(2 of 2)
Enormously Wasteful. Several scientists have theorized that the pulses may be caused by white dwarf or neutron stars rotating rapidly around each other in a binary system; any particles passing through the rotating and intense magnetic field that must exist between the two stars would produce strong radiation that would periodically sweep the earth. Others have suggested that the intense gravity of a star in such a binary system would act as a lens, periodically intensifying and focusing the radiation from the twin star passing behind it.
There still is the remote chance, some astronomers feel, that the signals are being sent by distant, advanced civilizations. While admitting this possibility, Astronomer Drake, for one, stresses that there are strong arguments against it. The signals, he notes, are transmitted over a very wide range of frequencies—an "enormously wasteful" procedure not to be expected of superintelligent beings. And if the signals from pulsar 1 are being transmitted in all directions from a distance of a few hundred light-years away from earth, the power level of the transmitting source must be about ten billion times greater than the entire electrical generating capacity of our civilization—"too high," Drake says, "to be plausible."
Most scientists agree with Drake's reasoning, and a slight majority now appears to favor the theory of extraordinary, vibrating white dwarf stars as the probable source of the signals from space. Said Jodrell Bank Astronomer Smith at the close of the Royal Astronomical Society meeting: "It looks as if the little green men are now white dwarfs."