UNISTELLAR - MORNINGCALM SEPTEMBER 2018

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THE L VARIABLE

It’s 2018, and it’s time to crowdsource the stars.

A condensed version of this piece appeared in MorningCalm magazine’s September 2018 issue.

Are we alone in the cosmos? It’s a big question, but it can come up from just a passing glance at the night sky. Yet when’s the last time you did that? By 2050, some estimates predict that almost 70 percent of Earthlings will live in urban areas, increasingly trading the stars for city lights. When French start-up Unistellar announced a crowdfunding campaign for the eVscope — a compact, user-friendly telescope that produces a bright and clear view of sky objects even amid light-polluted cities — it met immediate, resounding support. Since Galileo first used a telescope to observe the skies, we’ve been using increasingly sophisticated instruments to answer our most curious questions — like whether there are others out there dreaming, wondering and exploring.

In astronomy, there’s a famous argument called the Drake Equation that lays out what we would have to know to estimate how much intelligent life there is in the Milky Way. Included in it are parameters like the rate of star creation — and then the fraction of stars that have planets, and the fraction of those that could support life. All together, it approximates how many alien civilizations could be sending out detectable signals. The Drake Equation is a starting point, and there is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

To get closer to an answer, we need more people watching the sky. “We want to have this impact on society where people get more involved with science,” says Laurent Marfisi, one of Unistellar’s founders. “And astronomy is one of the best doors to get people interested in science — questioning the universe.” At CES 2018, the eVscope was honored in the Tech for a Better World category. About a year and a half ago, Franck Marchis, a lead scientist at the SETI Institute, heard about the eVscope while attending CES 2017. “I was a bit skeptical,” he admits. But as he learned about the eVscope’s use of data processing to produce a better view of the sky in real time, he realized how smart it was. “I thought, ‘That’s exactly what we should have done a long time ago.’”

Most modern research telescopes use mirrors to reflect collected light onto the eyepiece, where objects appear bigger and brighter than they do to the naked eye. The bigger the mirror, the more light it can collect. The biggest telescopes on Earth contain primary mirrors 8 to 10m in diameter. To get a sense of how powerful these are, consider that the average maximum diameter of a human pupil is about 8mm.

Part of the difficulty in ramping up layman interest in astronomy has been that what you see through a consumer-grade telescope is so disappointing compared to pictures taken by behemoths like the Hubble. Why bother with your own kit when you can just marvel at someone else’s hi-res astrophotography? Earthbound telescopes, no matter how big its mirrors, also tend to suffer from a distortion effect caused by turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere. The only way to avoid it altogether is to send your telescope beyond the confines of our planet. NASA only spent $1.2 billion doing so with Hubble.

“The thing that people don’t realize is that to maintain a telescope like Keck,” says Marchis, referring to the Hawaiian observatory housing two telescopes with 10m mirrors, “it costs millions of dollars per year. We estimated that the cost of one night of observation at Keck is about $50,000. So when you use this telescope, the last thing you want to spend time on is calibrating, aligning, finding your target.”

The eVscope is much cheaper than $50,000, and it calibrates, aligns and finds your target for you. More importantly, it gives you a vibrant view of the night. Its 11.4cm primary mirror may seem unremarkable, but rather than using a larger, more expensive mirror, the eVscope has solved the problem of brightness with its image sensor. And while there are telescopes for hobbyists with bigger mirrors and greater modularity, these have a high barrier of entry, requiring assembly and calibration. They can also weigh over 40kg. The eVscope only requires you to connect the scope to its included tripod to start using it, and at just 7kg, it’s small enough to fit into a backpack. Marfisi says the eVscope is aimed at both enthusiasts and people who “never had the courage to buy a telescope.”

In July 2017, Marchis and Unistellar officially joined forces. Marchis’ research at the SETI Institute focuses on finding evidence of life on exoplanets, and as a science communicator, he believes that greater public engagement in the study of the universe is not just noble, but necessary. The eVscope is built around this ethos: it contains a database of asteroids, as well as one with some millions of stars collected from professional astronomers, which essentially functions as a map the eVscope uses to automatically align to a target. And it doesn’t require an internet connection. “That’s why it was not easy to do,” says Marchis. “We basically managed to put into this telescope this library of stars. That’s in fact a significant problem that we’ve been trying to solve for years — how to make this compact instrument without having to be connected to the internet.”

There are aspects of the eVscope that do ask you to go online, though. Unistellar is working on an app that will allow users to submit observations to professional astronomers, and Marchis envisions being able to send mass alerts for observation events, such as when a disintegrating comet passes near Earth. He notes with pride that the SETI Institute has millions of followers on social media — a bona fide influencer with real gravitational pull. “We were one of the first institutes to have social media,” he says. “Social media is basically used to send information on what’s going on in space, what we’re doing at the SETI Institute, and why it’s important.”

Inventions are well and good, but it’s the democratization of technology that causes seismic shifts in our world. Internet access has allowed modern cultures to mobilize as never before, sharing information and perspectives at practically light speed. And astronomy too has changed our lives in immeasurable ways. If you’ve ever gotten an X-ray or used an app that relies on GPS, you should thank your lucky stars. The ever-ambitious goals of the field has meant that the tech developed in pursuit of them is often revolutionary, later trickling down into applications that become enmeshed in the way we live.

Unsurprisingly, astronomy today continues to help us see more clearly. “I’ve been working in a field called adaptive optics,” says Marchis, “which is basically a way to compensate the effect of the atmospheric turbulence on Earth. We’re using adaptive optics for other applications. One of them is to basically map in real time the activity of the brain for small animals, to understand how the synapses connect to each other, and how the signals are sent from one part of the brain to another one. Some people even map an entire brain using a combination of adaptive optics and data science.” It turns out that seeing extremely distant objects and extremely close objects are two sides of a coin. “Because the problem you’re trying to solve is basically the same,” Marchis points out. “You’re trying to image something which is very faint, very small, through a very turbulent medium.”

In its faintness, it’s easy to miss how much activity there is in the sky, but a look through the eVscope reminds us. In the solar system alone there are over 700,000 known asteroids. With so much to study, astronomers are often revising what we thought we knew. Just this past July, scientists discovered 10 new moons orbiting Jupiter. Another relatively fresh discovery is that the average star likely has at least one orbiting planet — many of them having more, with some of those surely at a habitable distance from their sun. Such revelations must have shifted Drake Equation estimates.

Still, our slice of the universe has been quiet. In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi casually noted what seems to be a discrepancy between the immensity of the galaxy and its perfect silence. Maybe, despite how many planets there are in the universe, we’re simply underestimating how much more emptiness there is. “If we were randomly inserted into the Cosmos,” Carl Sagan once wrote, “the chance that we would find ourselves on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.” He reminds us that this number, written out, would be “a one followed by 33 zeroes.”

Or maybe the Milky Way is clamoring with signals that have traversed this absurd expanse, but we lack the technology to pick them up. “There is one thing we’re looking for at the SETI Institute. It’s something that not a lot of people have been looking for,” says Marchis. “Basically, a signal of a civilization — an intelligent civilization, which could try to communicate with us using lasers. We’re developing a bunch of stations to look in the sky for these bursts of life. We think they’ll be extremely bright but extremely fast; we’re talking about less than a second. So having an array of telescopes like the eVscope looking through the sky continuously will be a way to capture those signals. That’s one of the reasons the SETI Institute is involved in this project.” Marchis adds, “And nobody has done this so far. Nobody has observed the sky 24/7, everywhere on Earth.”

The suggestion of such grand aspirations fills you with optimism. We can do this; all it takes is some time and cooperation. But if the achievements of space exploration glorify the best qualities of the human race, that an encounter with other intelligent life hasn’t happened yet casts doubt over whether we can overcome our greatest flaws. You see, one explanation for Fermi’s question looks at L, the last variable of the Drake Equation, defined as “the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.” The explanation suggests that the longer a civilization with the tech to send signals into space has been doing so, the more likely it is that the civilization will have arrived at a point of self-destruction. Maybe this seems pessimistic, but Fermi made his observation just years after his work on the Manhattan Project helped develop the world’s first nuclear weapon. As the effects of human-caused climate change accelerate at an unprecedented pace on Earth, what can the view from beyond this planet teach us? Not just how to escape when things get too dire, but a lesson in fatalism. The way things are going, maybe our fate is already written in the stars.

Astronomy started as a boyhood passion for Marfisi, but it has been a lifelong teacher. “It can have a role in developing a kind of wisdom about life,” he says. Until Unistellar delivers the first industrially produced eVscopes in April 2019, it will continue to hold public demos, where it quickly becomes clear just how collaborative and social astronomy can and should be.

“We make mistakes; we’re not perfect. That’s part of the scientific method,” says Marchis. “We are not trying to convince people that there are aliens on other planets.” He says that the search for life is really a way to learn more about our own species. “I’m a very positive person, but sometimes when I look at what’s going on in the world, I wonder if we’re not getting a shorter and shorter L every day. We are not cherishing ourselves as a civilization. We structure ourselves into small groups, fighting, and at the end we’re not progressing as a civilization. And SETI is all about the L. It’s the limitation.”

If Marchis one day meets a different intelligent civilization, these are the first questions he will ask: “How did you manage to survive all these problems you probably created? How did you overcome the division in your society?” There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer. The answer to such questions could be beyond our ability to understand — but we should ask anyway. A distant star is really just a winking question mark.