WEBVTT - Did Earth get a message from aliens?

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<v Speaker 1>In many ways, it's a scientific dream come true, a

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<v Speaker 1>fantasy even to be indulged during daydreams. Usually it goes

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<v Speaker 1>something like this. You're sitting at your desk where you

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<v Speaker 1>monitor some telescope or communications equipment. Suddenly you see something unusual,

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<v Speaker 1>interrupting endless hours of monotony. It's some kind of signal,

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<v Speaker 1>something you've never seen before, something that can't have come

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<v Speaker 1>from any Earth source and isn't produced by any natural phenomenon.

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<v Speaker 1>It's a signal from space. It's humanity's first interplanetary email.

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<v Speaker 1>Of course, that's exciting, it's amazing, it's mind blowing, but

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<v Speaker 1>you know it's actually just the first step. The existence

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<v Speaker 1>of the signal says hey, aliens are here. But what

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<v Speaker 1>is the message that's encoded inside? What does that alien

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<v Speaker 1>email have to say? Does it say you killed my father,

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<v Speaker 1>prepared to die? Does it say here's our alien unified

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<v Speaker 1>theory of everything? Or is an interstellar version of a

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<v Speaker 1>Nigerian oil scam? Of course we're dying to know. But

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<v Speaker 1>how do we crack the message? How do we know

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<v Speaker 1>what the alien code is? How do we figure it out?

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<v Speaker 1>And hanging over the whole enterprise is the question What

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<v Speaker 1>if we can't What if we never figure out what

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<v Speaker 1>it means, and there's a growing sense of doubt that

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<v Speaker 1>it actually means anything. What if it's not an alien

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<v Speaker 1>email but some kind of weird universe electromagnetic purp. Now

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<v Speaker 1>this scientific fantasy has turned into a kind of scientific nightmare.

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<v Speaker 1>Today in the podcast, we're going to be digging into

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<v Speaker 1>the true story of a message from the skies and

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<v Speaker 1>what it might mean. We'll be answering the question did

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<v Speaker 1>Earth get a message from aliens?

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<v Speaker 2>Welcome to Daniel and Kelly is extraordinary universe. I'm Kelly

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<v Speaker 2>Wiener Smith, and I think probably there are aliens out there. Daniel,

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<v Speaker 2>how are you doing? What's your story?

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<v Speaker 1>Hi? I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a particle physicist and a

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<v Speaker 1>professor at UC Irvine, and I wish I could say

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<v Speaker 1>I was an alien.

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<v Speaker 2>That is not what I expected you were going to

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<v Speaker 2>go with today. Why do you wish you were an alien?

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<v Speaker 1>Earth just seems like such a wonderful place to visit,

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<v Speaker 1>And you know, there's so many friendly physicists and other

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<v Speaker 1>scientists who want to know all of your secrets of

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<v Speaker 1>the universe. I just imagine it would be a great

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<v Speaker 1>experience to be an alien, arrive on Earth and get

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<v Speaker 1>to hang out with a bunch of cool nerds.

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<v Speaker 2>Okay, sweet, No, I'm down for that. Okay. So, if

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<v Speaker 2>you were able to send a message that you knew

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<v Speaker 2>aliens were going to get, what would you send out

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<v Speaker 2>into space if you knew it would be received?

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<v Speaker 1>Oh my gosh, Kelly, Wow, the hardest question time.

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<v Speaker 2>Oh Man, no balls here.

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<v Speaker 1>Unfortunately, I pretty strongly believe that any message we send

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<v Speaker 1>out into space will be undecipherable, untranslatable without us there

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<v Speaker 1>to explain it or to interact with them or some

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<v Speaker 1>kind of common context. I love the message that we

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<v Speaker 1>did send out into space, but I think it's probably

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<v Speaker 1>impossible for aliens to figure out what we meant by that,

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<v Speaker 1>because I think there's so much of us in it,

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<v Speaker 1>so much of our cultural context, and that it's hard

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<v Speaker 1>for us to see that and to strip it away.

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<v Speaker 1>But of course, if you gave me the opportunity, I

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<v Speaker 1>would still send something, probably a picture of my kids.

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<v Speaker 2>Aw, that's cute. I think if I was going to

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<v Speaker 2>send a message out in a space, one thing that's

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<v Speaker 2>kind of universal is music, especially instrumental music. So I

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<v Speaker 2>think i'd send some like beautiful music out into space,

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<v Speaker 2>because I agree. I think if you sent like we

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<v Speaker 2>come in peace, they wouldn't know what that means. I mean,

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<v Speaker 2>I can listen to music from a culture I know

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<v Speaker 2>nothing about and still feel kind of choked up about it.

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<v Speaker 2>I don't know. Maybe that's the closest we have to

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<v Speaker 2>something universal.

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<v Speaker 1>Maybe I mean it's the universe, maybe across humans. And

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<v Speaker 1>I can appreciate music from other species like bird song

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<v Speaker 1>can be quite nice. But I don't know if that

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<v Speaker 1>means that it's universal beyond Earth right, other than just

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<v Speaker 1>speculation and hope, do we have any solid evidence biologically

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<v Speaker 1>for music being something that has to fundamentally be part

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<v Speaker 1>of intelligence.

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<v Speaker 2>No, absolutely not. But I think it's maybe one of

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<v Speaker 2>our best chances at sending something that represents our whole species.

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<v Speaker 2>Because almost all of us are excited about music.

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<v Speaker 1>That means we have to send them Taylor Swift or

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<v Speaker 1>like the Macarena or something.

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<v Speaker 2>I think we could take a more historical perspective.

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<v Speaker 1>What's more likely to get us invaded or nuked from orbit? O?

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<v Speaker 2>God, let's withhold the makarena. Bleeps.

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<v Speaker 1>But we don't just have to speculate about signals to

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<v Speaker 1>send to aliens, because humanity has sent messages to the

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<v Speaker 1>skies in the past, and we've done so in response

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<v Speaker 1>to weird lips and bleeps we've heard from the cosmos.

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<v Speaker 2>Do you think most people know about the weird blue

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<v Speaker 2>in bleeps we've heard. I think we should ask our audience.

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<v Speaker 1>One of the best candidates for a potential alien signal

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<v Speaker 1>is something we're going to be talking about on the

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<v Speaker 1>podcast today. It's called the Wow signal because someone wrote

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<v Speaker 1>wow next to the computer print out when they first

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<v Speaker 1>saw it. Was it Aliens? Was it the Russians? Was

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<v Speaker 1>it just birds?

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<v Speaker 2>I think the writing wow next to it thing is

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<v Speaker 2>really cute, better than WTF or something a WTF signal?

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<v Speaker 1>I love it, And so I asked folks what they

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<v Speaker 1>thought the Wow signal might be. Was it a message

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<v Speaker 1>from aliens? Or are we just fooling ourselves. Here's what

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<v Speaker 1>people had to say.

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<v Speaker 2>I'm not sure what calls the Wow signal.

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<v Speaker 1>Maybe supernova, maybe maybe aquasa.

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<v Speaker 2>Some sort of cosmic anomaly.

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<v Speaker 1>I don't remember if there's been any resolution on its origin,

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<v Speaker 1>so I'd love to hear progress on that.

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<v Speaker 2>The Wow signal is a seventy two second narrow band

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<v Speaker 2>high energy signal sent by the Santee, an alien race,

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<v Speaker 2>in an attempt to find refuge from their failing three

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<v Speaker 2>body problem.

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<v Speaker 1>It must be very impressive to be called the WOW.

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<v Speaker 1>That's the signal that was seen by SETTI for a

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<v Speaker 1>brief time. I don't think it's known what caused it,

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<v Speaker 1>no idea, It never never repeated.

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<v Speaker 2>My guess is the WOW signal was a short transmission

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<v Speaker 2>from a satellite that just happened to be in the

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<v Speaker 2>beam of the Big Year at the time, something that

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<v Speaker 2>they thought was alien. But they've recently done done some

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<v Speaker 2>research to improved that it was actually a massive comet

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<v Speaker 2>going between one planetary signal and US. I think it

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<v Speaker 2>had something to do with hydrogen. I'm curious to hear.

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<v Speaker 1>To find out the WOW signal was just a glitch,

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<v Speaker 1>a random occurrence. Or who was written upside down and

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<v Speaker 1>he was thinking about his mom mikes would be moving.

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<v Speaker 1>Electrons burst from like a pulsar equasar that collided with

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<v Speaker 1>the cloud of hydrogen, which then created the signal of

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<v Speaker 1>sweatpast Earth. If you'd like to virtually answer these persons

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<v Speaker 1>on the street questions, we'd love to have you participate

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<v Speaker 1>please write to us two questions at danieland Kelly dot org.

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<v Speaker 1>That's danieland Kelly dot O RG Kelly, is.

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<v Speaker 2>K E l L Y not I E. That's the

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<v Speaker 2>wrong way to spell it. Sorry to I E. Kelly's

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<v Speaker 2>out there. Let's go ahead and alienate the audience for

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<v Speaker 2>no reason. So I thought the answers that we got

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<v Speaker 2>this time around were great. I really loved the person

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<v Speaker 2>who was quick on their feet and had the upside

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<v Speaker 2>down and it actually met mom answer, like, oh, message

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<v Speaker 2>for mom, I got to call home.

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<v Speaker 1>Maybe moms are the most universal thing in the universe, Kelly.

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<v Speaker 2>I love that idea. I think that's probably right. Everyone

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<v Speaker 2>everywhere loves their mom.

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<v Speaker 1>I don't know. We have a running joke as a

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<v Speaker 1>family whenever we watch a movie, either the dad or

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<v Speaker 1>the mom is usually like a terrible character. And so

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<v Speaker 1>you know, when you see a mom acting badly on

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<v Speaker 1>the screen, my kids are like, moms are the worst.

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<v Speaker 1>Oh you see a dad behaving terribly, and they're like,

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<v Speaker 1>dads are the worst. Oh my gosh. But anyway, I

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<v Speaker 1>hope aliens out there have really nice moms.

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<v Speaker 2>I hope so too. Well. So another common guess was

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<v Speaker 2>that this was just a like equipment problem or some

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<v Speaker 2>you know, environmental phenomena. So let's get into where we

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<v Speaker 2>collected the WOW signal, what it looked like, and let's

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<v Speaker 2>jump in.

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<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the Wow signal is a really exciting example something

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<v Speaker 1>I think is really important, which is basically just listening

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<v Speaker 1>to the universe and trying to hear messages. You know,

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<v Speaker 1>we don't have a whole lot of ways of communicating

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<v Speaker 1>with aliens because we're stuck on this rock. You know,

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<v Speaker 1>space is vast and rockets are slow, and even photons

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<v Speaker 1>don't go very fast compared to the huge distances between

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<v Speaker 1>here and any other stars. So our best chance to

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<v Speaker 1>discover life is not to land on some other planet

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<v Speaker 1>or for other aliens to land here, but to hear

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<v Speaker 1>from them, right, to get a message from space. And

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<v Speaker 1>so the best way to figure out are we alone

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<v Speaker 1>in the universe is to listen to hear if other

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<v Speaker 1>people are basically sending us interplanetary emails.

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<v Speaker 2>I feel like it's common for people to try to

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<v Speaker 2>convince you that the question they work on is really

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<v Speaker 2>important by prefacing it with one of the most important

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<v Speaker 2>questions humankind will ever have to answer. And people often

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<v Speaker 2>say whether or not we're alone one of the most

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<v Speaker 2>important questions humankind will ever have to answer. And I

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<v Speaker 2>think that's the one time that I believe it. I

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<v Speaker 2>think that might actually be one of the most important questions.

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<v Speaker 2>What do you think what do you think is the

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<v Speaker 2>most important question humans could ever answer?

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<v Speaker 1>Man, you are dropping the big questions kind of.

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<v Speaker 2>Getting us off track.

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<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, no, I agree, And I think we know

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<v Speaker 1>it's one of the most important questions because it's one

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<v Speaker 1>of the oldest questions, and there's a question we've been

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<v Speaker 1>asking since we've been asking questions. It's up there with

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<v Speaker 1>like how big is the universe and where does it

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<v Speaker 1>all come from? It changes the whole context of our experience,

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<v Speaker 1>you know, in a way that like some question in

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<v Speaker 1>organic chemistry, can you synthesize this polysaccharator or whatever? I

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<v Speaker 1>don't even know enough chemistry to make that joke, you know,

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<v Speaker 1>like the answer doesn't change what it means to be human,

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<v Speaker 1>what it means to be alive, and how you should

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<v Speaker 1>live your life. But if we know we're alone in

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<v Speaker 1>the universe, we're the only thinking beings that really changes

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<v Speaker 1>what it means to be human. And also if we're

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<v Speaker 1>one in the zillion changes what it means to be human.

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<v Speaker 1>So yeah, I agree this is one of the deep questions.

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<v Speaker 1>I don't personally work on this question, which means I'm

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<v Speaker 1>not like invested in it that same way, but I

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<v Speaker 1>agree it's one of the most important questions basically anybody's

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<v Speaker 1>ever asked.

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<v Speaker 2>And I also don't work on this question, but I

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<v Speaker 2>still think it would probably profoundly change the way I

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<v Speaker 2>see everything. And I feel like, also over the course

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<v Speaker 2>of my life, I've been more and more convinced that

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<v Speaker 2>probably there's something else out there. During my lifetime, we've

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<v Speaker 2>learned so much about other exoplanets and how much is

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<v Speaker 2>out there, and I feel like, statistically it would be

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<v Speaker 2>really surprising if we were alone. And so anyway, I'm

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<v Speaker 2>more excited about listening.

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<v Speaker 1>I think it's really interesting how scientists have hunches like that.

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<v Speaker 1>I don't think that's widely enough understood that you know,

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<v Speaker 1>we're scientists and we're doing science and we're trying to

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<v Speaker 1>be objective, but also look where people we got feelings

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<v Speaker 1>and guesses and emotions, and that's important because that drives

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<v Speaker 1>how science is done. Like, if you believe in something,

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<v Speaker 1>you're more likely to investigate it, And of course you

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<v Speaker 1>can investigate it in a very scientific way and try

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<v Speaker 1>to draw objective answers, but it changes the kind of

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<v Speaker 1>things you do with your science, little places you spend

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<v Speaker 1>your time. So these like scientific hunches, they're important. You know,

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<v Speaker 1>these feelings that scientists have.

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<v Speaker 2>Well, I think you need to be honest about them,

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<v Speaker 2>because if you feel like something is right, then you

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<v Speaker 2>need to be extra careful to make sure you're not

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<v Speaker 2>tricking yourself into something. You know. I think people who

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<v Speaker 2>are like, oh, scientists, they're always unbiased and they're just

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<v Speaker 2>looking for the truth. It's like, no, we're humans. We

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<v Speaker 2>like have a hunch that things are going to go

0:11:19.720 --> 0:11:21.240
<v Speaker 2>one way or another, and you need to be honest

0:11:21.280 --> 0:11:23.960
<v Speaker 2>about that and then try extra hard to prove yourself

0:11:23.960 --> 0:11:26.640
<v Speaker 2>wrong if you know you're leaning in a certain direction exactly.

0:11:26.640 --> 0:11:29.000
<v Speaker 1>And I feel just that way about the aliens question.

0:11:29.360 --> 0:11:32.480
<v Speaker 1>People write to me about this because I'm very skeptical

0:11:32.640 --> 0:11:35.160
<v Speaker 1>of all the videos that we've seen, you know, gimbal

0:11:35.200 --> 0:11:37.280
<v Speaker 1>and the Tiktac video and all this stuff. And I

0:11:37.360 --> 0:11:39.760
<v Speaker 1>talked to Mick West once about it and he helped

0:11:39.800 --> 0:11:42.040
<v Speaker 1>us debunk them. And the reason I feel so skeptical

0:11:42.080 --> 0:11:44.440
<v Speaker 1>about them is that the threshold is absolutely, very very high.

0:11:44.480 --> 0:11:46.559
<v Speaker 1>And one reason for that is that I really want

0:11:46.559 --> 0:11:48.760
<v Speaker 1>it to be true, Like I want there to be aliens,

0:11:48.760 --> 0:11:50.840
<v Speaker 1>and I want them to be here on Earth visiting us.

0:11:50.960 --> 0:11:52.640
<v Speaker 1>I would so love for that to be true that

0:11:52.679 --> 0:11:55.840
<v Speaker 1>I have to be extra scrupulous about believing this stuff, right,

0:11:55.840 --> 0:11:58.160
<v Speaker 1>It needs to be really, really rock solid, because I

0:11:58.240 --> 0:12:01.439
<v Speaker 1>know I'm biased in fame of believing it, And.

0:12:01.400 --> 0:12:04.080
<v Speaker 2>So I bet you want it to be true because

0:12:04.080 --> 0:12:07.120
<v Speaker 2>you would love to know their physics theories and if

0:12:07.160 --> 0:12:09.319
<v Speaker 2>they imagine with ours.

0:12:09.760 --> 0:12:11.880
<v Speaker 1>Absolutely, I would love to talk to a theoretical physicists

0:12:11.920 --> 0:12:14.480
<v Speaker 1>from another planet, if they even do theoretical physics. And

0:12:14.720 --> 0:12:16.360
<v Speaker 1>you know, of course that I'm writing a book on

0:12:16.400 --> 0:12:19.320
<v Speaker 1>that exact question, but also because it would instantly answer

0:12:19.360 --> 0:12:22.160
<v Speaker 1>so many other questions about the prevalence of life, Like

0:12:22.360 --> 0:12:25.280
<v Speaker 1>your hunch that there is life out there in the

0:12:25.360 --> 0:12:27.680
<v Speaker 1>universe is informed, of course by science. You know, there

0:12:27.679 --> 0:12:29.480
<v Speaker 1>are a lot more planets, a lot more stars, a

0:12:29.480 --> 0:12:31.360
<v Speaker 1>lot more earth like planets and all that stuff, But

0:12:31.360 --> 0:12:34.240
<v Speaker 1>there's still the question of how often life arises, and

0:12:34.280 --> 0:12:37.000
<v Speaker 1>something we don't even understand here on Earth, right, And

0:12:37.040 --> 0:12:39.719
<v Speaker 1>so that would help us understand that question, which I

0:12:39.800 --> 0:12:42.920
<v Speaker 1>feel like is so deep and informs the context of

0:12:42.960 --> 0:12:46.800
<v Speaker 1>our lives so profoundly that yeah, I'm desperate to know.

0:12:47.520 --> 0:12:49.720
<v Speaker 1>And also because it's a question that has an answer,

0:12:49.840 --> 0:12:52.199
<v Speaker 1>and the answer is out there. Yeah, like the aliens

0:12:52.200 --> 0:12:54.120
<v Speaker 1>are either there or they're not. You know, it's just

0:12:54.160 --> 0:12:56.640
<v Speaker 1>a fact about the universe and we just don't have

0:12:56.800 --> 0:12:58.880
<v Speaker 1>the answer. It's like if somebody puts the answer in

0:12:58.920 --> 0:13:00.760
<v Speaker 1>an envelope in front of you, you're going to be

0:13:00.800 --> 0:13:02.800
<v Speaker 1>so desperate to open it, right. That's to me what

0:13:02.920 --> 0:13:05.480
<v Speaker 1>science is is like ripping open the envelopes of the universe.

0:13:05.640 --> 0:13:09.040
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Yeah, I just started this book called The Zoologists

0:13:09.040 --> 0:13:11.920
<v Speaker 2>Guide to the Galaxy, and the argument that he's making

0:13:12.000 --> 0:13:15.400
<v Speaker 2>is that natural selection must be acting everywhere, and so

0:13:15.520 --> 0:13:18.400
<v Speaker 2>there are some things you can predict about how animals

0:13:18.440 --> 0:13:20.360
<v Speaker 2>will look and anyway, as a biologist, I would just

0:13:20.440 --> 0:13:23.880
<v Speaker 2>love to know, like do they have something like DNA

0:13:23.960 --> 0:13:26.560
<v Speaker 2>like we do? Are there other ways of encoding things?

0:13:26.920 --> 0:13:28.960
<v Speaker 2>I mean, it does feel like they must be shaped

0:13:29.000 --> 0:13:31.480
<v Speaker 2>by natural selection, but is that true? And what do

0:13:31.520 --> 0:13:34.480
<v Speaker 2>they look like now? And I'm only about the first

0:13:34.600 --> 0:13:36.160
<v Speaker 2>quarter of the way into the book and it's a

0:13:36.320 --> 0:13:39.120
<v Speaker 2>very interesting argument. But okay, so we both agree.

0:13:39.200 --> 0:13:42.400
<v Speaker 1>Well, I actually talk to Eric Kirshenbaum and interviewed him

0:13:42.440 --> 0:13:44.840
<v Speaker 1>for the book that I'm writing. He's hilarious, and you know,

0:13:44.880 --> 0:13:47.880
<v Speaker 1>I believe his arguments that like, basically critters or always

0:13:47.880 --> 0:13:50.160
<v Speaker 1>going to munch on other critters, and that affects how

0:13:50.360 --> 0:13:53.120
<v Speaker 1>aliens evolve. And you can learn a lot about how

0:13:53.120 --> 0:13:56.199
<v Speaker 1>aliens might behave from the things that have happened here

0:13:56.200 --> 0:13:58.320
<v Speaker 1>on Earth. But maybe he's totally wrong, and the only

0:13:58.360 --> 0:14:00.560
<v Speaker 1>way to know he is to meet the aliens.

0:14:00.640 --> 0:14:03.200
<v Speaker 2>That's right. Anyway, So we have spent way longer than

0:14:03.240 --> 0:14:06.440
<v Speaker 2>we intended talking about why we should look you and

0:14:06.480 --> 0:14:09.480
<v Speaker 2>I are convinced that we should be looking how do

0:14:09.600 --> 0:14:10.120
<v Speaker 2>you look?

0:14:10.360 --> 0:14:12.400
<v Speaker 1>Well, Basically, the right way to do it is to

0:14:12.440 --> 0:14:17.120
<v Speaker 1>open every single technological eyeball or earball that you can

0:14:17.640 --> 0:14:20.680
<v Speaker 1>right listen to the skies in every possible way, because

0:14:20.680 --> 0:14:23.200
<v Speaker 1>we can't anticipate how are aliens going to try to

0:14:23.240 --> 0:14:26.600
<v Speaker 1>connect with us? Now, Because we're scientists, the first thing

0:14:26.600 --> 0:14:29.080
<v Speaker 1>we do is the easiest thing, Right, every time you

0:14:29.200 --> 0:14:31.640
<v Speaker 1>try something in science, you always do the dumbest, simplest,

0:14:31.720 --> 0:14:35.040
<v Speaker 1>cheapest thing first, because hey, that might just work something

0:14:35.160 --> 0:14:37.720
<v Speaker 1>you're done right, and when that doesn't work, then you

0:14:37.760 --> 0:14:40.640
<v Speaker 1>get more creative and more expensive. So the simplest, easiest

0:14:40.680 --> 0:14:43.240
<v Speaker 1>thing to do is to just listen for radio waves.

0:14:43.280 --> 0:14:45.600
<v Speaker 1>Like it's that simple. You know, we have these things

0:14:45.600 --> 0:14:47.920
<v Speaker 1>that can send messages from one part of the Earth

0:14:47.920 --> 0:14:50.520
<v Speaker 1>to the other by exciting the electromagnetic field. You know,

0:14:50.560 --> 0:14:53.000
<v Speaker 1>that's how radio waves work. You have an antenna somewhere,

0:14:53.080 --> 0:14:56.000
<v Speaker 1>electrons inside of it are oscillating because of the current

0:14:56.120 --> 0:14:59.560
<v Speaker 1>that makes oscillating electromagnetic waves, which is then reach an

0:14:59.560 --> 0:15:03.040
<v Speaker 1>antenna you have which wriggles the electrons in your antenna,

0:15:03.040 --> 0:15:05.000
<v Speaker 1>which creates a current which feeds into your circuit and

0:15:05.040 --> 0:15:07.960
<v Speaker 1>then gets translated into sound for your ears. Right, So

0:15:08.000 --> 0:15:11.080
<v Speaker 1>the idea is, Look, you don't need air or anything

0:15:11.120 --> 0:15:13.000
<v Speaker 1>to send radio waves. You can send them from here

0:15:13.040 --> 0:15:14.960
<v Speaker 1>to the moon. You can send them from here to Mars.

0:15:15.000 --> 0:15:18.800
<v Speaker 1>They go through space itself, just like light does. Right.

0:15:19.160 --> 0:15:23.120
<v Speaker 1>Radio waves are fundamentally just another kind of light. Light

0:15:23.200 --> 0:15:26.120
<v Speaker 1>exists in lots of different frequencies. We can see it

0:15:26.160 --> 0:15:28.920
<v Speaker 1>from like red up to violet, but it exists in

0:15:29.000 --> 0:15:32.880
<v Speaker 1>higher frequencies we can't see the ultraviolet and lower frequencies,

0:15:32.920 --> 0:15:35.520
<v Speaker 1>we can't see the infrared and radio waves, and so

0:15:35.640 --> 0:15:40.160
<v Speaker 1>this is basically like listen for radio waves from space

0:15:40.200 --> 0:15:41.760
<v Speaker 1>because we have that technology.

0:15:42.280 --> 0:15:46.560
<v Speaker 2>So we could also look for like photons from far away.

0:15:46.680 --> 0:15:50.040
<v Speaker 2>Are there any kind of waves that would not travel

0:15:50.080 --> 0:15:53.000
<v Speaker 2>through space and could not be used to send a message?

0:15:53.280 --> 0:15:56.680
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, absolutely, we can definitely look for signals from space,

0:15:56.760 --> 0:15:59.600
<v Speaker 1>like if aliens are shining a laser beam at us

0:15:59.600 --> 0:16:01.720
<v Speaker 1>and turn it on and off in Morse code or

0:16:01.840 --> 0:16:04.320
<v Speaker 1>the alien equivalent, we could totally see that. The different

0:16:04.320 --> 0:16:07.920
<v Speaker 1>frequencies have different strengths and weaknesses because the universe is

0:16:08.000 --> 0:16:12.720
<v Speaker 1>transparent or opaque at different frequencies. Like the visible spectrum

0:16:12.760 --> 0:16:15.560
<v Speaker 1>is nice because the universe is mostly transparent. Like if

0:16:15.560 --> 0:16:18.200
<v Speaker 1>you shine a laser beam from here to Alpha Centauri,

0:16:18.320 --> 0:16:21.000
<v Speaker 1>it's gonna make it and they can see that laser

0:16:21.040 --> 0:16:24.520
<v Speaker 1>because visible light can go through space. It's transparent. And

0:16:24.560 --> 0:16:26.160
<v Speaker 1>you know, it didn't always used to be that way.

0:16:26.280 --> 0:16:28.840
<v Speaker 1>Earlier in the history of the universe, it was filled

0:16:28.880 --> 0:16:31.120
<v Speaker 1>with a plasma and the universe was opaque. And so

0:16:31.160 --> 0:16:33.520
<v Speaker 1>it's just like in our era of the universe that

0:16:33.560 --> 0:16:36.240
<v Speaker 1>it's mostly transparent to this, but space is not actually

0:16:36.280 --> 0:16:38.920
<v Speaker 1>empty right, there's lots of dust and gas and stuff,

0:16:39.160 --> 0:16:41.480
<v Speaker 1>so some frequencies of light can penetrate that and some

0:16:41.560 --> 0:16:44.720
<v Speaker 1>of them can't. So radio waves in infrared and ultraviolet

0:16:44.760 --> 0:16:46.920
<v Speaker 1>and X rays, some of those things can make it

0:16:46.920 --> 0:16:48.880
<v Speaker 1>through gas and dust and some of them can't. So

0:16:48.920 --> 0:16:50.480
<v Speaker 1>the right thing they do is still listen on all

0:16:50.560 --> 0:16:53.760
<v Speaker 1>the frequencies because we don't know where they're coming from

0:16:53.840 --> 0:16:56.440
<v Speaker 1>and how they can transmit, So they might be invisible

0:16:56.440 --> 0:16:58.320
<v Speaker 1>to us because they're behind gas and dust in the

0:16:58.360 --> 0:17:01.320
<v Speaker 1>center of the galaxy or something else. But radio is

0:17:01.360 --> 0:17:03.560
<v Speaker 1>sort of easy. We have lots of receivers for radio,

0:17:03.840 --> 0:17:05.720
<v Speaker 1>We have large antenna, and we've been doing it a

0:17:05.720 --> 0:17:08.639
<v Speaker 1>little while, so radio is sort of like the first place.

0:17:08.400 --> 0:17:11.520
<v Speaker 2>To go, you know, there's lots of radio stations on Earth.

0:17:11.840 --> 0:17:15.600
<v Speaker 2>Is everything that we transmit to each other by radio

0:17:16.240 --> 0:17:18.920
<v Speaker 2>also making it out into space, Like have the aliens

0:17:18.960 --> 0:17:21.720
<v Speaker 2>heard the Macarena or will they in many late years

0:17:21.760 --> 0:17:24.080
<v Speaker 2>or whatever? Or does it depend on where we're aiming it,

0:17:24.240 --> 0:17:27.040
<v Speaker 2>Like our radios aimed towards Earth, and so those messages

0:17:27.080 --> 0:17:28.679
<v Speaker 2>aren't going out into deep space.

0:17:28.800 --> 0:17:31.560
<v Speaker 1>No, we have definitely beamed the Macharina into deep space.

0:17:31.920 --> 0:17:34.760
<v Speaker 1>Embarrassingly right now, or maybe they love it, you know,

0:17:34.800 --> 0:17:37.280
<v Speaker 1>and maybe that's the reason they're going to come, which

0:17:37.320 --> 0:17:40.600
<v Speaker 1>would be wonderful. Messages can be beamed, they can be aimed,

0:17:40.720 --> 0:17:43.600
<v Speaker 1>but generally radio is not right. Radio is broadcast in

0:17:43.640 --> 0:17:45.520
<v Speaker 1>every direction, so you can pick up your tailor switch

0:17:45.560 --> 0:17:48.200
<v Speaker 1>in every direction, which means that it's also broadcast up

0:17:48.280 --> 0:17:51.120
<v Speaker 1>right and out into space, and also with our TV signals,

0:17:51.320 --> 0:17:53.960
<v Speaker 1>and so yes, our signals have left the planet though

0:17:54.000 --> 0:17:57.080
<v Speaker 1>you know, we've only been transmitting for about one hundred years,

0:17:57.640 --> 0:18:00.560
<v Speaker 1>and that means that there's like a bubble one hundred

0:18:00.680 --> 0:18:03.840
<v Speaker 1>light years wide within which you can pick up signals

0:18:03.880 --> 0:18:06.159
<v Speaker 1>from Earth. And one hundred light years seems like a

0:18:06.160 --> 0:18:08.960
<v Speaker 1>long way because light travels really really fast, right, but

0:18:09.080 --> 0:18:12.800
<v Speaker 1>the galaxy is one hundred thousand light years across, So

0:18:12.880 --> 0:18:15.080
<v Speaker 1>the fraction of the Milky Way which is filled with

0:18:15.160 --> 0:18:19.440
<v Speaker 1>Earth signals is really really small. And as you get

0:18:19.480 --> 0:18:23.040
<v Speaker 1>further and further from Earth, those signals get weaker. If

0:18:23.080 --> 0:18:25.480
<v Speaker 1>you're twice as far away, the signals get four times

0:18:25.480 --> 0:18:27.719
<v Speaker 1>a week. If you're ten times further away, then they

0:18:27.720 --> 0:18:30.119
<v Speaker 1>get one hundred times this week. So because they're not

0:18:30.160 --> 0:18:32.600
<v Speaker 1>typically aimed, they get really pretty weak when you get

0:18:32.600 --> 0:18:35.320
<v Speaker 1>to like the next star. So, for example, our radio

0:18:35.320 --> 0:18:40.400
<v Speaker 1>telescopes couldn't pick up Earth like transmissions from the nearest star.

0:18:41.000 --> 0:18:44.879
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so the nearest aliens living on a planet orbiting

0:18:44.880 --> 0:18:48.520
<v Speaker 2>the nearest star wouldn't necessarily be able to eavesdrop on

0:18:48.640 --> 0:18:51.640
<v Speaker 2>all of the communications we were sharing by radio during

0:18:51.680 --> 0:18:53.840
<v Speaker 2>World War II, for example, so they might not know

0:18:54.080 --> 0:18:55.920
<v Speaker 2>about those atrocities, and then don't have to be so

0:18:56.119 --> 0:18:58.760
<v Speaker 2>insecure about how our species looks exactly.

0:18:58.800 --> 0:19:01.040
<v Speaker 1>If we knew they were there, beam them a message,

0:19:01.040 --> 0:19:04.560
<v Speaker 1>which they probably could receive, assuming they had technology similar

0:19:04.560 --> 0:19:07.479
<v Speaker 1>to ours. But if we're just broadcasting into space, then

0:19:07.480 --> 0:19:09.119
<v Speaker 1>by the time it gets there. Again, if they have

0:19:09.200 --> 0:19:11.439
<v Speaker 1>technology similar to ours, they wouldn't be able to pick

0:19:11.480 --> 0:19:14.000
<v Speaker 1>it up. If they're far advanced and their technology is

0:19:14.040 --> 0:19:16.760
<v Speaker 1>much more powerful, then yeah, maybe they're listening to us

0:19:16.840 --> 0:19:19.439
<v Speaker 1>right now and they watched every episode of I Love Lucy,

0:19:19.640 --> 0:19:22.159
<v Speaker 1>in which case we got some splaining to do.

0:19:24.040 --> 0:19:26.960
<v Speaker 2>I'm enjoying your choice of pop culture references, and I'm

0:19:27.000 --> 0:19:30.040
<v Speaker 2>not sure if I'm getting some insights into your preferences

0:19:30.040 --> 0:19:34.320
<v Speaker 2>here or not. So let's take a break for some commercials,

0:19:34.359 --> 0:19:54.000
<v Speaker 2>and when we get back, we'll talk about Sagittarius A.

0:19:54.000 --> 0:19:57.600
<v Speaker 2>All right, we're back. During the break, you told me

0:19:57.640 --> 0:20:00.160
<v Speaker 2>something that I didn't know, which means I didn't read

0:20:00.200 --> 0:20:05.080
<v Speaker 2>our outline very carefully, which is that Sagittarius A is

0:20:05.119 --> 0:20:09.760
<v Speaker 2>a black hole discovered by radio waves. All right, tell

0:20:09.760 --> 0:20:10.439
<v Speaker 2>me more about that.

0:20:10.760 --> 0:20:12.879
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, we do radio to talk to each other, but

0:20:13.040 --> 0:20:16.399
<v Speaker 1>astronomers do radio to listen to the skies. But not

0:20:16.480 --> 0:20:19.720
<v Speaker 1>in the beginning. Radio astronomy has its origins in the

0:20:19.840 --> 0:20:23.480
<v Speaker 1>radio industry. The first radio telescope was built by somebody

0:20:23.480 --> 0:20:25.760
<v Speaker 1>at Bell Labs, essentially to listen to see like, hey,

0:20:25.800 --> 0:20:28.480
<v Speaker 1>how much noise is there in the radio spectrum? How

0:20:28.560 --> 0:20:29.960
<v Speaker 1>much do we have to worry about this if we

0:20:30.000 --> 0:20:32.280
<v Speaker 1>want to transmit radio around the world. So this is

0:20:32.280 --> 0:20:35.159
<v Speaker 1>like in the thirties, This is not somebody doing astronomy.

0:20:35.160 --> 0:20:38.480
<v Speaker 1>This is just like, hey, this is a commercial, useful technology.

0:20:38.680 --> 0:20:40.920
<v Speaker 1>Let's figure out how noisy it is. And then after

0:20:41.040 --> 0:20:43.119
<v Speaker 1>World War Two there are a lot of advances in

0:20:43.280 --> 0:20:46.800
<v Speaker 1>radar which then got applied to radio astronomy, and that's

0:20:46.800 --> 0:20:49.000
<v Speaker 1>when it first took off and people started listening in

0:20:49.080 --> 0:20:52.040
<v Speaker 1>depth to the skies and they immediately discovered something really

0:20:52.040 --> 0:20:54.560
<v Speaker 1>really weird that there was a point in the sky

0:20:54.760 --> 0:20:57.960
<v Speaker 1>where you couldn't really see anything interesting, but it was very,

0:20:58.119 --> 0:21:01.679
<v Speaker 1>very loud in the radio. It wasn't loud or equivalently

0:21:01.720 --> 0:21:04.400
<v Speaker 1>bright in the visible like if you look with a telescope,

0:21:04.520 --> 0:21:06.879
<v Speaker 1>you couldn't really see anything there, but that point in

0:21:06.920 --> 0:21:09.760
<v Speaker 1>the sky was extraordinarily loud in the radio.

0:21:10.680 --> 0:21:12.879
<v Speaker 2>Why are black holes screaming in radio?

0:21:16.880 --> 0:21:19.040
<v Speaker 1>Death metal? Of course? I mean what kind of music

0:21:19.320 --> 0:21:21.080
<v Speaker 1>is a black hole going to make? You know? Soell

0:21:21.200 --> 0:21:27.199
<v Speaker 1>Garden right, it's not John Denver for sure. Yeah. So

0:21:27.240 --> 0:21:30.040
<v Speaker 1>why do things in the sky emit in radio? Well,

0:21:30.080 --> 0:21:33.760
<v Speaker 1>all electromagnetic radiation that includes visible photons and X rays

0:21:33.800 --> 0:21:38.160
<v Speaker 1>and everything are emitted by charged particles being accelerated. It's

0:21:38.200 --> 0:21:41.240
<v Speaker 1>a fundamental piece of electromagnetism. Like you have an electron,

0:21:41.560 --> 0:21:43.840
<v Speaker 1>you accelerate, it means you're giving it a kick in

0:21:43.920 --> 0:21:45.800
<v Speaker 1>order to conserve momentum. It's going to shoot off a

0:21:45.800 --> 0:21:48.880
<v Speaker 1>photon in the other direction, right, That's how charge particles

0:21:48.920 --> 0:21:51.720
<v Speaker 1>get accelerated. Every time a charge particle is accelerated, it's

0:21:51.760 --> 0:21:53.919
<v Speaker 1>going to give off a photon. So what's happening here

0:21:54.000 --> 0:21:56.520
<v Speaker 1>is you have electrons moving at high speeds being bent

0:21:56.800 --> 0:22:00.399
<v Speaker 1>by the strong magnetic fields around the black hole, and

0:22:00.480 --> 0:22:04.040
<v Speaker 1>that corresponds to radio and it's fascinating because stars don't

0:22:04.040 --> 0:22:06.320
<v Speaker 1>produce radio waves. If you listen to the sky in radio,

0:22:06.400 --> 0:22:08.720
<v Speaker 1>you don't hear from the stars. They admit in the

0:22:08.800 --> 0:22:11.639
<v Speaker 1>visible spectrum, they admit in the infrared, but they're pretty

0:22:11.720 --> 0:22:14.200
<v Speaker 1>quiet in the radio. And so this is like another

0:22:14.240 --> 0:22:16.720
<v Speaker 1>way to see what's out there in the universe. It's like, well,

0:22:16.800 --> 0:22:19.199
<v Speaker 1>some stuff is loud in this frequency, some stuff is

0:22:19.240 --> 0:22:22.159
<v Speaker 1>loud in that frequency. The sky looks very different at

0:22:22.160 --> 0:22:23.120
<v Speaker 1>different frequencies.

0:22:23.520 --> 0:22:26.439
<v Speaker 2>Okay, So we looked out and there was an area

0:22:26.600 --> 0:22:30.240
<v Speaker 2>that was screaming sound garden. It was screaming at us

0:22:30.240 --> 0:22:32.720
<v Speaker 2>in radio. We decided that was a black hole. We

0:22:32.800 --> 0:22:34.119
<v Speaker 2>named it Sagittarius A.

0:22:34.720 --> 0:22:36.800
<v Speaker 1>That's right, And that really kicked off the whole era

0:22:36.880 --> 0:22:39.200
<v Speaker 1>of radio astronomy, and people started listening to the sky

0:22:39.600 --> 0:22:43.080
<v Speaker 1>discovering all sorts of stuff, and of course people were wondering, like, hey,

0:22:43.200 --> 0:22:46.800
<v Speaker 1>are we also going to get messages from non black holes?

0:22:46.800 --> 0:22:49.960
<v Speaker 1>And you know, maybe aliens are sending messages to us.

0:22:50.080 --> 0:22:53.440
<v Speaker 1>And there's one frequency in the radio which astronomers particularly

0:22:53.480 --> 0:22:55.960
<v Speaker 1>think maybe aliens are going to use this channel to

0:22:55.960 --> 0:22:58.240
<v Speaker 1>talk to us, and that's called the twenty one centimeters

0:22:58.280 --> 0:23:02.040
<v Speaker 1>hydrogen line. A cloud of hydrogen will very naturally emit

0:23:02.119 --> 0:23:05.720
<v Speaker 1>at this particular frequency because it corresponds to like an

0:23:05.840 --> 0:23:09.280
<v Speaker 1>energy gap in hydrogen. You get hydrogen hot and excited,

0:23:09.320 --> 0:23:11.800
<v Speaker 1>and then it cools back down and it emits a photon.

0:23:11.880 --> 0:23:14.479
<v Speaker 1>When those electrons dek back down, it admits of this

0:23:14.520 --> 0:23:17.760
<v Speaker 1>particular frequency. And because hydrogen is like the basic building

0:23:17.800 --> 0:23:20.600
<v Speaker 1>block of the universe is hydrogen, everywhere, anybody who does

0:23:20.720 --> 0:23:23.199
<v Speaker 1>radio astronomy is going to hear hydrogen and they're going

0:23:23.240 --> 0:23:26.240
<v Speaker 1>to listen to hydrogen and use this to study the universe.

0:23:26.320 --> 0:23:28.800
<v Speaker 1>So it's sort of like figuring out, Hey, anybody out

0:23:28.840 --> 0:23:31.600
<v Speaker 1>there who's curious about the universe is probably paying attention

0:23:31.680 --> 0:23:34.400
<v Speaker 1>to this channel. So let's spam this channel, or let's

0:23:34.400 --> 0:23:36.000
<v Speaker 1>listen to this channel to see if this is what

0:23:36.080 --> 0:23:37.480
<v Speaker 1>people using to talk to each other.

0:23:37.800 --> 0:23:40.960
<v Speaker 2>Okay, that's very cool. And so once we think we

0:23:41.080 --> 0:23:44.720
<v Speaker 2>Eves dropped on something, how long ago did this happen?

0:23:45.119 --> 0:23:47.000
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so people have been listening to this for a

0:23:47.040 --> 0:23:49.440
<v Speaker 1>long long time, wondering if we're going to get a message,

0:23:49.520 --> 0:23:52.359
<v Speaker 1>and then there was this fantastic moment. It was August fifteenth,

0:23:52.520 --> 0:23:55.800
<v Speaker 1>nineteen seventy seven. This took place at Ohio State. They

0:23:55.800 --> 0:23:58.800
<v Speaker 1>have a radio telescope they called the Big Ear. Love

0:23:58.840 --> 0:24:01.760
<v Speaker 1>that name. And the way this telescope works is it's

0:24:01.840 --> 0:24:04.119
<v Speaker 1>just a bunch of antennas. Right. You say telescope, and

0:24:04.160 --> 0:24:07.120
<v Speaker 1>you imagine like a scientist using one eyeball to look

0:24:07.160 --> 0:24:09.480
<v Speaker 1>through a glass or something. Right, But a telescope is

0:24:09.520 --> 0:24:11.920
<v Speaker 1>a general word for anything that can listen to the skies,

0:24:12.160 --> 0:24:14.360
<v Speaker 1>and so this telescope is just a bunch of radio

0:24:14.400 --> 0:24:17.680
<v Speaker 1>antennas spread out across a cornfield somewhere. That's how they

0:24:17.720 --> 0:24:19.879
<v Speaker 1>listen to these radio waves. You can also have like

0:24:19.920 --> 0:24:22.840
<v Speaker 1>a big dish, you know, like the Green Bank Observatory

0:24:22.880 --> 0:24:25.520
<v Speaker 1>and the Parks observatories. These are actually big dishes help

0:24:25.600 --> 0:24:27.280
<v Speaker 1>focus it. But you can also just spread out a

0:24:27.280 --> 0:24:29.879
<v Speaker 1>bunch of antennas on the ground, and that's what the

0:24:29.880 --> 0:24:32.240
<v Speaker 1>Ohio State Big Ear was. And the way this thing

0:24:32.280 --> 0:24:34.919
<v Speaker 1>worked is it scanned for ten seconds and then it

0:24:35.000 --> 0:24:37.439
<v Speaker 1>processed it through a computer for two seconds and then

0:24:37.440 --> 0:24:39.520
<v Speaker 1>summarized the strength of anything it saw. So it's like

0:24:39.560 --> 0:24:43.120
<v Speaker 1>ten seconds of scanning, two seconds of analysis. And printing out.

0:24:43.200 --> 0:24:45.359
<v Speaker 1>And when I say printing out, I mean literally this

0:24:45.520 --> 0:24:48.760
<v Speaker 1>telescope feeds its data into an old fashioned computer and

0:24:48.880 --> 0:24:51.720
<v Speaker 1>IBM eleven thirty, which is then printed out the data

0:24:51.800 --> 0:24:56.560
<v Speaker 1>like onto one of those line printers, you know, like

0:24:56.560 --> 0:24:59.680
<v Speaker 1>like this is the output of the telescope. Yeah, exactly.

0:25:00.080 --> 0:25:02.920
<v Speaker 1>And so some human had to then go like literally

0:25:03.000 --> 0:25:05.440
<v Speaker 1>sift through these pages to see, like, hey, was there

0:25:05.440 --> 0:25:07.960
<v Speaker 1>anything interesting last night? You watch a movie of like

0:25:08.000 --> 0:25:11.160
<v Speaker 1>Discovering Aliens, and there some guy like sifting through pages

0:25:11.280 --> 0:25:13.600
<v Speaker 1>looking for something interesting, Like that's what really happened.

0:25:14.640 --> 0:25:16.960
<v Speaker 2>So was there someone whose job was just to sit

0:25:17.040 --> 0:25:20.560
<v Speaker 2>there constantly, so someone was always on shift. Presumably our

0:25:20.600 --> 0:25:22.959
<v Speaker 2>eyes detect patterns, and so we'd look for things that

0:25:23.040 --> 0:25:25.479
<v Speaker 2>look like a pattern or something different than what we

0:25:25.480 --> 0:25:26.320
<v Speaker 2>were usually seeing.

0:25:26.720 --> 0:25:28.840
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so this had to be scanned visually, and they

0:25:28.840 --> 0:25:32.119
<v Speaker 1>would transform the signal from the telescope into a code.

0:25:32.560 --> 0:25:35.560
<v Speaker 1>And so if they saw basically nothing in this spectrum,

0:25:35.640 --> 0:25:37.600
<v Speaker 1>it would be a space. If they would put a

0:25:37.640 --> 0:25:39.760
<v Speaker 1>one or two or three. If it was a stronger signal,

0:25:39.760 --> 0:25:41.840
<v Speaker 1>all the way up to nine. For a fairly strong signal,

0:25:41.920 --> 0:25:45.040
<v Speaker 1>it got really strong, it would go into letters ABCDFG

0:25:45.160 --> 0:25:47.440
<v Speaker 1>all the way up to you. You was the maximum

0:25:47.440 --> 0:25:49.600
<v Speaker 1>signal that could detect that was saturating it. And so

0:25:49.720 --> 0:25:53.280
<v Speaker 1>there was this morning August fifteenth, nineteen seventy seven, when

0:25:53.320 --> 0:25:56.680
<v Speaker 1>they saw a signal that was seventy two seconds long,

0:25:56.960 --> 0:26:00.480
<v Speaker 1>so six observing periods, which corresponds to six legs, and

0:26:00.520 --> 0:26:03.000
<v Speaker 1>the signal was six E, the letter Q, the letter

0:26:03.160 --> 0:26:06.320
<v Speaker 1>U J and five. Now this is very confusing because

0:26:06.320 --> 0:26:08.199
<v Speaker 1>it makes it sound like, oh, the aliens sent us

0:26:08.200 --> 0:26:11.800
<v Speaker 1>an email and it was these letters six EQUJ five.

0:26:12.160 --> 0:26:14.600
<v Speaker 1>Like I said, a license plate. You should not use

0:26:14.640 --> 0:26:17.360
<v Speaker 1>your decoding skills to try to understand what the aliens

0:26:17.400 --> 0:26:20.920
<v Speaker 1>meant from these letters. These just correspond to the strength

0:26:21.000 --> 0:26:23.679
<v Speaker 1>of the signal. If you translate this back from the

0:26:23.680 --> 0:26:27.320
<v Speaker 1>particular code that this experiment used, it basically just means

0:26:27.320 --> 0:26:29.760
<v Speaker 1>that the signal got stronger and then very very strong,

0:26:29.840 --> 0:26:32.400
<v Speaker 1>and then quieter. So it's like a blip. It goes

0:26:32.480 --> 0:26:33.840
<v Speaker 1>up and then comes down.

0:26:34.119 --> 0:26:39.320
<v Speaker 2>But you're missing two seconds every ten seconds, that's right.

0:26:39.720 --> 0:26:43.720
<v Speaker 2>So it could be even more complicated, that's right.

0:26:43.600 --> 0:26:47.680
<v Speaker 1>Because the telescope can't sample constantly because the computer was slow, essentially,

0:26:47.720 --> 0:26:50.200
<v Speaker 1>and so you're missing two seconds Also, the signal could

0:26:50.200 --> 0:26:52.959
<v Speaker 1>have been longer. We only saw it for seventy seconds

0:26:53.040 --> 0:26:56.359
<v Speaker 1>because that's how long it was visible for. This telescope

0:26:56.400 --> 0:26:59.000
<v Speaker 1>can't be pointed. It's just like laying on a cornfield somewhere,

0:26:59.119 --> 0:27:02.560
<v Speaker 1>and as the Earth rotates, it basically scans different parts

0:27:02.560 --> 0:27:06.040
<v Speaker 1>of the sky, and so it just naturally scanned across

0:27:06.119 --> 0:27:09.320
<v Speaker 1>this region for seventy seconds. It could have still been emitting. Right,

0:27:09.320 --> 0:27:11.320
<v Speaker 1>you can't like turn the earth back and like hold

0:27:11.320 --> 0:27:11.879
<v Speaker 1>on a second.

0:27:11.960 --> 0:27:13.080
<v Speaker 2>That was great, go back.

0:27:14.000 --> 0:27:16.600
<v Speaker 1>Also, they didn't see this until like you know, days

0:27:16.680 --> 0:27:18.719
<v Speaker 1>later when they got to looking at this output. But

0:27:18.800 --> 0:27:21.760
<v Speaker 1>still it was a very strong signal like the letter's

0:27:21.840 --> 0:27:24.359
<v Speaker 1>Q and you in there tell you it's a very

0:27:24.480 --> 0:27:27.679
<v Speaker 1>very powerful signal. It's very loud compared to like the

0:27:27.800 --> 0:27:31.040
<v Speaker 1>average noise you expect in this spectrum. It's exactly the

0:27:31.119 --> 0:27:33.439
<v Speaker 1>kind of thing at the twenty one centimeter line you

0:27:33.560 --> 0:27:35.920
<v Speaker 1>might expect to get from aliens.

0:27:36.160 --> 0:27:39.480
<v Speaker 2>So we've got this message that caught our attention, and

0:27:39.520 --> 0:27:42.000
<v Speaker 2>so presumably, as you mentioned, you don't get things that

0:27:42.040 --> 0:27:44.520
<v Speaker 2>are this loud most of the time. And so what

0:27:44.680 --> 0:27:48.399
<v Speaker 2>do you do with it? Now? Yeah, how do you

0:27:48.400 --> 0:27:50.359
<v Speaker 2>figure out what it was? From? Just this information.

0:27:51.480 --> 0:27:54.119
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, exactly. Well, the first thing you do is you're

0:27:54.119 --> 0:27:56.120
<v Speaker 1>write wow on the piece of paper next to it,

0:27:56.280 --> 0:28:01.120
<v Speaker 1>forever immortalizing yourself and your handwriting in the history of astronomy. Right,

0:28:01.160 --> 0:28:03.200
<v Speaker 1>that's literally what it did, Like on that physical piece

0:28:03.200 --> 0:28:05.760
<v Speaker 1>of paper, he wrote wow exclamation point because it was

0:28:05.880 --> 0:28:08.280
<v Speaker 1>very unusual, and that really highlights the nature of the

0:28:08.320 --> 0:28:10.600
<v Speaker 1>problem and also a hint to try to figure it out, Like,

0:28:10.720 --> 0:28:14.280
<v Speaker 1>this is an unusual signal compared to what we typically see.

0:28:14.600 --> 0:28:16.760
<v Speaker 1>That means that, like we listen to the sky in radio,

0:28:16.800 --> 0:28:19.119
<v Speaker 1>we look around, we hear, we know the kind of

0:28:19.160 --> 0:28:21.280
<v Speaker 1>things we expect to see, you know, black hole this

0:28:21.440 --> 0:28:24.640
<v Speaker 1>and black hole that, and random electrones amid different clouds.

0:28:24.880 --> 0:28:27.639
<v Speaker 1>We know typically what the sky does, and this is unusual.

0:28:28.359 --> 0:28:32.520
<v Speaker 1>Unusual doesn't necessarily mean aliens, right, it means not the

0:28:32.560 --> 0:28:37.200
<v Speaker 1>typical thing, quite rare, very weird. Again, not necessarily aliens.

0:28:37.440 --> 0:28:40.320
<v Speaker 1>It means it's fascinating, It means we could learn something.

0:28:40.560 --> 0:28:42.680
<v Speaker 1>It means it's definitely something you should pay attention to

0:28:42.760 --> 0:28:45.280
<v Speaker 1>and look for more examples of. But how to interpret

0:28:45.320 --> 0:28:47.720
<v Speaker 1>that is difficult. And this is like a classic thing

0:28:47.760 --> 0:28:50.520
<v Speaker 1>in science. You know, we're always doing this two hypothesis test,

0:28:50.520 --> 0:28:54.120
<v Speaker 1>where like, do we reject the current hypothesis do we

0:28:54.160 --> 0:28:56.720
<v Speaker 1>accept the new hypothesis. You can't just reject the current

0:28:56.760 --> 0:28:58.960
<v Speaker 1>one and be like, yeah, I have no explanation. You

0:28:59.040 --> 0:29:02.400
<v Speaker 1>need some explanation, some way to describe this, some theory

0:29:02.440 --> 0:29:05.240
<v Speaker 1>that says this is why we should see this particular

0:29:05.320 --> 0:29:08.600
<v Speaker 1>weird thing and not some other weird thing. And that's

0:29:08.720 --> 0:29:10.520
<v Speaker 1>very hard, you know. How do you look at this

0:29:10.560 --> 0:29:14.600
<v Speaker 1>signal and say I'm convinced this is from aliens? It's

0:29:14.720 --> 0:29:16.400
<v Speaker 1>very challenging. It's not an easy thing to do.

0:29:16.520 --> 0:29:19.000
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, especially when you only see it once and you

0:29:19.040 --> 0:29:21.200
<v Speaker 2>get no more extra information, and so you can't try

0:29:21.200 --> 0:29:23.320
<v Speaker 2>to match it up with a natural phenomenon or something

0:29:23.360 --> 0:29:25.000
<v Speaker 2>like that. And so what did they try doing?

0:29:25.040 --> 0:29:27.360
<v Speaker 1>People try to do lots of stuff. Number one is like,

0:29:27.520 --> 0:29:29.920
<v Speaker 1>look for other examples of this. Do we see this

0:29:30.000 --> 0:29:32.720
<v Speaker 1>anywhere else? In this guy? Has anybody else ever seen one?

0:29:33.000 --> 0:29:35.240
<v Speaker 1>And nobody's been able to repeat this like it didn't

0:29:35.280 --> 0:29:38.560
<v Speaker 1>come back. You know. A classic possible explanation for this

0:29:38.720 --> 0:29:41.040
<v Speaker 1>is like, oh, it's something out there that's emitting, but

0:29:41.240 --> 0:29:44.440
<v Speaker 1>like a pulsar, right. Pulsars are neutron stars, which are

0:29:44.520 --> 0:29:47.800
<v Speaker 1>remnants from stellar collapse. You have a star, it burns

0:29:47.800 --> 0:29:50.080
<v Speaker 1>its life mostly at the end. It's very very bright,

0:29:50.120 --> 0:29:53.040
<v Speaker 1>it burns out very quickly, it collapses. You're left with

0:29:53.080 --> 0:29:57.280
<v Speaker 1>this very dense remnant. Sometimes those are spinning really really fast,

0:29:57.360 --> 0:29:59.760
<v Speaker 1>and they're spinning off center, so they have like a

0:29:59.800 --> 0:30:02.280
<v Speaker 1>b shooting up and down their poles, and that beam

0:30:02.360 --> 0:30:05.440
<v Speaker 1>is now sweeping across the universe. And if you're in

0:30:05.480 --> 0:30:07.680
<v Speaker 1>the path of that beam, you're not always in the

0:30:07.720 --> 0:30:10.160
<v Speaker 1>path of the beam. It's like a lighthouse. It's sweeping

0:30:10.200 --> 0:30:13.120
<v Speaker 1>past you regularly. So pulsar is cool. And actually, when

0:30:13.160 --> 0:30:15.840
<v Speaker 1>pulsars were first discovered, people thought, oh, maybe this is

0:30:15.880 --> 0:30:19.760
<v Speaker 1>aliens because they were regular it's like beep, beep, beep.

0:30:19.800 --> 0:30:22.440
<v Speaker 1>But this was just one beep, so it's not a pulsar.

0:30:22.960 --> 0:30:26.080
<v Speaker 1>This never came back again. Nobody's ever seen anything this

0:30:26.200 --> 0:30:28.760
<v Speaker 1>strong from that direction in the sky. So they were

0:30:28.760 --> 0:30:32.400
<v Speaker 1>able to like immediately filter out a bunch of possible explanations.

0:30:32.600 --> 0:30:34.840
<v Speaker 1>And for me, there's sort of two simultaneous things you

0:30:34.880 --> 0:30:36.880
<v Speaker 1>need to do. One is like, well, let's see if

0:30:36.920 --> 0:30:40.280
<v Speaker 1>there are prosaic explanations, you know, just some natural phenomena

0:30:40.520 --> 0:30:43.480
<v Speaker 1>we haven't seen before. And also let's actively try to

0:30:43.520 --> 0:30:46.800
<v Speaker 1>figure out if it looks like an alien signal. And

0:30:46.880 --> 0:30:48.800
<v Speaker 1>this is the challenge I was referring to earlier, like

0:30:48.920 --> 0:30:51.400
<v Speaker 1>how do you do that? How do you decode an

0:30:51.480 --> 0:30:54.000
<v Speaker 1>alien signal? And the challenge really is that you don't

0:30:54.000 --> 0:30:56.160
<v Speaker 1>know what you're trying to decode it into. Like let's

0:30:56.160 --> 0:30:59.120
<v Speaker 1>say the Aliens encode their message somehow, even if you

0:30:59.160 --> 0:31:02.120
<v Speaker 1>could guess correctly how to decode it, how would you

0:31:02.200 --> 0:31:04.760
<v Speaker 1>know that you've done it correctly? Right, you don't know

0:31:04.800 --> 0:31:06.640
<v Speaker 1>what you're translating it back into. It's not like the

0:31:06.680 --> 0:31:09.240
<v Speaker 1>Aliens have written in English, and once you figure out

0:31:09.280 --> 0:31:11.440
<v Speaker 1>the puzzle, some message is going to pop out and

0:31:11.440 --> 0:31:14.360
<v Speaker 1>be like, Hi, we're from Alpha Centauri. Right. You have

0:31:14.400 --> 0:31:17.479
<v Speaker 1>to somehow not only know the system they're using to

0:31:17.520 --> 0:31:21.680
<v Speaker 1>translate their ideas into radio waves and reverse that, but

0:31:21.760 --> 0:31:24.200
<v Speaker 1>you have to be able to recognize the message when

0:31:24.200 --> 0:31:26.560
<v Speaker 1>it's decoded, which we can't do because we have no

0:31:26.680 --> 0:31:29.400
<v Speaker 1>idea how the aliens think or what they might be saying.

0:31:29.680 --> 0:31:31.680
<v Speaker 2>So, like I imagine if they had been trying to

0:31:31.720 --> 0:31:36.760
<v Speaker 2>communicate with us, maybe it would be something easier ish

0:31:37.120 --> 0:31:39.320
<v Speaker 2>to figure out, like the prime numbers or you know,

0:31:39.320 --> 0:31:41.200
<v Speaker 2>maybe we all would have converged on that, because I

0:31:41.320 --> 0:31:43.360
<v Speaker 2>think that's the thing that's pitched often as some way

0:31:43.400 --> 0:31:45.719
<v Speaker 2>to communicate our intelligence to other life forms. But if

0:31:45.720 --> 0:31:49.120
<v Speaker 2>we only got it once for a little while, if

0:31:49.120 --> 0:31:51.719
<v Speaker 2>it is an alien message, it would probably be eavesdropping, right,

0:31:51.720 --> 0:31:54.280
<v Speaker 2>because otherwise it would have been pointed at us. Maybe

0:31:54.280 --> 0:31:56.240
<v Speaker 2>this was a message for someone else, which I think

0:31:56.280 --> 0:31:58.920
<v Speaker 2>makes it even less likely that we'd be able to

0:31:58.920 --> 0:32:01.240
<v Speaker 2>figure it out. Anyway. It's a hard problem.

0:32:02.200 --> 0:32:04.080
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, you're right, and people often think, oh, well, if

0:32:04.120 --> 0:32:08.080
<v Speaker 1>it's mathematics, it's probably simpler somehow to translate or easier

0:32:08.120 --> 0:32:11.040
<v Speaker 1>to recognize, but that's not necessarily true. You know, we

0:32:11.080 --> 0:32:13.480
<v Speaker 1>don't know how much of mathematics is human, and how

0:32:13.560 --> 0:32:16.880
<v Speaker 1>much of mathematics is universal, how much it just reflects

0:32:16.920 --> 0:32:19.800
<v Speaker 1>our thinking, and how much it reflects something deep in

0:32:19.880 --> 0:32:23.000
<v Speaker 1>the universe. Even if you're going to start off with mathematics,

0:32:23.040 --> 0:32:25.280
<v Speaker 1>you still have to use some kind of symbol, some

0:32:25.360 --> 0:32:27.960
<v Speaker 1>kind of way to represent the number one or the

0:32:28.040 --> 0:32:31.760
<v Speaker 1>number seven. Here's what eleven looks like. And so there's

0:32:31.800 --> 0:32:34.680
<v Speaker 1>always going to be some sort of cultural influence because

0:32:34.760 --> 0:32:38.200
<v Speaker 1>the way we communicate is through symbols, like right now,

0:32:38.200 --> 0:32:41.200
<v Speaker 1>I'm translating my ideas into words, and because we agree

0:32:41.200 --> 0:32:43.640
<v Speaker 1>on the meaning of those words, I imagine that my

0:32:43.760 --> 0:32:46.280
<v Speaker 1>words are creating in your mind the ideas that are

0:32:46.280 --> 0:32:49.080
<v Speaker 1>in my mind. Right, But that's because we've agreed in

0:32:49.120 --> 0:32:52.520
<v Speaker 1>common on the meaning of those words. And every single

0:32:52.600 --> 0:32:56.680
<v Speaker 1>kind of communication method that's not like directly brain to brain,

0:32:56.760 --> 0:32:59.840
<v Speaker 1>we don't have telepathy, relies on this translation right where

0:32:59.880 --> 0:33:02.560
<v Speaker 1>you go to symbols and then back to ideas, and

0:33:02.600 --> 0:33:06.120
<v Speaker 1>those symbols fundamentally are arbitrary. The way we represent one

0:33:06.240 --> 0:33:09.240
<v Speaker 1>or the way we represent like mathematical operations, all of

0:33:09.280 --> 0:33:12.520
<v Speaker 1>those things are cultural symbols. And so we talked on

0:33:12.600 --> 0:33:14.600
<v Speaker 1>the top of the episode about the messages we've sent

0:33:14.680 --> 0:33:18.400
<v Speaker 1>into space, Like Carl Sagan and Francis Drake designed this

0:33:18.520 --> 0:33:22.000
<v Speaker 1>pioneer plaque that they sent into space hoping maybe someday

0:33:22.080 --> 0:33:24.800
<v Speaker 1>aliens would get it right. They got to actually answer

0:33:24.880 --> 0:33:26.840
<v Speaker 1>the question that you posed to me, and they did

0:33:26.880 --> 0:33:29.520
<v Speaker 1>their best. But if you look at what they did, like, man,

0:33:29.560 --> 0:33:32.960
<v Speaker 1>there's so much humanity in that message. They tried to

0:33:33.040 --> 0:33:36.719
<v Speaker 1>encode the structure of atoms and spin flip transitions, and

0:33:36.760 --> 0:33:40.080
<v Speaker 1>they were really ambitious and frankly, I think it's impossible

0:33:40.080 --> 0:33:42.719
<v Speaker 1>for aliens to get that message and actually understand what

0:33:42.760 --> 0:33:45.360
<v Speaker 1>it means without already knowing a lot about us.

0:33:46.280 --> 0:33:49.240
<v Speaker 2>The biologist in May, didn't it also include pictures of

0:33:49.320 --> 0:33:51.080
<v Speaker 2>human bodies naked to be like, this is what we

0:33:51.120 --> 0:33:51.480
<v Speaker 2>look like?

0:33:51.840 --> 0:33:52.640
<v Speaker 1>Yeah? It did.

0:33:53.240 --> 0:33:56.040
<v Speaker 2>I think that's kind of cool, but also could just

0:33:56.080 --> 0:33:57.960
<v Speaker 2>be confusing. Is that what they eat?

0:34:00.600 --> 0:34:03.080
<v Speaker 1>Here's how we look like when you eat us for dinner? Yeah,

0:34:03.120 --> 0:34:05.480
<v Speaker 1>it could be a recipe. I actually talk to a

0:34:05.480 --> 0:34:09.080
<v Speaker 1>philosopher about this, because you know, philosophers think deeply about

0:34:09.080 --> 0:34:11.279
<v Speaker 1>like stripping away all of our assumptions and what does

0:34:11.320 --> 0:34:13.439
<v Speaker 1>this really mean? And how do we know what we're

0:34:13.440 --> 0:34:16.440
<v Speaker 1>doing here? I talk to Kareem Jabbari, a philosopher in

0:34:16.520 --> 0:34:19.160
<v Speaker 1>Sweden who thinks a lot about this and game theory

0:34:19.160 --> 0:34:21.359
<v Speaker 1>and should we communicate with aliens or are we likely

0:34:21.400 --> 0:34:24.200
<v Speaker 1>to get misinterpreted? And here's his comment. He says, quote

0:34:24.400 --> 0:34:29.759
<v Speaker 1>translation between speakers with no common language requires repeated interaction

0:34:29.920 --> 0:34:33.200
<v Speaker 1>and a familiar context. This implies that translating a message

0:34:33.200 --> 0:34:35.720
<v Speaker 1>conveyed to us by an encoded signal is not only

0:34:35.800 --> 0:34:40.080
<v Speaker 1>very difficult, but practically impossible. What he means. Thereby, repeated

0:34:40.120 --> 0:34:43.200
<v Speaker 1>interaction in a familiar context is basically like, Hey, if

0:34:43.239 --> 0:34:45.360
<v Speaker 1>I point to a rock, I can say rock and

0:34:45.400 --> 0:34:47.000
<v Speaker 1>you can look at it. And if I do that

0:34:47.040 --> 0:34:50.240
<v Speaker 1>a few times, you're like, Okay, this symbol. He's telling

0:34:50.239 --> 0:34:53.160
<v Speaker 1>me this word rock means this thing, and we can

0:34:53.200 --> 0:34:55.680
<v Speaker 1>build up from that a common dictionary. If you just

0:34:55.760 --> 0:34:58.479
<v Speaker 1>get a message, you have basically no hope of every

0:34:58.480 --> 0:35:01.400
<v Speaker 1>decoding it because you don't the symbols, and you also

0:35:01.640 --> 0:35:04.360
<v Speaker 1>can't recognize it if you have decoded it correctly.

0:35:04.960 --> 0:35:09.160
<v Speaker 2>I don't communicate back to do a lingo. But it's

0:35:09.200 --> 0:35:13.640
<v Speaker 2>teaching me Russian. It's working with me in my language.

0:35:13.719 --> 0:35:14.640
<v Speaker 2>That's why it's different.

0:35:14.960 --> 0:35:17.720
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's translating it for you. And also it's telling

0:35:17.719 --> 0:35:20.160
<v Speaker 1>you when you're right and telling you when you're wrong.

0:35:20.680 --> 0:35:24.160
<v Speaker 2>Okay, So like if someone just sent me a book

0:35:24.160 --> 0:35:26.560
<v Speaker 2>in Russian, I would be screwed. But so like we

0:35:26.640 --> 0:35:29.560
<v Speaker 2>translated the Rosetta Stone and that wasn't a back and forth.

0:35:29.640 --> 0:35:32.440
<v Speaker 2>Oh but we knew one of the three languages, and

0:35:32.480 --> 0:35:33.680
<v Speaker 2>we couldn't do it before then.

0:35:33.880 --> 0:35:36.640
<v Speaker 1>The Rosetta Stone had one of the languages we already knew,

0:35:36.719 --> 0:35:39.760
<v Speaker 1>and one of the languages we didn't, so that was helpful. Plus,

0:35:39.920 --> 0:35:41.799
<v Speaker 1>did you know that after we discovered the Rosetta stone,

0:35:41.800 --> 0:35:45.360
<v Speaker 1>it took us twenty years to decode that message on

0:35:45.440 --> 0:35:47.960
<v Speaker 1>the Rosetta stone, And that's for like a message, We

0:35:48.000 --> 0:35:50.880
<v Speaker 1>already knew what it said, right, And the reason is

0:35:50.920 --> 0:35:52.960
<v Speaker 1>that we had all sorts of backwards ideas about what

0:35:53.040 --> 0:35:57.520
<v Speaker 1>hieroglyphics were. People thought hieroglyphics were like pictorial. They're like, oh, look,

0:35:57.600 --> 0:36:00.040
<v Speaker 1>the bird symbol must be something about birds, right. It

0:36:00.080 --> 0:36:03.880
<v Speaker 1>turns out that was totally wrong. All hieroglyphics are actually phonetic,

0:36:04.040 --> 0:36:06.840
<v Speaker 1>like the bird signal means a sound that a speaker

0:36:06.880 --> 0:36:10.320
<v Speaker 1>would make. And so because they had this wrong cultural

0:36:10.360 --> 0:36:13.279
<v Speaker 1>assumption about hieroglyphics, it took them twenty years to figure

0:36:13.280 --> 0:36:15.200
<v Speaker 1>it out. And it wasn't until people use their cultural

0:36:15.239 --> 0:36:18.200
<v Speaker 1>context from the other languages to figure this out. And

0:36:18.239 --> 0:36:21.120
<v Speaker 1>there are lots of examples of languages here on Earth

0:36:21.320 --> 0:36:24.799
<v Speaker 1>that other humans have written down that nobody's ever translated,

0:36:25.000 --> 0:36:28.239
<v Speaker 1>like Etruscan. Nobody has ever figured out how to translate it.

0:36:28.280 --> 0:36:29.799
<v Speaker 1>Trust can we be a bunch of examples of it

0:36:29.840 --> 0:36:32.879
<v Speaker 1>and nobody's ever been able to translate it? So yeah,

0:36:32.920 --> 0:36:35.640
<v Speaker 1>I think it's pretty much hopeless to translate a message

0:36:35.640 --> 0:36:37.799
<v Speaker 1>from aliens unless the aliens show up and they like

0:36:37.840 --> 0:36:40.040
<v Speaker 1>point at apples and donuts, and you know, we can

0:36:40.080 --> 0:36:42.279
<v Speaker 1>have basically a duo lingo conversation with them.

0:36:42.360 --> 0:36:45.040
<v Speaker 2>So I feel like I'm usually the pessimistic one. It's

0:36:45.120 --> 0:36:47.280
<v Speaker 2>nice that the tables have turned. And on that note,

0:36:47.360 --> 0:37:06.360
<v Speaker 2>let's take a little break, all right. So we've established

0:37:06.360 --> 0:37:10.000
<v Speaker 2>that it's really hard to send messages and receive messages

0:37:10.040 --> 0:37:12.480
<v Speaker 2>that anybody would have any hope of understanding, but that

0:37:12.600 --> 0:37:17.040
<v Speaker 2>hasn't stopped humans from trying. Nothing stops us from trying.

0:37:17.080 --> 0:37:19.560
<v Speaker 2>So we talked about the voyager plaques and what's on them.

0:37:19.640 --> 0:37:22.520
<v Speaker 2>What have been some other methods or proposed methods for

0:37:22.560 --> 0:37:23.760
<v Speaker 2>communicating with aliens.

0:37:23.880 --> 0:37:25.560
<v Speaker 1>So there's been a bunch of really good ideas and

0:37:25.600 --> 0:37:29.440
<v Speaker 1>also a bunch of really hilarious absurd attempts. One of

0:37:29.440 --> 0:37:34.960
<v Speaker 1>my favorites is Austrian astronomer Joseph von Littrow. He proposed

0:37:35.000 --> 0:37:38.320
<v Speaker 1>that we take huge trenches and write out math equations

0:37:38.320 --> 0:37:40.760
<v Speaker 1>in them by filling them with water and then topping

0:37:40.760 --> 0:37:43.719
<v Speaker 1>them with curosene and setting them on fire. He thought

0:37:43.719 --> 0:37:47.880
<v Speaker 1>maybe Martians could see them from Mars and recognize that

0:37:47.960 --> 0:37:51.400
<v Speaker 1>we're here and we're smart. Just look at our flaming math.

0:37:51.840 --> 0:37:54.520
<v Speaker 2>So, I mean, that's epic. I guess this was back

0:37:54.560 --> 0:37:58.400
<v Speaker 2>when we thought that there were canals ferrying water around

0:37:58.400 --> 0:38:00.920
<v Speaker 2>on the Martian surface. Yeah, exactly, all right.

0:38:00.920 --> 0:38:03.040
<v Speaker 1>Back before we really knew anything about Mars, you know,

0:38:03.040 --> 0:38:04.560
<v Speaker 1>and it could have been there could have been intelligent

0:38:04.600 --> 0:38:07.080
<v Speaker 1>life on Mars before we had the technology to look

0:38:07.120 --> 0:38:07.720
<v Speaker 1>more carefully.

0:38:07.760 --> 0:38:09.640
<v Speaker 2>Sure, all right, well, so that's how I would like

0:38:09.680 --> 0:38:12.840
<v Speaker 2>to communicate with Zach from now on. I'm going to

0:38:12.920 --> 0:38:14.600
<v Speaker 2>put aside a little part of our yard so that

0:38:14.640 --> 0:38:16.360
<v Speaker 2>we can communicate with flaming mass.

0:38:16.520 --> 0:38:19.520
<v Speaker 1>What else, So we actually sent a message in response

0:38:19.560 --> 0:38:22.160
<v Speaker 1>to the wow signal. The WOW signal we know comes

0:38:22.160 --> 0:38:26.320
<v Speaker 1>from the Sagittarius constellation. So the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico,

0:38:26.640 --> 0:38:30.640
<v Speaker 1>now sadly destroyed, sent a message in response. A bunch

0:38:30.680 --> 0:38:33.280
<v Speaker 1>of humans sat down and decided, here's how we would

0:38:33.360 --> 0:38:36.480
<v Speaker 1>encode a message, and includes things like you know, what

0:38:36.520 --> 0:38:39.360
<v Speaker 1>our DNA looks like and what a human looks like,

0:38:39.680 --> 0:38:42.279
<v Speaker 1>all encoded into this two D sort of pictogram, and

0:38:42.320 --> 0:38:45.440
<v Speaker 1>we beamed it into space. Hoping that maybe somebody, if

0:38:45.440 --> 0:38:47.840
<v Speaker 1>they had sent us the Wow signal, was going to

0:38:47.880 --> 0:38:49.439
<v Speaker 1>get this as a reply, and.

0:38:49.360 --> 0:38:52.880
<v Speaker 2>I assume our mail was left unresponded to.

0:38:53.760 --> 0:38:55.920
<v Speaker 1>We haven't heard any response to the ARCIPA message. But

0:38:55.960 --> 0:38:58.680
<v Speaker 1>you know, maybe there's a fleet of ships coming to

0:38:58.719 --> 0:39:02.600
<v Speaker 1>destroy us or welcome into the galactic community. Guy who knows.

0:39:03.080 --> 0:39:05.279
<v Speaker 1>And you know, there's a lot of responsibility there, like

0:39:05.360 --> 0:39:09.560
<v Speaker 1>if you're going to broadcast from Earth on behalf of humanity,

0:39:09.760 --> 0:39:12.839
<v Speaker 1>Like it's interesting. There should be some thought that goes

0:39:12.880 --> 0:39:14.480
<v Speaker 1>into this, And I want to ask you about this.

0:39:14.560 --> 0:39:17.080
<v Speaker 1>You thought a lot about like international law and what

0:39:17.120 --> 0:39:19.439
<v Speaker 1>you can do in space. Are there any laws about

0:39:19.480 --> 0:39:21.840
<v Speaker 1>you know, stepping up to the mic and speaking for humanity?

0:39:22.040 --> 0:39:24.719
<v Speaker 2>No? No, I did look into this, and it's a

0:39:24.760 --> 0:39:28.080
<v Speaker 2>topic that has come up at the United Nations, but

0:39:28.640 --> 0:39:33.120
<v Speaker 2>no decision has actually been made, so there is no guideline.

0:39:33.440 --> 0:39:35.520
<v Speaker 2>So I think as Americans, we want to believe that

0:39:35.600 --> 0:39:38.480
<v Speaker 2>the message would come to us first. And if so,

0:39:38.800 --> 0:39:41.320
<v Speaker 2>there's no rule that says we have to like consult

0:39:41.360 --> 0:39:44.279
<v Speaker 2>the international community to say like, hey, we're gonna tell

0:39:44.320 --> 0:39:46.560
<v Speaker 2>them where we are. Is that okay? Everyone? We could

0:39:46.640 --> 0:39:50.440
<v Speaker 2>just do that. There's a group called SETI, the Search

0:39:50.480 --> 0:39:54.160
<v Speaker 2>for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and they do have a protocol that

0:39:54.280 --> 0:39:58.719
<v Speaker 2>was informed by the International Astronautical Association.

0:39:59.040 --> 0:40:00.880
<v Speaker 1>Is that right, sounds like a thing that could exist.

0:40:00.920 --> 0:40:03.840
<v Speaker 2>Sure, Yeah, some like smart spacey people. They came up

0:40:03.880 --> 0:40:05.680
<v Speaker 2>with a procedure for like what we should do, and

0:40:05.719 --> 0:40:08.640
<v Speaker 2>it does involve like if you get a message, be

0:40:08.719 --> 0:40:13.280
<v Speaker 2>careful deciphering it, share what you know, consult the United Nations,

0:40:13.320 --> 0:40:15.160
<v Speaker 2>and try to get some input from everybody. And so

0:40:15.239 --> 0:40:17.560
<v Speaker 2>like they've got some good procedures and they're probably one

0:40:17.560 --> 0:40:20.120
<v Speaker 2>of the groups that's more likely to receive these messages.

0:40:20.560 --> 0:40:23.279
<v Speaker 2>But no, there's no like specific international protocol for what

0:40:23.320 --> 0:40:27.040
<v Speaker 2>we're supposed to do, so you could just get rogue messages.

0:40:27.080 --> 0:40:29.120
<v Speaker 2>But I mean they've already like watched all of our

0:40:29.200 --> 0:40:33.040
<v Speaker 2>TV shows and listened to the BBC, so like, you know,

0:40:33.080 --> 0:40:35.319
<v Speaker 2>they probably know what we're about. The gig is up.

0:40:35.440 --> 0:40:38.040
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there's nothing left to hide. Well. I actually had

0:40:38.040 --> 0:40:41.080
<v Speaker 1>a chance to talk to Jill Tartar. She was a

0:40:41.120 --> 0:40:43.400
<v Speaker 1>director of SETI for a long time, and I asked

0:40:43.400 --> 0:40:46.239
<v Speaker 1>her this question once. Here's what Jill had to say.

0:40:46.520 --> 0:40:49.160
<v Speaker 3>Oh, we've thought about it and we've held workshops and

0:40:49.400 --> 0:40:53.680
<v Speaker 3>basically should we respond and if so, who will speak first?

0:40:53.719 --> 0:40:57.920
<v Speaker 3>And what will they say? And I think the disappointing

0:40:57.960 --> 0:41:00.520
<v Speaker 3>thing for me at the moment is we've held a

0:41:00.600 --> 0:41:04.440
<v Speaker 3>number of workshops. They haven't really involved very much of

0:41:04.480 --> 0:41:09.400
<v Speaker 3>the world's diverse cultures. It's been sort of pretty waspy

0:41:10.480 --> 0:41:15.400
<v Speaker 3>and pretty male. So we continue to think about this,

0:41:15.560 --> 0:41:20.600
<v Speaker 3>and I continue to try and find a way to

0:41:20.680 --> 0:41:26.120
<v Speaker 3>take this question globally and find appropriate venues to ask

0:41:26.280 --> 0:41:30.960
<v Speaker 3>other cultures and other ways of being and thinking what

0:41:31.120 --> 0:41:33.680
<v Speaker 3>they would do, how they feel. So it's a work

0:41:33.719 --> 0:41:34.520
<v Speaker 3>in progress.

0:41:34.760 --> 0:41:34.960
<v Speaker 2>You know.

0:41:35.560 --> 0:41:38.960
<v Speaker 3>Freeman Dyson and here's alive and would listen to me

0:41:39.120 --> 0:41:44.600
<v Speaker 3>talk and this is very very highbrow approach to doing things.

0:41:45.520 --> 0:41:48.719
<v Speaker 3>He would just chuckle and he'd say, come on, Jill,

0:41:49.640 --> 0:41:54.440
<v Speaker 3>if you ever make such an announcement, anybody anywhere on

0:41:54.480 --> 0:41:59.520
<v Speaker 3>the planet that has access to a transmit will grab

0:41:59.560 --> 0:42:03.840
<v Speaker 3>that trend and just start saying whatever the hell they please.

0:42:05.120 --> 0:42:07.080
<v Speaker 3>And then he, you know, with a twinkle in his eye,

0:42:07.080 --> 0:42:12.239
<v Speaker 3>and so he said, yeah, wouldn't that cacophony be about

0:42:12.320 --> 0:42:15.799
<v Speaker 3>the best representation of the Earth today that we could make.

0:42:16.200 --> 0:42:20.040
<v Speaker 2>I am feeling totally depressed because I think you're probably right.

0:42:20.120 --> 0:42:23.360
<v Speaker 2>They're going to be getting like the dankest memes and

0:42:23.520 --> 0:42:26.720
<v Speaker 2>all of the weirdest stuff that humans have to offer

0:42:27.080 --> 0:42:29.680
<v Speaker 2>as soon as we get that message. So probably no

0:42:29.800 --> 0:42:32.319
<v Speaker 2>hope of a concerted message set by all of us.

0:42:32.400 --> 0:42:34.400
<v Speaker 2>They're just going to get like all of our spam

0:42:34.440 --> 0:42:35.200
<v Speaker 2>all at once.

0:42:35.120 --> 0:42:36.680
<v Speaker 1>All right, So we have no hope of really ever

0:42:36.760 --> 0:42:40.640
<v Speaker 1>decoding this thing unless the aliens have somehow figured out

0:42:40.719 --> 0:42:43.359
<v Speaker 1>English and write to us in our own language, which

0:42:43.360 --> 0:42:45.560
<v Speaker 1>you know is not impossible and is the basis for

0:42:45.600 --> 0:42:48.000
<v Speaker 1>a lot of good science fiction. But in the meantime,

0:42:48.040 --> 0:42:50.280
<v Speaker 1>we haven't just been sitting idly by. We've been looking

0:42:50.320 --> 0:42:53.280
<v Speaker 1>for other explanations for what the Wow signal could be,

0:42:53.280 --> 0:42:56.440
<v Speaker 1>because again, it was very unusual, it's very weird. Doesn't

0:42:56.440 --> 0:42:59.040
<v Speaker 1>mean as aliens, but it does mean it's an opportunity

0:42:59.040 --> 0:43:02.200
<v Speaker 1>to potentially learning about what's out there in the universe,

0:43:02.440 --> 0:43:06.000
<v Speaker 1>And so we ruled out things like pulsars and stellar flares.

0:43:06.080 --> 0:43:08.200
<v Speaker 1>These things tend to be more periodic, they tend to

0:43:08.200 --> 0:43:11.400
<v Speaker 1>repeat themselves. The people also look really really carefully for

0:43:11.480 --> 0:43:14.960
<v Speaker 1>like more boring explanations. Is this just an Earth signal

0:43:15.080 --> 0:43:17.600
<v Speaker 1>bouncing off of a satellite, and you know, Earth's stuff

0:43:17.600 --> 0:43:20.960
<v Speaker 1>doesn't tend to broadcast in this regime is protected for astronomy.

0:43:21.120 --> 0:43:23.080
<v Speaker 1>So for example, if you're a radio station, you should

0:43:23.120 --> 0:43:25.480
<v Speaker 1>not be broadcasting in the twenty one centimeter line. If

0:43:25.480 --> 0:43:27.560
<v Speaker 1>you're building like a drone, you should not be using

0:43:27.560 --> 0:43:30.280
<v Speaker 1>this frequency to communicate between the controller and the drone.

0:43:30.280 --> 0:43:33.560
<v Speaker 1>It's like protected, it's supposed to stay quiet. That doesn't

0:43:33.600 --> 0:43:36.120
<v Speaker 1>mean that there isn't some like rogue station out there broadcasting.

0:43:36.160 --> 0:43:39.000
<v Speaker 1>And maybe this like bounces a satellite or something, but again,

0:43:39.000 --> 0:43:40.800
<v Speaker 1>it doesn't really look like it. They were able to

0:43:40.840 --> 0:43:42.560
<v Speaker 1>triangulate it to a place in the sky who was

0:43:42.600 --> 0:43:46.080
<v Speaker 1>fairly constant as the Earth moves, which suggested it doesn't

0:43:46.080 --> 0:43:48.160
<v Speaker 1>come from an earth like place. For it to come

0:43:48.200 --> 0:43:51.120
<v Speaker 1>off like a satellite in the sky, the satellite would

0:43:51.120 --> 0:43:54.600
<v Speaker 1>have to like be very slowly moving and not be tumbling.

0:43:54.880 --> 0:43:57.000
<v Speaker 1>It'd be very weird. And for a long time there

0:43:57.040 --> 0:44:00.319
<v Speaker 1>was just really no good explanation for this guy who

0:44:00.360 --> 0:44:03.719
<v Speaker 1>discovered it, Jerry Emon. He said, quote, I'm convinced that

0:44:03.760 --> 0:44:07.239
<v Speaker 1>the WOW signal certainly has the potential of being the

0:44:07.280 --> 0:44:10.840
<v Speaker 1>first signal from extraterrestrial intelligence. I'm like, all right, the

0:44:10.880 --> 0:44:13.520
<v Speaker 1>guy's invested in it. He's the one who wrote wow

0:44:13.600 --> 0:44:15.640
<v Speaker 1>on it. But you know he's also a serious astronomer.

0:44:15.680 --> 0:44:17.680
<v Speaker 1>He's not just somebody who's going to make these claims.

0:44:18.040 --> 0:44:20.440
<v Speaker 1>But as time goes on, we understand more and more

0:44:20.480 --> 0:44:23.440
<v Speaker 1>about the universe and we're better at thinking about like

0:44:23.719 --> 0:44:26.200
<v Speaker 1>rare things that could happen out there in the universe.

0:44:26.440 --> 0:44:29.600
<v Speaker 1>And so pretty recently there was a paper that explained

0:44:29.680 --> 0:44:31.840
<v Speaker 1>what might have caused the WOW signal.

0:44:32.320 --> 0:44:36.279
<v Speaker 2>Well, don't keep me waiting. What do they think it is?

0:44:36.640 --> 0:44:39.439
<v Speaker 1>Basically, they think it was a giant space laser, a

0:44:39.520 --> 0:44:42.960
<v Speaker 1>random organization of events in the sky that happened to

0:44:43.040 --> 0:44:46.960
<v Speaker 1>create this huge emission. This pulse of light pointed at Earth.

0:44:47.280 --> 0:44:50.239
<v Speaker 2>So it wasn't like aliens pointing a laser at us

0:44:50.280 --> 0:44:52.480
<v Speaker 2>hoping that we'd bet at it like a cat or something.

0:44:52.520 --> 0:44:55.680
<v Speaker 2>This was like the universe accidentally makes lasers.

0:44:56.320 --> 0:44:59.680
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, exactly right now. Lasers are something we know very

0:44:59.760 --> 0:45:01.880
<v Speaker 1>very we well here on Earth. Essentially, you have a

0:45:01.960 --> 0:45:04.600
<v Speaker 1>population of gas, and the gas can go up and

0:45:04.640 --> 0:45:07.319
<v Speaker 1>down on energy level, and if you pump energy into them,

0:45:07.480 --> 0:45:09.800
<v Speaker 1>they go up the energy level, and then they relax,

0:45:09.840 --> 0:45:12.400
<v Speaker 1>they go down an energy level they release a photon

0:45:12.680 --> 0:45:15.839
<v Speaker 1>of a particular wavelength that corresponds to that energy level,

0:45:15.880 --> 0:45:17.160
<v Speaker 1>and if you get a bunch of them in the

0:45:17.239 --> 0:45:19.600
<v Speaker 1>right conditions and the right cavity, they can resonate. And

0:45:19.640 --> 0:45:21.640
<v Speaker 1>that's what a laser is. It's like a little cavity

0:45:21.719 --> 0:45:24.560
<v Speaker 1>filled with these special atoms that have energy pumped in

0:45:24.800 --> 0:45:27.480
<v Speaker 1>just the right frequency, so they emit a very coherent

0:45:27.560 --> 0:45:30.279
<v Speaker 1>beam of powerful light. And this we can make here

0:45:30.320 --> 0:45:32.880
<v Speaker 1>on Earth, of course, but you could also randomly assemble

0:45:32.920 --> 0:45:35.720
<v Speaker 1>the ingredients in space. If you have something which dumps

0:45:35.719 --> 0:45:38.160
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of light into a pocket of gas that

0:45:38.200 --> 0:45:40.480
<v Speaker 1>has the right conditions, it can absorb that and then

0:45:40.520 --> 0:45:42.600
<v Speaker 1>they can emit it and they can generate a very bright,

0:45:42.640 --> 0:45:44.680
<v Speaker 1>pulseive light. And in this case, it's not actually a

0:45:44.680 --> 0:45:48.480
<v Speaker 1>space laser, but a space maser with an M like

0:45:48.520 --> 0:45:52.200
<v Speaker 1>for mom, oh good, exactly. And a maser is not

0:45:52.239 --> 0:45:55.120
<v Speaker 1>a laser that emits moms. It's a laser that emits

0:45:55.320 --> 0:45:59.120
<v Speaker 1>microwave photons. So you know that your microwave in your

0:45:59.239 --> 0:46:02.600
<v Speaker 1>kitchen is something that just beams light into your food

0:46:02.640 --> 0:46:05.600
<v Speaker 1>at a particular wavelength. The wavelength of that light is

0:46:05.600 --> 0:46:09.400
<v Speaker 1>what makes it called microwaves. It's fairly short wavelength compared

0:46:09.440 --> 0:46:10.520
<v Speaker 1>to like radio waves.

0:46:10.680 --> 0:46:14.080
<v Speaker 2>But so then why was the radio telescope picking up

0:46:14.440 --> 0:46:15.960
<v Speaker 2>micro waves.

0:46:15.960 --> 0:46:19.120
<v Speaker 1>Because microwaves are in the radio. There's so many terrible

0:46:19.200 --> 0:46:21.800
<v Speaker 1>names here, like we didn't understand for a long time

0:46:21.920 --> 0:46:24.839
<v Speaker 1>the connection between radio waves and visible light and all

0:46:24.840 --> 0:46:27.000
<v Speaker 1>this kind of other stuff. So different parts of the

0:46:27.040 --> 0:46:30.000
<v Speaker 1>electromagnetic spectrum, which all should just be called light or

0:46:30.040 --> 0:46:32.520
<v Speaker 1>should be called one thing, they all have different names,

0:46:32.560 --> 0:46:36.200
<v Speaker 1>and they're all overlapping and historically inconsistent. Anyway, this thing

0:46:36.400 --> 0:46:40.240
<v Speaker 1>in space emits light in the microwaves, So it's a maser,

0:46:40.360 --> 0:46:45.120
<v Speaker 1>not a laser. And interestingly, maser's actually predated lasers. Humans

0:46:45.120 --> 0:46:49.240
<v Speaker 1>invented masers before they invented lasers. Laser is much more famous,

0:46:49.320 --> 0:46:51.680
<v Speaker 1>so the masers don't get the licensing fees or whatever.

0:46:51.920 --> 0:46:53.960
<v Speaker 1>But if you have just the right stuff lined up

0:46:53.960 --> 0:46:56.440
<v Speaker 1>in the sky, you have like a source like a

0:46:56.480 --> 0:46:59.640
<v Speaker 1>magnetar or something, which emits a bunch of light and

0:46:59.640 --> 0:47:03.440
<v Speaker 1>then it hits a cloud of hydrogen gas. That hydrogen

0:47:03.480 --> 0:47:06.960
<v Speaker 1>gas acts like a mazer and creates a pulse of microwaves.

0:47:07.280 --> 0:47:08.920
<v Speaker 1>And if it all lines up where you have like

0:47:09.000 --> 0:47:11.560
<v Speaker 1>the source and then the gas and then the Earth.

0:47:11.960 --> 0:47:15.560
<v Speaker 1>Then the Earth can get washed over in this sudden, rare,

0:47:15.840 --> 0:47:19.440
<v Speaker 1>difficult to reproduce wash of radio waves at just the

0:47:19.520 --> 0:47:20.240
<v Speaker 1>right frequency.

0:47:20.560 --> 0:47:25.200
<v Speaker 2>So if we haven't seen this again, how do we

0:47:25.400 --> 0:47:29.280
<v Speaker 2>know that that's what happened? Because I feel like, ideally

0:47:29.360 --> 0:47:30.960
<v Speaker 2>what you'd want is to see it again at the

0:47:30.960 --> 0:47:32.839
<v Speaker 2>same time as this maser thing has happened, you can

0:47:32.880 --> 0:47:34.120
<v Speaker 2>be like, Bam, that's it.

0:47:34.360 --> 0:47:37.560
<v Speaker 1>Absolutely, Because science shouldn't just be descriptive. So I'm like, hey,

0:47:37.600 --> 0:47:40.560
<v Speaker 1>I can come up with a plausible explanation. You should

0:47:40.560 --> 0:47:42.200
<v Speaker 1>be able to prove that this is what it is.

0:47:42.360 --> 0:47:43.879
<v Speaker 1>And so what they did is they went back through

0:47:43.920 --> 0:47:47.279
<v Speaker 1>the Aricibo data, the radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and

0:47:47.360 --> 0:47:49.880
<v Speaker 1>they said, look, maybe this happens all the time, and

0:47:49.920 --> 0:47:52.239
<v Speaker 1>this one WOW signal was just like the brightest one

0:47:52.239 --> 0:47:54.680
<v Speaker 1>we've ever seen. So they went back and looked more carefully,

0:47:54.680 --> 0:47:57.320
<v Speaker 1>and they found a bunch of examples of similar signals,

0:47:57.440 --> 0:47:59.800
<v Speaker 1>not nearly as powerful as the Wow signal, but the

0:48:00.239 --> 0:48:04.160
<v Speaker 1>same shape, the same features in the Aerocibo data. And

0:48:04.200 --> 0:48:06.520
<v Speaker 1>this is exactly what you would expect, like if this

0:48:06.600 --> 0:48:09.520
<v Speaker 1>happens sometimes in the universe, you would expect occasionally to

0:48:09.560 --> 0:48:11.600
<v Speaker 1>be right in the center of the action when it's

0:48:11.640 --> 0:48:14.879
<v Speaker 1>super bright, and you would expect more often to see

0:48:14.880 --> 0:48:17.840
<v Speaker 1>weaker examples of it. So the brightest ones should be

0:48:17.920 --> 0:48:20.440
<v Speaker 1>rarest and less bright ones should be more common. And

0:48:20.480 --> 0:48:22.920
<v Speaker 1>they see a bunch of less bright versions of the

0:48:22.960 --> 0:48:27.120
<v Speaker 1>WOW signal in the Aerocibo data, And that's pretty compelling, right.

0:48:27.200 --> 0:48:29.879
<v Speaker 1>It suggests that there is a mechanism for generating these

0:48:30.000 --> 0:48:32.759
<v Speaker 1>kinds of signals out there in the universe, and that

0:48:32.800 --> 0:48:35.680
<v Speaker 1>we've seen them before. So if that's true, that means

0:48:35.719 --> 0:48:39.319
<v Speaker 1>the WOW signal probably was this kind of thing, and

0:48:39.480 --> 0:48:42.319
<v Speaker 1>it was rare. It wasn't usual, it was lucky right.

0:48:42.400 --> 0:48:45.320
<v Speaker 1>Everything had to line up just right, especially powerful magnetar

0:48:45.360 --> 0:48:49.040
<v Speaker 1>flare especially well lined up with Earth. Probably we're not

0:48:49.080 --> 0:48:51.440
<v Speaker 1>going to see another one of these for a long time.

0:48:51.719 --> 0:48:54.440
<v Speaker 1>That doesn't mean, necessarily, though, that it was aliens.

0:48:54.719 --> 0:49:01.160
<v Speaker 2>Science ruins everything, although vaccines are nice. My field does

0:49:01.200 --> 0:49:01.720
<v Speaker 2>good stuff.

0:49:03.120 --> 0:49:05.640
<v Speaker 1>Or maybe this is how aliens communicate, you know, maybe

0:49:05.640 --> 0:49:07.879
<v Speaker 1>there's like a galactic civilization out there and the way

0:49:07.920 --> 0:49:10.680
<v Speaker 1>they talk to each other is by inducing magnetars to

0:49:10.680 --> 0:49:14.759
<v Speaker 1>create masers in hydrogen gas and be messages and they'd

0:49:14.840 --> 0:49:17.440
<v Speaker 1>sent us a blast, and we haven't responded. We've like

0:49:17.520 --> 0:49:19.480
<v Speaker 1>left them on red for decades and.

0:49:19.440 --> 0:49:21.359
<v Speaker 2>Decades we've responded, Oh no.

0:49:21.320 --> 0:49:23.200
<v Speaker 1>You're right, we did respond, but we didn't respond in

0:49:23.200 --> 0:49:25.759
<v Speaker 1>the same way. Right, we sent our own radio message, right,

0:49:25.800 --> 0:49:28.200
<v Speaker 1>And maybe they're like, what's that. Yeah, And even if

0:49:28.200 --> 0:49:31.240
<v Speaker 1>this message wasn't aliens, that doesn't mean aliens aren't out there,

0:49:31.440 --> 0:49:33.120
<v Speaker 1>and it doesn't mean they aren't talking to us, and

0:49:33.160 --> 0:49:36.360
<v Speaker 1>it doesn't mean that they can't hear our messages. And

0:49:36.440 --> 0:49:38.720
<v Speaker 1>so there's actually a group out there. You talked about SETI,

0:49:38.840 --> 0:49:42.719
<v Speaker 1>the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. There's another group that's more aggressive.

0:49:42.719 --> 0:49:47.200
<v Speaker 1>They're called medi that wants to send messages to extraterrestrial intelligence.

0:49:47.239 --> 0:49:49.560
<v Speaker 1>They think like Earth should be out there. We should

0:49:49.600 --> 0:49:52.760
<v Speaker 1>be shouting that we exist, that we should be broadcasting

0:49:53.040 --> 0:49:55.799
<v Speaker 1>our location. We should be inviting everybody to come and

0:49:55.840 --> 0:49:58.839
<v Speaker 1>have dinner with us or of us, And so they've

0:49:58.880 --> 0:50:02.320
<v Speaker 1>been sending messages Like twenty seventeen, they sent a message

0:50:02.440 --> 0:50:05.760
<v Speaker 1>that was basically like a science and math Wikipedia page

0:50:05.840 --> 0:50:08.720
<v Speaker 1>to a red dwarf star located fair only nearby.

0:50:09.239 --> 0:50:11.960
<v Speaker 2>It feels to me like that is the kind of

0:50:12.000 --> 0:50:14.200
<v Speaker 2>thing that should maybe have to go through the un first,

0:50:14.440 --> 0:50:17.239
<v Speaker 2>like humanity should decide do we want to be like

0:50:17.480 --> 0:50:20.320
<v Speaker 2>blasting our address out into the cosmos and letting people

0:50:20.400 --> 0:50:24.160
<v Speaker 2>know that we're here. I guess technology gives people power

0:50:24.200 --> 0:50:25.160
<v Speaker 2>that is good in bad.

0:50:25.480 --> 0:50:28.759
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Essentially, the Internet's comments section is getting broadcasted to

0:50:28.800 --> 0:50:31.399
<v Speaker 1>the galaxy, and so let's hope that doesn't piss off

0:50:31.480 --> 0:50:32.319
<v Speaker 1>the aliens.

0:50:32.480 --> 0:50:34.719
<v Speaker 2>Well, if they're not going to attack us over the Macarina,

0:50:34.760 --> 0:50:35.880
<v Speaker 2>maybe we're going to be okay.

0:50:37.600 --> 0:50:40.560
<v Speaker 1>Or maybe it's the reason they come, right, Maybe something

0:50:40.680 --> 0:50:43.520
<v Speaker 1>somebody says in the Internet comment section is the reason

0:50:43.680 --> 0:50:46.719
<v Speaker 1>why aliens come and share with us all the secrets

0:50:46.760 --> 0:50:49.160
<v Speaker 1>of the universe. Let's end on an optimistic note.

0:50:49.480 --> 0:50:53.480
<v Speaker 2>Sure, yeah, on a low probability optimistic note, but let's

0:50:53.520 --> 0:50:53.799
<v Speaker 2>do it.

0:50:54.000 --> 0:50:56.160
<v Speaker 1>And even if this isn't aliens, and even if we

0:50:56.239 --> 0:50:59.120
<v Speaker 1>never meet aliens, the lesson here is that when you

0:50:59.280 --> 0:51:01.880
<v Speaker 1>listen to this, when you look out into the universe,

0:51:01.920 --> 0:51:05.480
<v Speaker 1>you always see something new, something weird, something fascinating. That

0:51:05.600 --> 0:51:08.319
<v Speaker 1>does teach us about how the universe works. Even if

0:51:08.360 --> 0:51:10.680
<v Speaker 1>the only thing we've learned from the Wow signal is like, hey,

0:51:10.760 --> 0:51:16.360
<v Speaker 1>sometimes universe organizes massive astronomical masers that beams powerful messages

0:51:16.400 --> 0:51:19.799
<v Speaker 1>through the universe. That's pretty cool, right, and understanding how

0:51:19.800 --> 0:51:22.200
<v Speaker 1>that all works, and understanding the crazy things that are

0:51:22.200 --> 0:51:25.040
<v Speaker 1>out there in the universe. It's worth doing. So we

0:51:25.040 --> 0:51:27.080
<v Speaker 1>should be listening to the sky with all of our

0:51:27.120 --> 0:51:28.520
<v Speaker 1>eyeballs and earballs.

0:51:29.800 --> 0:51:32.200
<v Speaker 2>Agreed, we need a lot more big ears out there.

0:51:32.600 --> 0:51:35.319
<v Speaker 1>Absolutely, And this is not my science, and this is

0:51:35.320 --> 0:51:37.600
<v Speaker 1>not Kelly's science, so we're not like self invested here.

0:51:37.760 --> 0:51:39.880
<v Speaker 1>But I definitely think we need more funding for this

0:51:40.080 --> 0:51:40.760
<v Speaker 1>kind of work.

0:51:41.080 --> 0:51:44.560
<v Speaker 2>I'm emotionally invested, but not professionally invested. Yes, I would

0:51:44.640 --> 0:51:46.640
<v Speaker 2>like more answers, Yes, exactly.

0:51:46.719 --> 0:51:48.440
<v Speaker 1>But you know, I believe in more funding for all

0:51:48.480 --> 0:51:51.759
<v Speaker 1>kinds of science. Like you're studying duck mating rituals, Like, yes,

0:51:52.040 --> 0:51:54.359
<v Speaker 1>that's funded. You never know what we're going to learn.

0:51:54.440 --> 0:51:57.160
<v Speaker 1>I don't understand why we don't fund more science in general.

0:51:57.400 --> 0:52:01.560
<v Speaker 1>It's such a great investment by humanity for humanity, about humanity.

0:52:01.760 --> 0:52:04.360
<v Speaker 1>It's human scientists that are getting paid to do this stuff.

0:52:04.360 --> 0:52:05.640
<v Speaker 1>It's just good all around.

0:52:05.800 --> 0:52:08.359
<v Speaker 2>I don't understanding there's a fascinating woman who studies duck

0:52:08.400 --> 0:52:10.320
<v Speaker 2>mating rituals who we should really have on the show

0:52:10.400 --> 0:52:11.680
<v Speaker 2>so coming soon.

0:52:14.880 --> 0:52:17.360
<v Speaker 1>So thanks very much everybody for listening to the messages

0:52:17.400 --> 0:52:21.040
<v Speaker 1>from our brains to yours. We're not aliens. You're probably

0:52:21.120 --> 0:52:24.440
<v Speaker 1>not an alien, but still we'd like to talk about aliens.

0:52:24.719 --> 0:52:35.840
<v Speaker 2>Thanks everyone. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio.

0:52:36.040 --> 0:52:38.600
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0:52:38.760 --> 0:52:41.480
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0:52:43.480 --> 0:52:46.439
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0:52:46.480 --> 0:52:49.479
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0:52:49.520 --> 0:52:49.920
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0:52:50.120 --> 0:52:53.640
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0:52:53.680 --> 0:52:56.520
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0:52:56.320 --> 0:52:58.160
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0:52:58.239 --> 0:53:02.120
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0:53:04.840 --> 0:53:05.880
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0:53:06.000 --> 0:53:07.520
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