Dominica’s traditional foods are countering modern threats.
KALINAGO TERRITORY, Dominica — Inside a small yellow roadside shop on the edge of a lush hill, two sisters are reviving an ancient staple to serve modern tastes and stave off a future threat.
The sisters, Valary Antoine and Arnique Valmond, are members of the Kalinago people, the largest Indigenous community in the Caribbean, with almost 3,000 residents living on Dominica’s east coast. At Eezee Side Cassava Delicacies, they are refining cassava, a brown tuber with white flesh. Processing cassava, also known as manioc or yuca, is hard work. You have to peel the bark-like skin, cut it up, press out the excess water, dry it, mill it, and sieve it. The result is a versatile white flour that is naturally gluten-free.
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Cassava is one of the earliest crops ever cultivated on the island as it spread throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. It’s a good source of vitamin C and produces more calories per acre than wheat or rice. Antoine and Valmond learned the business of harvesting, processing, and cooking with cassava from their grandfather, though the skills have been in the family for generations.
“He got it from his grandparents so then his knowledge of that was passed on to us,” Valmond said. “They only knew the cassava plain, or with just coconut. But right now we have added other things to the menu.” The sisters now use cassava to make breads, wraps, pizza, and desserts, which they sell across the island.
For Dominica, cassava is more than a local staple. The humble root vegetable is part of the country’s strategy for enhancing food security, promoting its culture, and adapting to climate change.
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While no country has escaped the effects of rising average temperatures, Dominica is one of the most vulnerable. Some 16 miles wide, 29 miles long, and home to 74,000 people, the small, rocky, jungle-covered island nation already bears the scars of heat waves, sea level rise, and hurricanes that have killed dozens of residents and devastated its economy. These ongoing threats are poised to get worse for Dominica, and many island countries and coastal communities around the world are close behind in the line of fire.
Nearly one-third of humanity lives within 60 miles of a coastline, which makes Dominica a critical case study in how to endure a warmer world. “The island is a sort of a Petri dish for all island developing states,” said Cozier Frederick, Dominica’s environment minister.
Dominica’s government has responded with a suite of policies to reduce its contributions to the problem and prepare for what lies ahead. The island currently gets 80 percent of its electricity from diesel and 20 percent from hydroelectric power. Dominica is aiming to switch to 100 percent clean energy with a big investment in geothermal power, harnessing the volcanic energy of the island. It’s also deploying early warning systems to get residents out of the path of disasters and updating its building codes to better survive severe weather.
The goal is to make Dominica, a country facing some of the most severe harms from global warming, into a climate-resilient nation.
That’s where cassava comes in. Dominica has a footprint of 300 square miles and the majority of that land is too mountainous for many types of industrial agriculture. But cassava actually thrives in Dominica’s hilly terrain. As an underground tuber, it can withstand intense storms that would otherwise wipe out grains growing above. It can survive in the soil untouched for years, if need be.
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Through reviving ancient traditions and leveraging modern technology, Dominicans hope to better withstand a scenario like the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. “We were wiped out,” said Samuel Carrette of the Climate Resilience Execution Agency for Dominica. “The statistics will tell you that.” The storm damaged 95 percent of structures on the island, exacting a toll of 224 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Airports and seaports were out of commission for weeks, leaving Dominicans without food imports.
With more domestic food production, Dominicans also want to cultivate a unique food culture that is as much of a draw for tourists as snorkeling in the bubbling champagne reef or relaxing in Wotten Waven’s hot springs. Dominica is a place where a fish fresh out of the sea can be on a plate in minutes. And residents say this all adds up to a lifestyle on the island that has enormous benefits: Dominica boasts one of the highest per capita populations of centenarians in the world, with currently 12 Dominicans who are over the age of 100, according to the Dominica Council on Ageing.
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But Dominica can only endure so much on its own. Like many island countries, it contributes a miniscule amount of greenhouse gas emissions to the global total, yet is facing some of the most direct consequences of warming. Already, extreme weather has hurt crop yields. The changing chemistry of the ocean and rising water temperatures are strangling coral reefs, altering where fish reside, and diminishing catches. And the ocean itself is rising up.
It’s a challenge many other countries are facing as well in a year where record-breaking heat, torrential downpours, and drought have shrunk harvests around the world.
Dominica’s survival thus also depends on actions far beyond its borders, both in curbing greenhouse gas emissions and in adapting to the unavoidable changes underway. However, from its soils and its seas, Dominica has many of the ingredients it needs to endure, and thrive, in a warming world, preparing for the future by drawing on its ancient roots.
Dominica has a long tradition of eating local, but climate change is shrinking the catch
An hour before the sun comes up, residents near the Layou River on Dominica’s west coast begin to check their nets, placed where the island’s longest river runs into the ocean. Their target is a tiny fish called the titiwi. They look like translucent minnows, and dozens can fit into the palm of your hand.
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The fish run into the sea at regular intervals timed with the cycles of the moon. At the right time of the month, the whole community gathers, and the fisherfolk — both men and women — wade into the waist-deep stream and gather up their nets to collect their catch.
The fish is a local favorite and even has an annual festival in its honor. It’s served dried, stewed, fried, or baked into fritters called accra. Some of the fishers even sample their catch raw.
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Fishing — in rivers, on shores, and out to sea — is a critical safety net for Dominica. On paper, it accounts for about 2 percent of its economy. However, a 2019 United Nations report noted that “small scale fisheries in Dominica have always contributed to the food security of the island’s small population, although this appears not to be accounted for in official statistics.” Most locals fish for subsistence, and much of the local seafood trade is informal, making it hard to track. But in times of trouble, Dominicans count on what they reel in on their lines and nets to feed their communities.
That was especially evident in the wake of disasters like Hurricane Maria, when shipping and air travel to Dominica came to an abrupt halt. “We interviewed quite a few fishermen about how they were impacted, and this revealed a few surprises,” said John Pinnegar, director of the Cefas Marine Climate Change Centre, in an email. “Apparently, the rapidly recovering … fisheries helped to alleviate food insecurity when other sources were disrupted.”
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Dominica’s tuna, marlin, mahi mahi, and even the tiny titiwi are now facing the effects of global warming. Catching titiwi requires closely monitoring the temperature, the seasons, and the tides that locals have observed over generations. The fishers say they’ve noticed that their hauls have declined slowly over the past 10 years as temperatures have gone up.
The titiwi fishers have begun to adapt. One challenge they’ve faced is in storing their catch when it’s abundant so they can save it for when times are lean. Development groups have been working to provide smokers and other preservation tools to the fishers.
However, there are more profound changes underway under the sea. Because of dissolved carbon dioxide, the ocean has become 30 percent more acidic since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. That has “osteoporosis-like effects on shellfish,” according to the NOAA. Ocean acidification also weakens coral skeletons, making them slower to grow and more vulnerable to disease, threatening the survival of all the sea life that depends on reefs.
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At the same time, these shifts have become an invitation for invasive species like lionfish. They eat smaller creatures that feed on the algae growing on coral. Without them, algae runs rampant, choking off coral growth. Lionfish also compete with native sea life for food. A single lionfish can reduce the native fish population on a coral reef by 79 percent, according to NOAA. Local conservation efforts have helped contain lionfish, but now Dominica’s corals are falling ill with stony coral tissue loss disease, an epidemic sweeping the Caribbean.
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To make matters worse, the oceans are warming fast. This year, the Caribbean saw the highest water temperatures in at least a century. Hotter water can slow down the ocean’s upwelling process that lifts nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus compounds, toward the surface from deeper waters to nourish fish. Warmer sea surface temperatures have also contributed to record-sized blooms of sargassum, an algae that’s been washing up on beaches where it emits smelly, toxic hydrogen sulfide gas as it rots.
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The whole planet will feel these shifts in the seas. The World Bank reports that 600 million people’s livelihoods depend in some way on fisheries, and according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 3.3 billion people get at least 20 percent of their animal protein from the water.
It will take more time to grapple with the full impacts of the recent extreme heat on Dominica’s fisheries, but some residents say they have already felt the impact.
Jesse Hoffman, the chef of Lacou Melrose House in Roseau, said he works with local farmers and fishers to source all of his ingredients from within the island. That was tougher to do this year. “It’s been an unseasonably hot and dry spring over here, and there was a while when you couldn’t really get much fish at all for a few weeks,” Hoffman said. “They were saying the water is too hot.”
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“When basically the normal seasonal temperature averages are going out of flux, it starts with the growers — they have all kinds of headaches with that, and obviously it trickles down to what we’re able to get and serve,” he added.
Dominica’s farmers and fishers are trying to anticipate how further changes in the climate will affect them and how they can prepare, but it’s been a struggle. One obstacle is that there isn’t enough regional climate data, according to Shobha Maharaj, a climate scientist who co-authored the chapter on small island states for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That makes it harder to deliver practical information to the people who are producing food.
So the demand for more local knowledge has revived interest in traditional farming and fishing methods as rising temperatures create an environment that no one has experienced before.
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Dominica can’t hold the rest of the world at bay forever
To cope with these challenges, Dominica needs to bring in more money as well, and that means inviting more visitors. Tourism already makes up 25 percent of its economy, according to the World Bank.
Dominica bills itself as the Caribbean’s nature island, leveraging its pristine mountains, rainforests, 365 rivers, and shorelines as draws for tourists. The country is especially popular with scuba divers. To allow more visitors, the country is currently in the process of building a new airport that can accommodate airliners from Europe, as well as building new resorts. Giant cruise ships already fill Dominica’s port on a regular basis, and more may soon dock.
But all this development has exposed a tension. It runs counter to the idea of the island as a natural oasis. “We’re trying to balance with keeping nature intact, but also, we’re mindful that it may not grow if there’s no one outside seeing it and appreciating it and learning from it,” said environment minister Frederick.
Locals also worry about the climate impacts of all this additional travel from overseas. More visitors from afar means more greenhouse gases.
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“Every person flying to Dominica burns … fuel,” said Samuel Raphael, the proprietor of the Jungle Bay resort in Soufrière, south of Roseau. “It’s true that there’s a conflict. There’s an opportunity cost for everything.”
At the same time, Dominica’s tastes have already begun to change. There’s a growing appetite for imported packaged and processed foods which are often less healthy than fresh local options. And as they move away from subsistence farming and fishing and into the service sector, the island’s residents are becoming more sedentary. Extreme weather that damaged boats and uprooted crops further accelerated these trends as people resorted to food from boxes, bags, bottles, and cans.
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“What I realized after Maria, for example, we had an increase of persons reporting high blood pressure and diabetes,” said Casius Darroux, a former minister for Kalinago affairs in Dominica. “Personally, I think it is because of the imported products or the stuff that we’ve got after Maria and may have triggered it.”
One way Dominica is seeking to increase its food security and promote its cuisine is by collaborating more with its neighbors in the Caribbean. “We share common history,” Frederick said. “We have a national flag, a national song, a national food, a national plant, but we’re able to create synergies among ourselves.” Already, some of Dominica’s fishers are working with neighbors on islands like Saint Vincent to share techniques on how to increase yields for species like titiwi.
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Kreig Harris/UN Foundation
The task is not only to protect food security as temperatures rise, but also to preserve what makes Dominica’s cuisine unique against the bland homogeneity of globalization. Dominica teaches some of the most important lessons in how to eat on a baking planet as farmers, fishers, cooks, chefs, and diners around the world contend with the consequences of climate change. The biggest obstacle, though, is cultivating a taste for more sustainable economies and whetting appetites for bigger bites out of global greenhouse gas emissions. Without a concerted effort to reduce warming, far more dire outcomes will be on humanity’s menu.
This story was supported by a grant from the UN Foundation.
Real scientists are searching for alien life. Don’t let the kooks distract you.
This summer, a stony-faced David Grusch, a former US Air Force intelligence officer, sat before a House Oversight subcommittee and made some extraordinary claims. Chief among them is that the American government has a clandestine program that locates then reverse engineers unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) — an ostensibly less-silly way of saying unidentified flying objects, or UFOs — and that US operatives were in possession of nonhuman biological matter.
His audience of congressional representatives was skeptical, dismissive, and cynical. But just as they were about to mockingly dismiss him, Grusch played his ace. He took out several high-resolution photographs of dismembered creatures, clearly not of this world, being carefully extracted from the wreckage of their spaceships by scientists in hazmat suits. That was it — the moment everything changed. People gasped in shock. The camera flashes went off like fireworks. Aliens were real. Nothing would ever be the same.
Just kidding.
Grusch didn’t provide an ounce of verifiable evidence, citing only anonymous sources telling him vague things. When pressed for confirmation, he said because this was all so exceedingly classified, he was unable to provide specific details while under oath.
It would be tempting to think such displays of kookiness are rare. But just weeks later, a similar UAP session at the Mexican Congress involved the appearance of a coffin-like box containing the purported remains of aliens. (Spoiler alert: They weren’t aliens).
Let’s get something straight: Congressional hearings are not the way we are going to discover the existence of intelligent alien life. They are a distraction from the bona fide alien-hunting work — the sort that doesn’t involve grandstanding individuals and showy stunts, but scientists searching a sea of stars for the sounds or sights of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Because space is inconveniently enormous and traversing it so intensely time-consuming (without bending the fabric of space-time to your will, anyway), it’s exceedingly more likely that humanity’s first brush with extraterrestrials (ETs) will come in the form of eavesdropping on radio transmissions they’ve sent, or seeing a sign of technological civilization with a telescope, than recovering a pancaked little green wayfarer from a crashed capsule.
So that’s where scientists are focusing their work: listening, and watching the stars above.
This endeavor is exhaustive and exhausting, and the multitude of false positives can make it feel Sisyphean. But the prospect of success makes it worthwhile. A confirmed ET signal detection would be a moment that “divides history into before we knew there was somebody out there, and after,” says Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute.
Discovering the existence of ET intelligence would also instantaneously teach us something profound about the sustainability of life across the universe.
“If we detect a civilization, that means civilizations can exist for a reasonable amount of time and overcome their issues and problems,” says Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, a planetary habitability researcher at NASA. “That means there’s great hope for us.” (Or, if the grim history of colonization has anything to say about it, great peril.)
This is not simply a matter of pointing technological ears and eyes at the night sky and hearing the whispers or music of a distant intelligence. The cosmos is a noisy place, brimming with energetic bursts — including the hubbub from Earth itself — that drown out, and occasionally mimic, potential alien transmissions. It makes possible signs of ET intelligence tricky to spot and harder to confirm.
That prompts the question: One day, we may get a message from, or see the signs of, intelligent alien life. So how would we know it’s real?
Why search for extraterrestrial intelligence?
Are we alone? It is a question that many of us inherently feel is worth tackling. But why does trying to answer it actually matter?
SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — is something any astronomer or astrophysicist can do if they have access to the right kind of observatories. The best-known place that engages in it is the SETI Institute, a privately funded nonprofit research organization in Silicon Valley. Inaugurated in 1984, its funders and specific functions have shifted over time, but it has always been interested in looking out for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Other SETI research groups at other institutions and universities around the world share that same elemental goal.
And if you ask any of their members to explain their motivations, a common refrain is that the scientific revelations of discovering ET would be unparalleled.
If they were to discover that there is life out there — intelligent life that has forged a civilization — it would first mean that biology is not a fluke. Instead, it is something that can take root on many worlds; something that does not merely arise but repeatedly produces thinking, technological, curious creatures, those that may wish to share their knowledge of the universe, and their way of traversing or surviving it, with others. And if this civilization existed on a world very different from Earth, it would demonstrate that the largely unlivable cosmos is populated by myriad different isles of habitability.
Like many initially avant-garde scientific disciplines, from astrobiology to planetary defense, “there was a bit of suspicion about the credibility of the field by some of our colleagues” for many years, says Andrew Siemion, the director of the University of California Berkeley SETI Research Center. It sounded a little too sci-fi, something seemingly untethered from reality, more X-Files than X-ray astronomy. But those dedicated to the cause didn’t mind. “I wonder what kind of mentality it takes to not be interested in SETI?” says Siemion. “What kind of a person is that?”
The giggle factor hasn’t been helped by ignominious public displays like the recent congressional UAP hearings. But the skeptical perception over SETI research has “changed immeasurably over the last seven years,” says Siemion. This is partly because of the Breakthrough Listen program, a splashy, attention-grabbing $100 million drive for SETI research, one funded by the foundation established by philanthropic couple Yuri and Julia Milner. Far from being yet another eccentric pet project of society’s uppermost economic echelons, the program —of which Siemion is the principal investigator — vigorously supports serious SETI research and is helping to advance the field.
Whatever the institute or source of funding, and whether researchers are exclusively dedicated to the search or devote a mere fraction of their time to it, the goal is always the same: to find evidence of a technosignature — empirical evidence of something produced by a non-natural, technological source.
But how best to look for one?
Tuning the galactic radio
In 1959, two physicists, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, authored a Nature paper that attempted to make an aspect of science fiction something decidedly factual. It was titled “Searching for Interstellar Communications.”
The paper made the point that our habitable corner of space, and thus our human civilization, might be obvious to spot via an observatory from another world — and if that is true, then aliens might be trying to contact us. “We shall assume that long ago they established a channel of communication that would one day become known to us,” they wrote. “What sort of channel would that be?”
That paper marks “the beginning of modern SETI,” says Siemion. That is because it suggested a concrete, scientific way to search: do the astronomic equivalent of turning the dial on an analog radio, ultimately finding the frequency that contains a message from aliens. This is the mainstay of SETI research to this day.
We are drowning in an ocean of radio waves cascading at the speed of light through the cosmos. They come from pretty much everything, including collapsing stars, the auroras of gas giant planets — and communications technology. Pretty much anything that causes the hyperactive motion of electrons can emit radio waves. Importantly, each radio wave carries with it some clues about its source. By analyzing their frequencies, and chronicling how the signal’s properties change over time, scientists can tell the difference between a civilization’s radio transmission and, for example, an erupting black hole.
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Marc Kaufman/Washington Post via Getty Images
Natural sources of radio waves have distinct fingerprints. Namely: Those sources broadcast across a wide range of frequencies, explains Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University. They emit signals that can be picked up on many stations of an astronomer’s (jacked-up) radio dial.
An artificial source of radio waves (i.e., an alien transmitter beaming out a message) would look very different. Think about humanity’s own radio communications. When you want to listen to a particular radio station, you must tune into a very specific frequency. That is essentially what radio SETI research is: a hunt for coherent transmissions broadcast on an extremely narrow range of frequencies (dubbed “narrowband”). “Nature just cannot do that,” says Jean-Luc Margot, a radio astronomer and technosignature researcher at the University of California Los Angeles. Narrowing down a broadcast to a particular frequency, or a few frequencies, requires machinery — with essentially no exceptions.
That means this quest is fundamentally straightforward. Scientists are looking for “stuff you don’t see normally coming from stars and galaxies,” says Michael Garrett, the director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. “Anything that you don’t expect nature to produce.”
But that’s easier said than done. Nature has temporarily hoodwinked astrophysicists in the past. Take pulsars. Today, scientists know that they are the rapidly spinning, hyperdense corpses of stars, emitting beams of radiation from two poles like a deity’s lighthouse. But that wasn’t always the case.
The flamboyant behavior of pulsars was first theorized about in 1967. In 1968, a different group of scientists discovered the signal from a pulsar for the very first time, but they didn’t know exactly what it was; the regularity of the radiation bursts seemed so nonrandom that, for a moment, astronomers could not entirely rule out an artificially generated signal as a possibility, even dubbing the source LGM1 — “little green men 1”. But later that year, another scientist connected the regular rhythm of LGM1 with the pre-existing star carcass lighthouse theory, and LGM1 was understood to be a natural phenomenon, not a beacon of an alien design.
There are always caveats, and nature is always capable of surprises. But a nonrandom narrowband radio signal coming from space is an excellent place to start. Siemion likens it to seeing the Great Pyramid of Giza amid a vast field of rocks. Sure, it’s technically possible some natural process could have resulted in a pyramid, but the likelihood of crafting this sort of order out of such chaos is infinitesimally small — and even if you find one, you can check to make sure it isn’t a fluke of nature.
The technosignature checklist
Theoretically, anyone doing regular radio astronomy — gawping at supermassive black holes, for instance — could stumble upon one of these seemingly nonnatural radio signals. But it’s very unlikely. This sort of radio astronomy requires opening your instrument’s mechanical ears to a huge range of frequencies.
Looking for a radio technosignature means very carefully searching for signals amid the storm of natural noise. Fortunately, contemporary radio SETI searches levy the power of supercomputers and, increasingly, machine learning programs to simultaneously twiddle the dials of many different radio receivers, scouring for narrowband signals of interest.
But lest we forget, space is gargantuan. Even if signal searches are more efficient these days, there’s a lot of space to peruse. And most SETI researchers won’t always do targeted research — for example, listening in on tranquil stars known to have potentially habitable rocky worlds orbiting them. “You don’t know what an advanced civilization would do,” says Margot. They might build a radio beacon far from their homeworld, perhaps around a more hostile star, one they monitor remotely. “I think the best approach is to look over the entire celestial sphere,” he says.
If we are lucky, there may be a way to cut some corners. In their 1959 paper, Cocconi and Morrison noted that the most abundant stuff in the universe is hydrogen. Hydrogen gas is everywhere, and it naturally produces radio emissions at a specific frequency: 1,420 MHz. Other astronomy-practicing civilizations would almost certainly know this, and realize that other civilizations would also know this — so why not broadcast a transmission at that exact frequency?
“If you have to look for somebody you don’t know at the airport, you go to the rendezvous point,” says Margot. “1,420 MHz may be the rendezvous point for civilizations trying to advertise their presence.”
Even if that turns out to be the case, humanity’s radio transmissions are obfuscating our efforts to look for the alien equivalents. Earth itself, and the many satellites orbiting it, generate a hurricane of radio waves. Sometimes, SETI researchers can pick up signals from space that are our own robotic spacecraft, or terrestrial signals bounced back from the moon.
“It’s really annoying,” says Wright.
That’s why some researchers are (ambitiously) calling for a SETI-focused radio observatory on the far side of the Moon, which would avoid much of this noise — at least while the soon-to-be-permanent human presence on the lunar surface remains small.
But let’s say you can rule out humanity’s own radio interference. Scientists must then determine it’s coming from somewhere else in space. One or a handful of radio observatories could be used to get a decent idea of where that signal was coming from. But if you use a huge number of radio dishes at once — the 64-dish MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, for example, or even combining multiple observatories and arrays across the planet — you get a major boost in sensitivity that could allow you to locate the planet around a star from which the signal is broadcasting.
Tick all these boxes and you have something extremely promising on your hands. But it can get even better: If the signal changed its structure during the transmission — something known as modulation — then that would blow everyone’s socks off. “If there was some obvious modulation there, then we would know that it was also conveying information,” says Garrett. This is the difference between hearing a constant dial tone on the phone versus hearing hold music or someone speaking.
“It’s not clear you’d ever understand them any more than cavemen would understand the London newspapers,” says Shostak, of the SETI Institute. But we could recognize the modulations are representative information of some sort — anything from mathematical sequences to sounds that represent a spoken language — without being able to translate the content.
At this point, so long as multiple research groups all came to the same conclusion independently, it would be difficult to doubt that a technosignature (a.k.a. intelligent life) has been identified. As you’ve probably guessed, this is yet to transpire, although there have been several moments in which, for a second, things looked mighty promising.
In 2020, for example, a seemingly nonrandom narrowband radio signal was detected by the Breakthrough Listen project. Dubbed BLC1, it was especially tantalizing as it was thought to be emanating from the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, a system thought to have rocky (and potentially habitable) worlds in its orbit. But multiple studies eventually concluded the signal was Earth-based interference of some kind, nothing alien.
“It was a roller coaster, I guess you could say,” says Siemion. “It was really exciting.” And by interrogating the signal so rigorously, it proved to be a great educational experience. “We’re looking forward to BLC2,” he adds.
Video killed the radio star
As is often said, seeing is believing, and there is a chance that our first technosignature will come about not by listening to the universe’s radio stations but by peering down the sights of a telescope.
One way astronomers search for other planets is the transit method. If a star’s brightness temporarily dips, then something probably passed in front of it as seen from Earth. If it dips in regular intervals and by the same amount each time, that’s usually caused by a planet.
If, during a transit, a star’s light passes through a world’s skies, then it carries information about the chemical makeup of that planet’s atmosphere — information that, with the right instruments, astronomers can decode. This is useful for all sorts of reasons, including working out if a world is potentially habitable to biology of any variety, or even to search for hints of possible biosignatures themselves — chemicals that can be produced (sometimes exclusively) by life.
This technique could also be used to find the pollution from an alien civilization. Nitrogen dioxide, for example, is made by forest fires, volcanoes, lightning, and other natural sources. But much of Earth’s nitrogen dioxide comes from the burning of fossil fuels, particularly from road vehicles. Detecting that on an exoplanet may hint at the presence of a fossil fuel-burning civilization that has yet to move exclusively onto sources of futuristic clean energy, like nuclear fusion.
Like many biosignatures with both natural and artificial sources, the detection of plenty of nitrogen dioxide wouldn’t be a slam-dunk confirmation of an alien intelligence.
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NASA Ames
Other chemicals would sound a clearer alarm, such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These are found in aerosol sprays, packing materials, solvents, refrigerants, and more; they ate away at the ozone layer before being broadly banned across the globe by the Montreal Protocol. “There is no natural process that can produce CFCs,” says Kopparapu, the NASA planetary habitability researcher. It is not inconceivable that, as the James Webb Space Telescope is examining an exoplanet for biosignatures, it detects the presence of CFCs.
SETI scientists are not just interested in the information carried by that starlight; they are also curious about the total amount of starlight they are receiving. When an object passes in front of the star, its apparent brightness dips. And it’s possible the dip could be caused by something other than a planet — something much more implausible but considerably more fantastic.
Science fiction is full of alien megastructures, unfathomably giant objects like world-sized space stations or colossal orbs surrounding stars to siphon off an almost endless supply of solar energy. There is always a chance that a transit reveals the existence of something decidedly nonnatural around a distant star — a detection that could be followed up by targeted radio SETI work.
Some transits have already raised astronomers’ eyebrows. The chaotic, sporadic dimming around Tabby’s Star (named after an American astronomer who led the team that discovered the star’s weird light fluctuations), for example, cannot be explained by the periodic orbit of a planet. Nobody can confidently explain the cause of these shenanigans, but various hypotheses have been suggested, including the shattered remnants of a planet, swarms of comets, and, yes, an alien megastructure — a type of optical technosignature. Although few scientists are betting on an extraterrestrial intelligence explanation, ongoing work has still to conclusively rule it out.
Interstellar interlopers
It is possible that the first confirmation of ET intelligence will be from a detection much closer to home, possibly within our own solar system. Astronomers are looking out for strange objects near our sun’s orbit. And sometimes they find them.
On October 19, 2017, astronomers detected something deeply unusual soaring through our solar system: A pancake or cigar-shaped, extremely reflective body that was accelerating as it was leaving the solar system, a speed uptick that its gravitational slingshot around the sun alone could not apparently explain.
The object was dubbed ‘Oumuamua, and it was the first confirmed sighting of an interstellar object, something that originated from another star system.
Its exotic disposition was initially inexplicable, but the idea that it was a natural entity with unusual characteristics was quickly accepted by astronomers — with one notable exception.
Avi Loeb, a Harvard astronomer known for making provocative (and unsubstantiated) claims about alien technology that much of the scientific community finds both exhausting and loathsome, concluded that the most plausible explanation for ‘Oumuamua is that it’s the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence. Perhaps it was a type of reconnaissance craft, a vessel propelled by the wind-like push of starlight on its reflective sail. He wrote a bestselling book about it titled Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.
Six years on, there is still considerable debate as to the true nature of the object. But astronomers are in lockstep about one thing: Loeb’s theory about ‘Oumuamua doesn’t pass the smell test.
It has been thoroughly debunked by multiple researchers, including Wright, whose co-authored breakdown of the key claims ends with a more rational conclusion, one that the wider community shares: It’s a comet (or asteroid) whose shape is no weirder than many of the objects found in the outer solar system and whose odd acceleration can, in fact, be explained by several different natural processes, including the vaporization of ices acting like an ephemeral rocket booster. (Researchers at the SETI Institute and members of Breakthrough Listen also found no radio signals coming from ‘Oumuamua.)
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Rubin Obs./NSF/AURA/W. O’Mullane
Like those UAP hearings in Congress, this sort of breathless hype is distracting from the real work that SETI researchers conduct.
Optical SETI is an increasingly popular field of research — and it’s about to get even easier to do, thanks to the under-construction Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, a machine equipped with a next-generation telescopic eye that can see vast swaths of space while also spying faint objects very far away. Most observatories can only do one or the other. But Rubin will find millions of new objects in the solar system every single year, including comets, asteroids, and even interstellar objects visiting our galactic backwater.
Its forensic 10-year census will provide astronomers with a visual encyclopedia of the solar system’s menagerie, from the regular, round-ish asteroids and comets to the odder ones that look like dog bones, cigars, or snowmen, from those close to Earth to those at the fringes of the solar system.
From then on, scientists would be able to quickly spot an object that, compared to the hundreds of millions of others on record, looks genuinely unnatural. “If the Death Star was sitting out at 200 au [200 times the Earth-sun distance], probably we would see it,” says Meg Schwamb, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast. Not only that, but if an object isn’t orbiting the sun in a way that can be explained by conventional physics, the Rubin Observatory would be able to spy it acting weirdly. “It’s a reasonable question to ask: Did anything move in the wrong direction?” says Schwamb.
If you know, you know
SETI research is grueling work. No matter how scientists do it, it takes time, effort, and heapings of healthy skepticism. Those looking for the tangible gratification of a classic UFO are almost certainly going to be very disappointed.
Of course the US military is hiding things, says David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton. But that doesn’t mean it’s hiding aliens.
The way Spergel sees things, an alien intelligence visiting Earth either wants to be seen — in which case it would be rather flamboyant about it, showing itself to governments and citizens alike — or it doesn’t, in which case it will remain inscrutable to everyone, even spies. They would not attach blinking lights to their interplanetary spacecraft, just as Ukraine’s drones do not announce their existence to Russian forces with flashing underside lights.
Spergel quips that the only way that bright lights on an alien reconnaissance spacecraft make even the tiniest bit of sense is if an extraterrestrial intelligence is pranking us. “What if the aliens we see are basically teenagers cow tipping — and we’re cows?” he says, smirking.
Spergel is also the chair of a recently inaugurated NASA committee on UAPs, one whose members have been discussing ways in which the space agency and its commercial partners can (unlike the US military) transparently gather and share data to assist the American government’s analyses of potential UAP sightings.
That transparency is emblematic of SETI research as a whole. Those conducting it want to be public about it, to share their excitement, to nix the daydreams of conspiracy theorists — and to underscore that it is tough work that comes with no guarantees.
In that 1959 paper, Cocconi and Morrison noted that “the probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.” More than half a century later, that feeling is still commonplace among SETI researchers.
“Yes, you have to be patient. Yes, it’s hard and frustrating,” says Siemion. “But at the end of the day, you’re uncovering the greatest mystery in the universe.”
To him, the most interesting part of the search for alien intelligence is as philosophical as it is scientific. Channeling the late Carl Sagan, he says the “most interesting property of the universe by a wide margin is that somehow it has evolved a capacity to know itself, to ask questions about itself.”
In other words, billions of years of unconscious physics and chemistry created biology, and another few billion years have resulted in at least one species (i.e., us humans) that wonders aloud how everything came to be, effectively giving the cosmos self-awareness.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know that we aren’t the only ones capable of that? Everyone needs some alone time, but nobody likes to be truly, permanently alone. SETI scientists are simply applying that notion on a species-wide scale. We could potentially join other intelligent species on a quest for self-understanding. They might not know the answers to the Big Questions — the “why are we here” category of queries — any more than we do, but we can join them in figuring it out.
Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is easy to find online. Here’s how to avoid spreading it.
After Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on Israel on October 7, killing at least 1,000 and taking at least 150 hostages, and Israel declared war against Hamas and retaliated, photographs and videos of violence flooded out of the region and onto social media. Some of the images were posted by victims on the ground at the attacks. Some were reportedly seeded by Hamas, but others were years old, taken from conflict zones in other parts of the world, or even from a fictional video game. For the average internet user, knowing what information to trust online has never been more challenging.
As someone who has covered misinformation through dozens of major news events, I know that people flock to social media during a crisis for many reasons. Maybe it’s because the mainstream news doesn’t feel fast or immediate enough, or because the crisis has put them or someone close to them in harm’s way and they need help. Perhaps they want to see and share and say something that captures the reality of an important moment in time because they don’t know what else to do when the world is on fire. Misinformation and manipulation often spread for the same reasons, slipping into the feeds of those who believe it can’t hurt to share a startling video or gruesome photograph or call for aid, even if they’re not sure of the reliability of the source.
When war goes online, the churn of good and bad information is supercharged by the stakes. While state-sponsored information wars existed well before the invention of the internet, social media has enabled all kinds of propaganda and dangerous falsehoods to rapidly reach millions. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, for example, livestreamers and scammers reposted old videos to TikTok, claiming they showed the latest from the front lines, in order to get views and trick people into donating to fake fundraisers.
Last year, I wrote a guide to being online in wartime to help people navigate the misinformation around Russia’s war in Ukraine. A lot of the advice about how to quickly evaluate a river of online information hasn’t changed much over the years. But social media has changed quite a bit in just a few months; in the days since the Hamas attack, it has become clear that some of the old tricks for verifying unreliable posts need to be modified or unlearned altogether.
This is particularly true on X, formerly known as Twitter, which was once a central destination for those who wanted to follow major news events in real time. Elon Musk, the platform’s owner and CTO, spent the hours after Hamas attacked Israel spreading misinformation about the conflict and even told his 150 million followers to get news on the attack from two verified accounts that have a clear history of sharing false information. Musk’s recommendation had at least 11 million views before it was deleted, according to the Washington Post. This is after Musk spent months diminishing the platform’s capacity to moderate against misinformation and hate speech.
Since the initial attack, X users circulated a fabricated White House memo that claimed the US government was sending $8 billion in aid to Israel. An account posing as the Jerusalem Post fueled a false rumor that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in the hospital. And because Twitter’s verification system has been repurposed into a premium badge for paying subscribers, who also get boosted engagement with their tweets, it’s now relatively easy to buy eyeballs on X and imitate expertise on the platform.
Misinformation is an exhausting topic, one that’s difficult to define, and on some platforms, including X, tackling misinformation is no longer a company priority to address. So, increasingly, it’s up to you to sort through the mess. No online guide will fully protect you against the bad and untrue stuff online. But there are things you can do to navigate the online chaos that follows a major news event.
Understand the platform you’re on
Many large social media platforms have shifted back to prioritizing engagement over reliability for the posts their users see on their feeds. That has created a friendlier environment for online nonsense and coordinated disinformation. The situation is certainly made worse by the transformation of Twitter, once a useful news feed, into X, something drastically different.
X is much less trustworthy and useful these days during breaking news, and evaluating sources on the platform is trickier. On X, a blue check mark once meant that the platform had verified the identity of the person or people behind the account, or that the account officially belonged to an organization. But the badge no longer serves as a verification of identity; it’s now a feature for X’s paying users, who also get better engagement and features, putting their posts in front of more people. Some verified users are also part of a program that pays them based on their engagement on X, so for them, going viral literally pays off.
Plenty of blue-checked X users have indeed been sharing misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war. Some claim to be sharing footage of the war in action when in fact they are just repurposing clips from a video game and getting millions of views. Those videos are also getting views on TikTok.
TikTok has, in some ways, stepped into the role Twitter once had as the key social media app that people turn to in order to follow a major news event. The app, which many think of as an entertainment platform, is very different from Twitter in the 2010s, when it was a must-read for breaking news. While Twitter anointed its share of expert influencers, creators are the main conduit for news on TikTok. The app’s news creators build fandoms around their personalities and promise of independence from, say, mainstream sources. All that said, TikTok also has issues with misinformation.
And then there’s Telegram, one of the platforms Hamas is using to release violent footage. Telegram, which is part group chat and part social media platform, is popular globally, has few moderation practices, and has long been a home for extremists and conspiracy theorists who have left or been banned from more mainstream platforms. More on that later.
Learn to SIFT
The SIFT method, developed by digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield, is a good framework for learning how to evaluate emotionally charged or outrage-inducing online posts in the middle of an unfolding crisis. There are two reasons I like it: First, it’s adaptable to a lot of situations. And second, the goal here isn’t a full fact-check. SIFT is meant to be a quick series of checks that anyone can do in order to decide how much of your attention to give what you’re seeing and whether you feel comfortable sharing a post with others.
The SIFT method breaks down to four steps: “Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.” That “Stop” step can do a lot of work during a major, violent conflict like the Israel-Hamas war. People get engagement on questionable or untrue posts during breaking news by tugging on your emotions and beliefs. So if a video, photograph, or post about the war seems to confirm everything you’ve ever believed about a topic or makes you immediately furious or hopeful or upset, stop yourself from instantly sharing it.
Then, investigate the source. This can be done pretty quickly. Click on the account sharing the thing you saw and glance at their information and previous posts. You’re not launching a full-scale investigation here. You’re just trying to get a sense of who has ended up in your feed. Next, find better coverage. That means you open up a bunch of tabs. Is this being reported anywhere else by trustworthy news sources? Has this claim been fact-checked? And finally, trace the source. Open up the news article and run a search for a phrase in the quote you’re about to share. See if you can find that image attributed elsewhere, and make sure the captions describe the same thing.
Check in with yourself
During acts of unfathomable violence, videos of death and maiming circulate online with the imperative to witness. Please understand that you do not have to view violent footage circulating online in order to process a horrible event, whether you feel you can handle seeing it or not.
Check in with yourself and think critically about the role you want to play on- and offline in a moment like this. That might mean resisting the impulse to become an instant breaking news reporter in your group chat. If you don’t have the skill set to evaluate for accuracy the videos of on-the-ground footage in a neighborhood you’ve never visited, you’re not likely to develop it in a matter of minutes.
I’ve tried to avoid giving specific instructions in this guide in terms of what platforms to use or not use as a regular person trying to get news. I’m going to make one now: Especially if you’re unfamiliar with Telegram, now is not the time to indulge in your curiosity and dive into the app looking for “raw” footage and live updates. In addition to the risk of encountering and engaging with literal propaganda, Telegram is notoriously bad at surfacing good information.
Your attention is valuable
Online falsehoods need attention and amplification to work. You might not have a big account with a ton of followers, but every reshare matters, both to the circle of people who see your posts online and to the engagement numbers for the original post. Interacting with something on social media — whether a cautious share “in case” it’s true or a repost to point out that something definitely isn’t — signals to the site’s algorithms that you’re interested in that content. In other words, outrage shares are still shares, even if you’re talking about a bad analysis, an unsourced photograph, or an outright lie.