article de Didier Jamet
7 AOUT 2024
As the Nuits des Étoiles 2024 kicks off Friday, we've chosen to provide you with something to liven up your observing evenings, by debating whether we've already got the answer to one of humanity's most fundamental questions - whether we're alone in the Universe.
In January 2011, Frank Drake, one of the fathers of the SETI extraterrestrial intelligent life search program, told our colleagues at Ciel et Espace the following about briefly captured radio signals: "I suspect that a small fraction of them were of extraterrestrial origin".
At the time, this spectacular statement went relatively unnoticed, and was quickly blamed on the program's need for funding, which led even the most respectable of scientists to make thunderous declarations.
Now, 13 years later, and with Frank Drake joining the stars in 2022, a colorful character by the name of Simon Holland has been relaying on his Youtube channel for the past few months some quite extraordinary claims reminiscent of Frank Drake's words, and likely to constitute the discovery of the millennium: the SETI intelligent life search program would indeed have recorded unintentional radio emissions from stellar systems located at most a few tens of light-years away.
The signals would have been found in SETI's raw data, but would have gone unnoticed until a team of Italian mathematicians, inspired by the work of Professor Claudio Maccone, applied a new method of analysis to them, the Karhunen-Loeve transform, far more powerful than the Fourier transform previously used by the SETI program, and capable of detecting signals embedded in noise down to incredibly low signal-to-noise ratios.
The announcement would have been made to the United Nations, as provided for in the SETI post-detection protocols, but they would have asked the scientists involved to complete their observations before making such a resounding announcement, which could have far-reaching consequences for certain beliefs. This would explain the current abundance of funding for radio astronomy programs, as well as the very impressive efforts of Chinese scientists in this direction.
Of course, it all sounds like a science-fiction scenario, and we're reminded of Robert Zemeckis' excellent Contact, with its dazzling performance by Jodie Foster. Of course, we have to admit that when our editor Didier Jamet interviewed Simon Holland, although he was extremely welcoming and warm, and appeared to be acting in good faith, he didn't provide any concrete proof of his claims, nor the name of his famous, reliable source.
Under these conditions, it's impossible for us to confirm the veracity of what he said.
First of all, a few biographical details about Simon Holland: a Scotsman now living in France after stints in the UK and USA, he has spent most of his career in television and science documentaries. After studying film at university, he went straight to the BBC, where he worked in the science documentary department, initially as an editor. He then left the BBC to work for PBS on a series called Nova, as well as National Geographic, Discovery Channel, etc., all references in the field of high-quality popular science. He then became a director and finally a producer. His main activity was to transform the complex scientific ideas of researchers who weren't necessarily good at popularizing science into television programs that could be understood by the general public, and this is what he continues to do today on his Youtube channel.
For all these reasons, after weighing up the pros and cons, and even though we have been unable to verify any of the assertions made, we have decided to broadcast this interview in spite of everything.
It was conducted by Didier Jamet, editor-in-chief of Ciel des Hommes, on Thursday August 1, 2024 at Simon Holland's home in south-west France. Although lacking in the evidence we'd expect for such extraordinary claims, it strikes us as a worthy, and possibly historic, document in the already long history of the search for intelligent life in the Universe. Here it is:
Didier Jamet : Hello Simon, thank you for having us and for agreeing to tell us a little more about the extraordinary claims you relay on your Youtube channel. How did you come by this information? I don't suppose you're a radio astronomer?
Simon Holland :This is a fantastic discovery which has the potential to leave its mark on the history of mankind. I have good evidence that what I'm saying is true, and my sources are extremely reliable. I'm not a radio astronomer myself but for many years, I've been in contact with radio astronomers in Cambridge, Hawaii and Europe. In this community, it's an open secret that since the beginning of the 21st century, signals from non-human intelligences, what radio astronomers call techno signatures, has possibly been discovered. And the story of this discovery is fascinating.
At the end of the 1990s, the SETI program launched a participatory science program called SETI@home, in which anyone could download data to be processed by their computer during periods when their PC's computing capacity was idle, in search of radio signals with very specific characteristics that would have signed off their intelligent and intentional nature.
As the program was a huge success, they sent data about the same spot in the sky repeatedly to several people, as there were millions of participants in the program. According to the SETI organization in Berkeley, at the end of the program in March 2020, they obtained no conclusive signals.
But SETI is an open-source data organization. In particular, the raw data was shared by a team of mathematicians in Italy. They applied to the data a new statistical analysis method called KLT (Karhunen-Loève Transformation). The KLT is a mathematical algorithm that is superior to the classical Fast Fourier Transform used by regular SETI@home in many respects:
KLT can filter signals from background noise in both wide and narrow bands. This contrasts sharply with FFT, which applies rigorously only to narrow-band signals.
Most of all, KLT can detect signals embedded in noise down to incredibly low values of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), of the order of 10-3.
These new analyses on the data detected between 5 and 18 particularly interesting radio sources that had been completely missed by Fourier transform analysis. This is well known in European radio astronomy circles.
I heard about these sources manifesting a possible techno signature from a man who is the administrator of a European radio astronomy organization. I won't say his name. This information is very sensitive but these signals have been taken seriously by the European network.
One of the most interesting signals comes from the Proxima Centauri system, the closest to us. We already know that this system contains several planets, two of them, perhaps three, which we have detected using the radial velocity technique. At least one of them is in the habitable zone of its star, Proxima Centauri, i.e. at a distance compatible with the presence of liquid water on its surface. And these two planets would be sources of unnatural radio emissions. I say unnatural, because it has been suggested that these emissions could be due to piezoelectric rocks rubbing against each other. But my source confirms that they have enough detail in the signal from at least one of the Proxima Centauri exoplanets to indicate that the signal is continuous, like a gigantic carrier wave. By analyzing it in greater detail with the latest radio telescopes and combining the data interferometrically, my source affirms that they have detected a modulation in the signal: this is the sign that there is data being transferred through this carrier, varying amplitude and frequency.
Didier Jamet :Do we have any idea what kind of information is being transmitted ?
Simon Holland : No, we can't decipher it at the moment. All we can say is that they use part of the electromagnetic spectrum for communication purposes, just as we do on Earth. So it's a bit like eavesdropping, but all we hear is a faint, unintelligible whisper: we know there's a message, but we can't understand it at this stage. We're missing far too much information.
Didier Jamet :This is potentially such a huge discovery that I'm surprised you're the only one to state these things so clearly. How did you come by this information, and why isn't it being claimed by the scientists themselves ?
Simon Holland :I'm not the only one who knows this, not by a long shot ! I'm simply the only one who doesn't fear for my career or my reputation, which allows me to openly reveal this information before it is made official by the United Nations. I was contacted by someone who is very knowledgeable about these issues, someone who knows that I have a large community of followers on Youtube, that I have a certain credibility linked to my experience as a science popularizer with the BBC or National Geographic. He wants to spread this information via someone who has an interest in these issues but who is also a skeptic capable of asking the right questions to test the veracity of this claim. That's what I did, and my source totally convinced me of the solidity of his assertions. I was very hard on him, asking for proof of what he was saying, references, peer-reviewed scientific works, the names of other radio astronomers who could confirm his claims: he responded positively to most of my requests.
Didier Jamet :If this discovery is so subtantiated, why isn't this all being made public officially ?
Simon Holland :My source asserts that many people are aware of this fact, but that the group who made the discovery of this signal, and are still actively studying it today, contacted the United Nations to make the announcement, and that the UN replied that the data were not solid enough for such a potentially revolutionary announcement to be made to the world public, at a time when many political as well as religious and moral crises are shaking the planet.
It is interesting to note, however, that more and more funding is being allocated to these radio astronomy listening programs, notably in Europe through the Horizon program. Funding for radio astronomy over the past 5 years has risen to levels never seen before, and new radio telescopes have been built or are in the process of being built all over the world, such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in Australia. There are as yet no peer-reviewed scientific articles published in serious journals, and with good reason, since some of these instruments are still under development. But I think there are enough clues to affirm that all this corresponds to reality.
Even SETI now openly states that their search strategy has evolved and that they are no longer looking for intentional communications, but for electromagnetic leaks from technological civilizations.
Didier Jamet : We specifically mentioned the signal from Proxima Centauri. Do you know the location of others clearly identified sources? There are at least 4 others, if I'm following you correctly.
Simon Holland :I spoke to Dr. Andrew Siemion, who is the SETI coordinator at UC Berkeley and PI for Breakthrough Listen. I asked him exactly this very same question. The reason they're radioing the solar system closest to Earth is first of all practical: you can hope to get high-resolution data, pick up a relatively weak signal. He also says there's possibly a limit beyond which there's no point in looking for a technological signature.
Andrew Siemion and I discussed if there was a maximum distance worth looking for an alien technological signature. A very distant signal would be 1000s of years old, by the time it reached earth. Maybe 100 light years would be the maximum distance in time and space, worth looking for. Any further away, the alien civilisation might be dead.
To answer your question, I don't know where they are, but my source does.
Didier Jamet :What message would you like to convey to our readers by way of conclusion to this interview ?
Simon Holland :It's so important to transcend national and governmental boundaries. Scientific knowledge must benefit all mankind. We need to share this information internationally, and I think radio astronomy specifically is one of the best scientific organizations for sharing data and information. I can't wait for SETI or Breakthrough Listen to finally publish their findings, and I have every reason to believe that this official revelation is now imminent.
Interviewed by Didier Jamet, reproduction and use of text and photos forbidden without authorization.
