Alien Life

TES Teaching Resource of the Year - 2011

• 88 Miles per hour
• Alien Life
• Astronomy Master Class
• Celestial Wanderers
• It's full of stars
• Recreating the Big Bang
  

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Lesson idea. Lesson 6 of a series of 6 entitled “Astronomy masterclass” (SC0018).

Teaching approach. This last of six presentations to recruit students for A level physics, is more light-hearted and simpler than the two previous resources. It considers the arguments around whether or not humanity is alone and includes an initial look at the bizarre nature of many of the claims of alien encounters - including a fictional one for good measure - before moving onto the more serious side of alien hunting. It concludes with a probabilistic argument based on the Fermi paradox.

Resource details
Title	Alien Life
Topic	[[Topics/Astronomy|Astronomy]]
Teaching approach	[[Teaching Approaches/|]]
Learning Objectives	By the end of the session students should be able to: • Appreciate that it is extremely unlikely that there is sentient life elsewhere in our solar system, • Consequently appreciate that the majority of "encounters" are almost certainly not real and some of the psychological and physiological explanations for this, • Appreciate that microbial life may be much more common than sentient life, but is also much harder to find, • Understand the SETI organisation and what it has found so far.
Format / structure	A Narrated Screencast of Session 5 from the Astronomy Masterclass. This fifth session looks at the frontiers of human understanding and the truly strange world proposed by Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. 1. Session 5 narrated video 34mins http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXLUTm-rXnA&feature=relmfu, 2. Session 5 prezi is slides 141-199 of the 241mb file: https://www.box.com/shared/aqnk3lvr09. http://prezi.com/2hk390sfkqjh/the-astronomy-masterclass/ 3. Astronomy masterclass.pdf use pages 141-199 for Session 5. The overview Masterclass Prezi (all 6 sessions) can be viewed online http://prezi.com/2hk390sfkqjh. The full set of resources for the 6 sessions can be viewed online at: http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/The-Astronomy-Masterclass-6070303/ (This also includes a link to the associated 7 videos on YouTube).
Subject	[[Resources/Science|Science]]
Age of students / grade	[[Resources/Secondary|Secondary]],  [[Resources/KS4|KS4]]
Related ORBIT Wiki Resources	Astronomy Masterclass, It's full of stars, From Earth to Moon, Celestial Wanderers, Recreating the Big Bang, 88 Miles per hour
Files and resources to view and download	For session 6 of the Astronomy Masterclass, see p201 to 234 of the full PDF at https://www.box.com/shared/aqnk3lvr09

Teacher's Notes

Session 6 – Alien Life

The final session aims to tackle the “are we alone” question and the abduction question, looks briefly at the Fermi paradox and finishes with a look at the needed conditions for life outside our solar system.
Note this session requires you to hide some small bits of red card BEFORE the session starts. See bold section below for details.
• Do aliens exist? – full survey data http://www.alieninfluence.com/do-aliens-exist.html • Video - comedian Peter Cook impersonating an alien abduction victim – It is sometimes worth skipping the first few mins (where he claims to work in a biscuit factory) to get onto the alien abduction story before the students realise he is a comedian (usually happens when he claims to have visited the planet IKEA) – Quality on this is pretty poor – If anyone has a better original please let me know!
http://stabbers.truth.posiweb.net/stabbers/html/clive_anderson/01norman_house.htm
• Some abduction stories are clearly stupid – however many people seem to believe them – a simple search on Google shows how popular the idea is.
• However many different “aliens” have been claimed to visit the Earth over the last 60 years. Whilst it is potentially possible that aliens have visited us – it is very unlikely that all of the ones on the timeline exist... So why do people claim they do?
• Card trick – ask everyone to pick a card and focus hard on that one card (do this quickly) – switch to the next slide and state “you are all so predictable you all picked the same card and I removed it.” Someone will probably notice all the cards have changed – but many will not and will swear that the original 4 are still there...
• Lack of souvenirs is a good argument against mass alien abduction.
• However some people really do seem to believe they were abducted. Betty Hill’s story
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_and_Barney_Hill_abduction
- Betty hill really believes she was abducted – of that there is no doubt – so either she is correct OR she has a very vivid imagination.
• The Hill abduction was the first ever reported case of “abduction” and it may be significant that it followed shortly after the 1953 film “War of the Worlds” - It is certainly interesting that NO claims of alien visitation and/or abduction were recorded BEFORE the idea was created in science fiction specifically in the radio broadcast of WotW in 1938.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_drama)
• The Roswell incident – Most probably a secret US military balloon – however still some speculation as to its origin http://en.wikipedia.org
/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident
• Planetary exploration has ruled out other civilisations within our own solar system – (session 3) – which means to get here and abduct people aliens must have travelled a very very long way. And If abduction/visitation stories are probably fictional – then there remains 4 possibilities.
• The goldilocks zone
- Just the right distance from the star http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitable_zone
- It is however possible for life to exist outside of the habitable zone – however this is much more unlikely
• So how do we find places where aliens could live? The SETI project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI
• Searching for regular signals like the green image
• So far found nothing but static
• Challenge – Requires setup before the session starts – cut a piece of red card into 8 pieces. Hide 7 bits in the room – put the 8th somewhere far far away – ideally in your bin at home or something. Offer something really nice (big box of sweets etc) if the group can re-assemble it in 1 min. When they fail offer to give them an extra 2 mins...
- Proving a negative is very difficult – How long would they need to search before they would give up?
- How long until they decided it wasn’t there?
• Carl Sagan (who was a lead scientist on the Voyager project – session 3) developed a way of estimating how many alien civilisations there should be...
- Video - The Drake Equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
- Video - In the Big bang clip the actors go on to refine the drake equation to work out the chances of them getting a girlfriend...
• The Drake equation is full of assumptions – however it is VERY difficult to put in assumptions to give an answer of the order of 101 or 102. Most estimations put the number of aliens at either 106 or higher OR 10-1 or lower.
- This leads onto the Fermi Paradox – where are they?
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
• Statistically speaking – IF aliens want to be found AND they exist – we should be able to detect them. After a significant time spent searching IF we do not find them – the likelihood switches from “they do exist but we just didn’t see them” to “there is nothing there”. The probabilities for this are very hard to calculate however the flip point will probably happen at some time in the relatively near future.
• The Flake equation is a parody of the drake equation that looks back at the area of alien abduction.
• Video - The final video of the session shows Jeremy Beadle spoofing an alien landing in the 1980’s I wonder if Aliens can really drink tea?

End of session 6

Potential cloudy weather activities

• Create an alien abduction defence kit
• Cinematic showing of videos created in sessions 4/5
• Feedback survey/suggestions for next year’s masterclass!