First Contact - Ready for Reading

C1 Advanced · Multiple Choice Reading · Ready for C1 Advanced 4th Edition, Macmillan Education

You are going to read an article about researchers looking for signs of alien life. For questions 1–6, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

Scientists have been listening for extraterrestrial transmissions since the 1960s, but all they have picked up is static. There are a lot of stars and, by inference, lots of planets, on which aliens could evolve. So why hasn’t one had the courtesy to make itself known to us? It is a good question, one originally posed by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, one of the founders of quantum physics. If intelligent life is common in the universe, we should have been contacted long ago, he argued. After all, Earth is relatively young in astronomical terms, while alien civilisations elsewhere in the universe have had billions of years to rise, establish themselves and make themselves known to humanity. ‘So where are they?’ asked Fermi. This is Fermi’s paradox, and one which scientists, despite all their efforts, still struggle to resolve. Much of their problem lies with the basic make-up of our galaxy. The Milky Way is an unremarkable group of stars, in a not very special part of the cosmos that contains a hundred billion stars – a promising enough number if seeking the odd intelligent alien, you might have thought. However, most of these stars are going to be too big, too short-lived, too hot or too cold to support planets that might sustain intelligent beings. Thus the hunt to find the homes of clever extraterrestrials becomes less of a steady systematic search and more of a hunt for a planetary needle in a galactic haystack. And there are other reasons why our galaxy is not alive with the sound of extraterrestrial twitter. From the perspective of US astronomers Peter D Ward and Donald Brownlee, Earth turns out to be prime galactic real estate. First, our sun is a highly stable star unaffected by wild fluctuations in radiation output. Furthermore, our solar system is situated in a safe suburban part of the galaxy, undisturbed by close neighbouring stars that could dislodge comets hovering at the edges of most solar systems. For good measure, our world is further blessed in having a relatively large moon which helped stabilise Earth’s rotation, preventing wild climatic swings. In other words, say these scientists, the primitive slime that evolved on Earth was blessed with conditions that allowed it, eventually, to evolve into the only intelligent creatures known to science: ourselves. So, while alien life may be commonplace on other planets, a hostile environment may mean that only single-cell forms can be supported there. Or it could be that extraterrestrial civilisations are ten a penny in our galaxy but doomed from the start. Aliens may simply be like us: just smart enough to invent technology but not clever enough to control it. Thus they may be wiping themselves out round the galaxy almost as fast as they develop technology, an argument put forward by the evolutionary expert Stephen Jay Gould. ‘Perhaps any society that could build technology for such interplanetary travel must first pass through a period of potential destruction where technological capacity outstrips social or moral restraint. Perhaps no, or very few, societies can ever emerge intact from such a crucial episode.’ Such arguments are rejected by other astronomers, however. These scientists have argued that absence of evidence is very different from evidence of alien absence. For a start, says Seth Shostak, chief astronomer for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), alien hunting has been hindered – until recently – by a lack of equipment and resources. Governments have consistently refused to finance SETI programmes, and so its practitioners have had to borrow time on astronomical radio telescopes, usually for only a few days at a time. ‘It’s like trying to do medical research when you have to go next door to borrow a microscope for a couple of hours at most,’ adds Shostak. However, SETI scientists are now building their own telescopes, a classic example being the Allen Array, funded through an