Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and it is Saturday, so we have
Speaker 1: a vault episode for you. This one, originally published eleven two,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, is an interview with astrophysicist Adam Frank
Speaker 1: about the search for alien life.
Speaker 2: Let's dive right.
Speaker 3: In Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb. On today's episode, I'll be chatting with
Speaker 1: Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of
Speaker 1: Rochester and author of the new book The Little Book
Speaker 1: of Aliens, which is available now in all fourmats. So hey,
Speaker 1: let's jump right into the conversation. I think you're going
Speaker 1: to really enjoy this one.
Speaker 2: Hi, Adam, Welcome to the show. It's great to be here.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much.
Speaker 1: You discussed this a bit in the new book, The
Speaker 1: Little Book of Aliens, and of course I have to
Speaker 1: ask you about it here in the episode. How did
Speaker 1: you first become interested in the possibility of alien life?
Speaker 2: Well, it's hard for me to remember a time when
Speaker 2: I wasn't interested in the possibility of alien life. As
Speaker 2: I discussed in the book. I got my start on
Speaker 2: this when I was five years old, when I wandered
Speaker 2: into my dad's library. My dad was a writer who
Speaker 2: had an interest in science fiction, science and science fiction,
Speaker 2: and they're on the lower levels of the library, you know,
Speaker 2: the lower shelf there was all of his pulp science
Speaker 2: fiction magazines, all those amazing stories and Isaac Asmanov's you
Speaker 2: know whatever, and those pictures. You know, every cover had
Speaker 2: a semi lurid illustration of dudes bouncing around on you know,
Speaker 2: alien worlds and michel entire space suits or rocket ships
Speaker 2: blasting through space, or bug eyed monsters and aliens. And
Speaker 2: from that moment on, like, I've never had any other choice. So,
Speaker 2: you know, after thirty years of being an astronomer, of
Speaker 2: being an astrophysicist, including you know, a fair amount of
Speaker 2: time recently last decade or so focusing on astrobiology, I
Speaker 2: wrote the book because I really wanted people to see
Speaker 2: how close we were to scientists finding evidence one way
Speaker 2: or the other for alien life where they live on
Speaker 2: alien planets.
Speaker 1: Now I'll get back to like the real hunt for
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial life here in a second. But on the subject
Speaker 1: of just media that inspired you. Were there any particular
Speaker 1: favorite films? And I have to add the caveat. I'm
Speaker 1: asking this as someone who appreciates both higher browse sci
Speaker 1: fi but also the silliest cheese. So don't shy away
Speaker 1: from mentioning anything from the discount band.
Speaker 2: Plan nine from Outer Space. No, No, that actually not
Speaker 2: so listen. I'm a huge science fiction fan, huge, and
Speaker 2: so when I was a kid, I devoured everything there was.
Speaker 2: And you kids today don't know how bad it was
Speaker 2: back then. Right back then, you literally had Star Trek reruns.
Speaker 2: So this is the mid seventies, right when I'm coming
Speaker 2: up as a kid Star Trek reruns. You had Lost
Speaker 2: in Space, which was terrible, right, and then there was
Speaker 2: all the bad science fiction movies from the fifties that
Speaker 2: would rerun on like Saturday morning at eleven thirty on
Speaker 2: what was called Chiller Theater, which was you know, on
Speaker 2: Channel eleven back in the days when you only had
Speaker 2: like five or six channels. So I devoured everything, and
Speaker 2: so the things, the highbrow stuff I loved were my dad.
Speaker 2: I remember one night my dad wakened me up and say,
Speaker 2: come on, come on, you gotta watch this. And it
Speaker 2: was Forbidden Planet, right, which is this classic which is
Speaker 2: amazing because it's the embodiment of the nineteen fifties pulp
Speaker 2: science fiction. But it's really smart, right, It's really actually
Speaker 2: based on the Tempest and the key idea that it
Speaker 2: has in there, which I explore in the book quite
Speaker 2: a bit. I have a whole chapter on it, is
Speaker 2: the idea of dead ancient alien civilizations, right, the vision
Speaker 2: of the Krell machinery when they're down in the planet,
Speaker 2: if anybody's ever seen there. So, you know, so all
Speaker 2: of Star Trek, all you know, movies like This Island Earth,
Speaker 2: you know, which wasn't so great, but so all of
Speaker 2: that really shaped my own on thinking about about aliens
Speaker 2: and about space. It really mattered quite a bit to me.
Speaker 2: There's also a show called UFOs, which do you know
Speaker 2: of that one? Have you ever seen that?
Speaker 1: I don't think I know that one?
Speaker 2: Though it was it was a British show. It was
Speaker 2: actually a precursor to Space nineteen ninety nine, do you
Speaker 2: know that? Yeah, So this was actually the same kind
Speaker 2: of models. You'll see a lot of similarities, and it
Speaker 2: was it ran you know. You can find it on
Speaker 2: the internet you want, and it was this idea that
Speaker 2: you know, the the UFOs were coming to steal human
Speaker 2: organs and there was a secret shadow organization which was
Speaker 2: protecting the Earth from that, and I loved that as well.
Speaker 2: So pretty much anything I could get my hands on
Speaker 2: I watched endlessly, and of course Marvel Comics, because there
Speaker 2: was a whole space side of you know, star Lord.
Speaker 2: You know. When I when I, you know, I was
Speaker 2: the the science advisor for Doctor Strange and I got
Speaker 2: to meet Kevin Figi. We were, you know, in the
Speaker 2: room working on the script together, and he asked me,
Speaker 2: you know, what was your favorite star Marvel and I
Speaker 2: got to like totally nerd out. And there's this like one,
Speaker 2: this little known edition of star Lord from the seventies,
Speaker 2: which was actually my favorite because it was a space opera,
Speaker 2: it was a space adventure. So all of that really
Speaker 2: shaped my pop culture understanding. And up until streaming, I
Speaker 2: think I could claim I'd seen every science fiction movie
Speaker 2: TV show ever made by stream. When streaming happened, it
Speaker 2: was I was overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: But now I'm glad you mentioned like the you know,
Speaker 1: aliens coming for organs and so forth, because of course
Speaker 1: that's a huge part of it the scarier visions of
Speaker 1: what alien contact might consist of, and like for my
Speaker 1: own part, I remember there was a short period in
Speaker 1: my childhood when I had just seen some uf episodes
Speaker 1: of unsolved mysteries, and I became legitimately scared for a
Speaker 1: short amount of time that UFO abduction could happen to me.
Speaker 1: I just wasn't exposed to like speculative or that many
Speaker 1: optimistic views of what UFOs could consist of. So I
Speaker 1: can't help but wonder how many others were sort of
Speaker 1: fundamentally primed that way toward the possibility of alien life.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I have the there's a chapter in
Speaker 2: the book where I look at sort of the pop
Speaker 2: culture effects of aliens because you know, one of the
Speaker 2: maazting things that is happening right now, which is really
Speaker 2: kind of the purpose or one purpose of the book
Speaker 2: is to show people how the search for life in
Speaker 2: the universe is now totally scientifically legitimate, which it wasn't
Speaker 2: when I was coming up. When I was coming up
Speaker 2: as a graduate student in the eighties, the search for
Speaker 2: life was either a joke or it was considered a
Speaker 2: dead end because the Viking probes in the seventies to
Speaker 2: Mars hadn't really found anything, so it was a really
Speaker 2: sort of dead paer in the search for life. And
Speaker 2: then but now, you know, for reasons I'm sure we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about, and the reason they know that,
Speaker 2: which is what a lot of the book is about.
Speaker 2: We're really you know, the next giant telescope is only
Speaker 2: is going to be built focusing on the detection of life.
Speaker 2: So you're right that the pop culture really shaped a
Speaker 2: lot of people's opinions about what we should think about
Speaker 2: with aliens and what life in the universe might be. Now,
Speaker 2: you know, as I discussed in the book, and I'm
Speaker 2: sure we're going to talk about, I'm very skeptical about
Speaker 2: that UFOs have anything to do with life outside the universe.
Speaker 2: But again, as you say, the pop culture stuff, the
Speaker 2: UFOs and the TV and the movies, whether hybrow or lowbrow,
Speaker 2: shaped people's understanding of how we should be thinking about
Speaker 2: life in the universe. And the amazing thing about the
Speaker 2: science is the science takes us actually in a more
Speaker 2: imaginative and more amazing directions because you've got to really
Speaker 2: try and think about it in a systematic way. But
Speaker 2: it's it's interesting to note, right, many people are afraid
Speaker 2: of aliens or feeling, you know, they're it's either one
Speaker 2: either the aliens are like these gods who are coming
Speaker 2: down to give us the cures for cancer, or they're
Speaker 2: coming to eat us or mate with us, you know,
Speaker 2: one of the others.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned the seventies being this pivotal point, and
Speaker 1: you talked about this in the book. Why did this
Speaker 1: What did the serious quitt it, serious consideration of potential
Speaker 1: alien life look like prior to the seventies and the
Speaker 1: advent of Seti and what like? What were the limiting
Speaker 1: factors in how did it change?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So what's interesting is this question are we alone?
Speaker 2: Is one of the oldest human questions around. You can
Speaker 2: see the Greeks arguing about it, and you know, the
Speaker 2: book starts with this discussion of the history of this.
Speaker 2: So Aristotle and Democratists, you can see them kind of
Speaker 2: arguing with each other in writing from two thousand, five
Speaker 2: hundred years ago. Giordano Bruno gets burnt at the stake,
Speaker 2: you know, for heresy, which had to do with Catholic doctrine.
Speaker 2: But really one of the reasons he got in trouble
Speaker 2: was he was advocating for this Pernican view that the
Speaker 2: Earth was just one planet of many, and many of
Speaker 2: those planets out among the stars would be inhabited. But
Speaker 2: what happens, actually the first pivotal decade is the fifties,
Speaker 2: because you get the Fermi paradox and you get the
Speaker 2: Drake equation. You get these two things happening at the
Speaker 2: beginning of the end, which are the first sort of
Speaker 2: scientific the scientific questions, questions that you could ask a
Speaker 2: you could ask scientifically, you could pose a research problem
Speaker 2: and carry it out. And then Drake, Frank Drake carries
Speaker 2: out at the end of that nineteen sixty the first
Speaker 2: astro biological experiment ever done. So he takes two radio
Speaker 2: telescopes and he points him at the sky and he
Speaker 2: looks for signals from you know, an intelligent civilization something
Speaker 2: like might be beaming off of Earth right now. And
Speaker 2: that is the first time anybody's been able to do
Speaker 2: any kind of experiment asking whether it's dumb life, you know,
Speaker 2: microbial life, or smart life meaning that builds civilizations. So
Speaker 2: that launches SETI, that launches the scientific inquiry about a
Speaker 2: life the universe, and through most of the sixties it's
Speaker 2: now SETI becomes a field, but it's very marginal. It's
Speaker 2: still in the you know, there's a few brave scientists
Speaker 2: doing it, but it's still kind of seen to be
Speaker 2: kind of out there. And then what happens is the
Speaker 2: UFOs and everything that's going on with UFOs, which is
Speaker 2: you know, tends to be the conspiracy theories and the
Speaker 2: hoaxes and the that starts to cloud the public's opinion
Speaker 2: about and the scientists even opinion about things like SETI.
Speaker 2: Now NASA is also at the same time conducting searches,
Speaker 2: is thinking about life on planets in the Solar System.
Speaker 2: So there's the Viking landers to Mars, which scoop up
Speaker 2: some soil and try and test for sort of earthlike microbes.
Speaker 2: Those have inconclusive results, negative or inconclusive results. So by
Speaker 2: the time you coming into the eighties, the search for
Speaker 2: life in the universe is either you still have this
Speaker 2: sort of what we call the giggle factor that if
Speaker 2: you tried to mention the search for life in the universe,
Speaker 2: particularly the search for intelligent life meaning industrial technology life, yeah,
Speaker 2: eyebrows are going to raise Congress literally some congressmen make
Speaker 2: hay and that there's I talk about this the giggle
Speaker 2: factor in the book and show people how this happened.
Speaker 2: Congress like doesn't even allow NASA to fund SETI because
Speaker 2: the congressmen are like, this is a waste of taxpayers dollars.
Speaker 2: You know. So by the time you're into the late eighties,
Speaker 2: when I'm a graduate student, SETI is just there's a
Speaker 2: few brave pioneers who are living on you know, private funds,
Speaker 2: not that SETI. SETI never really got a lot of funding,
Speaker 2: and that's an important part part of this, but it's
Speaker 2: living on fumes. There really is barely any SETI going on,
Speaker 2: and people the thought about, you know, even dumb life
Speaker 2: on planets had stalled, and so by you know, when
Speaker 2: you're coming into the nineteen nineties, the idea of life
Speaker 2: in the universe is almost nobody cares. Nobody's paying except
Speaker 2: for you know, some pioneers. And certainly when I was
Speaker 2: a scientist, then there was a sense of like, don't
Speaker 2: even think about that. That's a dead end, you know,
Speaker 2: or you're going to become a joke. Don't waste your
Speaker 2: career on that, which is amazing because again that's the
Speaker 2: point of the book is to show that right now,
Speaker 2: this is the this is the most important issue in
Speaker 2: astronomer or one of the most important issues in astronomy.
Speaker 2: If you're a young astronomer, good shot that you're going
Speaker 2: to aim your career at astrobiology. Quite a change, right.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, so you mentioned the Fermi paradox and the
Speaker 1: Drake equation. What do you think are the most important
Speaker 1: fundamentals for listeners or just like the alien curious, alien
Speaker 1: optimists or skeptics out there to take home concerning these
Speaker 1: two properties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question, rob because the point here
Speaker 2: is that whether you are into UFOs or not into UFOs,
Speaker 2: if you have if you want to think about life
Speaker 2: in the universe at all, you And that's why, you
Speaker 2: know why I lay out this history in the book
Speaker 2: in this short fun chapters. You know, it is literally
Speaker 2: a little book of aliens, because I wanted people and
Speaker 2: easy to have an easy way in and out. For this,
Speaker 2: you have to deal with the Fermi paradox and the
Speaker 2: Drake equation. So let's deal with Let's think about the
Speaker 2: Fermi paradox first. The Fermi paradox just asked the question
Speaker 2: if life is common, particularly intelligent life, then why aren't
Speaker 2: they everywhere? Right? And that can take two forms. One
Speaker 2: is why aren't they here now? Right? But FORMI recognize
Speaker 2: very quickly he's he kind of did the calculation in
Speaker 2: his head and saw that a spacefaring race, even if
Speaker 2: it's going at it can only go at a tenth
Speaker 2: of the speed of light, which we believe is the
Speaker 2: limit for any and nothing can travel faster than light.
Speaker 2: That you would cross the galaxy and you could hop
Speaker 2: from star system to star system in a time that's
Speaker 2: very short compared to the age of the galaxy. Long
Speaker 2: for us, it's on the order of six hundred thousand years.
Speaker 2: But in terms of the galaxy, the galaxy should be
Speaker 2: entirely populated. So one way of interpreting that is why
Speaker 2: aren't they here now? Right? And so there's various answers
Speaker 2: to that. But there's an indirect version of that, which
Speaker 2: is more important because people often have this feeling that, oh,
Speaker 2: every night, astronomers like take their telescopes and look at
Speaker 2: the sky searching for evidence of alien intelligences, right, and
Speaker 2: nothing could be further from the truth. Right. That's a
Speaker 2: version what I call that the indirect Fermi paradoxes. Well,
Speaker 2: We've looked and we haven't found But as I've said,
Speaker 2: because of the giggle factor, we haven't looked, right, We
Speaker 2: just we have not done those searches. There's never been
Speaker 2: any money funding to use telescopes to do that. So
Speaker 2: Jason Wright and colleagues did a study where they showed
Speaker 2: that if the sky was like the ocean, how much
Speaker 2: of the ocean have we searched and you know, and
Speaker 2: aliens were fish, how much of the ocean have we
Speaker 2: searched for? And answer is a hot tub? Right, that's
Speaker 2: how all you take all the steady searches and you
Speaker 2: combine them, and we've basically looked at a hot tubs
Speaker 2: worth of ocean. Now, if you looked at a hot
Speaker 2: tubs worth of water and didn't find any fish, would
Speaker 2: you then say, up, there's no fish in the ocean.
Speaker 2: So the answer is we just haven't looked. But we
Speaker 2: are looking now, Like finally there's funding, right, Finally there's
Speaker 2: there's a community of scientists with the backing of you know,
Speaker 2: the government science agencies to really start this search for life.
Speaker 2: Whether it's whether it's again dumb life or smart life,
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter. We're finally we finally know where to look.
Speaker 2: We finally know how to look, and we're looking. So
Speaker 2: that's the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation. What's important about
Speaker 2: it was in nineteen sixty after doing this his first search,
Speaker 2: he was asked by the Government of all People to
Speaker 2: lead a workshop on interstellar communications. And so they brought
Speaker 2: together a few people, the eight or nine researchers. And
Speaker 2: what Drake needed to do he needed an agenda for
Speaker 2: the meeting, like what do we even talk about? And
Speaker 2: what he did is he took the problem the question
Speaker 2: is how many intelligence civilizations are there in the galaxy?
Speaker 2: And he broke it up into seven sub problems, which
Speaker 2: when you multiplied their answer together, you'd get the answer
Speaker 2: to the big question. And it turned out that those
Speaker 2: sub problems became so famous because he offered people a
Speaker 2: way of breaking this big problem up into smaller problems
Speaker 2: that you could actually do research on. For example, the
Speaker 2: first sub problem is how many stars are there? Right,
Speaker 2: that's the first thing you want to know, and we
Speaker 2: already he already knew that, right. The second sub problem
Speaker 2: was how many planets are there? Or what's the fraction
Speaker 2: of stars with planets at the time, nobody knew what
Speaker 2: that was. It could have been that the universe was barren.
Speaker 2: You know, that our solar system was a freak and
Speaker 2: most stars don't have planets. And now we've answered that
Speaker 2: question thanks to the Drake equation, and people said, like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's the next question we need to answer. We now
Speaker 2: know that every star in the sky hosts a family
Speaker 2: of worlds. That is that's one of the that happened
Speaker 2: in the nineties, the beginning of the nineties, and that
Speaker 2: was the beginning of this change. Right. That was a
Speaker 2: massive revolution in astrobiology because it told us that the
Speaker 2: place where life forms, which is planets, those are common,
Speaker 2: those are as cheap as dirt. And then the next
Speaker 2: term in the Drake equation was for every star that
Speaker 2: has planets, how many planets are in the right place
Speaker 2: for life to form, which we think has to do
Speaker 2: with liquid water on the surface. What's the what's the
Speaker 2: you know, how many are in this this Goldilocks ban
Speaker 2: of orbits where it's not too hot, not too cold,
Speaker 2: so you can have liquid water on the surface. And
Speaker 2: the answer for that is one in five. So go
Speaker 2: outside tonight, look up at the night sky. Every star
Speaker 2: you see has has worlds orbiting it, and every five
Speaker 2: of those has a planet that's sitting there where the
Speaker 2: experiment with life and civilizations even is being run by
Speaker 2: the universe.
Speaker 1: So getting into what we're looking for, I thought, we
Speaker 1: thought we might ask about techno signatures and biosignatures in
Speaker 1: what In twenty nineteen you became principal investigator on NASA's
Speaker 1: first grant to study techno signatures. So what are they
Speaker 1: and how are we looking for them? And what have
Speaker 1: we found?
Speaker 2: Yes, So the amazing thing about these revolutions, so the
Speaker 2: exoplanet revolution, as I call it, and started in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety five when we discovered our first planet. By within
Speaker 2: another ten or twenty years or so, we had figured
Speaker 2: out how to look into the atmospheres of those planets.
Speaker 2: And what happens is, you know, we detect planets as
Speaker 2: they when they orbit in front of their star. It's
Speaker 2: like a little tiny eclipse. The planet passes in front
Speaker 2: of the star and blocks the light. But if the
Speaker 2: planet has an atmosphere, there's a little while when the
Speaker 2: light from the star passes through the atmosphere and reaches us.
Speaker 2: And when that happens, it leaves an imprint. There's some
Speaker 2: of the light is absorbed by chemicals, compounds, molecules in
Speaker 2: the atmosphere, and we can use that. Every one of
Speaker 2: those imprints is like a fingerprint of what's in that atmosphere.
Speaker 2: So we call that atmospheric characterization. And so what's in
Speaker 2: that imprint it potentially are signatures of things like a biosphere. Right,
Speaker 2: so the Earth has a biosphere. It's the sum total
Speaker 2: of all the life on the planet, all the plants,
Speaker 2: all the planktin. It leaves a giant imprint in the
Speaker 2: light from Earth, and the same thing can happen in
Speaker 2: an alien world. So a biosignature would be something like
Speaker 2: oxygen right on Earth. The only reason oxygen is in
Speaker 2: the atmosphere is because life puts it there. If life
Speaker 2: goes away, the oxygen goes away very quickly. So if
Speaker 2: you discover oxygen on a in an alien world, that's
Speaker 2: a good shot that that planet has life a robust biosphere.
Speaker 2: So oxygen dimethyl sulfide, that is a chemical which is
Speaker 2: in Earth's atmosphere. It's only there because all the plankton
Speaker 2: are kind of farting it out there. So we have
Speaker 2: a whole long list and that we're we're generating more
Speaker 2: and more lists of biosignatures which if we detect them,
Speaker 2: that will be and that will be evidence that there's
Speaker 2: life on that planet. Techno signatures this is this is
Speaker 2: a newer field. And as you say, I'm the principal
Speaker 2: investigator on the first time NASA was willing to fund
Speaker 2: the search for intelligent life. Last NASA been funding the
Speaker 2: search for dumb life for a while, but because of
Speaker 2: that giggle factor, techno signatures or you know, intelligent life
Speaker 2: was not on the list. Now it is. So the
Speaker 2: group I'm part of we are looking for we're designing,
Speaker 2: we're coming up with the list of possible techno signatures.
Speaker 2: So one, what are they? One, we just wrote a
Speaker 2: paper on this. Chemicals, industrial chemicals, So for example, chlorofluorocarbons
Speaker 2: or CFCs. These are the things that you know, we
Speaker 2: were using in air conditioners that got pumped into the
Speaker 2: atmosphere and we're destroying the ozone hole, right. Those things actually,
Speaker 2: so either by pollution or if you were trying to
Speaker 2: terraform mars, you would purposely pump them into an atmosphere
Speaker 2: because they're great greenhouse gases. Actually, so we showed that
Speaker 2: even with the James Web Space Telescope, you could detect
Speaker 2: chloroflora carbons in the atmosphere of a world that was
Speaker 2: forty light years away and if it had levels close
Speaker 2: to our level even now. So those that's if we
Speaker 2: and chloroflora carbons cannot be there is just no way
Speaker 2: nature produces them. They're too complex and weird. Or so
Speaker 2: discover those you've discovered there's a technological civilization there on
Speaker 2: that planet. If you discovered those in a planet's atmosphere,
Speaker 2: city lights, if you know, if a civilization is using
Speaker 2: artificial illumination, we may be able to detect the spectral signature,
Speaker 2: the signature in light of those cities. The large scale
Speaker 2: use of solar panels, you would be able to see
Speaker 2: the reflectants, all that light bouncing off the solar panels,
Speaker 2: you'd be able to see. And the list goes on
Speaker 2: and on. We may be able to detect if you
Speaker 2: have a lot of satellites in orbit, in geosynchronous orbit,
Speaker 2: you might be able to detect They call that the
Speaker 2: Clark Belt after Arthur C. Clark. You might be able
Speaker 2: to detect that. So you know, the list goes on
Speaker 2: and these we're figuring out now exactly how to look
Speaker 2: for those, so once people start doing these observations, they'll
Speaker 2: be able to they'll be able to know exactly where
Speaker 2: to look. So it's amazing we actually have the technology
Speaker 2: now so that over the next ten years, twenty years,
Speaker 2: thirty years, we're going to have actual data relevant to
Speaker 2: the question, whereas the last two than five hundred years
Speaker 2: have been people yelling at each other or burning each
Speaker 2: other at the stake.
Speaker 1: It's I think it's fascinating that with the techno signatures,
Speaker 1: you're talking about things that have a lot more nuance
Speaker 1: to them, I guess arguably compared to what might pop
Speaker 1: into a lot of sci fi viewers' heads, not being
Speaker 1: something like a Dyson sphere or a diceent cloud something
Speaker 1: they've seen on Star Trek.
Speaker 2: And so right, yeah, you know, the Dyson sphere is
Speaker 2: still ongoing though there's still people looking for, you know,
Speaker 2: alien mega structures. Who doesn't love saying alien megastructure. That's
Speaker 2: still an ongoing concern. And you know, with one of
Speaker 2: the important pieces of the history that I talk about
Speaker 2: in the book is boujoyan star or Tabby Star people
Speaker 2: called him, and this was a. This was a star
Speaker 2: we were looking at with you know, the Kepler space telescope,
Speaker 2: which is a planet finder, and rather than the sort
Speaker 2: of smooth the clips that we expect when a planet
Speaker 2: passes in front of the star, what they were seeing
Speaker 2: signals of like they couldn't understand it. It was like
Speaker 2: the light from the star was blotting out and then
Speaker 2: coming back and then blotting out again, blotting, blotting, not thing.
Speaker 2: And for you know, so when people were thinking about this,
Speaker 2: they made their list of possible you know what this
Speaker 2: was comets, clouds of dust, broken up planets, and at
Speaker 2: the bottom list was alien megastructures. And that was twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen. That blew the doors off of the old
Speaker 2: The fact that they even mentioned this in the paper
Speaker 2: and that everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay, it could
Speaker 2: be kind of signaled that, you know, if you're doing
Speaker 2: this work, you can't laugh, you can't giggle about that
Speaker 2: possibility anymore. If you're going to stare at hundreds thousands
Speaker 2: of planets and you know, look for biosignatures, you can't
Speaker 2: ignore the possibility of that some of these are going
Speaker 2: to have techno signatures. So that was really that was
Speaker 2: an art an apocryphal moment in this study where people
Speaker 2: were finally, you know, the giggle factor had was gone,
Speaker 2: and it's like, yeah, sure, okay, that's one of the
Speaker 2: things we have to consider. It's probably last on the
Speaker 2: list because you want to consider things you already know exist,
Speaker 2: but it's there, and then you know, at some point
Speaker 2: we may have a planet where you really are going
Speaker 2: to take that seriously.
Speaker 1: Now, I of course have to to ask you about
Speaker 1: the various alleged UFO evidence and the recent congressional hearings
Speaker 1: on UFOs or UAPs. Do you feel like this had
Speaker 1: an impact on like the average person's interest in or
Speaker 1: willingness to, you know, give credence to UFO reports or
Speaker 1: to give credence to the possibility of alien life. And
Speaker 1: how should we logically consider the current state of UFO
Speaker 1: UAP evidence or lack thereof.
Speaker 2: Yes. So that's the reason why about a third of
Speaker 2: the book is about UFOs and UAPs, because I really
Speaker 2: wanted people to understand how science sees them, how scientists
Speaker 2: see them. Because, of course, as you say, because of
Speaker 2: pop culture, right, the UFOs have they they you know,
Speaker 2: the alien invasion happened in the fifties and they won.
Speaker 2: They live in our heads, you know, in many ways.
Speaker 2: For me, the prevalence of UAPs and UFOs now is
Speaker 2: actually because of what's been happening with the science right
Speaker 2: since the nineteen nineties. Every week there's a new story
Speaker 2: earth like planet found orbiting other stars. The fact that
Speaker 2: scientists have been so clearly been willing to take the
Speaker 2: search for life seriously on alien worlds, I think helped
Speaker 2: in some way smooth the ground for this, you know,
Speaker 2: explosion of interest in UAPs and the whole I document
Speaker 2: both the history of you know, UAP or UFOs going
Speaker 2: back to nineteen forty seven, the first the first sighting,
Speaker 2: and people really need to know that because that shapes
Speaker 2: a lot of UFO culture to what's happening now. With
Speaker 2: that twenty seventeen New York Times article, right, that's what
Speaker 2: blew everything out of the water, with those three videos
Speaker 2: which have been you know, cycle endlessly over and over again,
Speaker 2: and people sort of think there's lots of videos, there's
Speaker 2: really only those three. But the important thing is, I
Speaker 2: think that for people to understand where we're at right
Speaker 2: and where we're going, and that's what I try and
Speaker 2: give people in the book. So the first thing is
Speaker 2: that absolutely, for a scientists, there is no evidence, not
Speaker 2: even close, that would link anything about UFOs or UAPs
Speaker 2: to alien life to something non human. Right, and you
Speaker 2: actually and that's why I wanted people to you know,
Speaker 2: if you actually look even what has happened since twenty seventeen,
Speaker 2: that this that conclusion holds. You know, scientists are brutal.
Speaker 2: We're really really mean to each other. You know about
Speaker 2: like trying to link a piece of data to a claim, right,
Speaker 2: and where we are brutal and nasty to each other,
Speaker 2: because that is how we can ensure that we're correct.
Speaker 2: If we weren't brutal and nasty to each other, you
Speaker 2: and I wouldn't be using these amazing technologies, right, you know,
Speaker 2: quantum mechanics, electronics, you know, electromagnetism, all the technology, all
Speaker 2: the science that goes into the technology you and I
Speaker 2: are using right now was because scientists are so mean
Speaker 2: to each other. And the day for UFOs and UAPs
Speaker 2: just isn't even close to that. It's either blurry photographs,
Speaker 2: which haven't changed over seventy years, right, I mean, there's
Speaker 2: still blurry photographs come on or personal testimony and personal testimony,
Speaker 2: it's it's not much science can do with that. So
Speaker 2: I think it's great that the pilots feel that they
Speaker 2: you know, pilots have the freedom to report what they're
Speaker 2: seeing because you know, they are seeing something. The question
Speaker 2: is what are they seeing? So like Ryan Graves, you know,
Speaker 2: he's one of the pilots who's involved with this, and
Speaker 2: I was on his podcast. You know, I've had some
Speaker 2: really great conversations. So that's great, And I'm all for
Speaker 2: an open, transparent, you know, investigation by like they'd say,
Speaker 2: the NASA panel or Project Galileo. It's for to investigate this,
Speaker 2: right and let's just let's go where the data leads us.
Speaker 2: But as of right now, that data does not lead
Speaker 2: us anywhere that would point to extraterrestrial So, for example,
Speaker 2: at the nat so, the NASA panel held a hearing
Speaker 2: and you know, they were talking about their results and
Speaker 2: the result of some of the other agencies, and you know,
Speaker 2: one of the things that was talked about there was,
Speaker 2: you know, of the of the thousand or eight hundred
Speaker 2: or so sightings, including those you know from the military
Speaker 2: that the government has and announced in that famous report
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one, only six percent couldn't be explained right,
Speaker 2: only six percent right, which means that the sky the
Speaker 2: other ninety four percent had reasonable explanations. The sky is
Speaker 2: not full of unexplainable stuff, which you know, the hype
Speaker 2: around UFOs and UAPs makes it seem like, oh my god.
Speaker 2: And then even that six percent, you know, some of
Speaker 2: those are unexplained because you don't even have you can't
Speaker 2: even begin to make an explanation. Now. I will note, though,
Speaker 2: and I talk about this in the book, that some
Speaker 2: of the ones in the unexplained category are truly when
Speaker 2: you hear the stories, you know are truly freaky deeky
Speaker 2: right in the sense like a ghost story, it raises
Speaker 2: the hair on the back of your neck. But until
Speaker 2: you do the research, you know those ones are probably
Speaker 2: we'll see, we'll just see where those go. But the
Speaker 2: is the vast overwhelming majority are either explainable or don't
Speaker 2: have enough data to explain, with a tiny minority that
Speaker 2: are like, wow, okay, that's interesting and then we're just
Speaker 2: going to have to do the rea. But again, that's
Speaker 2: so even with that category, that's not a place that
Speaker 2: you're or that's not enough to be make this jump
Speaker 2: to this enormous conclusion that that that aliens are visiting
Speaker 2: us because you know, again, you need this very solid
Speaker 2: data chain, not just personal testimony, not that somebody said, oh,
Speaker 2: the radar operator said it was moving at this speed.
Speaker 2: I need to see the instrument. I need to know
Speaker 2: how that instrument was built. I need to know every
Speaker 2: just like I would with the James Webspace telescope.
Speaker 1: So how well prepared are we culturally and or institutionally
Speaker 1: to either you know, have that glimpse of of of
Speaker 1: some distant world where there's a strong possibility that what
Speaker 1: we're looking at is you know, anything ranging from a
Speaker 1: techno signature that we can put stock in, or some
Speaker 1: sort of a megastructure, or even on the other end
Speaker 1: of the spectrum, like actual first contact. Like how prepared
Speaker 1: are we for those possibilities.
Speaker 2: I believe that it will be the most profound discovery
Speaker 2: in human history. It will it will reshape our understanding.
Speaker 2: And again, I don't care if we even if we
Speaker 2: find dumb life, even if we detect a planet and
Speaker 2: you know, through its study, find that it's got a
Speaker 2: biosphere that is equally it doesn't have to be a civilization, right,
Speaker 2: And the reason for that is life is so bizarre
Speaker 2: compared to every other physical system. So I'm involved. I
Speaker 2: have a part of a project from actually the PI
Speaker 2: on this other study where we're also just looking at
Speaker 2: the physics of life. We're trying to answer why is
Speaker 2: life so different from every other physical system? Right? So
Speaker 2: for example, you know, black holes are weird, black holes
Speaker 2: are crazy, right, But a black hole will never invent
Speaker 2: a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face,
Speaker 2: which is a kangaroo. Right. Only evolution does that. Life
Speaker 2: is the only physical system which invents, which creates, which innovates,
Speaker 2: And right now, as far as we know, we're the
Speaker 2: only example of life in the entire universe. Like, you know,
Speaker 2: are we a one off? Are we an accident? Are
Speaker 2: we a mistake? Or is life with all of its
Speaker 2: creative capacity common? Because even if it's just life, even
Speaker 2: if it's just microbes, it means that we're part of
Speaker 2: a community, a cosmic community of life. And because of
Speaker 2: life's innovative capacities, who knows, you know, if it's if
Speaker 2: life is common, who knows where it's gone. I don't
Speaker 2: need to find an alien civilization. I just need to
Speaker 2: find a microbe because then I know that evolution is
Speaker 2: something that the universe does more than just here, and
Speaker 2: evolution is unbounded. Evolution can do anything. So I don't
Speaker 2: think we would have riots in the street, you know,
Speaker 2: I don't think that's going to be necessary. But I
Speaker 2: do think you know, if people want an example, the
Speaker 2: Copernican Revolution, right, you know, in fortune hundred, you went
Speaker 2: to bed and you were like, oh, the sun's going
Speaker 2: to rise tomorrow because the Earth is the center of
Speaker 2: the universe and the sun goes around the Earth. And
Speaker 2: then two hundred years later you went to bed and
Speaker 2: you're like, oh, the sun doesn't come up. The horizon
Speaker 2: goes down because the Earth is spinning as it goes
Speaker 2: around the Sun. And that was just an astronomical discovery.
Speaker 2: And yet the Copernican Revolution figures in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment,
Speaker 2: the Protestant Reformation. It was, you know, it was a
Speaker 2: game changer. It actually rewired how all of humanity understood
Speaker 2: itself and what was possible. So you know, these astronomical
Speaker 2: discoveries don't just sit out there in some egghead's brain.
Speaker 2: You know, they matter, and they always have mattered. So
Speaker 2: finding life in the universe one way or the other
Speaker 2: would change everything. Finding a civilization would that Now that outright,
Speaker 2: that takes us even further. And I think the most
Speaker 2: important thing there is, you know, we are so horrible
Speaker 2: to each other. We're such a messed up species. And
Speaker 2: though we're capable of so much, and it's not clear
Speaker 2: whether or not, through nuclear war, climate change, or AI,
Speaker 2: whether we're going to still be around in one hundred
Speaker 2: years or five hundred years. Finding a civilization, as I
Speaker 2: discussed in the book, because we did research on this,
Speaker 2: would mean we would Finding a civilization means finding an
Speaker 2: older civilization. That's what the probability tells you. Anything you
Speaker 2: find will be older, and that means somebody made it right.
Speaker 2: It would be It would be like an existence proof
Speaker 2: that long lived civilizations are possible, and without we don't
Speaker 2: have to have contact with them, we don't have to
Speaker 2: talk to them. Just knowing they were there would be
Speaker 2: proof that, yeah, you know what, it's possible to get
Speaker 2: through all of that evolutionary baggage and you know, make
Speaker 2: it last for a long time.
Speaker 1: That's a wonderful way of looking at it. I don't
Speaker 1: think I quite thought about that spin on it before. Now,
Speaker 1: another thing you talk about in the book I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask you about here is getting beyond sort of
Speaker 1: the mirror image idea of what alien life consists of.
Speaker 1: You know, it could be because as everyone always discusses,
Speaker 1: like life on Earth and our model of intelligent life
Speaker 1: is the only model we have when considering what might
Speaker 1: be out there. But what else is possible?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the most fun parts of the book for me
Speaker 2: were the last you know, third or so, where I
Speaker 2: started asking, you know, using what we understand with the
Speaker 2: science we have, what might aliens look like and what
Speaker 2: might they be like? So the first part of that
Speaker 2: is understanding how evolution works. Right, So we know the
Speaker 2: laws of physics and chemistry are universal, they're going to
Speaker 2: occur anywhere, and we also Darwinian evolution is really a logic.
Speaker 2: It's a logic that anything we'd want to call alive
Speaker 2: probably has to follow. So that means you can use
Speaker 2: those as kind of guide rails. You know, remember when
Speaker 2: you were bowling when you were a little kid and
Speaker 2: had those bumper rails that kept your ball. That's what
Speaker 2: science is, right, Science is constrained imagination. You want to
Speaker 2: use your imagination, but you also don't want to just
Speaker 2: write science fiction story, so you can use those three
Speaker 2: principles physics, chemistry and Darwinian evolution. And the cool thing
Speaker 2: about that is is you see an evolution there are
Speaker 2: two forces. There's convergence. Physics and chemistry is going to
Speaker 2: give life problems. How do you move around? How do
Speaker 2: you find food? You know? Are you on a are
Speaker 2: you in a water world? Are you you know? Are
Speaker 2: you in a world that has a surface and then
Speaker 2: an atmosphere. Evolution will probably find the same kinds of
Speaker 2: solutions to those problems, like, for example, wings right. If
Speaker 2: you have an atmosphere, then you know, passing air over
Speaker 2: a curved surface great way to get around, right wings.
Speaker 2: But it doesn't mean the wings look will look anything
Speaker 2: like what has happened here. Could be like some kind
Speaker 2: of weird bony frame with like mucus, a gooey mucus,
Speaker 2: you know, in between them. That was just something I
Speaker 2: have to think of some ideas. So, but evolution also
Speaker 2: works by accidents, like a trillion accidents. So this battle
Speaker 2: between accidents and sort of the the you know physics
Speaker 2: and chemistry means that you know, legs well, you should
Speaker 2: expect to find legs being you know, evolved in lots
Speaker 2: of plays, but don't expect them to look anything like
Speaker 2: what we have here. And in fact, accidents are so
Speaker 2: important that Stephen J. Gould, the great evolutionary biologist, said
Speaker 2: that if you rewind the tape of life on Earth
Speaker 2: and allowed it to start over again, you wouldn't have
Speaker 2: any species of the kind that we have today. Everything
Speaker 2: would be different. And this leads to a startling conclusion,
Speaker 2: which is that in spite of Star Trek and in
Speaker 2: spite of Star Wars, we are the only humans in
Speaker 2: the entire universe. We are the only humanoids in the
Speaker 2: entire universe. So we should not expect to find, you know,
Speaker 2: little grays, little green men. You know, the idea of
Speaker 2: a head on top of shoulders, with two arms and
Speaker 2: two legs, you know, maybe with an antenna on the forehead.
Speaker 2: You know, I talk about the whole idea of prosthetic foreheads,
Speaker 2: in the prevalence of prosthetic foreheads in sci fi. That's
Speaker 2: just not going to happen, you know, the odds are
Speaker 2: you know, it's pretty remote. So when we think about
Speaker 2: life in the universe, we should expect to be surprised,
Speaker 2: and we might also expect to be grossed out by
Speaker 2: what we find. So that's the first point, and then
Speaker 2: we can talk about alien ethics and alien minds. There's
Speaker 2: always this idea that, oh, you know, we're gonna be
Speaker 2: able to figure out a way to communicate because they'll,
Speaker 2: you know, like Carl Sagan thought, oh well, we'll teach
Speaker 2: them our math and then we'll translate our math to
Speaker 2: their math, and that will be the beginning, you know.
Speaker 2: And then very soon after you know, figuring out that
Speaker 2: pie you know is involved with circles, we'll be sharing
Speaker 2: knock knock jokes and cures for cancer. But that may
Speaker 2: not be possible at all. And my favor one of
Speaker 2: my favorite science fiction movies is a Rival, right with
Speaker 2: that great you know, they send in aliens arrived, They
Speaker 2: send in a Carl Sagan kind of character and a linguist,
Speaker 2: and the Carl Sagan character, with his you know, using
Speaker 2: math to communicate fails spectacularly. And it's the linguist who
Speaker 2: understands that language is not about mathematics. It's about the
Speaker 2: experience of being in a body and living, and she
Speaker 2: makes contact to find out that they actually have a
Speaker 2: very different kind of physics even they live or experience
Speaker 2: of physics. They live past, present and future at the
Speaker 2: same time. So I think, you know, the beautiful part
Speaker 2: about this study, the scientific study, is how we can
Speaker 2: use science to systematically explore or imagine the unimaginable. Right O.
Speaker 2: What we have to do now is get beyond the
Speaker 2: terrestrial and imagine life as we don't know it. And
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of different projects by different people. You know,
Speaker 2: we're trying to do this in our own project, but
Speaker 2: to really break past the boundaries of Earth life. And
Speaker 2: that's really exciting because you know, it's great to go
Speaker 2: places where you know, you want to be surprised. The
Speaker 2: universe is much more imaginative than we are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And of course I can't help but think of
Speaker 1: various sci fi visions we've had they try and get
Speaker 1: into this, like the differences and in what a potential
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial civilization could want compared to us. And I guess
Speaker 1: like this more basic, sort of Twilight Zone era version
Speaker 1: of this is like, well, we we want to explore
Speaker 1: and they want to eat us, right, But you know, the.
Speaker 2: More a cookbook that's a Cookbook's episode. Ever, it's still
Speaker 2: a waterful episode.
Speaker 1: But then you have all these other, you know, visions
Speaker 1: I instantly think of, like Iimbanks's culture novels. We're listening
Speaker 1: to the idea of, like it, very advanced civilizations just
Speaker 1: ending up with fundamentally different goals and ambitions to the
Speaker 1: point where they just like sort of blink out of
Speaker 1: existence and so forth. And yeah, it's I feel like
Speaker 1: those kind of examples kind of help us expand our
Speaker 1: horizon on imagining what aliens could want. And then also
Speaker 1: of course just sort of brings us to a limit
Speaker 1: and realize, oh, there are all these other things we
Speaker 1: can't even imagine.
Speaker 2: Right right, And then but that's what's cool is we
Speaker 2: have to then sort of try to imagine them. We
Speaker 2: have to figure out how to work our way like
Speaker 2: because the first so then what that means is and
Speaker 2: this was the fun part of exploring this in the
Speaker 2: book and people hopefully you know, will take this journey
Speaker 2: along with us, is you have to sort of the
Speaker 2: first thing you do is figure out, Okay, where am
Speaker 2: I blinded? Right? So the first job is to say,
Speaker 2: what are the constraints that I've been operating my where
Speaker 2: are my biases? What have I what have I been
Speaker 2: blinding myself to identify those, and then you can see like,
Speaker 2: oh oh, I got to go around those, you know,
Speaker 2: and begin to work on that. So, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: the science fiction writers. I've always wanted to have a
Speaker 2: meeting between scientists and science fiction writers because I, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm a I read a lot of science fiction, and
Speaker 2: I find often a lot of my best ideas that
Speaker 2: I want to pursue in research come from you know,
Speaker 2: science fiction writers as storytellers have a kind of imaginative
Speaker 2: capacity that I think we lack in science because of
Speaker 2: these biases that we've put on for ourselves. And so
Speaker 2: but then they're systematically doing it right in the sense
Speaker 2: that they have to write a story that has, you know,
Speaker 2: challenges and obstacles, et cetera. So I think that could
Speaker 2: be really fruitful. And that's part of this frontier that
Speaker 2: we're on. We're going to look for life, and as
Speaker 2: we look for life, we have to look for things
Speaker 2: that are not just replicas of life here on Earth.
Speaker 1: Adam, thanks for coming on the show. This is this
Speaker 1: has been a treat. This is a great way to
Speaker 1: start my Wednesday morning. Here November first, the book, The
Speaker 1: Little Book of Aliens is available in all formats. I
Speaker 1: think it's going to be a great stocking stuff for,
Speaker 1: if you will, for anybody on the spectrum of interest in,
Speaker 1: or skepticism about, or enthusiasm for alien life.
Speaker 2: Thanks Rob, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for
Speaker 2: having me on.
Speaker 1: Thanks once more to Adam Frank for coming on the
Speaker 1: show again. The book is The Little Book of Aliens,
Speaker 1: available now in all formats. You can read more about
Speaker 1: his work at adamfrankscience dot com and his Facebook author's
Speaker 1: page is Adam Frank Author. Thanks as always to the
Speaker 1: excellent JJ Possway for producing the show. A reminder that
Speaker 1: we are a science podcast here at Septa Bow your
Speaker 1: Mind with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays
Speaker 1: we do listener mail, on Wednesdays we do a short
Speaker 1: form Artifa Monster Fact episode, and on Fridays we set
Speaker 1: aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
Speaker 1: film on Weird House Cinema. And yes, we have been
Speaker 1: meaning to discuss Forbidden Planned and maybe this islander for
Speaker 1: some time, so I don't know, Maybe this conversation will
Speaker 1: encourage us to go ahead and view one of those selections.
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