Documents / Hearing transcript
This is the printed record of a July 29, 1968 symposium on unidentified flying objects held by the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives, chaired by Rep. J. Edward Roush. The committee heard statements from six scientists: J. Allen Hynek, James E. McDonald, Carl Sagan, Robert L. Hall, James A. Harder and Robert M. L. Baker. It also printed papers from Donald Menzel, Stanton Friedman, Frank Salisbury and others. Hynek argued that puzzling UFO reports from competent witnesses deserve serious scientific study.
“Nevers”43 pages
88 with another dish, similarly outfitted if one existed at the incredible distance of 1,000 light years away, a light year being about 6.6 trillion miles, and the distance to the nearest star being a little over 4 lightyears. Now, let me then go to the question of the cosmic perspective of where we are. We are, of course, sitting on a planet, the third from the Sun, which is going around the Sun, which is a star -like, and the other stars visible on a clear night to the naked eye. The first small slide will give an impression of what happens when you point a moderate telescope in the direction of the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. This is a photograph of a star cloud. You are looking at tens of thousands of suns here. In fact, the number of suns in our galaxy is about 150,000 million. They are collected into a disk -shaped pattern, shown in the next slide; the next slide will show a photograph of the nearest galaxy like our own. That fuzzy spiral thing in the middle is M-31, that is also known as the Great Galaxy Andromeda, and if that were a photo- graph of our galaxy, we would be situated extremely far out, in fact, a little far off the slide, very much in the galactic boon docks. The Sun is nowhere near the center of the galaxy. It is a very out-of-the- way rural location we happen to be in. Now, in collection of 150,000 million stars in the Milky Way Galaxy,our sun is just one, and there are at least billions of other gallaxies, and the last slide, - will show you what happens if you point a tele- scope away from the obscuring dust and stars in the galaxy. You then start seeing dozens of other galaxies. everyone of those funny -shaped spiral and irregular -shaped things there, and some of the spherical - shaped ones, are other galaxies, each of which are containing about 100 billion stars as well. So it is clear that there are in the accessible universe, some hundredsof billions of billions of stars, all more or less like our own. Now, if we want to assess the likelihood that there are intelligentcivilizations somewhere in advance of our own, on planets of other stars in our own galaxy, we have to ask questions which cover a variety of scientific subjects, some of which are fairly well known, some of which are extremely poorly known. For a numerical assessment of whether there is likely intelligence in other parts of the galaxy in a form we do not have at present, let me indicate the kinds of things we know. It depends on the rate of star formation. It depends on the likelihood that the given star has planets. It de- pends on the likelihood at least one of those planets is at a position from the essential star which is suitable for the origin of life. It de- pends on the likelihood that the origin of life actually occurs on thatplanet. It depends on the probability life once arisen on that planetwill evolve to some intelligence. It depends on the likelihood that in- telligence, once emerged, will develop a technical civilization. And it depends on the lifetime of the technical civilization, because technicalcivilization of a very short lifetime, will result in very few technical cvilizations being around at any given time. We know something about some of these. There is some reason to believe that planets are a reason-
Hearing transcript, from the govinfo collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 256 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.