Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And as I record this,
Speaker 1: it is early March twenty twenty, just days after I
Speaker 1: received some devastating news. Technically, the whole world received this news.
Speaker 1: I'm just taking it particularly hard. I heard that the
Speaker 1: distributed computing project SETI at Home is shutting down, at
Speaker 1: least for a while. It's going on hiatus by the
Speaker 1: end of March. Now, for two decades, this project has
Speaker 1: been relying on computer processing cycles provided by people like
Speaker 1: all of you guys out there, just using regular computer
Speaker 1: processors rather than some sort of massive super computer. Why
Speaker 1: was it making use of that, Well, it was combing
Speaker 1: through massive amounts of information gathered by radio telescopes in
Speaker 1: search for signals created not through some natural cosmological process,
Speaker 1: but rather as evidence of intelligent communication. SETTI, you see,
Speaker 1: stands for the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. Now, in
Speaker 1: this episode, I'm going to talk about the history of
Speaker 1: SETTI as a science, and then as well, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna kind of pivot around and talk about the
Speaker 1: distributed computer programs and the CETI at Home program in particular.
Speaker 1: We'll find out how distributed computing works. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: a couple of other distributed computing programs that you can
Speaker 1: still participate in if you're so inclined, and we'll also
Speaker 1: look into what's next for SETI at Home and learn
Speaker 1: why it's going on hiatus in the first place. Now,
Speaker 1: we human beings have hypothesized about the possibility of extra
Speaker 1: terrestrial or alien intelligence for a really long time. It's
Speaker 1: a frequent topic in pop culture. But perhaps I shouldn't
Speaker 1: even use the word hypothesize, because for a really long
Speaker 1: time in our history, there really wasn't any way to
Speaker 1: test that hypothesis other than for us to, you know,
Speaker 1: look up at the sky and say, Nope, that ain't it.
Speaker 1: But that would all change with the invention of the
Speaker 1: radio telescope. So it was in the nineteen twenties when
Speaker 1: an engineer named Carl Jansky, working for Bell Telephone Laboratories
Speaker 1: set the stage for radio astronomy. But that wasn't Jansky's
Speaker 1: goal at the time. He had been tasked with figuring
Speaker 1: out where the source was of some signal interference that
Speaker 1: was affecting telephone communications at that time. So in an
Speaker 1: effort to kind of figure this out, he built a
Speaker 1: directional antenna, and I guess that itself deserves its own
Speaker 1: quick explanation. So and enna's can transmitted pickup signals, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's what they do, and it actually helps
Speaker 1: to talk about transmitters first to understand how receiving antenna works.
Speaker 1: So a transmitter takes an electrical signal, typically one that's
Speaker 1: been boosted with amplification, and sends that signal to a
Speaker 1: transmitting antenna. Now we know that electricity and magnetism are related, right,
Speaker 1: We've talked about that a ton in previous episodes, and
Speaker 1: we've talked about electro magnetism and the electro magnetic spectrum
Speaker 1: a lot on this show, even recently. So if you
Speaker 1: run a current through a conductor, it generates electromagnetic waves,
Speaker 1: including if the conductor's big enough, radio waves. Now on
Speaker 1: the electromagnetic spectrum, radio waves have the longest wavelengths if
Speaker 1: you look across that spectrum. They are a non ionizing
Speaker 1: form of radiation, meaning they lack the power to strip
Speaker 1: electrons away from atoms, and they aren't harmful. The waste
Speaker 1: stuff like X rays or gamma rays are. So you
Speaker 1: can wander around and you know, I have radio waves
Speaker 1: hitting you. It's not gonna affect you in any way.
Speaker 1: You won't even notice. Okay, So sending a powerful electrical
Speaker 1: current through a big conductor generates radio waves along with
Speaker 1: other electromagnetic radiation. You can encode information on radio waves
Speaker 1: by altering that signal in some way. Otherwise you're just
Speaker 1: sending out a long, steady tone like a sign wave.
Speaker 1: The two main ways to do this are frequency modulation,
Speaker 1: in which you change the frequency of the radio waves
Speaker 1: that you're sending out within a certain band of frequencies,
Speaker 1: or amplitude modulation, in which you change the amplitude. Or
Speaker 1: you can think of it as almost like the strength
Speaker 1: of the radio waves that you're sending out. That would
Speaker 1: end up being FM and a M radio respectively. All right,
Speaker 1: So receivers take that same process, but they reverse it.
Speaker 1: So as long as the signals that the antenna pick
Speaker 1: up are fluctuating in some way, then it's going to
Speaker 1: create an electric current in that antenna. So a properly
Speaker 1: tuned receiver that encounters the respect of radio wave radiation.
Speaker 1: We'll see that whole process go and reverse. The radio
Speaker 1: waves will induce electricity to flow through the antenna to
Speaker 1: whatever device the antenna is hooked up to. It might
Speaker 1: be a meter, in which case you'll see the little
Speaker 1: indicator show that there's a current running through that circuit.
Speaker 1: Or it'll my radio so that you can listen to
Speaker 1: a radio station that way, could be any number of things.
Speaker 1: It usually will require amplification of that signal. Typically the
Speaker 1: signal is too weak to actually power anything significant, so
Speaker 1: you would run it through an amplifier and thus take
Speaker 1: that same signal and just boost its power before sending
Speaker 1: it on to do whatever it was supposed to do.
Speaker 1: Now I've dramatically simplified this whole process. There's other stuff
Speaker 1: we could talk about that really plays an important part,
Speaker 1: like the concept of resonance, but that is really the
Speaker 1: matter for a different episode entirely, and I have covered
Speaker 1: it in previous episodes too. So essentially that's how antenna's work.
Speaker 1: So jen Ski designed a directional antenna as opposed to
Speaker 1: an omnidirectional antenna. So an omnidirectional antenna, as the name implies,
Speaker 1: can pick up signals transmitted from any direction from around
Speaker 1: that antenna. Like, just imagine an antenna poking up straight
Speaker 1: in the air and it can accept radio waves from
Speaker 1: any direction. Uh Now, a directional antenna is designed in
Speaker 1: such a way where it is much more sensitive at
Speaker 1: picking up signals that are coming from specific points. You
Speaker 1: have to point the antenna toward the area where you
Speaker 1: expect there to be a radio wave, and the benefit
Speaker 1: is you can pick up much weaker radio waves typically
Speaker 1: with a directional antenna than with an omnidirect antenna. However,
Speaker 1: if you're a couple of degrees off, if your antenna
Speaker 1: is not pointed directly at the source, you may not
Speaker 1: pick up the signal at all. So if you have
Speaker 1: the directional antenna pointed north, for example, but the source
Speaker 1: of radio waves is to the west, then your antenna
Speaker 1: might not pick it up because it's pointed in a
Speaker 1: different direction. However, this is an incredibly useful tool if
Speaker 1: you're trying to look for a specific you know, source
Speaker 1: of of interference in your telephone communication system. I should
Speaker 1: also add that there's another important thing about directional antennas
Speaker 1: is that even they have a limit to how far
Speaker 1: they can pick up a signal here on Earth. And
Speaker 1: this has to do with the fact that our Earth
Speaker 1: is and brace yourselves round, it's not a flat earth people.
Speaker 1: The way radio waves propagate and it can be transmitted
Speaker 1: and received, that alone would ls that the Earth has
Speaker 1: to be curved. And here's the reason. When you broadcast
Speaker 1: radio waves, they travel outward in a straight line from
Speaker 1: the source of radiation. And if the Earth were flat,
Speaker 1: then no matter how far away you were, if you
Speaker 1: had a sensitive enough antenna, you'd be able to pick
Speaker 1: up radio waves from that source. However, because the Earth curves,
Speaker 1: then you look at two different points on the planet
Speaker 1: that are far enough apart. That curvature means that if
Speaker 1: you're having radio waves travel out at a straight line
Speaker 1: from point A, they won't reach point B because it's
Speaker 1: curved away from the path right, it'll be those radio
Speaker 1: waves will just go out into space instead. There is
Speaker 1: an exception to this, and that's certain radio waves are
Speaker 1: the right length where they can bounce off the Earth's
Speaker 1: ion a sphere. So you can use the ionosphere sort
Speaker 1: of like a mirror. You can point radio waves toward it.
Speaker 1: It will bounce off the ionosphere and then angle back
Speaker 1: down toward the surface of the Earth. That way, you
Speaker 1: could actually transmit much further than you could just from
Speaker 1: line of sight. You can think of his line of sight.
Speaker 1: You don't even actually have to be able to see
Speaker 1: the thing. It just has to be, like I said,
Speaker 1: a more or less straight path from point A to
Speaker 1: point B for you to pick it up. Okay, but
Speaker 1: that's beside the point. Jansky's antenna was a directional antenna
Speaker 1: meant to pick up that source of uh of of interference.
Speaker 1: So he's picking up weird signals as he's using this
Speaker 1: directional antenna that don't seem to have any terrestrial source
Speaker 1: to them, Like if he pointed the directional antenna up
Speaker 1: into the air. He was picking up signals, but he
Speaker 1: could not identify where those signals were coming from. And
Speaker 1: in nine after he had been scratching his head over
Speaker 1: where this source could have come from, he concluded that
Speaker 1: at least some of the signals had to be extra
Speaker 1: to rest real and origin. They had to be coming
Speaker 1: from outside the Earth, from space itself. He didn't know
Speaker 1: where they were coming from or what was producing them,
Speaker 1: but he was sure that it wasn't coming from Earth.
Speaker 1: It was seemingly coming from the center of the Milky
Speaker 1: Way galaxy that, by the way, is the galaxy that
Speaker 1: that we're in the Milky Way. Well, Jansky published his
Speaker 1: findings in nineteen thirty two, and then he moved on
Speaker 1: to work with other stuff, with a telephone system. I mean,
Speaker 1: he wasn't an astronomer or an astrophysicist or anything like that,
Speaker 1: so he dedicated his attention elsewhere. But another American engineer
Speaker 1: named Grote Reber would build on Jansky's work, and by
Speaker 1: the way, I am certain I mispronounced his name entirely,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna soldier on. He read Jenski's work and
Speaker 1: then he decided, you know what, I want to find
Speaker 1: out more about these these signals that seemed to be
Speaker 1: coming from space. So he built and actual radio telescope.
Speaker 1: He set out to build a device specifically to detect
Speaker 1: these kind of signals, and so he built a bowl
Speaker 1: shaped antenna, you know, a parabolic kind of antenna in
Speaker 1: nineteen seven, and it was capable of detecting radio signals
Speaker 1: from space. Now, when I say radio signals from space,
Speaker 1: I am not necessarily talking about stuff that was purposefully
Speaker 1: or intelligently transmitted, because a lot of stuff in space
Speaker 1: generates radio waves. The Sun, for example, does it, other
Speaker 1: stars do it. Pulsars and quasars produce radio waves. Radio
Speaker 1: astronomy gave scientists tools to detect and learn more about
Speaker 1: stuff and space. Then we could manage with things like
Speaker 1: optical telescopes, that is, light based telescopes. So in the
Speaker 1: decades following Reaver's work we saw a lot of progress
Speaker 1: in astronomy thanks to radio telescopes. Now we're going to
Speaker 1: skip up to nine teen fifty seven, and that's when
Speaker 1: a telescope designed by Bernard Level and Charles Husband went
Speaker 1: live for the first time at Jodrell Bank at the
Speaker 1: University of Manchester, and it was called the Mark one telescope,
Speaker 1: though these days folks tend to refer to it as
Speaker 1: the Level telescope. And this thing is big. It has
Speaker 1: a parabolic dish to help focus radio waves on the
Speaker 1: antenna and that dish measures seventy six meters or two
Speaker 1: hundred fifty feet across. A complicated analog computer consisting of
Speaker 1: electro mechanical components was designed so that it could position
Speaker 1: this antenna, could point it at different sections of the sky,
Speaker 1: and this antenna could actually track a radio source as
Speaker 1: it moved across the sky, so you could point it
Speaker 1: at something and then use the computer to constantly adjust
Speaker 1: the radio antenna's position so that it moved along with
Speaker 1: this whatever the source was of the R waves, and
Speaker 1: you could get a better read on it. And there's
Speaker 1: a really impressive piece of technology. Uh. And it also
Speaker 1: picked up the third stage of the rocket that was
Speaker 1: used to launch spot Nick. That's the first man made satellite,
Speaker 1: that's the one the Soviet Union put up into space.
Speaker 1: And uh, it was launched just a few months after
Speaker 1: the level telescope came online, so it actually detected that.
Speaker 1: That was one of the things that indicated how useful
Speaker 1: and important radio telescopes could be beyond just their astronomical
Speaker 1: or cosmological uses. Now, the power of the level telescope
Speaker 1: impressed a lot of very smart people, and a couple
Speaker 1: of those people were Giuseppe Coccone and Philip Morrison. They
Speaker 1: proposed that a sufficiently powerful transmitter and a sufficiently powerful
Speaker 1: receiver would be able to send communications across vast reaches
Speaker 1: of space. So if you had parabolic antennas of particularly
Speaker 1: strong power in two different locations, you could transmit and
Speaker 1: receive radio signals even if you were you know, light
Speaker 1: years apart from each other. Now that communication is still
Speaker 1: restricted by the speed of light, because radio weights travel
Speaker 1: at the speed of light and nothing goes faster than
Speaker 1: the speed of light. So if the two points of
Speaker 1: contact are let's say, eight light years apart from each other,
Speaker 1: it would take eight years for an outgoing message to
Speaker 1: reach the recipient and another eight years to wait for
Speaker 1: a response. So um, there will be no instant messaging.
Speaker 1: But beyond that, it meant that you could take a
Speaker 1: radio telescope and you could use it to search for
Speaker 1: signs that maybe someone out there in space has already
Speaker 1: been using radio technology for communications or for other purposes,
Speaker 1: and that perhaps this could help us determine if there
Speaker 1: are other examples of intelligent life out there. I'll explain
Speaker 1: more about how this was used in just a moment,
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick break. Coach Tony and
Speaker 1: Morrison wrote a paper about their proposal titled searching for
Speaker 1: Interstellar Communications. The journal Nature published this paper, and the
Speaker 1: two scientists address some pretty big questions. See now, as
Speaker 1: the late great Douglas Adams once observed, space is big,
Speaker 1: really big, and these radio telescopes are directional, so you
Speaker 1: have to pick a spot to point the telescope at.
Speaker 1: But how do you determine where you should look? How
Speaker 1: do you decide this is the point in space we're
Speaker 1: going to search right now. You might start off searching
Speaker 1: the equivalent of a ghost town, and it could be
Speaker 1: that a neighboring region of space might be absolutely teeming
Speaker 1: with life. But because of that directional telescope, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: know that. You're just be getting data from total uninhabited
Speaker 1: part of space. So the implication you get as oh,
Speaker 1: there's nobody out there. Meanwhile, like two space doors down,
Speaker 1: there's a raging party going on. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: if you were staring into a warehouse from the keyhole
Speaker 1: of a door. You would only see stuff within the
Speaker 1: view of that keyhole, but there could be a whole
Speaker 1: lot more warehouse just outside your area of view. You
Speaker 1: would have no idea if anything was actually in the
Speaker 1: warehouse or not. You would only be able to see
Speaker 1: from that narrow range of the keyhole. That was the
Speaker 1: same issue they were having with radio telescopes. Moreover, you
Speaker 1: could point the radio telescope at a place where there
Speaker 1: is intelligent life but maybe it's at a region that's
Speaker 1: so far away from the Earth we can't detect that life.
Speaker 1: So let me put that another way. Human beings started
Speaker 1: broadcasting radio in the early nineteen hundreds, so it's really
Speaker 1: been less than a hundred fifty years since we started
Speaker 1: using radio for communication. There are stars in the Milky
Speaker 1: Way Galaxy again, the same galaxy that our solar system
Speaker 1: is in, that are around nine hundred thousand light years
Speaker 1: away from us. That means it would take light nine
Speaker 1: hundred thousand earth years to travel from that distant star
Speaker 1: to us, so it takes nearly a million years for
Speaker 1: the information to get to us. A radio communication would
Speaker 1: require the same amount of time to get to us.
Speaker 1: That means that if intelligent alien life exists, or even
Speaker 1: existed on a planet around that distant star, that life
Speaker 1: would have had to have invented and made use of
Speaker 1: radio technology a million years ago for us to pick
Speaker 1: up those signals today. That's assuming that intelligent life would
Speaker 1: have somehow survived that million years. Uh for us to
Speaker 1: say that intelligent life exists today, right we we wouldn't
Speaker 1: know that for sure. All we could say is there
Speaker 1: appears to have been an intelligent civilization that existed a
Speaker 1: million years ago, we aren't really sure what they're up
Speaker 1: to now because we'd have no way of knowing. We
Speaker 1: would only know from the signals that were sent from
Speaker 1: the past. That's the neat thing about space too. The
Speaker 1: further you look, the more you're looking into the past,
Speaker 1: you're not seeing present situations just because the restriction of
Speaker 1: the speed of light. So you'd only really be able
Speaker 1: to see any current alien civilization if they were, you know,
Speaker 1: relatively close to us, because otherwise you can't be certain
Speaker 1: that that civilization still exists if it's thousands of light
Speaker 1: years away. Moreover, alien civilizations would only have been able
Speaker 1: to hear us if they were around a hundred fifty
Speaker 1: light years or closer to Earth. If they're further than
Speaker 1: a hundred fifty light years away, then our podcasts would
Speaker 1: not have gone far enough out to reach them. This,
Speaker 1: by the way, is why a lot of science fiction
Speaker 1: stories are really more like fantasy stories. A lot of
Speaker 1: them involve aliens finding out about Earth because they picked
Speaker 1: up a radio or television broadcast, but those broadcasts have
Speaker 1: only been around for a few decades, so that would
Speaker 1: require the aliens to be relatively close to Earth in
Speaker 1: the first place to pick up those transmissions because of
Speaker 1: those limitations of the speed of light. Anyway, my point
Speaker 1: was we might be quote unquote looking at the right spot,
Speaker 1: but the right spot might be far enough away that
Speaker 1: any radio broadcasts would still be in transit to us
Speaker 1: and wouldn't have arrived yet. It may not arrive for
Speaker 1: thousands of years. And that's just one more tiny part
Speaker 1: of why looking for meaningful signals in the sky is
Speaker 1: a huge challenge. You've heard the phrase looking for a
Speaker 1: needle in a haystack. Well, it's like that, but you know,
Speaker 1: roughly a bazillion times harder than that. Conconi and Morrison
Speaker 1: said out an argument about which areas of the galaxy
Speaker 1: would be most likely to host an intelligent civilization capable
Speaker 1: of radio transmissions. This included targeting stars that are neither
Speaker 1: too hot nor too small or cold. Hot stars burnout quickly,
Speaker 1: and the thought was, if it's a really hot star,
Speaker 1: it might go through its life cycle fast enough that
Speaker 1: life doesn't have a chance to evolve on any planets
Speaker 1: that might be an orbit around that star. So the
Speaker 1: star's life cycle is literally too short for life to
Speaker 1: have formed around that system, smaller, colder stars tend to
Speaker 1: be the really old ones, ones that have been around
Speaker 1: for billions of years, and with that much time, eventually,
Speaker 1: orbiting planets will lock on a star so that one
Speaker 1: side of the planet always faces the star and the
Speaker 1: opposite side of the planet always faces away from the start,
Speaker 1: So one side is always lit and the other side
Speaker 1: is always dark, and that kind of planet would probably
Speaker 1: be incapable of supporting life. So said coach Tony and Morrison,
Speaker 1: we should look for stars that are not that different
Speaker 1: from the Sun. These would be the right age and
Speaker 1: size to potentially support life if an orbiting planet were
Speaker 1: within a certain range, which we tend to refer to
Speaker 1: as the Goldilocks region. It has to be a distance
Speaker 1: that's not too close to the Sun, but not too
Speaker 1: far away either, and that really narrows things down in fact,
Speaker 1: and it means we can cross off potentially thousands or
Speaker 1: millions of stars from our otherwise unmanageably huge list of
Speaker 1: potential targets to look at. And so with this in mind,
Speaker 1: another astronomer and an astrophysicist named Frank Drake decided to
Speaker 1: take this hypothesis and to actually put it in action.
Speaker 1: He conducted the first search for extraterrestrial intelligence with the
Speaker 1: help of radio astronomy, and it was called Project OSMA,
Speaker 1: named after the care or Ozma from L. Frank Baum's
Speaker 1: oz books. Drake secured time on a radio telescope that
Speaker 1: measured twenty six ms or eighty five ft across to
Speaker 1: scan for radio frequencies that originated out of towels CT
Speaker 1: and epsilon Eri. Donnie. Those are two different stars, and
Speaker 1: both stars are relatively close to our own solar system,
Speaker 1: and both our sun like enough that they could serve
Speaker 1: as potentially good targets based on Cochoni and Morrison's proposed guidelines.
Speaker 1: Apart from one outlier, his team found no evidence of
Speaker 1: radio signals indicating potential intelligent communication. The one outlier they
Speaker 1: did pick up, while initially interesting, proved to be terrestrial
Speaker 1: in nature, meaning that it originated from an aircraft made
Speaker 1: by dull old humans, didn't come from outer space. It
Speaker 1: was something that we had created and this radio telescope
Speaker 1: just happened to pick it up. And uh. That actually
Speaker 1: illustrates another challenge with using radio telescopes, weeding out the
Speaker 1: signals that are actually coming from us as opposed to
Speaker 1: coming from space, and it sure would be embarrassing to
Speaker 1: come forward with a claim that you've discovered alien communication
Speaker 1: only for it to turn out to be a terrestrial signal,
Speaker 1: like an old Mork and Mindy episode or something that's
Speaker 1: only got a character who's supposed to be an alien
Speaker 1: and it it's not actually alien. Now, luckily, this early
Speaker 1: experience taught researchers to include a secondary antenna that would
Speaker 1: only be sensitive enough to detect terrestrial signals. So you
Speaker 1: put this secondary antenna near the first antenna. They're both
Speaker 1: pointed at the same section of sky, and then when
Speaker 1: you get a a beep, you know you register a signal.
Speaker 1: You can compare the primary telescope, the one that you're
Speaker 1: using to search for extra terrestrial intelligence, against this smaller antenna,
Speaker 1: and if the smaller antenna also picked up the signal,
Speaker 1: you know that signal was terrestrial, because the smaller intenna
Speaker 1: isn't powerful enough to pick up stuff from outer space.
Speaker 1: So you say, all right, well, if it appears on both,
Speaker 1: we know that that came from Earth. We know that
Speaker 1: that's not actually a signal scent from somewhere out in space.
Speaker 1: So they learned that lesson very quickly, and that was
Speaker 1: very helpful. Drake further contributed to the discourse about the
Speaker 1: search for extraterrestrial intelligence by proposing a way to sort
Speaker 1: of conceptualize the possibility of detecting intelligent civilizations in the universe.
Speaker 1: These days. We call it the Drake equation, and it's
Speaker 1: a pretty cool concept, and it goes something like this.
Speaker 1: All right, there's a variable that we're going to call in.
Speaker 1: In represents the number of civilizations in our galaxy with
Speaker 1: which we could possibly communicate. So in is that number.
Speaker 1: It's an unknown number. What determines the value of that number, Well,
Speaker 1: it's a bunch of stuff that you have to take
Speaker 1: into account, and that includes the average rate at which
Speaker 1: stars form in the Milky Way, the number of those
Speaker 1: stars that will actually have planets form around them, because
Speaker 1: not every star has planets, the average number of those
Speaker 1: planets that could potentially support life, the number of planets
Speaker 1: that could support life that actually go on to support life.
Speaker 1: So far, we haven't found any that definitively fit that
Speaker 1: that definition. Then the number of those planets in which
Speaker 1: the life that forms can develop to the point of
Speaker 1: gaining intelligence, The number of planets with intelligent life that
Speaker 1: then develop and use communication tools that would be detectable
Speaker 1: from Earth. And then the length of time such civilizations
Speaker 1: have been doing that, because that length of time will
Speaker 1: determine whether or not they would be detectable. Right so,
Speaker 1: even if they exist, again, if they're far far away,
Speaker 1: there's no way we could detect them anyway, because again
Speaker 1: the speed of light is a limiting factor. So this
Speaker 1: equation is not meant to give us a heart and
Speaker 1: fast now where like three or something. Instead, it helps
Speaker 1: us frame the likelihood of detecting intelligent life, uh specifically
Speaker 1: intelligent life that is using radio communication. We don't really
Speaker 1: know anything about the number of plants that can definitively
Speaker 1: support life or anything else beyond that particular variable. Right
Speaker 1: we we've got information about some of the other stuff.
Speaker 1: We have a general idea of how frequently stars form
Speaker 1: in the milky Way. We are refining our understanding of
Speaker 1: how many stars have planets. Turns out that way more
Speaker 1: stars have planets than we initially thought. Then we have
Speaker 1: to think, all right, well, how many of those plants
Speaker 1: could potentially support life based upon their distance from the star,
Speaker 1: the age of the star, the heat of the star
Speaker 1: all of those other variables. So we're slowly learning more
Speaker 1: about the front half of that equation, and the back
Speaker 1: half is still largely a mystery to us. Now, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's important so that we can use that kind of
Speaker 1: information to help refine our search. Right. We want to
Speaker 1: make sure that we are looking at the places most
Speaker 1: likely to produce good results, because again, space is really big.
Speaker 1: If we just randomly point the telescope in any given direction,
Speaker 1: the odds of success are miniscule. We want to improve
Speaker 1: those odds as best we can by making some intelligent
Speaker 1: decisions based on educated guesses. Really now, Uh, The SETI Institute,
Speaker 1: a not for profit scientific research organization, wouldn't come into
Speaker 1: being until ninety four. However, between Drake's project OZMA in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen sixties and the set Institute's formation in four,
Speaker 1: there were lots of astronomers who were looking for signals
Speaker 1: that might have originated from an intelligent civilization out in space.
Speaker 1: I find a lot of people confuse SET the science
Speaker 1: that's the general science of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, and
Speaker 1: SET the Institute. Uh. Those are the SETI Institute is
Speaker 1: dedicated toward a deeper understanding of life in general and
Speaker 1: its place in the universe, and the potential existence of
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial intelligence. But the two are not synonymous. It's not
Speaker 1: Set and the SETI Institute are related but distinct. Now,
Speaker 1: back in nineteen seven, there was an astronomer named Jocelyn
Speaker 1: Bell who noticed something that initially seemed really promising from
Speaker 1: a set perspective. Turned out it was incredible information, period,
Speaker 1: but we just didn't understand its significance at the time.
Speaker 1: She noticed what appeared to be a pulsing radio signal.
Speaker 1: She and her supervisor charted the pulses that they were detecting,
Speaker 1: and they were detecting them at regular intervals, like each day,
Speaker 1: slightly off by hours or whatever. But it was it
Speaker 1: was unusual. They weren't expecting it, and at the time
Speaker 1: they didn't have an explanation for the origin of those
Speaker 1: radio pulses, so they had to label it as something,
Speaker 1: and at the time they labeled it l g M.
Speaker 1: One l g M stood for Little Green Men. It
Speaker 1: was a somewhat tongue in cheap way to indicate that,
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe this is purposeful radio broadcasting. We
Speaker 1: don't know. They kept looking into it. They kept trying
Speaker 1: to figure out exactly what it was and where the
Speaker 1: signal was originating from, and over time they concluded that
Speaker 1: it was actually a naturally occurring pulse. It was not
Speaker 1: like an outgoing phone message from beyond the stars or something. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: this hunch that they had that it was a naturally
Speaker 1: occurring phenomenon proved correct, and scientists were able to figure
Speaker 1: out that the pulse was coming from rotating neutron stars
Speaker 1: called pulsars. So while it didn't turn out to be aliens,
Speaker 1: astronomers were able to expand our understanding of space. So
Speaker 1: it's still super cool. It just you know, it wasn't aliens.
Speaker 1: Ohio State University launched the first long term set study
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy three, and unlike other attempts, this one
Speaker 1: surveyed the entire night sky as the Earth rotated. Instead
Speaker 1: of honing in on a specific region of space and
Speaker 1: then just staying locked onto that region, it would do
Speaker 1: a full scan every night, slightly different arc each night,
Speaker 1: but a full scan of the night sky. In ninety seven,
Speaker 1: that system registered a signal that was many times stronger
Speaker 1: than the background signals that the telescope was recording. There
Speaker 1: was an analyst named Jerry Emmon who wrote down the
Speaker 1: word wow in the margin of the computer print out
Speaker 1: for that detection, and to this day we call it
Speaker 1: the Wow signal. And the signal had a profile that
Speaker 1: suggested it wasn't your typical, naturally occurring radio wave, it
Speaker 1: was this weird spike. But despite numerous efforts, the telescope
Speaker 1: did not pick up any subsequent signals from that part
Speaker 1: of space. Em and himself later guessed that perhaps the
Speaker 1: signal originated from Earth. Maybe it was something that got
Speaker 1: beamed up and then reflected off of something in space,
Speaker 1: like a piece of space debris, and thus it didn't
Speaker 1: originate from, you know, extraterrestrial sources at all, but we
Speaker 1: don't know for sure. Astronomers oversaw similar efforts with different
Speaker 1: radio telescopes around the world over the years, and it's
Speaker 1: a bit tricky because it requires securing time on radio
Speaker 1: telescopes for the purposes of searching for extra terrestrial intelligence,
Speaker 1: and the owners of those telescopes, frequently scientific research institutions
Speaker 1: universities that kind of thing. They often have their own priorities,
Speaker 1: which may or may not involve seeking out evidence of
Speaker 1: intelligent life in the galaxy, so finding time when you
Speaker 1: can use those radio telescopes is pretty tricky stuff. In
Speaker 1: Thomas Pearson and Jill Tarter found the not for profit
Speaker 1: organization called the City Institute with the mission to understand
Speaker 1: life and a sort of universal context. So again, while
Speaker 1: there is a set organization, SET as a whole really
Speaker 1: refers to the science the effort, the specific application of
Speaker 1: techniques and processes, and an effort to attain a particular outcome,
Speaker 1: namely to find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Astronomers interested in
Speaker 1: pursuing goals related to SET often have to wait for
Speaker 1: times when radio telescopes aren't in active use for some
Speaker 1: other purpose, and that really limits what they can accomplish.
Speaker 1: Other groups have to developed a way to piggyback onto
Speaker 1: existing radio telescopes. So piggyback systems tend to be systems
Speaker 1: that monitor data picked up by a radio telescope, so
Speaker 1: it's like it's like an additional computer readout of what's
Speaker 1: going on. So the team that's using the radio telescope
Speaker 1: is doing it to do some specific purpose. Meanwhile, SET
Speaker 1: researchers are using a a parallel readoubt just looking for
Speaker 1: anything that might stand out as a potential example of
Speaker 1: evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence. Uh, this is tricky because again
Speaker 1: the set researchers have no say on where a telescope
Speaker 1: is going to be pointed. They're just looking at the
Speaker 1: same data but for a different reason, So it's not ideal.
Speaker 1: But again, radio telescopes are kind of hard to come by.
Speaker 1: Even with all these limitations, scientists were generating a lot
Speaker 1: of information that they needed to sift through. Radio telescopes
Speaker 1: pick up a lot of noise, and there may be
Speaker 1: signal in that noise. I mean, that signal might be
Speaker 1: incredibly weak. But you have to really examine the data
Speaker 1: closely in order to figure out what is truly a
Speaker 1: signal versus just random noise in the background. And then
Speaker 1: you have to weed out all the other stuff like
Speaker 1: did that signal come from a natural phenomenon? Did it
Speaker 1: come from a terrestrial source? This is not easy to do.
Speaker 1: Scientists were already have to work pretty hard to secure
Speaker 1: time with radio telescopes. It would be even harder to
Speaker 1: secure time with something like a supercomputer because supercomputers also
Speaker 1: are owned by just a few different universities and research
Speaker 1: organizations and labs, and they typically are being used for
Speaker 1: other stuff that takes a higher priority than searching for
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial intelligence. And then there was a breakthrough, and that
Speaker 1: breakthrough came in the form of network connectivity. In the
Speaker 1: early nineteen nineties, the mainstream public first began learning about
Speaker 1: this weird thing called the Internet, and by the Internet was,
Speaker 1: if not a household term, at least something most folks
Speaker 1: had some experience or knowledge of, and that's what opened
Speaker 1: up the opportunity for study at home. I'll explain more
Speaker 1: in just a minute, but first let's take another quick break.
Speaker 1: So they there are many different models for computing. When
Speaker 1: I was growing up, I was familiar with a more
Speaker 1: centralized model. So in my case, I was growing up
Speaker 1: in the era of personal computers, and the computers I
Speaker 1: first used were completely self contained. They didn't connect to
Speaker 1: a larger network. All the processing capability, all the programs,
Speaker 1: all the capacity for storage. We're connected to the physical
Speaker 1: computer itself. They might be peripherals, but it was all
Speaker 1: part of the personal computer. A few years ago, the
Speaker 1: big trend was cloud computing. So with cloud computing, you've
Speaker 1: got networked servers that are doing a lot of the
Speaker 1: processing power for big applications. The devices we're using, whether
Speaker 1: they're computers or mobile devices or sensors or whatever, are
Speaker 1: mostly acting as transmitters and receivers. For many tasks. We
Speaker 1: provide input to these devices, and the device than transmits
Speaker 1: commands to some distant group of servers that takes that
Speaker 1: information and does some sort of operation on it, produces
Speaker 1: some sort of result, and sends that back to us.
Speaker 1: So no longer do we have to have really powerful
Speaker 1: computers directly at our disposal. We can rely on cloud
Speaker 1: services to do that computing for us, at least for
Speaker 1: some things. For other things, like if you want to
Speaker 1: do low latency, high graphics fidelity gaming, for example, you
Speaker 1: want to have a really good, strong computer processor at
Speaker 1: your disposal because latency with transmission can completely ruin that experience.
Speaker 1: But for the most part, you get what I'm saying well.
Speaker 1: Setting at Home was an example of sort of a
Speaker 1: third model called distributed computing. The idea was that you
Speaker 1: could take a group of regular, old personal computers, the
Speaker 1: kind that any average person could have in their home.
Speaker 1: You would install some software on those computers, and that
Speaker 1: software would allow the computers to process chunks of data
Speaker 1: in some particular a before sending the results back to
Speaker 1: wherever that data was coming from in the first place.
Speaker 1: So if someone needed to tackle a really big data
Speaker 1: processing job, one that could be divided up into smaller chunks,
Speaker 1: that person could use a centralized computer or maybe a
Speaker 1: network of computers to send out these smaller chunks of
Speaker 1: data to this distribution of personal computers for processing and
Speaker 1: then wait for the results to come back and then
Speaker 1: group them all together and see what you got. It
Speaker 1: speeds things up considerably. It increases the processing assets of
Speaker 1: the project as more computers joined that project, and it
Speaker 1: reduces the need to turn to stuff like supercomputers. And
Speaker 1: it also achieved another goal which the founders of the
Speaker 1: project had in mind, which was to encourage enthusiasm and
Speaker 1: excitement around the subject of science. Computer scientist David Gedgay,
Speaker 1: astronomers Woody Sullivan and Dan Wertheimer, and David Anderson, who
Speaker 1: was David's graduate school advisor collectively came up with this
Speaker 1: idea all the way back in specifically with set at Home.
Speaker 1: They were trying to come up with a scientific application
Speaker 1: people would be excited to participate in, and while they
Speaker 1: weren't necessarily super optimistic, that set at home would produce,
Speaker 1: you know, incredible results from a scientific perspective. They thought
Speaker 1: from a motivating perspective, it was just the ticket, and
Speaker 1: it was pretty genius. Upon launch, anyone with a computer
Speaker 1: and an Internet connection could conceivably help in the search
Speaker 1: for extraterrestrial intelligence. The researchers created a screen saver program,
Speaker 1: so if you wanted to participate, you could download the
Speaker 1: screen saver and install it on your personal computer. When
Speaker 1: your computer would go idle and activate the screen saver,
Speaker 1: the processor of your computer, which wise would be doing
Speaker 1: very little, would get to work on some data sent
Speaker 1: over from the set research project. So the research project
Speaker 1: would pull information from a radio telescope divided into chunks
Speaker 1: and then parcel it out to people participating in this
Speaker 1: project when complete. When your processor was done working on
Speaker 1: a chunk of data, it would send the results back
Speaker 1: to the central point for the project and wait for
Speaker 1: the next chunk of data. And if you were to
Speaker 1: come back to do some work on your computer, Let's
Speaker 1: say you come back after taking a break for half
Speaker 1: an hour, the screensaver goes inactive and the program would
Speaker 1: surrender your processing cycles back to you, so you didn't
Speaker 1: have to worry about cet at Home suddenly taking up
Speaker 1: all of your computers processing power. It would only jump
Speaker 1: back onto the job when your computer went idle again
Speaker 1: and your your CPU had availability. Now, as I said,
Speaker 1: this idea was genius, but the original implementation of the
Speaker 1: idea was less. So now that's not a slight on
Speaker 1: the researchers, because when they launched the project in May,
Speaker 1: they were expecting that they might get as many as
Speaker 1: a thousand people signing up. They figured that, well, this
Speaker 1: is an interesting idea, and we'll probably see some folks
Speaker 1: really you know, who are really into science joined, but
Speaker 1: I'm not sure about anything beyond that. Now, with that expectation,
Speaker 1: they only dedicated a single desktop PC for the purposes
Speaker 1: of assigning processing tasks and receiving the results from the
Speaker 1: distributed computers. They did not anticipate how enthusiastic the reception
Speaker 1: to the project would be. They didn't see a thousand
Speaker 1: people sign up when they launched Setting at Home. They
Speaker 1: saw a million people sign up. So let's put that
Speaker 1: into perspective. Let's say you've set up a lemonade stand
Speaker 1: and you did some brief scouting work, and you anticipated
Speaker 1: that the location you're setting up in. You're gonna see
Speaker 1: maybe ten customers and third minutes, and you think that's manageable. Well,
Speaker 1: what you didn't realize is that you've actually set up
Speaker 1: your stand in sour puss scurvy town. It's a town
Speaker 1: populated entirely by people with an unquenchable thirst for lemonade.
Speaker 1: So instead of ten people showing up in that first
Speaker 1: half hour, ten thousand people mob your lemonade stand. You
Speaker 1: are overwhelmed. Well, the same thing happened to the ct
Speaker 1: at Home PC that was in charge of sending out
Speaker 1: and receiving all that data. It was a good problem
Speaker 1: to have, but it was still a problem. Sun Microsystems
Speaker 1: jumped in and donated a bunch of computers to help
Speaker 1: the City at Home administrators make the system work, and
Speaker 1: from that moment on the program went into high gear.
Speaker 1: People in the program were contributing to scientific exploration just
Speaker 1: by allowing their IDOL computers to focus on complicated mathematical
Speaker 1: problems when the computer was otherwise not in use. It
Speaker 1: was a beautiful thing. The response also meant that the
Speaker 1: project could go through information orders of magnitude faster than
Speaker 1: if it had all been handled in house. The they
Speaker 1: had the advantage of a million processors. That's something that
Speaker 1: no SETI project could have afforded on its own at
Speaker 1: that time. It also inspired other scientific projects to launch
Speaker 1: distributed computing efforts. Folding at Home, for example, taps into
Speaker 1: idle computers to solve protein folding problems that could lead
Speaker 1: to incredible advances in medicine and biology. On top of that,
Speaker 1: online communities formed around Seat at Home. People connected over
Speaker 1: forums and formed friendships. There were even stories about people
Speaker 1: meeting online, falling in love, and getting married out in
Speaker 1: the real world, all while using their computers to seek
Speaker 1: out evidence of intelligent life. It was all really remarkable
Speaker 1: and beautiful. But hey, if it was so super cool,
Speaker 1: why the heck is the project shutting down now? Twenty
Speaker 1: one years after it launched? Is the book closed on
Speaker 1: extra terrestrial intelligent life? Are we done? Have we given up? Well?
Speaker 1: Not quite. The problem now is that we've got a
Speaker 1: ton a mountain of processed data from this project that
Speaker 1: has to be further analyzed, and that taps into something
Speaker 1: else that I plan to talk about more later on
Speaker 1: this year, the challenges of big data. We're able to
Speaker 1: collect mind staggeringly huge amounts of information, but understanding and
Speaker 1: using that information is another matter. It presents a really
Speaker 1: big challenge. Even with all of these analyzed chunks of info,
Speaker 1: that data still has to be processed to see what's
Speaker 1: actually been found over the two decades of Seating at Home.
Speaker 1: The researchers overseeing Ceting at Home hope to publish a
Speaker 1: paper on the subject, and to do that, they need
Speaker 1: to look at all the results of the stuff that
Speaker 1: the program actually found, and so they need to stop
Speaker 1: gathering data while that happens. They have to actually stop
Speaker 1: so that they can see what they have, as opposed
Speaker 1: to continuously adding to that pile. This hiatus will allow
Speaker 1: the team to look at the results, form conclusions, and
Speaker 1: write a paper based on the whole project. And while
Speaker 1: we don't anticipate any reports of intelligent communications popping up
Speaker 1: as a result of this analysis, the endeavor as a
Speaker 1: whole has been really successful, particularly in the context of
Speaker 1: getting people excited about participating in science. On the back
Speaker 1: end of Seating at Home is an infrastructure that grew
Speaker 1: over time. It is called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for
Speaker 1: Network Computing. This support system hosts numerous distributed computing projects
Speaker 1: that work on the same basic principles as setting at home.
Speaker 1: It's just that each of these projects have a different
Speaker 1: goal or purpose. Some are dedicated to detecting and measuring
Speaker 1: asteroids uh. Some provide cern process us in capabilities to
Speaker 1: help analyze data produced by the Large Hadron Collider in
Speaker 1: an effort to gain, you know, a deeper understanding of
Speaker 1: particle physics and quantum mechanics. There are projects that focus
Speaker 1: on climate science, physics, cognitive science, and more, and you
Speaker 1: can check them all out at blink dot Berkeley, dot
Speaker 1: e d U, slash projects dot PHP. That's b O
Speaker 1: I n C dot Berkeley, dot E d U, slash
Speaker 1: projects dot p HP. If you want to dedicate some
Speaker 1: of your computer's idle processing power to solving really interesting
Speaker 1: problems and science, it's a great way to contribute. You're
Speaker 1: not even doing anything active, but you are helping, you know,
Speaker 1: peel back the border of our understanding. We're pushing that
Speaker 1: boundary further and further out, and you can do it
Speaker 1: just with your computer's idle time. It's pretty incredible. So
Speaker 1: while study at home is writing off into the sunset,
Speaker 1: at least for a while. Anyway, there are still efforts
Speaker 1: around the world dedicated in full or in part to
Speaker 1: the search for extraterrestrial life. The search hasn't ended yet,
Speaker 1: even if Set at Home is at least for now over,
Speaker 1: And while we don't have anything jumping out to us
Speaker 1: as a positive, absolutely yes, we need to check this out.
Speaker 1: We're pretty sure someone's talking to us kind of uh incident.
Speaker 1: It's good to remember that space is really big. Who knows,
Speaker 1: maybe the next star we point a telescope at will
Speaker 1: be beaming. Whatever the alien version of the Great British
Speaker 1: Bake Off is, one can only hope. And that wraps
Speaker 1: up this episode of tech stuff. My hat is off
Speaker 1: to the CET at Home crew. I think it was
Speaker 1: an admirable use of technology to inspire people to get
Speaker 1: into science. I think it was a worthy endeavor to
Speaker 1: search for extraterrestrial and telligence. It was great to see
Speaker 1: other projects take that same model and apply it to
Speaker 1: their own uh scientific endeavors. So it's to me one
Speaker 1: of those great stories in technology. Even if we didn't
Speaker 1: find any direct evidence of little green men out there,
Speaker 1: who knows what the future will bring. If you guys
Speaker 1: have any suggestions for future topics, for tech Stuff reach
Speaker 1: out to me. You can find me on Facebook or Twitter.
Speaker 1: The handle for both is tech Stuff HSW and I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.