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Copyright © 1993, Dennis Webb (denjwebb@aol.com).
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I want to see faraway inhabited planets but the laws of physics prevent me. I look anyway. We look with our eyes. We see with our minds. The mind's wonder comes from its belief that the eye's soft smudges are the universe's galaxies. Can we really know what a galaxy is? No, but we look and believe. The nature of those galaxies is only a learned estimate. Through our belief, the observed smudge becomes a galaxy. We can turn that kind of observing believing into seeing faraway inhabited planets orbiting remote stars.
A remote star sends photons burped from its tortured atoms. A telescope rounds up a bunch of these photons and pokes them in our eye. A few percent of those photons fire neurons in our brain. The neurons wrestle with recollections of Herschel, Hubble, Shapely, Time-Life picture books, and Burnham's Celestial Handbook. The vision becomes a galaxy that becomes a smile.
I observe galaxies because I want to see other inhabited planets. If there are planets around one star or a million, some teeny percentage of the light raining down on us is reflected off a planet. We can't know which photon is from the Planet of the Apes any more than we know whether there is a Planet of the Apes. If a planet is there, its light shines on us.
Tau Ceti is a very close star and a good candidate for planets like ours. I figure about ten thousand Tau Ceti photons hit every square centimeter on the Earth every second. That's plenty to explain how we see Tau Ceti with naked eyes. If Tau Ceti has a planet like the earth, the light off that planet is perhaps one billionth as bright as the star. Since this is really faint, let's use a 10 inch telescope. We would have to watch Tau Ceti for about an hour for a single photon from its planet to trigger a neuron. If it had 5 planets, you could see one of their photons after 12 minutes. You could stare for years and not receive the photon. There may be no planets or they might be poorly placed.
A larger aggregation of stars would increase our belief that we have seen the light of faraway planets. The Great Galaxy in Andromeda, M31, is a big handy bunch of fairly close stars. Surely some of the millions of planets would be placed to reflect a few photons our way. We would have to observe through a 10-inch telescope for an hour and a half assuming there were five planets per star. How long have you observed M31? You can believe that your brain has registered a photon that has bounced off a planet in another galaxy. Extragalactic planets in your own telescope!
Since we are not actually resolving the light of distant planets, we can construct a different telescope that is more efficient in receiving this believed photon. I offer the "Single Photon Philosophical Telescope." This instrument need not focus, discriminate, or specifically detect that photon. Its aperture should increase inexpensively. It should efficiently receive a wide range of wavelengths. The basic principal is to receive the photons physically with human skin, that is to get an infinitesimal sunburn from special light. Touching is better than seeing anyway. Dressed in shorts, I expose 600 square inches of skin. This is the aperture of a 28 inch telescope. My flesh receives all bands of radiation equally well.
My parents started this flesh telescope with their love and I finished it over 40 years with pasta, girl scout cookies, and beer. I skybathe in the light of M31 for three seconds to receive a photon from one of its planets. I am pleased, in this way, to be two thousand times as efficient as a 10 inch telescope! This works during the day since I receive without discriminating. It will not take time away from night-time observing. You can receive these photons while walking to school or mowing the lawn. To enlarge the aperture, add more people or increase their nudity. Please consider local community standards regarding public nudity. The longer we work, lounge or dance outside, the more naked we are, the more special a photon we receive. With this increase in performance we can consider still more exotic photons.
I still want to see other inhabited planets. In 1959, Project Ozma observed Tau Ceti for signs of intelligent life. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia listened on 1420 megahertz (the "water hole") for four weeks. They did not hear anything that sounded like intelligent radio. Perhaps Tau Ceti has no planets. Maybe the planets are uninhabited. Perhaps the children of Tau Ceti use satellite communications or telepathy. Maybe their FCC keeps that part of the radio spectrum quiet listening for extra-Tau-Cetial communication. We are never to know which. However, the listening continues in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or SETI.
The Single Photon Philosophical Telescope is the amateur's SETI instrument of choice. Frank Drake, the founder of Project Ozma, devised a way of estimating the number of communicating civilizations in our galaxy. Twisting his equation, I figure to sky-bathe for 20 hours to receive a photon from one of M31's inhabited planets. If 100 people joined, we collectively receive the special photon in 13 minutes. If we consider all galaxies, you probably can't walk by a window without hitting one of these believed photons.
What could this photon be? This light is direct contact with an inhabited planet. It could have reflected off the faraway planet's clouds, oceans, streets or buildings. It could be the glow of a nuclear war or the glint off an astronomical observatory. It could be the reflection off a pilgrim at prayer or the smile of an alien child. What would that photon mean to you? What would your lifetime accumulation of these photons mean? We believe meaning into this statistical possibility, just as we turn a smudge of light into a galaxy. The special photon from the faraway planet might be real. Probably. Or real enough to make you smile next time you are beneath a clear sky.