Copyright © 2018 by Michael Wall, PhD

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ISBNs: 978-1-5387-2938-0 (ebook)
E3-20181010-DA-NF
Table of Contents

Introduction: Wow! 7
Part I: What’s Out There? 10
Chapter 1: Where Is Everybody? 11
Chapter 2: Are We All Martians? 20
Chapter 3: What Does ET Look Like? 27
Chapter 4: Do Aliens Have Sex? 40
Chapter 5: What Are We Looking For? 45
Chapter 6: Where Is ET Hiding? 57
Chapter 7: How Would the World Be Told? 69
Chapter 8: Could We Talk to ET? 73
Chapter 9: How Would the World Respond? 78
Chapter 10: Have We Already Found ET? 83
Chapter 11: Will Aliens Kill Us All? 90
Part II: Getting Out There 96
Chapter 12: Will We Colonize the Moon and Mars? 97
Chapter 13: Can We Go Interstellar? 105
Chapter 14: Will There Be a Homo spaciens? 112
Chapter 15: Is Time Travel Possible? 116
Chapter 16: What Will Happen to Us? 120
Bibliography 123
Acknowledgments 125
About the Author 126
For Teddy
 Introduction

Wow!

Two days after Elvis Presley died, astronomer Jerry Ehman

was sitting at his kitchen table, poring over an eye-straining thicket of
numbers and letters on computer printouts. This was not his way of coping
with the King’s untimely demise; it was his job. Well, sort of. Ehman had
volunteered to look for interesting patterns in this messy mass of data,
which had been collected by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio
telescope.
Something in the jumble caught Ehman’s eye: the vertical string
6EQUJ5. It was so surprising that he circled the mini column with his red
pen and wrote “Wow!” in the margin in a lovely, looping script. It’s nice
that this iconic moment was immortalized in such an eye-pleasing way. The
story would be marginally worse if the word had been written in my mom’s
pinched and slanting scrawl.
6EQUJ5 was code describing a radio signal that had come in three days
previously, on August 15, 1977. Ehman saw that the Wow! signal, as it has
come to be known, was strong, covered a narrow range of wavelengths, and
lasted 72 seconds, as would be expected from a deep-space source. (This
was the length of time that the Big Ear could observe a distant cosmic
target, before Earth’s rotation rolled another patch of sky into view.) All of
these characteristics were consistent with a transmission from an alien
civilization.
But there was more. The Wow! signal’s frequency was 1,420 megahertz
—squarely within the “water hole,” the slender, radio-quiet range that
many astronomers had predicted ET would use to contact us. The name
stems from its position between the frequencies of naturally occurring
cosmic hydrogen atoms (H) and hydroxyl (OH) molecules, which together
form water. Also, it’s a kind of joke: the water hole should attract
conversation, just like an office water cooler. (If you’re a fan of nature
shows, water hole may evoke images of wildebeest getting ambushed by lions
or crocodiles at dwindling, muddy pools, which is a valid image as well, if
ET means to do us harm.)
This was very intriguing indeed, but astronomers would need more
information before they could say anything definitive about the Wow!