Why the $100m alien listening project may be a huge waste of time

Stop calling all the time. Ever heard of the three-day rule? Beckie/Flickr, CC BY-SA

The launch of the $100M Breakthrough Initiative project to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been supported by many leading scientists including Stephen Hawking and astronomer royal Martin Rees. But there is no evidence – and few convincing theories – to suggest that intelligent, communicative aliens actually exist. So are listening projects really the best way to search for extraterrestrial life?

The possibility of life outside our own planet has been the subject of debate for centuries, with the essence of the problem crystallised by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. His now famous “Fermi paradox” runs simply: if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Galaxy, then why do we see no evidence for it?

Colonising the galaxy – hard but possible

We now know that planets around other stars are very common. Since the first discovery of a planet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi in 1995, around 2000 exoplanets have now been found. Most of these are close by – within a few hundred light years.

Statistical analysis of the results from the Kepler spacecraft suggest that as many as one-fifth of all sun-like stars has an Earth-like planet in its habitable zone, where conditions are such that liquid water could exist.

So if planets are so plentiful, then what about life? The Drake equation, formulated by Frank Drake in 1961, attempts to answer this question by suggesting there could be many civilisations in the Milky Way that we should be able to communicate with.

Who’s the king of the galaxy? Nick Risinger/wikimedia

However, while many of the terms in the equation are now known fairly well, others are highly uncertain. But let’s assume for a moment that such civilisations do exist. If they do, then might we notice them? A straightforward way for an alien civilisation to make itself known is simply to colonise the galaxy. Let’s consider how long this might take, assuming technology that is not too far away.

It would be possible now to build probes that could be sent out into space to search for other planets, land on them, and build replicas of the probe that could in turn be sent out to other planets and so on.

At the sort of speeds we can now imagine, such as that achieved by the New Horizons spacecraft (60,000 km/h), it would take a mere 18,000 years to travel a distance of one light-year. Let’s assume such a probe were sent to a planet ten light-years away, arriving after 180,000 years. It then builds ten copies of itself, and sends them off to other planets, each a further ten light years-away. In this way it would take only 5,000 probe generations to fill the entire galaxy – an accomplishment that would be achieved in less than a billion years.

But it’s not hard to imagine that an advanced civilisation might produce space probes that could travel significantly faster than ours currently do, so colonising the galaxy in just a few hundred million years is not unlikely.

But here’s the thing: the Milky Way has existed for around ten billion years, and we know that some planets exist around stars that are almost this old. So if intelligent life really is common, the likelihood is that it evolved elsewhere to our stage of intelligence several billion years ago, giving it plenty of time to colonise the galaxy. So where is everybody?

Are we all alone …?

Entire books have been written exploring the various solutions to the Fermi paradox, but they fall into the following general categories.

Rare Earth: It may be that there are no civilisations in the galaxy any more advanced than we are. Perhaps the combination of astronomical, geological, chemical and biological factors needed to allow the emergence of complex, multicellular life is just so unlikely that it’s only happened once.

Is intelligent life destined to destroy itself? United States Department of Energy/wikimedia

Doomsday: Perhaps life and civilisations emerge often, but it is the nature of “intelligent” life to destroy itself within a few hundred years?. The human race certainly has no shortage of ways of accomplishing this, whether it’s via physical, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction, or as a result of climate change, or even a nanotechnology catastrophe. If life doesn’t persist very long on any planet, we shouldn’t expect to see much evidence of it around the galaxy.

Extinction: Even if we don’t wipe ourselves out, perhaps the universe conspires to eliminate civilisations on a regular basis? It’s clear on Earth that there have been at least five mass extinctions. Some of these may have been triggered by the impact of massive asteroids, but other possible extinction causing events might include nearby supernovae or gamma-ray bursts.

…or are the aliens just hiding?

There is another class of possible solutions to the Fermi paradox that boil down to the fact that alien civilisations do exist, but we simply see no evidence of them.

Distance scales: Perhaps civilisations are spread too thinly throughout the Galaxy to effectively communicate with each other? Civilisations may be separated in space, and also in time, so two civilisations just don’t overlap during the time that they’re each active.

Technical problems: Maybe we’re not looking in the right place, or in the right way? Or maybe we just haven’t been looking for long enough? Perhaps we’ve not recognised a signal that’s out there, because the alien civilisation is using technology that we simply cannot comprehend.

Isolationist: Perhaps the aliens are out there, but they’re choosing to hide themselves from us? Perhaps everyone is listening, but nobody is transmitting? It may be that other civilisations know we’re here, but the Earth is purposely isolated, as if we’re some kind of exhibit in a zoo.

Finally, there are of course the more extreme possibilities such as that the Galaxy that we observe to be empty of life is a simulation, constructed by aliens. Or perhaps the aliens are already here among us. Such speculation is great for science fiction, but without evidence, it’s not worth pursuing further.

My own hunch is that life is indeed common in the galaxy, but intelligent life is rare – either because it doesn’t evolve very often, or it doesn’t last very long once it does. For that reason I think that SETI programmes are probably doomed to fail – although I would love to be proved wrong.

Instead I think the best chance of finding life elsewhere in the galaxy is through spectroscopy of the atmospheres of transiting terrestrial planets. That will be carried out by missions such as such as the European Space Agency’s PLATO spacecraft, due for launch in 2024. Such life may just be a green slime that we can scrape off a rock with our finger, but its detection would truly transform our view of the universe, and ourselves.

It's not all about aliens – listening project may unveil other secrets of the universe

Green Bank telescope is one of the observatories that wil eavesdrop on aliens. NRAO/AUI, CC BY-SA

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project got a $100 million boost this week from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. While this may seem like a lot of money to spend on a nearly impossible task, many astronomers welcome the investment. The cash will go some way to help save some observatories from closure and allow astronomers to continue to use the facilities for astrophysics research alongside SETI.

The “Breakthrough Listen” initiative, announced on July 20 at the Royal Society in London, will pay for giant radio telescopes at Green Bank in West Virginia, USA and the Parkes Observatory in Australia to scan the skies for signs of alien communications. The Lick Observatory’s optical telescope in San Jose, California will also join the search with the goal of scanning one million stars in our Milky Way galaxy along with a hundred other nearby galaxies. In the UK, the giant Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank is also involved in SETI programmes.

The funding, to be allocated over a decade, will pay for thousands of hours per year on these facilities compared to the tens of hours usually available to SETI scientists competing with other astronomical programmes. Frank Drake, one of the pioneers of modern SETI and a member of the Breakthrough Listen team, has described previous support for SETI research as patchy. The total worldwide support in recent years has been only about $500,000 from private gifts.

Little Green Men

The telescopes will look for signals that cannot easily be explained by natural phenomena. A repeating signal could be be promising, although caution is needed; in 1967, Northern Irish astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered mysterious regular and repeating pulses of radio emission. However the source of this emission, which she nicknamed Little Green Man 1 (LGM-1), turned out to be the first discovery of a pulsar – highly magnetised dense rotating neutron stars. These are recognised today as nature’s most accurate clocks and their discovery has certainly not been a waste of time.

Searching for alien acquaintances. Lewis Francis/wikimedia, CC BY

The Breakthrough Listen project will scan stars for signals in the frequency range of 1 to 10 gigahertz (GHz), a band identified as a good choice for communication. That is because radio signals at these frequencies can travel through the universe and the Earth’s atmosphere relatively unimpeded. Light at lower frequencies is difficult to distinguish from the astrophysical background and higher frequencies are more easily absorbed by intervening gas in the cosmos and the Earth’s atmosphere.

Impact here far beyond aliens

The injection of cash is a lifeline for struggling observatories. The Parkes radio telescope, famous for beaming images of Armstrong’s moon walk, was threatened with closure by 2016, as the Australian government redirected funding into development of the upcoming Square Kilometer Array.

The Greenbank telescope – the world’s largest steerable radio telescope – was under similar threat, with closure projected for 2017 unless new funding partners could be found.

These telescopes will now be trained on the sky and will gather vast amounts of data that will be made available through the SETI@home downloadable screen saver. This will allow the general public to help crunch the data in order to search for tell-tale signatures of intelligent extraterrestrial communications.

In 1959, two scientists – Philip Morrison and Guiseppe Cocconi – were the first to suggest technologically advanced alien civilisations might use electromagnetic radiation to communicate. Shortly after that, Frank Drake made the first search for alien radio signals using a previous generation of giant radio telescope in Greenbank and formulated an equation that suggested there could be ten civilisations in the Milky Way that we should be able to communicate with.

The new funding will allow SETI scientists to thoroughly scan a wider range of frequencies for the next ten years, where previous efforts involved intermittent and irregular eavesdropping sessions. While scientists are hopeful that they will make a positive detection, a negative result from such a comprehensive search will be equally important. To date we have only searched a minute portion of the universe, so it is definitely worth continuing to do so. However, if we fail to find anything after the more detailed search, we may want to think about other ways of looking for alien life.

But to find a needle in a haystack, one has to look further than the first stalk of hay. The data will also be useful for astrophysicists interested in naturally occurring cosmic radio emission. Many new pulsars may be found along with enigmatic fast radio bursts – brief flashes of very intense radio emission that lasts for only a fraction of a second. Such bursts were discovered in 1997 with the Parkes telescope and their origin is still a mystery. Data from the listening project could help solve this mystery.

This is an exciting time to systematically survey a large number of stars. We know that planets are common around a range of different types of stars thanks to recent ground and space-based missions such as NASA’s Kepler satellite, which have revolutionised our ability to find other worlds. At the same time, solar system missions have found evidence of life-enabling water on planets other than Earth.

While it may seem a big jump to finding intelligent and communicative extraterrestrials, this new investment may prove to be the turning point for SETI. In turn, plans are already in place to figure out how to respond if we are not alone – Milner plans to run a competition with a prize of $1m to find the best digital message to transmit back.

Ten years after the de Menezes killing, we're no better at identifying faces

The Brazilian's death showed a major human weakness PA/Johnny Green

It was ten years ago that the Metropolitan Police killed Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell station in south London in a case of mistaken identity. The family of the Brazilian electrician are still fighting for justice at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Police procedures were overhauled, but an uncomfortable truth will not go away. We have not learned much about face recognition since then. It is hard to be confident that the same thing could not happen again.

The events on July 22 2005 in south London followed the 7/7 attacks on the underground that had killed more than 50 passengers two weeks earlier. A second attack took place on July 21, but only the detonators exploded and the terrorists escaped. A massive police hunt was launched. A gym membership card with an address in Scotia Street, Tulse Hill, was found in one of the unexploded backpacks – the same block where 27-year-old de Menezes happened to live.

CCTV images showing the suspects had been circulated. When one of the surveillance officers on Scotia Street saw the Brazilian coming out of the flats, he flagged him as a potential match for the suspect. A series of flawed procedures ensued, leading ultimately to the shooting at point blank range of an innocent man.

Then as now, we are good at recognising familiar faces. We first identified the brain structures dedicated to face perception at the turn of the millennium with functional magnetic resonance imaging – more commonly known as fMRI. Researchers argued that the brain has specialised systems for faces, pointing to their importance for social interaction and mate selection.

We can recognise familiar people from bad quality images, and even from photos that have been stretched. As anyone who has strolled along the banks of the Seine in Paris can attest, we can identify people from caricatured line drawings. All of these abilities are impressive and imply that we are experts at face recognition. The problem is that when it comes to recognising unfamiliar faces we do not do so well.

Research shows that we get it wrong with unfamiliar faces around 30% of the time, even when somebody stands in front of us holding a fake ID. When two unfamiliar photographs are placed side by side and we are asked to decide whether they depict the same person, we still get it wrong just as often. Recently a study even showed that Passport Control officers do not fare any better than university students: all they do is take more time over their decisions.

Despite this, photographic identification is still the main way that terror and criminal suspects are identified. And in court cases there is still great weight placed on eyewitness testimony, particularly in how confident a witness claims to be.

Recognition in future

So what can we do to ensure that innocent people are not misidentified again? One solution is to identify people who are much better than average on tests of face recognition. It is inferred that about 1%-2% of the population are extremely good at recognising faces. These so-called “super recognisers” can remember about 80% of the faces that they encounter in daily life. Security services are currently looking for such people to help them identify people from CCTV or pick people out of large crowds.

Super recognisers could be part of the answer zimmytws

If Britain is faced with another large-scale suspect hunt in future, super recognisers might be employed to make crucial decisions to avoid a fatal misidentification. In tandem, researchers have a role to play too. Research suggests that biometric measures such as iris scans might be more useful than photographs for identifying faces, for example.

In our lab at the University of Stirling we are looking at what can be done to improve face recognition for unfamiliar faces. We are investigating brain function during face recognition to see if familiar and unfamiliar faces are recognised using different retrieval processes, and exploring how mnemonic strategies identified from memory research can be used to improve unfamiliar face recognition. For example if you thought about what hobbies a person might have when studying their photo, it might help to form a more stable memory representation that could be recognised as easily as a familiar face.

There has also been some interesting work into face matching led by Mike Burton at York University. My understanding is that they have found that training in face matching improves performance, but that individual differences are huge. The conclusion seems to be that security services should recruit people with natural ability – which again points to the value of super recognisers.

So although we are barely any further forward in the ability of the police to avoid disaster, there is at least the prospect of employing super recognisers and improving police training in future. That way, the type of misidentification that led to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes might eventually be easier to avoid.

Scientists at work: understanding human cooperation in a changing world

Many hands make light reindeer herding. Matthew Gwynfryn Thomas, Author provided

Deep into the Arctic Circle in the far north of Norway, Finland, Sweden and north-west Russia, a few thousand indigenous minority people known as the Saami continue to follow a lifestyle of reindeer husbandry. But their profession is increasingly under threat from a number of developments ranging from climate change to globalisation.

We travelled north to spend some time with this marginalised group to try to understand how they cooperate with each other, from an evolutionary standpoint. The results may help us understand how they can best protect their lifestyle from being crowded out in the future, like many other traditional cultures across the world.

A lifestyle under threat

The Saami are pastoralists who work in groups formed from a mixture of family and others sharing the burden of herding by keeping an eye on each other’s reindeer, protecting them from predators and working the land.

Over the years, this traditional way of life has absorbed many non-traditional features, from snowmobiles to GPS and from smartphones to Game of Thrones (I watched it for the first time with my Saami field assistant).

Reindeer as far as the eye can see. Matthew Gwynfryn Thomas, Author provided

The area where most Saami herders live is commonly known as Lapland. The landscape – full of roaming reindeer, emblematic of Christmas – becomes a verdant paradise during summer, when the sun never sets. You must sleep by your watch because the light outside cannot be trusted. Wandering at 2am, it feels like late afternoon. The area is covered with tree-lined mountains, snaking fjords strewn with fireweed and, to the very north, a rolling tundra that is both bleak and beautiful. And mosquitos. Lots of mosquitos.

This environment of extremes is where Saami people have tended reindeer for hundreds of years and hope to continue for many hundreds more. The herders have had bad experiences with researchers in the past. Just three weeks before my visit, the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research released a report saying that the high reindeer mortality in Finnmark may be due to overcrowding and starvation.

This caused something of an uproar, with some herders taking it to mean they were being blamed for their reindeer dying. Because of this, I found it difficult to convince people to take part in our study during my stay. The 30 we eventually interviewed were, however, generous with their time, thoughts and coffee.

But their profession faces challenges from climate change, extraction of natural resources, internal conflict and the high reindeer death rates. Indeed, reindeer husbandry itself may be in danger of being crowded out by relentless globalisation, despite nominal protection from the International Labour Organisation in Norway.

The science of cooperation

Humans are weird. Unlike many other animals, we happily cooperate with people we are not related to. But if evolution is all about reproducing copies of your genes into the future, why should you spend time helping people you are not related to?

If we have evolved to be nice to some, but not all, non-relatives, would that behaviour shift if we were part of a marginalised population such as the Saami? To find out, we played games with herders from one particular district in the Norwegian county of Finnmark, where most Saami herders live. Anthropologists have become fond of experimental games as a quick and dirty method of gaining insights into how people cooperate.

Father and son fixing a fence Matthew Gwynfryn Thomas, Author provided

Our study participants were given 15 litres of petrol each, split across three vouchers, to give as gifts to up to three other herders of their choosing. Reindeer herders can burn through a lot of petrol, especially during migration periods, so we thought their choices would reveal meaningful social relationships and hint at how people collaborate.

We found that the herders favoured members of their own herding group (known as a siida in the Saami language) over and above most relatives, but ultimately preferred giving gifts to close family within their siidas. People also gave gifts to newly established herders and to those they considered particularly skilled at reindeer husbandry. We argue that this flexible approach to cooperation has been and will continue to be a keystone of reindeer husbandry.

Evolutionary theory gives us a powerful set of tools for understanding human behaviour. Studies such as ours employ evolution as a lens through which we can understand how people respond to fluctuating environments, to encroaching globalisation and, not least, to one another.

Working in cooperative groups helps Saami people survive as reindeer herders. Despite – or maybe because of – their marginalisation, our participants helped not just their family and others in their herding groups but also the skilled herders and the new herders who might reciprocate in future.

Government policies attempt to make this way of life sustainable by privatising pastures and enforcing quotas on the number of reindeer herders can own. But research has shown that keeping more reindeer can help herders weather harsh times in this changeable and competitive environment.

Other policies target individual herders by, for example, subsidising higher slaughter rates, but ignore the effects that working together can have on slaughtering practices. The reality of reindeer husbandry demands flexibility. If we try to understand their routes to cooperation, we may well find that the herders can manage perfectly well without outside interference.

As US relations thaw, hopes grow in Cuba for a faster, freer internet

Cuba telecoms: updates required. Alejandro Ernesto/EPA

With the re-opening of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US, the world is watching to see where in Cuba changes will be seen first. Many hope that it will be the country’s 1990s-era internet access.

Cuba was first connected to the internet in 1996 through a Sprint link funded by the US National Science Foundation. A year later the Cuban government decided to contain and control the internet, leading to decades of stagnation and under-investment. A sub-sea link to Venezuela opened in 2012. Now the government says the internet is a priority.

Since the thaw of US-Cuba relations, Airbnb has already established a foothold in the country, despite the irony that an internet-based firm could be so quick to enter Cuba, a company where almost nobody has the internet. In 2011, Cuba’s statistics office estimated internet penetration of 22%, including those with access only to the local, government-run intranet. Freedom House, which ranked Cuba 62nd of 65 in terms of internet freedom, estimated that only 5% of Cubans have access to the internet proper.

Cuba’s internet does not rank highly, by any standard. Freedom House

The Cuban internet is run by an opaque monopoly, ETECSE. Only foreigners with permanent resident visas, foreign students or travelling businessmen can get dial-up internet accounts. Larger firms have access to DSL connections. Few Cubans are allowed internet access at home, so they illegally buy time from those with access for US$1.50-2 an hour, when an average monthly wage is US$20. They have rolled out 35 Wi-Fi hotspots and internet “navigation” rooms. A leaked document shows plans to make slow DSL available to some homes in built-up areas, but this isn’t a solution for all.

Cuba’s internet prices are the most expensive in Latin America. ITU/World Bank

The Cuban government says it wants to modernise the internet. To do that, it needs a long-term plan, because there is virtually no modern infrastructure on the island – but, in the meantime, short-term measures are needed to get the ball rolling now.

Short-term measures could focus on aggressively deploying satellite technology which, like other technologies such as voice-over-IP (internet voice calls), are currently banned. This would save the cost of deploying fixed lines throughout the island and would foster entrepreneurial spirit for citizens to provide local pockets of connectivity which could be expanded upon in due course. But this would come at the cost of giving up government control.

Connecting schools and universities should be a priority. In fact the National Science Foundation connecting up universities was the beginning of the internet in the US in the 1980s. It looks as if Huawei got its foot in the door first for short term projects, with its equipment used in the home DSL and Wi-Fi access projects. US companies, at least for now, are still barred from dealing with Cuba.

The Cuban government’s role in a decentralised satellite-access internet would be capacity planning and negotiating with satellite communication companies for bandwidth. It would also specify, evaluate and purchase ground station equipment (some of which could be manufactured on the island), and support satellite operators with loans for equipment costs and training. It should also take the lead in developing software for efficient offline operation with automatic compression for data when the user goes online. That software would be useful in any limited-bandwidth nation, not just Cuba.

In the long run, since it has very little infrastructure today, Cuba should skip technology generations, for example by waiting and planning for fifth-generation wireless connectivity. But policy decisions are more important than technology.

The government should consider various ownership and regulation policies before opening the door to foreign companies. For example Cuba should go slowly and consider a broad range of infrastructure ownership policies such as municipal ownership in Stockholm, government as a venture capitalist as in Singapore, government as rural wholesale backbone provider as in India, or individual ownership of final links.

But ultimately, the government has to make the political step of accepting a new role: of providing the infrastructure, while leaving others to provide the access. The prospect of ETECSA – or even a foreign import such as Comcast – acting as a monopoly ISP is not a welcome one.

If we are to find life beyond Earth, we need to be explorers, not hunters

What secrets will space reveal? AstroStar

The news that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is to receive increased funding and data through the $100m (£64m) Breakthrough Listen project is welcome news for astrobiologists like myself. Launched by Stephen Hawking, it particularly helps to allay growing concerns in the field about having too narrow a focus in our search for life in the universe.

Last week I attended the Pathways Towards Habitable Planets conference in Switzerland, where leading scientists in the search for habitable planets shared their results and ideas for the future. What was especially interesting was the relatively strong consensus on the problems with our definition of the habitable zone – the area around a star which is neither too hot nor too cold for orbiting planets to support liquid water on the surface. Even its name is misleading, as we’ll see in a moment. If we aren’t careful, obsessing about this zone could prevent us from reaching our ultimate goal of finding extraterrestrial life.

For as long as we have considered planets orbiting other stars, we have speculated over their propensity to host living organisms in the way that the Earth does. The habitable zone concept has helped astronomers to define where, in all those quintillions of acres of galactic real estate, we should search for planets that might be inhabited.

It may seem sensible to look for extraterrestrial life in regions where any Earth-like planet would have liquid water on the surface. Liquid water is an essential solvent for the chemical reactions that Earth biology relies on. If we find planets with liquid water, they satisfy a key criterion for being conducive to life as we know it.

Yet being in the zone neither automatically means that a planet will have water, nor that it could support life. It needs to have a “healthy” atmospheric composition – usually assumed to mean similar to Earth’s – and ideally a healthy magnetic field to shield it from high-energy particles belched forth by its parent star.

We might also demand that the planet’s orbit and rotation is stable and that any planetary neighbours kindly leave it alone. We don’t have enough data on the planets we have found to date to know if they meet all these criteria. Even if we did, we would most likely have to run a sophisticated computer simulation to model their climate before we could determine what conditions were really like on the surface.

These difficulties with the definition of the habitable zone can lead to astronomers and astrobiologists coming a cropper when speaking to the press. When a press release announces the detection of “a planet in the habitable zone”, the general public reads “a habitable planet”. It’s this confusion that prompted the discussion at the Pathways conference on whether we should change the zone’s name to something else – perhaps the surface liquid water zone, or the temperate zone.

Beyond this, there are other problems with the concept. Perhaps life doesn’t require surface liquid water to survive at all. Some have speculated that the liquid hydrocarbons on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, could be a solvent for a very different form of life, for example.

Other moons in our solar system, such as Europa and Enceladus, meanwhile, appear to have subsurface liquid water even though they reside outside the traditional habitable zone. The tidal heating they receive from their host planets is enough to make habitable zones beyond the habitable zone, if that’s not too confusing. The more we learn about other planets, the more the simplicity of the habitable zone’s definition begins to look dangerous.

Could Titan’s methane lakes host life? manjik

The need for focus

So why have astronomers persisted with the concept? The real reason is target selection. There are lots of stars in the Milky Way – and we now know of lots of planets surrounding them. Astronomers have limited resources, and not all astronomers want to search for biospheres.

Because we can only observe a few targets, we choose the ones that we think have a higher chance of yielding signs of life. Depending on how you detect them, most candidates are merely silhouettes on a star’s surface or wobbles in a star’s orbit. If we’re lucky, some are both – or we have managed to discover some information about molecules in their atmospheres using transmission spectroscopy, which is the study of the light the planet reflects from its parent star.

The next generation of exoplanet observations is designed to ensure we glean the maximum amount of information about as many planets as possible. This is in advance of the coming extremely large telescopes, which may be able to directly image any “Earth-like” planets nearby.

Yet this isn’t an excuse for going down the wrong path. It might be tempting to rush to the end of the search – hunting exclusively in the habitable zone – but we might be rushing to the wrong end. Consequently many scientists are saying we shouldn’t be looking for things that look like life, but merely things that look anomalous and can’t be explained by geochemical, non-biological processes.

The weird blooms of methane in Mars’ atmosphere pointed towards life, for instance. This turned out to be something of a false alarm, since they can also be explained without requiring organisms, as can many other potential signs of life on the planet. Frustrations aside, such anomalies are still worth exploring. The more we find, the more likely we are to find one caused by organisms.

I’m pleased to say that Breakthrough Listen is in the spirit of this approach. It will focus on sifting data from radio and infrared telescopes for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. It will not restrict its focus to zones, particular conditions, or even planets at all, but scan more widely to look for signals that can’t be explained by natural phenomena.

We should be exploring every kind of planet, not just hunting for ‘blue marbles’ like our own Fisherss

Every planet we find and learn about – even hellish worlds such as Venus, or gas giants such as Jupiter – is a piece of the puzzle of how planets form and evolve. They all help us learn how biospheres are born and how common or rare we really are. As we put our blue marble into ever clearer context, it’s my fond hope it will help us appreciate and cherish our singular, complex, beautiful world all the more.

As Franck Selsis, a leading figure in finding and characterising potentially habitable worlds, said at the Pathways conference, “Perhaps the best strategy is to have no strategy – except to simply explore”.

Ashley Madison breach reveals the rise of the moralist hacker

Tell no one... that we've just lost all your data. ALM

There’s value in more than just credit card data, as Avid Life Media (ALM), parent company of the extramarital affair website Ashley Madison, has found out after being raided for millions of their customer’s details.

All sorts of information that isn’t expressly financial is valuable – HR records including personal information and health information, such as those stolen from the US government, can be used to fraudulently gain access to other data, of for blackmail for financial gain or to further a political or moral agenda.

The Ashley Madison hackers, calling themselves Impact Team, seem to have a moral agenda, adding another dimension to the factors that motivate cybercriminals, and therefore something else for overburdened security professionals to consider.

It doesn’t get more sensitive than this

There is a spectrum of sensitive information, from an email address to private secrets. The theft of the Ashley Madison databases, essentially a list of 37m possible adulterers’ identifying details, must rank as one of the most “sensitive” troves of data ever acquired. While there will be credit card details too, it’s the potential for public (and private) embarrassment that many will be fearing.

Reported by security research Brian Krebs and confirmed by Noel Biderman, CEO of Avid Life Media (ALM), Impact Team’s statement rails against the motivations not just of the supposed cheaters using the site, but the site itself for facilitating this behaviour, demanding that ALM close down Ashley Madison and another of its sites, Established Men, permanently or risk the details being published.

The message left by Impact Team hackers. ImpactTeam/Krebs on Security

Impact Team’s ire is directed particularly at ALM’s “full delete” service where, for US$19, all a user’s details will be deleted. They claim ALM made US$1.7m from this service, yet leave the credit card details, obviously including real names and addresses, intact. Impact Team hint that the hack was made possible through an insider – embarrassing for a firm that had aimed to raise US$200m this summer from an IPO .

Encrypt! Encrypt! Encrypt!

According to a recent survey by Thales, typically the most sensitive data that is encrypted is employee and HR data. It goes without saying that this is highly sensitive information that can bring repercussions both on the individuals and the firm in question. As customers, we may not be pleased to note that customer details are some way down the list. Really, all these aspects should be closer to 100%.

Regularity with which certain types of company data are encrypted. Thales

Intellectual property is certainly a target for cyberattacks, with the loss of source code and secret product information potentially disastrous for companies. Hacking Team recently found the internal code of their commercial hacking tools posted all over the internet, for example.

When university researchers analysed 300 discarded hard disk drives they found that a third contained personal data including health and banking information (including a €50 billion euro currency exchange service), and even details for a missile defence system. The lack of planning and care in how this information was dealt with is astonishing.

Poking the hornet’s nest

The catastrophic raid on Sony’s corporate network last year was blamed on North Korea, but Sony has battled Anonymous, Lulzsec and Lizard Squad over the years, often over their stance on breaches of copyright. Again, a disgruntled insider within Sony is the most likely source of the breach. The hack led to all manner of documents appearing online – such as embarrassing emails from senior executives.

Sony’s trouble with hacking organisations can be traced to its court case against George Holtz, who Sony sued after he published root encryption keys for the PlayStation console. Sony demanded identifying details of visitors to his website and social media pages, and was given access to Holtz’s PayPal account. The case judge eventually granted Sony permission to view IP addresses of everyone who visited Holtz’s site, geohot.com. In April 2011, Sony settled the lawsuit out of court, but have since faced many further attacks.

The rise of moral and political hacktivism

The fact is hackers are increasingly pursuing a variety of agendas. In protest at St Louis County Police involvement in the death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the police department’s website was attacked, knocking it offline for several days. The group responsible declared they had gained access to dispatch tapes related to the day of the shooting, which they then uploaded to YouTube.

In political actions worldwide, from the Arab Spring uprising, to Russia’s suspected cyberattacks on Estonian government websites, or the Syrian Electronic Army, the internet is increasingly a new vector of attack. The internet as battleground is not in the future, it is already here, and as attack on the French channel TV5Monde should remind us, it may escalate to include control of news outlets too.

Hacktivism, where cybercriminals can also be freedom fighters. Bill Buchanan, Author provided

Organisations need to understand that there are new risks and new ways to distribute messages, especially from those skillful enough to disrupt traditional methods. It’s important to note that the viewpoint of the hacktivist will often be reflected in the political landscape of the time, and that this is subject to change. The hacktivist, a cybercriminal to some, can be a freedom fighter to others.

Be pure in thought and word and deed

The internet provides a voice for all, and there are many examples where corporations, organisations or governments have outraged groups around the world who have successfully staged an uprising or retaliation against them. Someone may be small on the internet, but can still have a massive impact. Sony lost billions of dollars from its share price, and forfeited a great deal of customer confidence.

A strong defence is the starting point, but if there is trusted internal access then it is possible to circumvent the locks. With digital media cards now supporting hundreds of gigabytes of data it’s not too difficult to take huge amounts of data off-site – and this is why encryption is so vital. In short:

1. Encrypt sensitive data
2. Control and limit access to sensitive data
3. Make sure those controls work
4. Check who has access to the data
5. Integrate multi-factor authentication for the access to sensitive information
6. Watch where you back up your data and protect that too
7. Don’t use the same encryption keys for everything

And finally, try not to upset people. Ashley Madison rashly boasted of its superior security, while flaunting what many would describe as unethical behaviour. Such things are red rags to a bull. Companies need to understand that their insecurity today is as much to do with their behaviour and the reactions or political and social aims of others in response as it is the straightforward quest for financial gain.