The Aliens Are . . . Here?!?

Soon after I blogged about what aliens may look like, astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell (of Apollo 14) claimed again, now on a British radio show, that governments have been covering up alien contact:

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24070088-13762,00.html

Calculating the probability of this being true is nearly impossible, as obviously no statistical data exists for the possibility of such claims. But we can think about related ideas and questions:

• How come none (or maybe very very few) of the thousands of amateur astronomers believe aliens have visited us? After all those hours of peering into the sky shouldn’t they have seen something by now?
• How about professional astronomers? If an academic astronomer were to find evidence for aliens he would be yelling at the top of his lungs about it, government coverups be damned.
• How did the aliens know we are here? The Solar System is in a part of the Milky Way that isn’t very dense. Did they detect the light or something similar leaving Earth?
• Why have the aliens not revealed themselves to us? They can’t possibly be afraid of us . . . perhaps they are ’studying’ us and don’t want to interfere?
• Dr. Mitchell claims the aliens have small bodies, large heads, and large eyes . . . like the “greys” from the X-files. Again the humanoid problem.
• He also says Roswell was real. Did aliens really have the technology to fly across the galaxy only to crash into a remote area of New Mexico?
• Can all the involved governments really keep a secret like this for 60 years?

Don’t get me wrong: I do hope there is a government(s) cover-up of alien existance and that we will eventually find out. But realistically I doubt there is anything to cover-up.

“If indeed there are alien spacecraft flying around Earth with the frequency with which UFO devotees are claiming, then I must ask how come I have never seen anything remotely resembling such an object, while at the same time I have managed to see all these various other types of phenomena.”

- Alan Hale, co-discoverer of Comet Hale-Bopp

The Aliens Are Coming, The Aliens Are Coming!

I’m currently reading a book called The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It’s about man’s first encounter with aliens, and it got me thinking about the way people imagine how aliens may look.

Usually, aliens are depicted as mostly identical, humanoid, man-like creatures. Examples include lifeforms from The Twilight Zone, The X-Files, and Star Trek. If the alien isn’t humanoid, then it is usually a monstrous scary creature that have all of people’s fears rolled up into one. Independence Day, Alien, and Starship Troopers have aliens that are good examples of this.

But what would an alien really look like? It’s hard to say, but it probably wouldn’t look like us. Earth is a certain sized planet, with a certain atmosphere, with a certain mixture of molecules, at a certain distance from the sun. Yet look how wildly different the species on Earth are. Compare a starfish with a giraffe and then tell me you’re not somewhat amazed they come from the same planet.

So should we ever run into an alien, or should an alien ever run into us, what can we expect? I have no idea. But I’m confident it won’t see the same spectrum of light that we see, or breathe the same air, or even be capable of surviving in Earth’s gravitational field. It might make noises with which to communicate but it will sound very different from our sounds. It will probably be a very different size than we are.

In fact, touching on that last point, I believe that the first evidence of alien species we ever run into will be from an unintelligent microscopic organism. Such a species can survive easier and longer than more complicated organisms and can come about from a wider range of planets. After all, we don’t expect to find evidence of cat like creatures on Mars, but we hope some sort of bacteria once lived there.

We’ll find evidence of something, someday. It just won’t look like us.

WordPress & Cryptographic Hash Functions

So I recently started this WordPress blog, as you have probably already figured out. I created my account and clicked the link in a verification e-mail they sent me . . . standard stuff. Then, shock. WordPress.com sent me an email reminding me of my password!

Bah, big deal you say. What’s the problem? Well, I’m glad you asked, because here is the problem: some database somewhere in WordPress.com land contains my plaintext password. If this database were to be compromised, my password, along with tens of thousands of others, would no longer be secure.

So how should it be done? The same way any well built application does it: with cryptographic hash functions. All a hash function does is turn a string of letters and numbers, like a password, into another string of letters and numbers. For example, the string ‘myPassword’ hashes to this using MD5:

deb1536f480475f7d593219aa1afd74c

‘myPassword’ will always hash into that string using MD5, on any computer, at any time. So how is this helpful? This is helpful because it is impossible to turn that random string above back into ‘myPassword’. In other words, you can only go in one direction, from ‘myPassword’ -> string, but not from string -> ‘myPassword’.

So all the folks at WordPress.com have to do is store that string above in their database instead of ‘myPassword’. Then, when I login with my password they can hash it and compare it with what they have in their database. Boom, instant secure authentication. And if their database is compromised, the hacker will have a bunch of useless hashes instead of usable passwords!

So always be wary when you sign up for something and they are able to send you your exact password. If you must use such a service, use a password that is different than other important passwords, as I have done with this WordPress blog.

On a related note, the people where I work always say I have access to their password. Nope, not true. All I have access to is a long string of letters and numbers. That’s why I cannot tell them their password when they forget, I can only reset it.

Note for you techie people: MD5 has issues (SHA-x is better), and the password should be salted to help prevent dictionary attacks.

Robert R. Wilson

Earlier today I listened to part of a podcast from the Aurora Forum at Stanford called “Against Ignorance: Science Education in the 21st Century.” One speaker mentioned that there are two perspectives on why science is important: 1) because it leads to tangible benefits, like non-stick frying pans, and 2) because learning about our world is in and of itself important.

The other speaker responded with an anecdote about the late Robert R. Wilson, the first director of the Fermilab. Wilson was asked by a member of the US House of Representatives if his expensive accelerator would aid the defense of the nation. His response was, “It has nothing to do directly with defending our country, except to make it worth defending.”

First Post, Hello World, and All That Jazz

The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
His fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air,
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there’s no returning.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.

A. E. Housman, The Oracles