IT CAME FROM THE LAB...
by Dr. Chris Cogswell
When trying to pick a single topic to discuss in this collection I found myself a bit like the dog who had caught the car. I’ve always loved things that my friends derisively call “spooky” – haunted houses, telekinetics, aliens and UFOs, Bigfoot, that sort of thing. But when asked to actually contribute to a collection of blog posts on UFOs I had absolutely no idea what to write about. Well, I think I’ve found a good topic, or at least something that I can discuss here that other people, as far as I can tell, haven’t considered yet in any great detail. So if the writing is dry and academic, at least the content is new! My goal here is to discuss the science and engineering of the UFO field, or at least dissect some of the common elements of the UFO phenomena from a scientific point of view. I’m not going to take any position on whether or not UFOs or aliens exist, because frankly I don’t think there is enough strong evidence either way. Obviously people are seeing something, but what that actually is cannot be fully vetted either way. And as a good Karl Popper reading scientist I find that the only way to really do good science is to actively attempt to disprove assertions as opposed to proving that they are true.
Which leads me to the point of this article, or at least the sort of common theme of this article. UFOs and the related alien abduction cases all seem to have common themes to them. Ships are often said to make no sound, flying via non-ballistic motion, with bright lights causing what appear to be radiation burns or scorch marks to those in the vicinity. The craft themselves appear to be made of a lustrous metallic substance, with bright lights often appearing around the edges of the ship, and often with rotating portions or rotational motion occurring for the entire craft. Those who are abducted claim that they are paralyzed, having surgical or intrusive medical experiments performed on them, and some claim that livestock or cattle are being drained of blood. But oftentimes these claims are the stuff of popular science fiction, or are observed to be constrained by the technological view-point of the times. One of my favorite examples of this are looking at the abduction cases of the 60’s and 70’s versus today. Woody Derenberger, the famous abductee in the Mothman Point Pleasant outbreak, claimed to have traveled aboard an alien ship and brought to the planet Lanulos. On those ships he claimed to see the flight path of the craft on something like a tube television set, which was the state of the art at the time but which from a modern perspective seems hilariously outdated. Many people use these examples as reasons to discount the experiences of people who have been abducted, while others have fallen into the logically regressive argument that aliens are similar to Descartes’ Demon in their perception altering abilities. In this sort of argument what you experience through perception such as sight or hearing can be altered in such a way that what you physically experience is no longer trustworthy. So in the case of Woody the claim is that the aliens are making you see what your mind is capable of perceiving. But this argument, just as in the case with Descartes’ Demon, can only lead to the conclusion that you therefore cannot know anything about the physical world around you. And boy would it be an unfortunate conclusion to this whole UFO investigation thing if all we ended up with was the same argument you could learn in any freshmen Philosophy course.
What I am interested in is thinking about some of the scientific or engineering breakthroughs really required of an alien ship. Or maybe more accurately, what kind of new technologies or advances could we learn if we ever got our hands on such a craft. This analysis will obviously be constrained by our current scientific state of technology. It is impossible to predict all advances, and just as Woody could not have predicted the creation of supercomputer cell-phones or flat screen TV’s from his vantage point, it is very likely that in 20 years I will look back at this post and laugh. But I think that it is interesting and worthwhile to imagine advances in fields not normally considered when one begins to imagine what a science fiction vehicle or society would look like.
One of the biggest things we always seem to totally ignore in movies or TV shows about alien ships is the materials that the ship must be made out for space travel to be possible. A spacecraft as we currently have them on Earth is a monstrously heavy thing, made up of various metals or metal alloys, ceramics, polymers, and composites of these materials, as well as electronic equipment and things of that sort. One huge breakthrough for Earth science from an alien craft may therefore come from the materials of the ships composition. For example, the ships outer hull may be composed of a super strong but super lightweight material, one that we have not discovered yet on Earth, but which investigation of this alien ship could allow us to study and recreate. The outer coating of the ship would also need to be capable of withstanding extreme radiation in all forms, but especially as heat load from the travel through space or into and out of atmospheres. These materials may be nanofabricated, meaning that they contain units in the nanometer range in their design or composition; similar to some of the research we can do now on the Earth. At the same time, perhaps the development of these bulk materials in some novel way that we currently don’t understand may have stopped their development of nanotechnology, opening up a whole new paradigm of scientific research in our laboratories. Regardless of how the materials are created, a set of lightweight, heat resistant, and durable materials would be a fundamental breakthrough for our own understanding of space travel and materials science. The reverse engineering of these materials would be difficult but not out of the range of possibility even in today’s scientific laboratories. X-Ray Diffraction would allow us to determine the crystallinity and unit cell dimensions of the materials of composition, with more detailed diffraction studies allowing us to determine the unit cell geometry and therefore physical make up of any crystalline material found on the ship. And when I say crystalline here I mean a material that has a repetitive atomic arrangement, most commonly thought about as things like diamonds or emeralds, but which can also be things like ceramics, clays, metal alloys and metal oxides. Spectroscopic techniques, dispersive X-Ray, and Mass Spectroscopy would allow us to determine the elements of composition, their relative percentages by mass, and along with microscopic techniques their potential position within a bulk composite of the material. Computational thermodynamics may allow us to determine the correct chemical processes or temperatures and pressures required to create single crystal materials, while thoughtful experimental design may allow us to create replicas of the materials as we find them. And our ability to determine how a solid is composed, what it’s made of, what its atomic arrangement is, and how to create it from starting elements is only getting better with more passing time.
In our reverse engineering of their materials we may also find that our periodic table or understanding of the elements has been significantly limited by our studies here on Earth. For instance, if in our study of the materials composition we find an element with a mass that we currently do not see on Earth it may open the door to the search for more heavy yet stable elements or isotopes of currently existing atoms. So for example if we look at the current periodic table we find that our current list of potential atoms stops at number 118, an element currently called Oganesson. This element has 118 protons, and in its most stable isotope 294 neutrons. But this significant difference in protons to neutrons makes the nucleus of this atom very unstable, in fact in all atoms with a large difference in protons to neutrons we expect to see nuclear decay. However, scientists working in nuclear energy or atomic structure have for a while now suspected that potentially we may eventually hit what is known as the island of stability, an area where the number of protons to neutrons once again becomes stable. This would result in very heavy atoms above those with 118 protons existing for long periods of time, just like any other element, and opening up a world of all new chemistries with super heavy elements. These elements would be very dense electronically, meaning potentially the ability to create very dense crystal lattices with a large number of bonds at each atomic node, or even materials that can transfer high rates of electrons such as in electronics or computers. It would be a huge discovery, one that would really fundamentally change our view of the world around us, and our ability to create new materials.
In terms of inside of the ship we could learn all kinds of new things, although not just from their computers and weapons systems, but from their life support systems and ship design. For example, one question we would immediately ask ourselves is how did these beings manage to survive the trip to our planet? Do they eat, sleep, and breathe in the same or similar ways to ourselves? How did they survive the trip without dying from old age, assuming aging is at a similar rate to humans? How is the ship powered, do they use wiring or how does energy transmit around the ship, do they use batteries or something else to store power, and what is the efficiency of their ships components in saving and using energy? Ultimately a lot of these questions have to do with efficiency and the ability to recycle energy, food, goods, whatever for use again. Right now when we go up into space, even in the little bit of space that we’ve currently been able to explore, we need massive amounts of goods including foods, water, oxygen tanks, fuel, energy, back up supplies, all kinds of things, and these are what make the lightweight design of ship components so important. Because every pound of heat shielding you can shave off may mean another pound of food or water! So how is it that these alien ships have traveled this far distance without running out of these essential supplies?
Well, one option could be that they get here so quickly that the need for essential supplies is limited. This would be the option if for example they were utilizing wormholes or some other kind of instantaneous or near instantaneous method of travel. This would mean they could just return to their home base whenever supplies were necessary, similar to how you don’t go out in your car with a weeks’ worth of food and water. Another option may be that they recycle EVERYTHING they use on the ship, something that our scientists are currently trying desperately to successfully implement or find methods to perform. One really common everyday example is recycling TV’s or cell phones so that rare metals which are part of these electronic components can be collected and reused. A less common but potentially far more important material for our space travel at least would be oxygen. When we breathe in we take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide, a gas that is extremely hard to break apart. This makes rebreather technology, or the conversion of carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen, a paramount goal of a huge number of scientific researchers. Some options utilize catalysis, others are trying to find microbes or plants that can be bioengineered to efficiently perform this goal, and others use even more exotic methods. The same problem exists for water, which we can potentially recycle by collecting wastewater and removing the other compounds to result in pure water. Pretty much every material on the ship, once used, would need to be recycled and repurposed either as a feedstock to result in necessary chemical components, or to be reused for the same purpose. So I would not be at all surprised to find a recycling and reformation center on the ship, a place to fabricate necessary components and ensure that continued survival is possible.
Another problem may be not just creating chemical compounds on the ship, but also the fabrication of tools and materials for repairs, emergencies, and just general survival that may not be common enough to have on the ship at launch. One option here may be 3-D printing, a technology which I think is comically over hyped in the popular media today as a novelty, but which could very well be important for future space exploration. But again we would run into the problem of recycling of materials, where do you get the stuff to feed into the fabricator or 3-D printer to allow for the creation of new things? Well again one option would be to break down and convert other matter into its constituent elements, allowing for the use of single stream feed stocks to create the chemicals and materials necessary for space travel. But another very interesting option may be to gather necessary but bulky components from surrounding planets, asteroids, or random space debris generally for use in these fabrication units. On ship then it would not be out of place to find collecting equipment or methods, maybe even robotic drones which can scan surrounding planets or systems, find the necessary components, and collect them for use in emergency situations.
However, this all may come down ultimately on whether or not the ability to collect and store energy is simple and feasible, another technology that if I was given a chance to look at an alien ship would be the first thing I’d search for. Energy generation methods could be all kinds of things, from solar panels, to chemical reactors similar to engines, to nuclear reactors, to more advanced energy systems like those suggested in the top journals of theoretical physics. So really, any speculation on that area would be somewhat ridiculous. However, it may be feasible that these devices generate lots of energy very efficiently, without the need for significant amounts of storable fuel. This may entail collecting energy from a fuel source that is widely available such as solar radiation, utilizing highly energy dense materials like some chemical compounds or nuclear fuels, or potentially using more exotic forms of energy that we currently don’t know of here on Earth. Now in terms of storing the energy generated, that is likely going to be a very important matter for the ship and its inhabitants. To utilize tools removed from the energy system on the ship, space suits and portable computers, robotics, etc. will all likely require some form of either energy generation at these delocalized centers or will need to have some kind of battery or portable energy system attached. One option would be to have energy collection occur as part of the technology itself, so for instance a computer or robot with solar panels that allow for energy generation, or a portable nuclear generator for vehicles or suits. Regardless of the method of energy storage of energy generation, finding one of these suits and reverse engineering them would be a huge leap forward. Currently one of the largest challenges for green energy applications such as solar power or wind turbines is how to store energy for use during periods where the energy source isn’t available, so for instance at nighttime or when it is not very windy. We currently do use batteries, but they are inefficient and can be quite difficult to fabricate. If the aliens have some better method of energy storage it could open up the door to electric vehicles, longer lasting electronics, robotics applications, and all kinds of other places where this may be useful.
Finding an alien ship would be a huge leap forward in our understanding of a lot of different applications, most of which we never talk about in pop culture or science fiction movies. Probably because showing a bunch of nerds like me in a lab analyzing X-Ray Diffraction data to figure out what sort of crystal structure the aliens electronic components have isn’t very compelling television. But really, these are where I think the most quick and exciting breakthroughs could be made. Even just knowing that there are other stable elements out there, waiting for us to discover them, could spur on a huge growth in the atomic fields. So while we don’t know what an alien ship may look like, we can guess at some of these exciting developments that might occur, and in turn make our movies and TV shows way more interesting. So screenwriters, if you’re reading this, I want to see more nuanced and interesting storylines about finding alien ships. Consider this free-use storyboard ideas. Just name an alien species the Cogs-Jells or something.
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Bio: Chris is a PhD in Chemical Engineering with research experience in nanomaterials for separations and catalysis. He is the host of the Mad Scientist Podcast!
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