell announcement, or almost definitely because it has never found evidence of aliens. OK, so a bunch of hackers turned out to be wrong about aliens. That’s nothing special. What is special, however, is the New York Times publishing a piece detailing the government’s five-year, $22 million program to investigate UFOs. It’s been a few weeks, and the media is still trying to make sense of it all. Only in 2017 could the craziest news of the year not be that the Pentagon actually admitted that such a program once existed. (Also, I still can’t believe Tom DeLonge was onto something real.) And less than a week after the New York Times piece was published, SpaceX’s final launch of the year turned Southern California’s skies into an eerie scene out of an alieninvasion movie. It wasn’t a UFO, of course, but the timing couldn’t have been better. If 2017 was a banner year for talking about aliens and UFOs with earnestness and enthusiasm, 2018 seems poised to take all of those conversations to new heights. The rapid advancement of new technology and the circulation of new data—combined with increasingly favorable odds that something is out there—means that as time passes, our search for cosmic companionship will only get more intense. The author, Neel V. Patel, is a science and tech journalist from New York City, reporting for publications like Slate, Popular Science and WIRED. He is an alum of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute (M.A., Journalism, ’14), as a part of the school’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP). https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/opinion/sunday/yes-there-have-been-aliens.html #6: Yes, There Have Been Aliens By Adam Frank June 10, 2016 Last month astronomers from the Kepler spacecraft team announced the discovery of 1,284 new planets, all orbiting stars outside our solar system. The total number of such “exoplanets” confirmed via Kepler and other methods now stands at more than 3,000. This represents a revolution in planetary knowledge. A decade or so ago the discovery of even a single new exoplanet was big news. Not anymore. Improvements in astronomical observation technology have moved us from retail to wholesale planet discovery. We now know, for example, that every star in the sky likely hosts at least one planet. But planets are only the beginning of the story. What everyone wants to know is whether any of these worlds has aliens living on it. Does our newfound knowledge of planets bring us any closer to answering that question? A little bit, actually, yes. In a paper published in the May issue of the journal Astrobiology, the astronomer Woodruff Sullivan and I show that while we do not know if any advanced extraterrestrial civilizations currently exist in our galaxy, we now have enough information to conclude that they almost certainly existed at some point in cosmic history. Among scientists, the probability of the existence of an alien society with which we might make contact is discussed in terms of something called the Drake equation. In 1961, the National Academy of Sciences asked the astronomer Frank Drake to host a scientific meeting on the possibilities of “interstellar communication.” Since the odds of contact with alien life depended on how many advanced extraterrestrial civilizations existed in the galaxy, Drake identified seven factors on which that number would depend, and incorporated them into an equation. The first factor was the number of stars born each year. The second was the fraction of stars that had planets. After that came the number of planets per star that traveled in orbits in the right locations for life to form (assuming life requires liquid water). The next factor was the fraction of such planets where life actually got started. Then came factors for the fraction of life-bearing planets on which intelligence and advanced civilizations (meaning radio signal-emitting) evolved. The final factor was the average lifetime of a technological civilization. Drake’s equation was not like Einstein’s E=mc2. It was not a statement of a universal law. It was a mechanism for fostering organized discussion, a way of understanding what we needed to know to answer the question about alien civilizations. In 1961, only the first factor — the number of stars born each year — was understood. And that level of ignorance remained until very recently. That’s why discussions of extraterrestrial civilizations, no matter how learned, have historically boiled down to mere expressions of hope or pessimism. What, for example, is the fraction of planets that form life? Optimists might marshal sophisticated molecular biological models to argue for a large fraction. Pessimists then cite their own scientific data to argue for a fraction closer to 0. But with only one example of a life-bearing planet (ours), it’s hard to know who is right. Or consider the average lifetime of a civilization. Humans have been using radio technology for only about 100 years. How much longer will our civilization last? A thousand more years? A hundred thousand more? Ten million more? If the average lifetime for a civilization is short, the galaxy is likely to be unpopulated most of the time. Once again, however, with only one example to draw from, it’s back to a battle between pessimists and optimists. But our new planetary knowledge has removed some of the uncertainty from this debate. Three of the seven terms in Drake’s equation are now known. We know the number of stars born each year. We know that the percentage of stars hosting planets is about 100. And we also know that about 20 to 25 percent of those planets are in the right place for life to form. This puts us in a position, for the first time, to say something definitive about extraterrestrial civilizations — if we ask the right question. In our recent paper, Professor Sullivan and I did this by shifting the focus of Drake’s equation. Instead of asking how many civilizations currently exist, we asked what the probability is that ours is the only technological civilization that has ever appeared. By asking this question, we could bypass the factor about the average lifetime of a civilization. This left us with only three unknown factors, which we combined into one “biotechnical” probability: the likelihood of the creation of life, intelligent life and technological capacity. You might assume this probability is low, and thus the chances remain small that another technological civilization arose. But what our calculation revealed is that even if this probability is assumed to be extremely low, the odds that we are not the first technological civilization are actually high. Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first. To give some context for that figure: In previous discussions of the Drake equation, a probability for civilizations to form of one in 10 billion per planet was considered highly pessimistic. According to our finding, even if you grant that level of pessimism, a trillion civilizations still would have appeared over the course of cosmic history. In other words, given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational. In science an important step forward can be finding a question that can be answered with the data at hand. Our paper did just this. As for the big question — whether any other civilizations currently exist — we may have to wait a long while for relevant data. But we should not underestimate how far we have come in a short time. Adam Frank is an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a cofounder of NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, and the author of About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang. Comparative Rhetorical Analysis You have been exploring the topic of aliens (extraterrestrial life) and have read six op-ed pieces:       “Aliens May Not Exist but That’s Good News for Our Survival” (Jim Al-Khalili) “But Seriously, Where Are the Aliens?” (Derek Thompson) “Does Alien Life Exist?” (Don Lincoln) “The Aliens Are Coming, and No One Cares” (Molly Roberts) “We Wanted to Believe” (Neel V. Patel) “Yes, There Have Been Aliens” (Adam Frank) Choose two articles, and write a comparative rhetorical analysis, answering the following key question: Key Question Of the two articles, which author makes a more convincing argument and why?  Purpose: Analyze and evaluate rhetorical choices in complex traditional texts (SLO #1).  Audience: Someone who is interested in the topic of aliens but unfamiliar with the articles.  Point-of-View: 3rd person (avoid “I” or “you” pronouns in this paper)  Requirements: o The MLA-formatted essay must be 1,500-2,000 words. No Works Cited page is necessary. o Students must highlight their essays in Microsoft Word or Google Docs using the pattern on the following page before submitting the rough draft or final draft on Canvas. o The essay must focus on evaluating the authors’ arguments for effectiveness and should avoid the student’s personal opinions regarding the topic or existence of aliens. o The essay must contain 4-6 body paragraphs focused on comparing and analyzing both authors’ use of claims, reasoning, assumptions, evidence, organizational strategies, rhetorical appeals, fallacies, etc. Comparative Rhetorical Analysis Essay Grading Rubric/Checklist Category Rationale/Comments Points Title is appropriate and original: Yes/No Title Introduction includes a hook/attention-grabber: Yes/No & Context regarding the topic of aliens is provided: Yes/No Introduction 20 Both authors are introduced and sources are summarized: Yes/No Thesis answers the Key Question and is highlighted yellow: Yes/No Body paragraphs have a clear topic: Yes/No Organization Body paragraphs discuss both authors: Yes/No 20 Body paragraphs progress in a logical order: Yes/No Support & Integration of Adequate evidence is used from both articles to support points: Yes/No Paraphrase and quotation are used effectively: Yes/No 20 Sources Comparison of rhetorical moves each author makes is effective: Yes/No Rhetorical Analysis & Evaluation of Sources Analysis of rhetorical moves is clear and in-depth: Yes/No Discussion of strengths and weaknesses of each text included: Yes/No Evaluation of which article is more effective is clear: Yes/No 50 Personal opinions regarding aliens are avoided: Yes/No Restates thesis and summarizes key points: Yes/No Conclusion Ends with a global statement about significance of analysis: Yes/No 10 Highlighting Pattern: Grammar, Highlighting,   & MLA Format    Thesis Statement=Yellow (Last sentence of introduction) Topics or Points of Comparison=Green (Hopefully, you have one topic or point of comparison for each body paragraph. This should be one word or phrase.) Examples from Article #1=Orange (Identify either article as Article #1--just be consistent. Highlight any quotes, evidence, or explanation regarding this article.) Examples from Article #2=Pink (Identify either article as Article #2-just be consistent. Highlight any quotes, evidence, or explanation regarding this article.) Evaluation of Effectiveness=Blue (Any time you are arguing why an article was effective or ineffective, highlight this blue.) Total 30 150 English 124 ◊ Spring 2019 ◊ Prof. Sarah Martin
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(Surname) 1
Student Name
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Comparative Rhetorical Analysis
Introduction
The question of whether we are alone in the universe or whether aliens exist has produced heated
debates among several scholars over the years. Whereas some of these scholars have attempted to
prove the existence of aliens in the universe, others have claimed that the available evidence proves
that we are alone in the universe, or maybe there are aliens out there, but they lack the intelligence
to or are unwilling to explore the other planets. Two authors, Molly Roberts and Derek Thompson,
both of who are editorial writers of The Washington Post and The Atlantic respectively, have come
up with specific arguments in an attempt to prove their stances in the debate on whether aliens
exist or not. This essay will be based on an analysis of the two articles on the basis of which author
has come up with the most convincing argument of the two.
In her article, "The Aliens are coming, and no one cares," Molly Roberts attempts to prove that
aliens are out there in the universe, but nobody wants to pay attention in them. She points out the
program initiated by Pentagon which gathered recordings of UFO sightings across the universe, as
well as a footage recorded by the military of a glowing ship darting through the sky. The program
also collected metal alloys which were proven to be of alien composition, and the director of the
program assured the public that whatever the world once considered as science fiction is now a
scientific fact. However, she claims that despite such evidence collected over the years, the people

(Surname) 2
still don't care. Even though some few people care, the Trump administration still hasn't taken the
possibility of an alien invasion seriously. She further claims that the reason why people d...


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