Are You There, Mars?
It’s me, Nikola Tesla
by Greg Collette, guest writer; illustration by Taryn Lindsay, staff artist
One-hundred-and-eleven years ago, strange things were happening in a barn a little more than two miles south of campus.
A mad scientist, pulled straight from the pages of a Jules Verne or Mary Shelly novel, was hard at work on a small local farm.
Wireless transfer of electricity, directed-energy weapons, wingless aircraft: for inventor Nikola Tesla, nothing was impossible. Upon his arrival in Colorado Springs in 1899, Tesla announced that he would use radio waves and the earth’s magnetic field to connect Pikes Peak to Paris.
During the two years he spent in Colorado Springs, Tesla experimented with radio communication and long-distance energy transference. Some nights, 40-meter-high bolts of man-made lightning erupted from his lab, illuminating the night sky. But those nights were mundane in comparison to many others. Lightning occurs on Earth an average of 44 times per second. The nights Tesla spent working on transcontinental telecommunication were the ones that were truly strange—even out of this world.
Tesla
was not the first to work with radio, but he pioneered it as one of the
dominant forms of communication during the 20th century. It was
Heinrich Rudolf Hertz who, in the mid-1880s, first transmitted and
received radio waves (or Hertzian waves as they were called at the
time). Tesla realized that by using high frequencies, radio could be
used for wireless correspondence, and so he applied for the first radio
system patent in 1897.
Like many of his other technological contributions, the popular memory forgot Tesla’s pioneering work in radio. Instead, Guglielmo Marconi is often remembered as the inventor of the radio. In 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the majority of Marconi’s patents, arguing they added nothing new to the designs of other radio pioneers like Tesla. Yet because the ruling did not impact Marconi’s British patent, his reputation as the inventor of the radio remained intact.
Tesla did gain recognition for an extraordinary first in radio communication. During his time in Colorado Springs, Tesla began receiving long-distance transmissions. They were not from Europe, as he had hoped. They were not even from Earth. In 1899, Tesla was the first human to receive and identify a signal from outer space.
Only a few miles from Colorado College, Nikola Tesla made first contact.
What did it say? And who or what sent this extraterrestrial transmission?
“One-two-three-four” was how Tesla interpreted the recurring signal.
Tesla believed this message originated on Mars. Not content with a one-sided conversation, he began sending his own signals to the Red Planet. He would spend the rest of his life trying to establish communication.
Even today, many dismiss Tesla’s claims—but after recreating his apparatuses scientists have concluded that Tesla may in fact have been receiving transmissions not from Mars, but from Jupiter. The signals were most likely cosmic waves created by electrical discharges from the gas giant’s magnetic fields and not from an intelligent being.
Perhaps it’s not an interaction that warrants an exuberant “Wow!” (more on that later), but with the reception of these cosmic radio waves, Tesla ushered in a new branch of scientific study: radio astronomy. At the time, as was typical, Tesla’s contemporaries scoffed at his discovery. It was not until the 1930s that the field came into its own.
Although he never communicated with an extraterrestrial being, Tesla’s dream of interplanetary radio communication is now a reality. Thanks to NASA’s Mars Rover missions, we are in constant radio correspondence with Mars. The missions utilize radio-controlled robots to explore the Red Planet’s surface—a technology first realized by none other than Nikola Tesla, the first person to remotely manipulate a machine when he unveiled a radio-controlled boat at a convention in 1898.
That’s right: Tesla is also the grandfather of modern robotics.
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) projects perpetuate Tesla’s attempts to contact extraterrestrial life. In 1961, the first SETI conference was held in West Virginia, and since then a dedicated worldwide network of astronomers and UFO enthusiasts have scanned the heavens for alien life using a combination of radio and optical telescopes.
For the past 50 years, the rest of the universe’s civilizations have remained relatively quiet, though an event referred to as the “Wow! Signal” did receive widespread attention in 1977. While working on a SETI project at the Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope, Dr. Jerry R. Ehman observed a potentially extraterrestrial extrasolar system signal lasting 72 seconds. On the left margin, Dr. Ehman wrote “Wow!” in red ink after noticing the narrowband radio signal’s pattern (a signal frequency that corresponded with SETI’s models of what an extraterrestrial radio communication would look like).
The excitement from the “Wow! Signal” eventually faded. UFO enthusiasts, however, still point to the signal as evidence for alien existence.
Will we ever receive messages from alien life forms? Even ones not intended for us? What about the thousands upon thousands of radio and television broadcasts we have sent out into space over the years? Will aliens listen to or watch those?
Probably not—and for more than one reason. Granted, our first radio transmissions have traveled relatively far. Moving at close to the speed of light since the early 20th century, our first broadcasts have already passed the Regulus star system, located 77.5 light-years away from Earth in the Leo constellation.
But due to radio signal degradation, however, these signals would be indiscernible against the background noise of the universe. As the distance increases between a transmission and its source, the force of the transmission becomes exponentially smaller. For every two meters a signal travels, it is one-quarter its original strength. Imagine the effects this relationship has on a signal traveling to the nearest known star, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.22 light-years away (42.2 trillion kilometers).
SETI advocates, however, argue that though the content of the program may be indecipherable, it would still be clear that the signal was not naturally-occurring.
A recent paper about the search for extraterrestrial life has been making the rounds of many science news sources. In “Detection Technique for Artificially-Illuminated Objects in the Outer System and Beyond” Harvard University’s Abraham Loeb and Princeton University’s Edwin Turner argue that artificial light could be distinguished from natural light. Instead of listening for alien radio waves, Loeb and Turner’s paper suggests we should instead look for the glow of extraterrestrial city lights.
Loeb and Turner calculate that today’s best telescopes could detect light from a Tokyo-sized city as far the Kuiper Belt, the region of the Solar System that the dwarf planet Pluto calls home.
With new advancements in telescope technology occurring every day, our view of space only gets better. Set to launch in 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope (Hubble’s replacement) will give us an unprecedented look at the universe.
It is because of the internet that Loeb and Turner’s method for detecting alien societies may be more effective than searching for their radio transmissions. With the increase in online communication and entertainment streaming, the world broadcasts less and less information each year, a trend Loeb and Turner believe most advanced civilizations probably follow.
In the end, perhaps we will first discover an alien society not by their radio signals, but by bolts of 40-meter-high lightning appearing in a cloudless night sky, emanating from a small mountain city that houses one of their world’s largest minds.