Alien Life/Teacher Notes

Session 6

Teacher's Notes

The final session aims to tackle the question “Are we alone?”. It looks briefly at the Fermi paradox and at the conditions needed for life outside our solar system. This session requires you to hide small bits of red card BEFORE the session starts. See below for details.

Do Aliens Exist?

• 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 worth skipping the early minutes where he claims to work in a biscuit factory to get to the alien abduction story before the students realise he is a comedian. This usually happens when he claims to have visited the planet IKEA. If anyone has a better quality clip please let us know! http://stabbers.truth.posiweb.net/stabbers/html/clive_anderson/01norman_house.htm

• Some abduction stories are clearly stupid, however a search on Google shows how many people seem to believe them. It has been claimed that many different “aliens” have visited Earth over the last 60 years. Whilst it is possible that aliens have visited – it is very unlikely that all exist. So why do people claim they do?

• Card trick – ask everyone to pick a card and quickly focus on that one card. 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 four are still there.

• Lack of memories 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 vivid imagination. The Hill story 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”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_drama). It is certainly interesting that no claims of alien visitation or abduction were recorded BEFORE the idea was created in the radio science fiction broadcast of WotW in 1938.

• The Roswell incident – is most probably a secret US military balloon. However there is still some speculation as to its origin http://en.wikipedia.org
  /wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident

Where could we find aliens?

• Planetary exploration has ruled out the existence of other civilisations within our own solar system. To get here and abduct people, aliens must have travelled a very very long way. And if these visitation stories are fictional, then there remains four possibilities:

- The goldilocks zone - just the right distance from the star http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitable_zone. It is possible for life to exist outside of the habitable zone, however this is much more unlikely

• How do we find places where aliens could live? See the SETI project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI) searching for regular signals like the green image, they've found nothing but static.

• Before the session start, cut a piece of red card into eight pieces. Hide seven parts in the room and put the eigth somewhere far away, in your bin at home for example. Offer something really nice (big box of sweets, etc.) if the group can re-assemble the card in a minute. 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 from 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 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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox )– where are they? Statistically speaking, if aliens exist and want to be found, we should be able to detect them. After spending a significant time 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.
  
• 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'?

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 Master Class!.