Speaker 1: In many ways, it's a scientific dream come true, a
Speaker 1: fantasy even to be indulged during daydreams. Usually it goes
Speaker 1: something like this. You're sitting at your desk where you
Speaker 1: monitor some telescope or communications equipment. Suddenly you see something unusual,
Speaker 1: interrupting endless hours of monotony. It's some kind of signal,
Speaker 1: something you've never seen before, something that can't have come
Speaker 1: from any Earth source and isn't produced by any natural phenomenon.
Speaker 1: It's a signal from space. It's humanity's first interplanetary email.
Speaker 1: Of course, that's exciting, it's amazing, it's mind blowing, but
Speaker 1: you know it's actually just the first step. The existence
Speaker 1: of the signal says hey, aliens are here. But what
Speaker 1: is the message that's encoded inside? What does that alien
Speaker 1: email have to say? Does it say you killed my father,
Speaker 1: prepared to die? Does it say here's our alien unified
Speaker 1: theory of everything? Or is an interstellar version of a
Speaker 1: Nigerian oil scam? Of course we're dying to know. But
Speaker 1: how do we crack the message? How do we know
Speaker 1: what the alien code is? How do we figure it out?
Speaker 1: And hanging over the whole enterprise is the question What
Speaker 1: if we can't What if we never figure out what
Speaker 1: it means, and there's a growing sense of doubt that
Speaker 1: it actually means anything. What if it's not an alien
Speaker 1: email but some kind of weird universe electromagnetic purp. Now
Speaker 1: this scientific fantasy has turned into a kind of scientific nightmare.
Speaker 1: Today in the podcast, we're going to be digging into
Speaker 1: the true story of a message from the skies and
Speaker 1: what it might mean. We'll be answering the question did
Speaker 1: Earth get a message from aliens?
Speaker 2: Welcome to Daniel and Kelly is extraordinary universe. I'm Kelly
Speaker 2: Wiener Smith, and I think probably there are aliens out there. Daniel,
Speaker 2: how are you doing? What's your story?
Speaker 1: Hi? I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a particle physicist and a
Speaker 1: professor at UC Irvine, and I wish I could say
Speaker 1: I was an alien.
Speaker 2: That is not what I expected you were going to
Speaker 2: go with today. Why do you wish you were an alien?
Speaker 1: Earth just seems like such a wonderful place to visit,
Speaker 1: And you know, there's so many friendly physicists and other
Speaker 1: scientists who want to know all of your secrets of
Speaker 1: the universe. I just imagine it would be a great
Speaker 1: experience to be an alien, arrive on Earth and get
Speaker 1: to hang out with a bunch of cool nerds.
Speaker 2: Okay, sweet, No, I'm down for that. Okay. So, if
Speaker 2: you were able to send a message that you knew
Speaker 2: aliens were going to get, what would you send out
Speaker 2: into space if you knew it would be received?
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, Kelly, Wow, the hardest question time.
Speaker 2: Oh Man, no balls here.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, I pretty strongly believe that any message we send
Speaker 1: out into space will be undecipherable, untranslatable without us there
Speaker 1: to explain it or to interact with them or some
Speaker 1: kind of common context. I love the message that we
Speaker 1: did send out into space, but I think it's probably
Speaker 1: impossible for aliens to figure out what we meant by that,
Speaker 1: because I think there's so much of us in it,
Speaker 1: so much of our cultural context, and that it's hard
Speaker 1: for us to see that and to strip it away.
Speaker 1: But of course, if you gave me the opportunity, I
Speaker 1: would still send something, probably a picture of my kids.
Speaker 2: Aw, that's cute. I think if I was going to
Speaker 2: send a message out in a space, one thing that's
Speaker 2: kind of universal is music, especially instrumental music. So I
Speaker 2: think i'd send some like beautiful music out into space,
Speaker 2: because I agree. I think if you sent like we
Speaker 2: come in peace, they wouldn't know what that means. I mean,
Speaker 2: I can listen to music from a culture I know
Speaker 2: nothing about and still feel kind of choked up about it.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Maybe that's the closest we have to
Speaker 2: something universal.
Speaker 1: Maybe I mean it's the universe, maybe across humans. And
Speaker 1: I can appreciate music from other species like bird song
Speaker 1: can be quite nice. But I don't know if that
Speaker 1: means that it's universal beyond Earth right, other than just
Speaker 1: speculation and hope, do we have any solid evidence biologically
Speaker 1: for music being something that has to fundamentally be part
Speaker 1: of intelligence.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely not. But I think it's maybe one of
Speaker 2: our best chances at sending something that represents our whole species.
Speaker 2: Because almost all of us are excited about music.
Speaker 1: That means we have to send them Taylor Swift or
Speaker 1: like the Macarena or something.
Speaker 2: I think we could take a more historical perspective.
Speaker 1: What's more likely to get us invaded or nuked from orbit? O?
Speaker 2: God, let's withhold the makarena. Bleeps.
Speaker 1: But we don't just have to speculate about signals to
Speaker 1: send to aliens, because humanity has sent messages to the
Speaker 1: skies in the past, and we've done so in response
Speaker 1: to weird lips and bleeps we've heard from the cosmos.
Speaker 2: Do you think most people know about the weird blue
Speaker 2: in bleeps we've heard. I think we should ask our audience.
Speaker 1: One of the best candidates for a potential alien signal
Speaker 1: is something we're going to be talking about on the
Speaker 1: podcast today. It's called the Wow signal because someone wrote
Speaker 1: wow next to the computer print out when they first
Speaker 1: saw it. Was it Aliens? Was it the Russians? Was
Speaker 1: it just birds?
Speaker 2: I think the writing wow next to it thing is
Speaker 2: really cute, better than WTF or something a WTF signal?
Speaker 1: I love it, And so I asked folks what they
Speaker 1: thought the Wow signal might be. Was it a message
Speaker 1: from aliens? Or are we just fooling ourselves. Here's what
Speaker 1: people had to say.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure what calls the Wow signal.
Speaker 1: Maybe supernova, maybe maybe aquasa.
Speaker 2: Some sort of cosmic anomaly.
Speaker 1: I don't remember if there's been any resolution on its origin,
Speaker 1: so I'd love to hear progress on that.
Speaker 2: The Wow signal is a seventy two second narrow band
Speaker 2: high energy signal sent by the Santee, an alien race,
Speaker 2: in an attempt to find refuge from their failing three
Speaker 2: body problem.
Speaker 1: It must be very impressive to be called the WOW.
Speaker 1: That's the signal that was seen by SETTI for a
Speaker 1: brief time. I don't think it's known what caused it,
Speaker 1: no idea, It never never repeated.
Speaker 2: My guess is the WOW signal was a short transmission
Speaker 2: from a satellite that just happened to be in the
Speaker 2: beam of the Big Year at the time, something that
Speaker 2: they thought was alien. But they've recently done done some
Speaker 2: research to improved that it was actually a massive comet
Speaker 2: going between one planetary signal and US. I think it
Speaker 2: had something to do with hydrogen. I'm curious to hear.
Speaker 1: To find out the WOW signal was just a glitch,
Speaker 1: a random occurrence. Or who was written upside down and
Speaker 1: he was thinking about his mom mikes would be moving.
Speaker 1: Electrons burst from like a pulsar equasar that collided with
Speaker 1: the cloud of hydrogen, which then created the signal of
Speaker 1: sweatpast Earth. If you'd like to virtually answer these persons
Speaker 1: on the street questions, we'd love to have you participate
Speaker 1: please write to us two questions at danieland Kelly dot org.
Speaker 1: That's danieland Kelly dot O RG Kelly, is.
Speaker 2: K E l L Y not I E. That's the
Speaker 2: wrong way to spell it. Sorry to I E. Kelly's
Speaker 2: out there. Let's go ahead and alienate the audience for
Speaker 2: no reason. So I thought the answers that we got
Speaker 2: this time around were great. I really loved the person
Speaker 2: who was quick on their feet and had the upside
Speaker 2: down and it actually met mom answer, like, oh, message
Speaker 2: for mom, I got to call home.
Speaker 1: Maybe moms are the most universal thing in the universe, Kelly.
Speaker 2: I love that idea. I think that's probably right. Everyone
Speaker 2: everywhere loves their mom.
Speaker 1: I don't know. We have a running joke as a
Speaker 1: family whenever we watch a movie, either the dad or
Speaker 1: the mom is usually like a terrible character. And so
Speaker 1: you know, when you see a mom acting badly on
Speaker 1: the screen, my kids are like, moms are the worst.
Speaker 1: Oh you see a dad behaving terribly, and they're like,
Speaker 1: dads are the worst. Oh my gosh. But anyway, I
Speaker 1: hope aliens out there have really nice moms.
Speaker 2: I hope so too. Well. So another common guess was
Speaker 2: that this was just a like equipment problem or some
Speaker 2: you know, environmental phenomena. So let's get into where we
Speaker 2: collected the WOW signal, what it looked like, and let's
Speaker 2: jump in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Wow signal is a really exciting example something
Speaker 1: I think is really important, which is basically just listening
Speaker 1: to the universe and trying to hear messages. You know,
Speaker 1: we don't have a whole lot of ways of communicating
Speaker 1: with aliens because we're stuck on this rock. You know,
Speaker 1: space is vast and rockets are slow, and even photons
Speaker 1: don't go very fast compared to the huge distances between
Speaker 1: here and any other stars. So our best chance to
Speaker 1: discover life is not to land on some other planet
Speaker 1: or for other aliens to land here, but to hear
Speaker 1: from them, right, to get a message from space. And
Speaker 1: so the best way to figure out are we alone
Speaker 1: in the universe is to listen to hear if other
Speaker 1: people are basically sending us interplanetary emails.
Speaker 2: I feel like it's common for people to try to
Speaker 2: convince you that the question they work on is really
Speaker 2: important by prefacing it with one of the most important
Speaker 2: questions humankind will ever have to answer. And people often
Speaker 2: say whether or not we're alone one of the most
Speaker 2: important questions humankind will ever have to answer. And I
Speaker 2: think that's the one time that I believe it. I
Speaker 2: think that might actually be one of the most important questions.
Speaker 2: What do you think what do you think is the
Speaker 2: most important question humans could ever answer?
Speaker 1: Man, you are dropping the big questions kind of.
Speaker 2: Getting us off track.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, I agree, And I think we know
Speaker 1: it's one of the most important questions because it's one
Speaker 1: of the oldest questions, and there's a question we've been
Speaker 1: asking since we've been asking questions. It's up there with
Speaker 1: like how big is the universe and where does it
Speaker 1: all come from? It changes the whole context of our experience,
Speaker 1: you know, in a way that like some question in
Speaker 1: organic chemistry, can you synthesize this polysaccharator or whatever? I
Speaker 1: don't even know enough chemistry to make that joke, you know,
Speaker 1: like the answer doesn't change what it means to be human,
Speaker 1: what it means to be alive, and how you should
Speaker 1: live your life. But if we know we're alone in
Speaker 1: the universe, we're the only thinking beings that really changes
Speaker 1: what it means to be human. And also if we're
Speaker 1: one in the zillion changes what it means to be human.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I agree this is one of the deep questions.
Speaker 1: I don't personally work on this question, which means I'm
Speaker 1: not like invested in it that same way, but I
Speaker 1: agree it's one of the most important questions basically anybody's
Speaker 1: ever asked.
Speaker 2: And I also don't work on this question, but I
Speaker 2: still think it would probably profoundly change the way I
Speaker 2: see everything. And I feel like, also over the course
Speaker 2: of my life, I've been more and more convinced that
Speaker 2: probably there's something else out there. During my lifetime, we've
Speaker 2: learned so much about other exoplanets and how much is
Speaker 2: out there, and I feel like, statistically it would be
Speaker 2: really surprising if we were alone. And so anyway, I'm
Speaker 2: more excited about listening.
Speaker 1: I think it's really interesting how scientists have hunches like that.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's widely enough understood that you know,
Speaker 1: we're scientists and we're doing science and we're trying to
Speaker 1: be objective, but also look where people we got feelings
Speaker 1: and guesses and emotions, and that's important because that drives
Speaker 1: how science is done. Like, if you believe in something,
Speaker 1: you're more likely to investigate it, And of course you
Speaker 1: can investigate it in a very scientific way and try
Speaker 1: to draw objective answers, but it changes the kind of
Speaker 1: things you do with your science, little places you spend
Speaker 1: your time. So these like scientific hunches, they're important. You know,
Speaker 1: these feelings that scientists have.
Speaker 2: Well, I think you need to be honest about them,
Speaker 2: because if you feel like something is right, then you
Speaker 2: need to be extra careful to make sure you're not
Speaker 2: tricking yourself into something. You know. I think people who
Speaker 2: are like, oh, scientists, they're always unbiased and they're just
Speaker 2: looking for the truth. It's like, no, we're humans. We
Speaker 2: like have a hunch that things are going to go
Speaker 2: one way or another, and you need to be honest
Speaker 2: about that and then try extra hard to prove yourself
Speaker 2: wrong if you know you're leaning in a certain direction exactly.
Speaker 1: And I feel just that way about the aliens question.
Speaker 1: People write to me about this because I'm very skeptical
Speaker 1: of all the videos that we've seen, you know, gimbal
Speaker 1: and the Tiktac video and all this stuff. And I
Speaker 1: talked to Mick West once about it and he helped
Speaker 1: us debunk them. And the reason I feel so skeptical
Speaker 1: about them is that the threshold is absolutely, very very high.
Speaker 1: And one reason for that is that I really want
Speaker 1: it to be true, Like I want there to be aliens,
Speaker 1: and I want them to be here on Earth visiting us.
Speaker 1: I would so love for that to be true that
Speaker 1: I have to be extra scrupulous about believing this stuff, right,
Speaker 1: It needs to be really, really rock solid, because I
Speaker 1: know I'm biased in fame of believing it, And.
Speaker 2: So I bet you want it to be true because
Speaker 2: you would love to know their physics theories and if
Speaker 2: they imagine with ours.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I would love to talk to a theoretical physicists
Speaker 1: from another planet, if they even do theoretical physics. And
Speaker 1: you know, of course that I'm writing a book on
Speaker 1: that exact question, but also because it would instantly answer
Speaker 1: so many other questions about the prevalence of life, Like
Speaker 1: your hunch that there is life out there in the
Speaker 1: universe is informed, of course by science. You know, there
Speaker 1: are a lot more planets, a lot more stars, a
Speaker 1: lot more earth like planets and all that stuff, But
Speaker 1: there's still the question of how often life arises, and
Speaker 1: something we don't even understand here on Earth, right, And
Speaker 1: so that would help us understand that question, which I
Speaker 1: feel like is so deep and informs the context of
Speaker 1: our lives so profoundly that yeah, I'm desperate to know.
Speaker 1: And also because it's a question that has an answer,
Speaker 1: and the answer is out there. Yeah, like the aliens
Speaker 1: are either there or they're not. You know, it's just
Speaker 1: a fact about the universe and we just don't have
Speaker 1: the answer. It's like if somebody puts the answer in
Speaker 1: an envelope in front of you, you're going to be
Speaker 1: so desperate to open it, right. That's to me what
Speaker 1: science is is like ripping open the envelopes of the universe.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I just started this book called The Zoologists
Speaker 2: Guide to the Galaxy, and the argument that he's making
Speaker 2: is that natural selection must be acting everywhere, and so
Speaker 2: there are some things you can predict about how animals
Speaker 2: will look and anyway, as a biologist, I would just
Speaker 2: love to know, like do they have something like DNA
Speaker 2: like we do? Are there other ways of encoding things?
Speaker 2: I mean, it does feel like they must be shaped
Speaker 2: by natural selection, but is that true? And what do
Speaker 2: they look like now? And I'm only about the first
Speaker 2: quarter of the way into the book and it's a
Speaker 2: very interesting argument. But okay, so we both agree.
Speaker 1: Well, I actually talk to Eric Kirshenbaum and interviewed him
Speaker 1: for the book that I'm writing. He's hilarious, and you know,
Speaker 1: I believe his arguments that like, basically critters or always
Speaker 1: going to munch on other critters, and that affects how
Speaker 1: aliens evolve. And you can learn a lot about how
Speaker 1: aliens might behave from the things that have happened here
Speaker 1: on Earth. But maybe he's totally wrong, and the only
Speaker 1: way to know he is to meet the aliens.
Speaker 2: That's right. Anyway, So we have spent way longer than
Speaker 2: we intended talking about why we should look you and
Speaker 2: I are convinced that we should be looking how do
Speaker 2: you look?
Speaker 1: Well, Basically, the right way to do it is to
Speaker 1: open every single technological eyeball or earball that you can
Speaker 1: right listen to the skies in every possible way, because
Speaker 1: we can't anticipate how are aliens going to try to
Speaker 1: connect with us? Now, Because we're scientists, the first thing
Speaker 1: we do is the easiest thing, Right, every time you
Speaker 1: try something in science, you always do the dumbest, simplest,
Speaker 1: cheapest thing first, because hey, that might just work something
Speaker 1: you're done right, and when that doesn't work, then you
Speaker 1: get more creative and more expensive. So the simplest, easiest
Speaker 1: thing to do is to just listen for radio waves.
Speaker 1: Like it's that simple. You know, we have these things
Speaker 1: that can send messages from one part of the Earth
Speaker 1: to the other by exciting the electromagnetic field. You know,
Speaker 1: that's how radio waves work. You have an antenna somewhere,
Speaker 1: electrons inside of it are oscillating because of the current
Speaker 1: that makes oscillating electromagnetic waves, which is then reach an
Speaker 1: antenna you have which wriggles the electrons in your antenna,
Speaker 1: which creates a current which feeds into your circuit and
Speaker 1: then gets translated into sound for your ears. Right, So
Speaker 1: the idea is, Look, you don't need air or anything
Speaker 1: to send radio waves. You can send them from here
Speaker 1: to the moon. You can send them from here to Mars.
Speaker 1: They go through space itself, just like light does. Right.
Speaker 1: Radio waves are fundamentally just another kind of light. Light
Speaker 1: exists in lots of different frequencies. We can see it
Speaker 1: from like red up to violet, but it exists in
Speaker 1: higher frequencies we can't see the ultraviolet and lower frequencies,
Speaker 1: we can't see the infrared and radio waves, and so
Speaker 1: this is basically like listen for radio waves from space
Speaker 1: because we have that technology.
Speaker 2: So we could also look for like photons from far away.
Speaker 2: Are there any kind of waves that would not travel
Speaker 2: through space and could not be used to send a message?
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, we can definitely look for signals from space,
Speaker 1: like if aliens are shining a laser beam at us
Speaker 1: and turn it on and off in Morse code or
Speaker 1: the alien equivalent, we could totally see that. The different
Speaker 1: frequencies have different strengths and weaknesses because the universe is
Speaker 1: transparent or opaque at different frequencies. Like the visible spectrum
Speaker 1: is nice because the universe is mostly transparent. Like if
Speaker 1: you shine a laser beam from here to Alpha Centauri,
Speaker 1: it's gonna make it and they can see that laser
Speaker 1: because visible light can go through space. It's transparent. And
Speaker 1: you know, it didn't always used to be that way.
Speaker 1: Earlier in the history of the universe, it was filled
Speaker 1: with a plasma and the universe was opaque. And so
Speaker 1: it's just like in our era of the universe that
Speaker 1: it's mostly transparent to this, but space is not actually
Speaker 1: empty right, there's lots of dust and gas and stuff,
Speaker 1: so some frequencies of light can penetrate that and some
Speaker 1: of them can't. So radio waves in infrared and ultraviolet
Speaker 1: and X rays, some of those things can make it
Speaker 1: through gas and dust and some of them can't. So
Speaker 1: the right thing they do is still listen on all
Speaker 1: the frequencies because we don't know where they're coming from
Speaker 1: and how they can transmit, So they might be invisible
Speaker 1: to us because they're behind gas and dust in the
Speaker 1: center of the galaxy or something else. But radio is
Speaker 1: sort of easy. We have lots of receivers for radio,
Speaker 1: We have large antenna, and we've been doing it a
Speaker 1: little while, so radio is sort of like the first place.
Speaker 2: To go, you know, there's lots of radio stations on Earth.
Speaker 2: Is everything that we transmit to each other by radio
Speaker 2: also making it out into space, Like have the aliens
Speaker 2: heard the Macarena or will they in many late years
Speaker 2: or whatever? Or does it depend on where we're aiming it,
Speaker 2: Like our radios aimed towards Earth, and so those messages
Speaker 2: aren't going out into deep space.
Speaker 1: No, we have definitely beamed the Macharina into deep space.
Speaker 1: Embarrassingly right now, or maybe they love it, you know,
Speaker 1: and maybe that's the reason they're going to come, which
Speaker 1: would be wonderful. Messages can be beamed, they can be aimed,
Speaker 1: but generally radio is not right. Radio is broadcast in
Speaker 1: every direction, so you can pick up your tailor switch
Speaker 1: in every direction, which means that it's also broadcast up
Speaker 1: right and out into space, and also with our TV signals,
Speaker 1: and so yes, our signals have left the planet though
Speaker 1: you know, we've only been transmitting for about one hundred years,
Speaker 1: and that means that there's like a bubble one hundred
Speaker 1: light years wide within which you can pick up signals
Speaker 1: from Earth. And one hundred light years seems like a
Speaker 1: long way because light travels really really fast, right, but
Speaker 1: the galaxy is one hundred thousand light years across, So
Speaker 1: the fraction of the Milky Way which is filled with
Speaker 1: Earth signals is really really small. And as you get
Speaker 1: further and further from Earth, those signals get weaker. If
Speaker 1: you're twice as far away, the signals get four times
Speaker 1: a week. If you're ten times further away, then they
Speaker 1: get one hundred times this week. So because they're not
Speaker 1: typically aimed, they get really pretty weak when you get
Speaker 1: to like the next star. So, for example, our radio
Speaker 1: telescopes couldn't pick up Earth like transmissions from the nearest star.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the nearest aliens living on a planet orbiting
Speaker 2: the nearest star wouldn't necessarily be able to eavesdrop on
Speaker 2: all of the communications we were sharing by radio during
Speaker 2: World War II, for example, so they might not know
Speaker 2: about those atrocities, and then don't have to be so
Speaker 2: insecure about how our species looks exactly.
Speaker 1: If we knew they were there, beam them a message,
Speaker 1: which they probably could receive, assuming they had technology similar
Speaker 1: to ours. But if we're just broadcasting into space, then
Speaker 1: by the time it gets there. Again, if they have
Speaker 1: technology similar to ours, they wouldn't be able to pick
Speaker 1: it up. If they're far advanced and their technology is
Speaker 1: much more powerful, then yeah, maybe they're listening to us
Speaker 1: right now and they watched every episode of I Love Lucy,
Speaker 1: in which case we got some splaining to do.
Speaker 2: I'm enjoying your choice of pop culture references, and I'm
Speaker 2: not sure if I'm getting some insights into your preferences
Speaker 2: here or not. So let's take a break for some commercials,
Speaker 2: and when we get back, we'll talk about Sagittarius A.
Speaker 2: All right, we're back. During the break, you told me
Speaker 2: something that I didn't know, which means I didn't read
Speaker 2: our outline very carefully, which is that Sagittarius A is
Speaker 2: a black hole discovered by radio waves. All right, tell
Speaker 2: me more about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we do radio to talk to each other, but
Speaker 1: astronomers do radio to listen to the skies. But not
Speaker 1: in the beginning. Radio astronomy has its origins in the
Speaker 1: radio industry. The first radio telescope was built by somebody
Speaker 1: at Bell Labs, essentially to listen to see like, hey,
Speaker 1: how much noise is there in the radio spectrum? How
Speaker 1: much do we have to worry about this if we
Speaker 1: want to transmit radio around the world. So this is
Speaker 1: like in the thirties, This is not somebody doing astronomy.
Speaker 1: This is just like, hey, this is a commercial, useful technology.
Speaker 1: Let's figure out how noisy it is. And then after
Speaker 1: World War Two there are a lot of advances in
Speaker 1: radar which then got applied to radio astronomy, and that's
Speaker 1: when it first took off and people started listening in
Speaker 1: depth to the skies and they immediately discovered something really
Speaker 1: really weird that there was a point in the sky
Speaker 1: where you couldn't really see anything interesting, but it was very,
Speaker 1: very loud in the radio. It wasn't loud or equivalently
Speaker 1: bright in the visible like if you look with a telescope,
Speaker 1: you couldn't really see anything there, but that point in
Speaker 1: the sky was extraordinarily loud in the radio.
Speaker 2: Why are black holes screaming in radio?
Speaker 1: Death metal? Of course? I mean what kind of music
Speaker 1: is a black hole going to make? You know? Soell
Speaker 1: Garden right, it's not John Denver for sure. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: why do things in the sky emit in radio? Well,
Speaker 1: all electromagnetic radiation that includes visible photons and X rays
Speaker 1: and everything are emitted by charged particles being accelerated. It's
Speaker 1: a fundamental piece of electromagnetism. Like you have an electron,
Speaker 1: you accelerate, it means you're giving it a kick in
Speaker 1: order to conserve momentum. It's going to shoot off a
Speaker 1: photon in the other direction, right, That's how charge particles
Speaker 1: get accelerated. Every time a charge particle is accelerated, it's
Speaker 1: going to give off a photon. So what's happening here
Speaker 1: is you have electrons moving at high speeds being bent
Speaker 1: by the strong magnetic fields around the black hole, and
Speaker 1: that corresponds to radio and it's fascinating because stars don't
Speaker 1: produce radio waves. If you listen to the sky in radio,
Speaker 1: you don't hear from the stars. They admit in the
Speaker 1: visible spectrum, they admit in the infrared, but they're pretty
Speaker 1: quiet in the radio. And so this is like another
Speaker 1: way to see what's out there in the universe. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: some stuff is loud in this frequency, some stuff is
Speaker 1: loud in that frequency. The sky looks very different at
Speaker 1: different frequencies.
Speaker 2: Okay, So we looked out and there was an area
Speaker 2: that was screaming sound garden. It was screaming at us
Speaker 2: in radio. We decided that was a black hole. We
Speaker 2: named it Sagittarius A.
Speaker 1: That's right, And that really kicked off the whole era
Speaker 1: of radio astronomy, and people started listening to the sky
Speaker 1: discovering all sorts of stuff, and of course people were wondering, like, hey,
Speaker 1: are we also going to get messages from non black holes?
Speaker 1: And you know, maybe aliens are sending messages to us.
Speaker 1: And there's one frequency in the radio which astronomers particularly
Speaker 1: think maybe aliens are going to use this channel to
Speaker 1: talk to us, and that's called the twenty one centimeters
Speaker 1: hydrogen line. A cloud of hydrogen will very naturally emit
Speaker 1: at this particular frequency because it corresponds to like an
Speaker 1: energy gap in hydrogen. You get hydrogen hot and excited,
Speaker 1: and then it cools back down and it emits a photon.
Speaker 1: When those electrons dek back down, it admits of this
Speaker 1: particular frequency. And because hydrogen is like the basic building
Speaker 1: block of the universe is hydrogen, everywhere, anybody who does
Speaker 1: radio astronomy is going to hear hydrogen and they're going
Speaker 1: to listen to hydrogen and use this to study the universe.
Speaker 1: So it's sort of like figuring out, Hey, anybody out
Speaker 1: there who's curious about the universe is probably paying attention
Speaker 1: to this channel. So let's spam this channel, or let's
Speaker 1: listen to this channel to see if this is what
Speaker 1: people using to talk to each other.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's very cool. And so once we think we
Speaker 2: Eves dropped on something, how long ago did this happen?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so people have been listening to this for a
Speaker 1: long long time, wondering if we're going to get a message,
Speaker 1: and then there was this fantastic moment. It was August fifteenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven. This took place at Ohio State. They
Speaker 1: have a radio telescope they called the Big Ear. Love
Speaker 1: that name. And the way this telescope works is it's
Speaker 1: just a bunch of antennas. Right. You say telescope, and
Speaker 1: you imagine like a scientist using one eyeball to look
Speaker 1: through a glass or something. Right, But a telescope is
Speaker 1: a general word for anything that can listen to the skies,
Speaker 1: and so this telescope is just a bunch of radio
Speaker 1: antennas spread out across a cornfield somewhere. That's how they
Speaker 1: listen to these radio waves. You can also have like
Speaker 1: a big dish, you know, like the Green Bank Observatory
Speaker 1: and the Parks observatories. These are actually big dishes help
Speaker 1: focus it. But you can also just spread out a
Speaker 1: bunch of antennas on the ground, and that's what the
Speaker 1: Ohio State Big Ear was. And the way this thing
Speaker 1: worked is it scanned for ten seconds and then it
Speaker 1: processed it through a computer for two seconds and then
Speaker 1: summarized the strength of anything it saw. So it's like
Speaker 1: ten seconds of scanning, two seconds of analysis. And printing out.
Speaker 1: And when I say printing out, I mean literally this
Speaker 1: telescope feeds its data into an old fashioned computer and
Speaker 1: IBM eleven thirty, which is then printed out the data
Speaker 1: like onto one of those line printers, you know, like
Speaker 1: like this is the output of the telescope. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And so some human had to then go like literally
Speaker 1: sift through these pages to see, like, hey, was there
Speaker 1: anything interesting last night? You watch a movie of like
Speaker 1: Discovering Aliens, and there some guy like sifting through pages
Speaker 1: looking for something interesting, Like that's what really happened.
Speaker 2: So was there someone whose job was just to sit
Speaker 2: there constantly, so someone was always on shift. Presumably our
Speaker 2: eyes detect patterns, and so we'd look for things that
Speaker 2: look like a pattern or something different than what we
Speaker 2: were usually seeing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this had to be scanned visually, and they
Speaker 1: would transform the signal from the telescope into a code.
Speaker 1: And so if they saw basically nothing in this spectrum,
Speaker 1: it would be a space. If they would put a
Speaker 1: one or two or three. If it was a stronger signal,
Speaker 1: all the way up to nine. For a fairly strong signal,
Speaker 1: it got really strong, it would go into letters ABCDFG
Speaker 1: all the way up to you. You was the maximum
Speaker 1: signal that could detect that was saturating it. And so
Speaker 1: there was this morning August fifteenth, nineteen seventy seven, when
Speaker 1: they saw a signal that was seventy two seconds long,
Speaker 1: so six observing periods, which corresponds to six legs, and
Speaker 1: the signal was six E, the letter Q, the letter
Speaker 1: U J and five. Now this is very confusing because
Speaker 1: it makes it sound like, oh, the aliens sent us
Speaker 1: an email and it was these letters six EQUJ five.
Speaker 1: Like I said, a license plate. You should not use
Speaker 1: your decoding skills to try to understand what the aliens
Speaker 1: meant from these letters. These just correspond to the strength
Speaker 1: of the signal. If you translate this back from the
Speaker 1: particular code that this experiment used, it basically just means
Speaker 1: that the signal got stronger and then very very strong,
Speaker 1: and then quieter. So it's like a blip. It goes
Speaker 1: up and then comes down.
Speaker 2: But you're missing two seconds every ten seconds, that's right.
Speaker 2: So it could be even more complicated, that's right.
Speaker 1: Because the telescope can't sample constantly because the computer was slow, essentially,
Speaker 1: and so you're missing two seconds Also, the signal could
Speaker 1: have been longer. We only saw it for seventy seconds
Speaker 1: because that's how long it was visible for. This telescope
Speaker 1: can't be pointed. It's just like laying on a cornfield somewhere,
Speaker 1: and as the Earth rotates, it basically scans different parts
Speaker 1: of the sky, and so it just naturally scanned across
Speaker 1: this region for seventy seconds. It could have still been emitting. Right,
Speaker 1: you can't like turn the earth back and like hold
Speaker 1: on a second.
Speaker 2: That was great, go back.
Speaker 1: Also, they didn't see this until like you know, days
Speaker 1: later when they got to looking at this output. But
Speaker 1: still it was a very strong signal like the letter's
Speaker 1: Q and you in there tell you it's a very
Speaker 1: very powerful signal. It's very loud compared to like the
Speaker 1: average noise you expect in this spectrum. It's exactly the
Speaker 1: kind of thing at the twenty one centimeter line you
Speaker 1: might expect to get from aliens.
Speaker 2: So we've got this message that caught our attention, and
Speaker 2: so presumably, as you mentioned, you don't get things that
Speaker 2: are this loud most of the time. And so what
Speaker 2: do you do with it? Now? Yeah, how do you
Speaker 2: figure out what it was? From? Just this information.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Well, the first thing you do is you're
Speaker 1: write wow on the piece of paper next to it,
Speaker 1: forever immortalizing yourself and your handwriting in the history of astronomy. Right,
Speaker 1: that's literally what it did, Like on that physical piece
Speaker 1: of paper, he wrote wow exclamation point because it was
Speaker 1: very unusual, and that really highlights the nature of the
Speaker 1: problem and also a hint to try to figure it out, Like,
Speaker 1: this is an unusual signal compared to what we typically see.
Speaker 1: That means that, like we listen to the sky in radio,
Speaker 1: we look around, we hear, we know the kind of
Speaker 1: things we expect to see, you know, black hole this
Speaker 1: and black hole that, and random electrones amid different clouds.
Speaker 1: We know typically what the sky does, and this is unusual.
Speaker 1: Unusual doesn't necessarily mean aliens, right, it means not the
Speaker 1: typical thing, quite rare, very weird. Again, not necessarily aliens.
Speaker 1: It means it's fascinating, It means we could learn something.
Speaker 1: It means it's definitely something you should pay attention to
Speaker 1: and look for more examples of. But how to interpret
Speaker 1: that is difficult. And this is like a classic thing
Speaker 1: in science. You know, we're always doing this two hypothesis test,
Speaker 1: where like, do we reject the current hypothesis do we
Speaker 1: accept the new hypothesis. You can't just reject the current
Speaker 1: one and be like, yeah, I have no explanation. You
Speaker 1: need some explanation, some way to describe this, some theory
Speaker 1: that says this is why we should see this particular
Speaker 1: weird thing and not some other weird thing. And that's
Speaker 1: very hard, you know. How do you look at this
Speaker 1: signal and say I'm convinced this is from aliens? It's
Speaker 1: very challenging. It's not an easy thing to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially when you only see it once and you
Speaker 2: get no more extra information, and so you can't try
Speaker 2: to match it up with a natural phenomenon or something
Speaker 2: like that. And so what did they try doing?
Speaker 1: People try to do lots of stuff. Number one is like,
Speaker 1: look for other examples of this. Do we see this
Speaker 1: anywhere else? In this guy? Has anybody else ever seen one?
Speaker 1: And nobody's been able to repeat this like it didn't
Speaker 1: come back. You know. A classic possible explanation for this
Speaker 1: is like, oh, it's something out there that's emitting, but
Speaker 1: like a pulsar, right. Pulsars are neutron stars, which are
Speaker 1: remnants from stellar collapse. You have a star, it burns
Speaker 1: its life mostly at the end. It's very very bright,
Speaker 1: it burns out very quickly, it collapses. You're left with
Speaker 1: this very dense remnant. Sometimes those are spinning really really fast,
Speaker 1: and they're spinning off center, so they have like a
Speaker 1: b shooting up and down their poles, and that beam
Speaker 1: is now sweeping across the universe. And if you're in
Speaker 1: the path of that beam, you're not always in the
Speaker 1: path of the beam. It's like a lighthouse. It's sweeping
Speaker 1: past you regularly. So pulsar is cool. And actually, when
Speaker 1: pulsars were first discovered, people thought, oh, maybe this is
Speaker 1: aliens because they were regular it's like beep, beep, beep.
Speaker 1: But this was just one beep, so it's not a pulsar.
Speaker 1: This never came back again. Nobody's ever seen anything this
Speaker 1: strong from that direction in the sky. So they were
Speaker 1: able to like immediately filter out a bunch of possible explanations.
Speaker 1: And for me, there's sort of two simultaneous things you
Speaker 1: need to do. One is like, well, let's see if
Speaker 1: there are prosaic explanations, you know, just some natural phenomena
Speaker 1: we haven't seen before. And also let's actively try to
Speaker 1: figure out if it looks like an alien signal. And
Speaker 1: this is the challenge I was referring to earlier, like
Speaker 1: how do you do that? How do you decode an
Speaker 1: alien signal? And the challenge really is that you don't
Speaker 1: know what you're trying to decode it into. Like let's
Speaker 1: say the Aliens encode their message somehow, even if you
Speaker 1: could guess correctly how to decode it, how would you
Speaker 1: know that you've done it correctly? Right, you don't know
Speaker 1: what you're translating it back into. It's not like the
Speaker 1: Aliens have written in English, and once you figure out
Speaker 1: the puzzle, some message is going to pop out and
Speaker 1: be like, Hi, we're from Alpha Centauri. Right. You have
Speaker 1: to somehow not only know the system they're using to
Speaker 1: translate their ideas into radio waves and reverse that, but
Speaker 1: you have to be able to recognize the message when
Speaker 1: it's decoded, which we can't do because we have no
Speaker 1: idea how the aliens think or what they might be saying.
Speaker 2: So, like I imagine if they had been trying to
Speaker 2: communicate with us, maybe it would be something easier ish
Speaker 2: to figure out, like the prime numbers or you know,
Speaker 2: maybe we all would have converged on that, because I
Speaker 2: think that's the thing that's pitched often as some way
Speaker 2: to communicate our intelligence to other life forms. But if
Speaker 2: we only got it once for a little while, if
Speaker 2: it is an alien message, it would probably be eavesdropping, right,
Speaker 2: because otherwise it would have been pointed at us. Maybe
Speaker 2: this was a message for someone else, which I think
Speaker 2: makes it even less likely that we'd be able to
Speaker 2: figure it out. Anyway. It's a hard problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right, and people often think, oh, well, if
Speaker 1: it's mathematics, it's probably simpler somehow to translate or easier
Speaker 1: to recognize, but that's not necessarily true. You know, we
Speaker 1: don't know how much of mathematics is human, and how
Speaker 1: much of mathematics is universal, how much it just reflects
Speaker 1: our thinking, and how much it reflects something deep in
Speaker 1: the universe. Even if you're going to start off with mathematics,
Speaker 1: you still have to use some kind of symbol, some
Speaker 1: kind of way to represent the number one or the
Speaker 1: number seven. Here's what eleven looks like. And so there's
Speaker 1: always going to be some sort of cultural influence because
Speaker 1: the way we communicate is through symbols, like right now,
Speaker 1: I'm translating my ideas into words, and because we agree
Speaker 1: on the meaning of those words, I imagine that my
Speaker 1: words are creating in your mind the ideas that are
Speaker 1: in my mind. Right, But that's because we've agreed in
Speaker 1: common on the meaning of those words. And every single
Speaker 1: kind of communication method that's not like directly brain to brain,
Speaker 1: we don't have telepathy, relies on this translation right where
Speaker 1: you go to symbols and then back to ideas, and
Speaker 1: those symbols fundamentally are arbitrary. The way we represent one
Speaker 1: or the way we represent like mathematical operations, all of
Speaker 1: those things are cultural symbols. And so we talked on
Speaker 1: the top of the episode about the messages we've sent
Speaker 1: into space, Like Carl Sagan and Francis Drake designed this
Speaker 1: pioneer plaque that they sent into space hoping maybe someday
Speaker 1: aliens would get it right. They got to actually answer
Speaker 1: the question that you posed to me, and they did
Speaker 1: their best. But if you look at what they did, like, man,
Speaker 1: there's so much humanity in that message. They tried to
Speaker 1: encode the structure of atoms and spin flip transitions, and
Speaker 1: they were really ambitious and frankly, I think it's impossible
Speaker 1: for aliens to get that message and actually understand what
Speaker 1: it means without already knowing a lot about us.
Speaker 2: The biologist in May, didn't it also include pictures of
Speaker 2: human bodies naked to be like, this is what we
Speaker 2: look like?
Speaker 1: Yeah? It did.
Speaker 2: I think that's kind of cool, but also could just
Speaker 2: be confusing. Is that what they eat?
Speaker 1: Here's how we look like when you eat us for dinner? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be a recipe. I actually talk to a
Speaker 1: philosopher about this, because you know, philosophers think deeply about
Speaker 1: like stripping away all of our assumptions and what does
Speaker 1: this really mean? And how do we know what we're
Speaker 1: doing here? I talk to Kareem Jabbari, a philosopher in
Speaker 1: Sweden who thinks a lot about this and game theory
Speaker 1: and should we communicate with aliens or are we likely
Speaker 1: to get misinterpreted? And here's his comment. He says, quote
Speaker 1: translation between speakers with no common language requires repeated interaction
Speaker 1: and a familiar context. This implies that translating a message
Speaker 1: conveyed to us by an encoded signal is not only
Speaker 1: very difficult, but practically impossible. What he means. Thereby, repeated
Speaker 1: interaction in a familiar context is basically like, Hey, if
Speaker 1: I point to a rock, I can say rock and
Speaker 1: you can look at it. And if I do that
Speaker 1: a few times, you're like, Okay, this symbol. He's telling
Speaker 1: me this word rock means this thing, and we can
Speaker 1: build up from that a common dictionary. If you just
Speaker 1: get a message, you have basically no hope of every
Speaker 1: decoding it because you don't the symbols, and you also
Speaker 1: can't recognize it if you have decoded it correctly.
Speaker 2: I don't communicate back to do a lingo. But it's
Speaker 2: teaching me Russian. It's working with me in my language.
Speaker 2: That's why it's different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's translating it for you. And also it's telling
Speaker 1: you when you're right and telling you when you're wrong.
Speaker 2: Okay, So like if someone just sent me a book
Speaker 2: in Russian, I would be screwed. But so like we
Speaker 2: translated the Rosetta Stone and that wasn't a back and forth.
Speaker 2: Oh but we knew one of the three languages, and
Speaker 2: we couldn't do it before then.
Speaker 1: The Rosetta Stone had one of the languages we already knew,
Speaker 1: and one of the languages we didn't, so that was helpful. Plus,
Speaker 1: did you know that after we discovered the Rosetta stone,
Speaker 1: it took us twenty years to decode that message on
Speaker 1: the Rosetta stone, And that's for like a message, We
Speaker 1: already knew what it said, right, And the reason is
Speaker 1: that we had all sorts of backwards ideas about what
Speaker 1: hieroglyphics were. People thought hieroglyphics were like pictorial. They're like, oh, look,
Speaker 1: the bird symbol must be something about birds, right. It
Speaker 1: turns out that was totally wrong. All hieroglyphics are actually phonetic,
Speaker 1: like the bird signal means a sound that a speaker
Speaker 1: would make. And so because they had this wrong cultural
Speaker 1: assumption about hieroglyphics, it took them twenty years to figure
Speaker 1: it out. And it wasn't until people use their cultural
Speaker 1: context from the other languages to figure this out. And
Speaker 1: there are lots of examples of languages here on Earth
Speaker 1: that other humans have written down that nobody's ever translated,
Speaker 1: like Etruscan. Nobody has ever figured out how to translate it.
Speaker 1: Trust can we be a bunch of examples of it
Speaker 1: and nobody's ever been able to translate it? So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's pretty much hopeless to translate a message
Speaker 1: from aliens unless the aliens show up and they like
Speaker 1: point at apples and donuts, and you know, we can
Speaker 1: have basically a duo lingo conversation with them.
Speaker 2: So I feel like I'm usually the pessimistic one. It's
Speaker 2: nice that the tables have turned. And on that note,
Speaker 2: let's take a little break, all right. So we've established
Speaker 2: that it's really hard to send messages and receive messages
Speaker 2: that anybody would have any hope of understanding, but that
Speaker 2: hasn't stopped humans from trying. Nothing stops us from trying.
Speaker 2: So we talked about the voyager plaques and what's on them.
Speaker 2: What have been some other methods or proposed methods for
Speaker 2: communicating with aliens.
Speaker 1: So there's been a bunch of really good ideas and
Speaker 1: also a bunch of really hilarious absurd attempts. One of
Speaker 1: my favorites is Austrian astronomer Joseph von Littrow. He proposed
Speaker 1: that we take huge trenches and write out math equations
Speaker 1: in them by filling them with water and then topping
Speaker 1: them with curosene and setting them on fire. He thought
Speaker 1: maybe Martians could see them from Mars and recognize that
Speaker 1: we're here and we're smart. Just look at our flaming math.
Speaker 2: So, I mean, that's epic. I guess this was back
Speaker 2: when we thought that there were canals ferrying water around
Speaker 2: on the Martian surface. Yeah, exactly, all right.
Speaker 1: Back before we really knew anything about Mars, you know,
Speaker 1: and it could have been there could have been intelligent
Speaker 1: life on Mars before we had the technology to look
Speaker 1: more carefully.
Speaker 2: Sure, all right, well, so that's how I would like
Speaker 2: to communicate with Zach from now on. I'm going to
Speaker 2: put aside a little part of our yard so that
Speaker 2: we can communicate with flaming mass.
Speaker 1: What else, So we actually sent a message in response
Speaker 1: to the wow signal. The WOW signal we know comes
Speaker 1: from the Sagittarius constellation. So the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico,
Speaker 1: now sadly destroyed, sent a message in response. A bunch
Speaker 1: of humans sat down and decided, here's how we would
Speaker 1: encode a message, and includes things like you know, what
Speaker 1: our DNA looks like and what a human looks like,
Speaker 1: all encoded into this two D sort of pictogram, and
Speaker 1: we beamed it into space. Hoping that maybe somebody, if
Speaker 1: they had sent us the Wow signal, was going to
Speaker 1: get this as a reply, and.
Speaker 2: I assume our mail was left unresponded to.
Speaker 1: We haven't heard any response to the ARCIPA message. But
Speaker 1: you know, maybe there's a fleet of ships coming to
Speaker 1: destroy us or welcome into the galactic community. Guy who knows.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's a lot of responsibility there, like
Speaker 1: if you're going to broadcast from Earth on behalf of humanity,
Speaker 1: Like it's interesting. There should be some thought that goes
Speaker 1: into this, And I want to ask you about this.
Speaker 1: You thought a lot about like international law and what
Speaker 1: you can do in space. Are there any laws about
Speaker 1: you know, stepping up to the mic and speaking for humanity?
Speaker 2: No? No, I did look into this, and it's a
Speaker 2: topic that has come up at the United Nations, but
Speaker 2: no decision has actually been made, so there is no guideline.
Speaker 2: So I think as Americans, we want to believe that
Speaker 2: the message would come to us first. And if so,
Speaker 2: there's no rule that says we have to like consult
Speaker 2: the international community to say like, hey, we're gonna tell
Speaker 2: them where we are. Is that okay? Everyone? We could
Speaker 2: just do that. There's a group called SETI, the Search
Speaker 2: for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and they do have a protocol that
Speaker 2: was informed by the International Astronautical Association.
Speaker 1: Is that right, sounds like a thing that could exist.
Speaker 2: Sure, Yeah, some like smart spacey people. They came up
Speaker 2: with a procedure for like what we should do, and
Speaker 2: it does involve like if you get a message, be
Speaker 2: careful deciphering it, share what you know, consult the United Nations,
Speaker 2: and try to get some input from everybody. And so
Speaker 2: like they've got some good procedures and they're probably one
Speaker 2: of the groups that's more likely to receive these messages.
Speaker 2: But no, there's no like specific international protocol for what
Speaker 2: we're supposed to do, so you could just get rogue messages.
Speaker 2: But I mean they've already like watched all of our
Speaker 2: TV shows and listened to the BBC, so like, you know,
Speaker 2: they probably know what we're about. The gig is up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's nothing left to hide. Well. I actually had
Speaker 1: a chance to talk to Jill Tartar. She was a
Speaker 1: director of SETI for a long time, and I asked
Speaker 1: her this question once. Here's what Jill had to say.
Speaker 3: Oh, we've thought about it and we've held workshops and
Speaker 3: basically should we respond and if so, who will speak first?
Speaker 3: And what will they say? And I think the disappointing
Speaker 3: thing for me at the moment is we've held a
Speaker 3: number of workshops. They haven't really involved very much of
Speaker 3: the world's diverse cultures. It's been sort of pretty waspy
Speaker 3: and pretty male. So we continue to think about this,
Speaker 3: and I continue to try and find a way to
Speaker 3: take this question globally and find appropriate venues to ask
Speaker 3: other cultures and other ways of being and thinking what
Speaker 3: they would do, how they feel. So it's a work
Speaker 3: in progress.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Freeman Dyson and here's alive and would listen to me
Speaker 3: talk and this is very very highbrow approach to doing things.
Speaker 3: He would just chuckle and he'd say, come on, Jill,
Speaker 3: if you ever make such an announcement, anybody anywhere on
Speaker 3: the planet that has access to a transmit will grab
Speaker 3: that trend and just start saying whatever the hell they please.
Speaker 3: And then he, you know, with a twinkle in his eye,
Speaker 3: and so he said, yeah, wouldn't that cacophony be about
Speaker 3: the best representation of the Earth today that we could make.
Speaker 2: I am feeling totally depressed because I think you're probably right.
Speaker 2: They're going to be getting like the dankest memes and
Speaker 2: all of the weirdest stuff that humans have to offer
Speaker 2: as soon as we get that message. So probably no
Speaker 2: hope of a concerted message set by all of us.
Speaker 2: They're just going to get like all of our spam
Speaker 2: all at once.
Speaker 1: All right, So we have no hope of really ever
Speaker 1: decoding this thing unless the aliens have somehow figured out
Speaker 1: English and write to us in our own language, which
Speaker 1: you know is not impossible and is the basis for
Speaker 1: a lot of good science fiction. But in the meantime,
Speaker 1: we haven't just been sitting idly by. We've been looking
Speaker 1: for other explanations for what the Wow signal could be,
Speaker 1: because again, it was very unusual, it's very weird. Doesn't
Speaker 1: mean as aliens, but it does mean it's an opportunity
Speaker 1: to potentially learning about what's out there in the universe,
Speaker 1: And so we ruled out things like pulsars and stellar flares.
Speaker 1: These things tend to be more periodic, they tend to
Speaker 1: repeat themselves. The people also look really really carefully for
Speaker 1: like more boring explanations. Is this just an Earth signal
Speaker 1: bouncing off of a satellite, and you know, Earth's stuff
Speaker 1: doesn't tend to broadcast in this regime is protected for astronomy.
Speaker 1: So for example, if you're a radio station, you should
Speaker 1: not be broadcasting in the twenty one centimeter line. If
Speaker 1: you're building like a drone, you should not be using
Speaker 1: this frequency to communicate between the controller and the drone.
Speaker 1: It's like protected, it's supposed to stay quiet. That doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that there isn't some like rogue station out there broadcasting.
Speaker 1: And maybe this like bounces a satellite or something, but again,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really look like it. They were able to
Speaker 1: triangulate it to a place in the sky who was
Speaker 1: fairly constant as the Earth moves, which suggested it doesn't
Speaker 1: come from an earth like place. For it to come
Speaker 1: off like a satellite in the sky, the satellite would
Speaker 1: have to like be very slowly moving and not be tumbling.
Speaker 1: It'd be very weird. And for a long time there
Speaker 1: was just really no good explanation for this guy who
Speaker 1: discovered it, Jerry Emon. He said, quote, I'm convinced that
Speaker 1: the WOW signal certainly has the potential of being the
Speaker 1: first signal from extraterrestrial intelligence. I'm like, all right, the
Speaker 1: guy's invested in it. He's the one who wrote wow
Speaker 1: on it. But you know he's also a serious astronomer.
Speaker 1: He's not just somebody who's going to make these claims.
Speaker 1: But as time goes on, we understand more and more
Speaker 1: about the universe and we're better at thinking about like
Speaker 1: rare things that could happen out there in the universe.
Speaker 1: And so pretty recently there was a paper that explained
Speaker 1: what might have caused the WOW signal.
Speaker 2: Well, don't keep me waiting. What do they think it is?
Speaker 1: Basically, they think it was a giant space laser, a
Speaker 1: random organization of events in the sky that happened to
Speaker 1: create this huge emission. This pulse of light pointed at Earth.
Speaker 2: So it wasn't like aliens pointing a laser at us
Speaker 2: hoping that we'd bet at it like a cat or something.
Speaker 2: This was like the universe accidentally makes lasers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly right now. Lasers are something we know very
Speaker 1: very we well here on Earth. Essentially, you have a
Speaker 1: population of gas, and the gas can go up and
Speaker 1: down on energy level, and if you pump energy into them,
Speaker 1: they go up the energy level, and then they relax,
Speaker 1: they go down an energy level they release a photon
Speaker 1: of a particular wavelength that corresponds to that energy level,
Speaker 1: and if you get a bunch of them in the
Speaker 1: right conditions and the right cavity, they can resonate. And
Speaker 1: that's what a laser is. It's like a little cavity
Speaker 1: filled with these special atoms that have energy pumped in
Speaker 1: just the right frequency, so they emit a very coherent
Speaker 1: beam of powerful light. And this we can make here
Speaker 1: on Earth, of course, but you could also randomly assemble
Speaker 1: the ingredients in space. If you have something which dumps
Speaker 1: a bunch of light into a pocket of gas that
Speaker 1: has the right conditions, it can absorb that and then
Speaker 1: they can emit it and they can generate a very bright,
Speaker 1: pulseive light. And in this case, it's not actually a
Speaker 1: space laser, but a space maser with an M like
Speaker 1: for mom, oh good, exactly. And a maser is not
Speaker 1: a laser that emits moms. It's a laser that emits
Speaker 1: microwave photons. So you know that your microwave in your
Speaker 1: kitchen is something that just beams light into your food
Speaker 1: at a particular wavelength. The wavelength of that light is
Speaker 1: what makes it called microwaves. It's fairly short wavelength compared
Speaker 1: to like radio waves.
Speaker 2: But so then why was the radio telescope picking up
Speaker 2: micro waves.
Speaker 1: Because microwaves are in the radio. There's so many terrible
Speaker 1: names here, like we didn't understand for a long time
Speaker 1: the connection between radio waves and visible light and all
Speaker 1: this kind of other stuff. So different parts of the
Speaker 1: electromagnetic spectrum, which all should just be called light or
Speaker 1: should be called one thing, they all have different names,
Speaker 1: and they're all overlapping and historically inconsistent. Anyway, this thing
Speaker 1: in space emits light in the microwaves, So it's a maser,
Speaker 1: not a laser. And interestingly, maser's actually predated lasers. Humans
Speaker 1: invented masers before they invented lasers. Laser is much more famous,
Speaker 1: so the masers don't get the licensing fees or whatever.
Speaker 1: But if you have just the right stuff lined up
Speaker 1: in the sky, you have like a source like a
Speaker 1: magnetar or something, which emits a bunch of light and
Speaker 1: then it hits a cloud of hydrogen gas. That hydrogen
Speaker 1: gas acts like a mazer and creates a pulse of microwaves.
Speaker 1: And if it all lines up where you have like
Speaker 1: the source and then the gas and then the Earth.
Speaker 1: Then the Earth can get washed over in this sudden, rare,
Speaker 1: difficult to reproduce wash of radio waves at just the
Speaker 1: right frequency.
Speaker 2: So if we haven't seen this again, how do we
Speaker 2: know that that's what happened? Because I feel like, ideally
Speaker 2: what you'd want is to see it again at the
Speaker 2: same time as this maser thing has happened, you can
Speaker 2: be like, Bam, that's it.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Because science shouldn't just be descriptive. So I'm like, hey,
Speaker 1: I can come up with a plausible explanation. You should
Speaker 1: be able to prove that this is what it is.
Speaker 1: And so what they did is they went back through
Speaker 1: the Aricibo data, the radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and
Speaker 1: they said, look, maybe this happens all the time, and
Speaker 1: this one WOW signal was just like the brightest one
Speaker 1: we've ever seen. So they went back and looked more carefully,
Speaker 1: and they found a bunch of examples of similar signals,
Speaker 1: not nearly as powerful as the Wow signal, but the
Speaker 1: same shape, the same features in the Aerocibo data. And
Speaker 1: this is exactly what you would expect, like if this
Speaker 1: happens sometimes in the universe, you would expect occasionally to
Speaker 1: be right in the center of the action when it's
Speaker 1: super bright, and you would expect more often to see
Speaker 1: weaker examples of it. So the brightest ones should be
Speaker 1: rarest and less bright ones should be more common. And
Speaker 1: they see a bunch of less bright versions of the
Speaker 1: WOW signal in the Aerocibo data, And that's pretty compelling, right.
Speaker 1: It suggests that there is a mechanism for generating these
Speaker 1: kinds of signals out there in the universe, and that
Speaker 1: we've seen them before. So if that's true, that means
Speaker 1: the WOW signal probably was this kind of thing, and
Speaker 1: it was rare. It wasn't usual, it was lucky right.
Speaker 1: Everything had to line up just right, especially powerful magnetar
Speaker 1: flare especially well lined up with Earth. Probably we're not
Speaker 1: going to see another one of these for a long time.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean, necessarily, though, that it was aliens.
Speaker 2: Science ruins everything, although vaccines are nice. My field does
Speaker 2: good stuff.
Speaker 1: Or maybe this is how aliens communicate, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: there's like a galactic civilization out there and the way
Speaker 1: they talk to each other is by inducing magnetars to
Speaker 1: create masers in hydrogen gas and be messages and they'd
Speaker 1: sent us a blast, and we haven't responded. We've like
Speaker 1: left them on red for decades and.
Speaker 2: Decades we've responded, Oh no.
Speaker 1: You're right, we did respond, but we didn't respond in
Speaker 1: the same way. Right, we sent our own radio message, right,
Speaker 1: And maybe they're like, what's that. Yeah, And even if
Speaker 1: this message wasn't aliens, that doesn't mean aliens aren't out there,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't mean they aren't talking to us, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean that they can't hear our messages. And
Speaker 1: so there's actually a group out there. You talked about SETI,
Speaker 1: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. There's another group that's more aggressive.
Speaker 1: They're called medi that wants to send messages to extraterrestrial intelligence.
Speaker 1: They think like Earth should be out there. We should
Speaker 1: be shouting that we exist, that we should be broadcasting
Speaker 1: our location. We should be inviting everybody to come and
Speaker 1: have dinner with us or of us, And so they've
Speaker 1: been sending messages Like twenty seventeen, they sent a message
Speaker 1: that was basically like a science and math Wikipedia page
Speaker 1: to a red dwarf star located fair only nearby.
Speaker 2: It feels to me like that is the kind of
Speaker 2: thing that should maybe have to go through the un first,
Speaker 2: like humanity should decide do we want to be like
Speaker 2: blasting our address out into the cosmos and letting people
Speaker 2: know that we're here. I guess technology gives people power
Speaker 2: that is good in bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Essentially, the Internet's comments section is getting broadcasted to
Speaker 1: the galaxy, and so let's hope that doesn't piss off
Speaker 1: the aliens.
Speaker 2: Well, if they're not going to attack us over the Macarina,
Speaker 2: maybe we're going to be okay.
Speaker 1: Or maybe it's the reason they come, right, Maybe something
Speaker 1: somebody says in the Internet comment section is the reason
Speaker 1: why aliens come and share with us all the secrets
Speaker 1: of the universe. Let's end on an optimistic note.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, on a low probability optimistic note, but let's
Speaker 2: do it.
Speaker 1: And even if this isn't aliens, and even if we
Speaker 1: never meet aliens, the lesson here is that when you
Speaker 1: listen to this, when you look out into the universe,
Speaker 1: you always see something new, something weird, something fascinating. That
Speaker 1: does teach us about how the universe works. Even if
Speaker 1: the only thing we've learned from the Wow signal is like, hey,
Speaker 1: sometimes universe organizes massive astronomical masers that beams powerful messages
Speaker 1: through the universe. That's pretty cool, right, and understanding how
Speaker 1: that all works, and understanding the crazy things that are
Speaker 1: out there in the universe. It's worth doing. So we
Speaker 1: should be listening to the sky with all of our
Speaker 1: eyeballs and earballs.
Speaker 2: Agreed, we need a lot more big ears out there.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And this is not my science, and this is
Speaker 1: not Kelly's science, so we're not like self invested here.
Speaker 1: But I definitely think we need more funding for this
Speaker 1: kind of work.
Speaker 2: I'm emotionally invested, but not professionally invested. Yes, I would
Speaker 2: like more answers, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: But you know, I believe in more funding for all
Speaker 1: kinds of science. Like you're studying duck mating rituals, Like, yes,
Speaker 1: that's funded. You never know what we're going to learn.
Speaker 1: I don't understand why we don't fund more science in general.
Speaker 1: It's such a great investment by humanity for humanity, about humanity.
Speaker 1: It's human scientists that are getting paid to do this stuff.
Speaker 1: It's just good all around.
Speaker 2: I don't understanding there's a fascinating woman who studies duck
Speaker 2: mating rituals who we should really have on the show
Speaker 2: so coming soon.
Speaker 1: So thanks very much everybody for listening to the messages
Speaker 1: from our brains to yours. We're not aliens. You're probably
Speaker 1: not an alien, but still we'd like to talk about aliens.
Speaker 2: Thanks everyone. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio.
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