Speaker 1: Hi, it's Jorge and Daniel here. And this holiday season,
Speaker 1: if you're looking for a gift for yourself, for a friend,
Speaker 1: or for your your family, why not get him the
Speaker 1: gift of Answers about the Universe. So check out our
Speaker 1: new book Frequently Ask Questions about the Universe. You can
Speaker 1: find details at universe f a q dot com. Thanks
Speaker 1: for supporting the podcast. Happy holidays everyone. How much have
Speaker 1: you thought about what it might be like to talk
Speaker 1: to aliens? While biologists wonder about what form alien life
Speaker 1: might take, linguists speculate about how we might communicate with them,
Speaker 1: and conspiracy theorists wonder whether aliens have already visited Earth
Speaker 1: and taken over our government. Physicists have long expressed confidence
Speaker 1: that they could most easily find common ground with aliens,
Speaker 1: assuming that math and physics are universal, not specific to
Speaker 1: Earth biology. Even more than that, physicists practically salivate at
Speaker 1: the prospect of learning from aliens answers to big questions
Speaker 1: in physics, how to bend space and time, or crack
Speaker 1: open black holes and play elaborate pranks on Navy pilots.
Speaker 1: But what would it actually be like to try to
Speaker 1: learn physics from aliens. Could we even understand the cosmic
Speaker 1: secrets they might share with us? Would they be so
Speaker 1: advanced it would be like Schrodinger explaining quantum mechanics to
Speaker 1: its cat. Do we actually share math and physics with
Speaker 1: every intelligent civilization out there? Or would their minds be
Speaker 1: so alien it would just be impossible. Hi, I'm Daniel.
Speaker 1: I'm a particle physicist, and I can't wait to talk
Speaker 1: to the aliens and learn the secrets of the universe.
Speaker 1: There are so many things we don't understand about the universe,
Speaker 1: and if aliens visit it or managed to send us
Speaker 1: a message, it seems likely that they might have been
Speaker 1: working on these questions for thousands or millions, or even
Speaker 1: billions of years. Imagine catapulting our understanding that far forward.
Speaker 1: We might learn about how quantum mechanics really works, or
Speaker 1: what's inside a black hole, or how the universe actually began.
Speaker 1: But is that making a basic mistake? Assuming the humans
Speaker 1: and aliens might think about science in the same way,
Speaker 1: how could we possibly anticipate what aliens might know, or
Speaker 1: think about or wonder at so Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge explain the universe of production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Media, in which we dive deep into all these
Speaker 1: questions about the universe. We asked the biggest, the deepest,
Speaker 1: the craziest questions, and we strain for answers, explaining to
Speaker 1: you everything we understand and everything that we don't. My
Speaker 1: friend and co host Jorge is on a break, but
Speaker 1: I have a special treat for you today. We are
Speaker 1: very lucky to have as a guest one of the
Speaker 1: leading scholars in the field of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Speaker 1: Today we'll be talking to Jill Tarter, astronomer and longtime
Speaker 1: chair of the SETI program, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence,
Speaker 1: and so today on the program, we'll be asking the
Speaker 1: question how should we be searching for extra terrestrial life?
Speaker 1: So it's my great pleasure to introduce Dr Jill Tarter.
Speaker 1: She's very well known for leading the SETI program for
Speaker 1: many years and is also famous for introducing the phrase
Speaker 1: brown dwarf in her pH d thesis, which she completed
Speaker 1: at Berkeley nine. But she's also been a leading voice
Speaker 1: in the search for extra terrestrial life and intelligence for
Speaker 1: more than three decades and has won many awards, including
Speaker 1: the Carl Sagan Prize for Science popularization and being elected
Speaker 1: to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr Tarter,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining us, Thank
Speaker 1: you for having me. Daniel. So, I actually dug into
Speaker 1: your thesis a little bit and I thought it was
Speaker 1: quite fascinating. But it's well. I actually also got my
Speaker 1: PhD from Berkeley the several years later, and I was
Speaker 1: curious reading through it. It's not obvious the direction of
Speaker 1: your career would take. So how did you get into
Speaker 1: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? Like what set you on
Speaker 1: that course? Well, it all had to do with Berkeley
Speaker 1: and graduate school and it was a big accident. So
Speaker 1: my first year at Berkeley, I was supported on our
Speaker 1: research assistant ship to program the first computer that we
Speaker 1: ever had on our desktop. So it was a PDP
Speaker 1: eight slash s now took two people to get it
Speaker 1: on the desktop, so it wasn't that small. But the
Speaker 1: other thing about it was that it had no language,
Speaker 1: so you had to program the whole thing in often
Speaker 1: for every instruction you wanted it to do, you had
Speaker 1: to set all the ones in zeros. Kind of a
Speaker 1: pretty arcane skill, but I found it interesting and fun,
Speaker 1: so I did that for a year, and then I
Speaker 1: went on to other things. Finally, many years later, when
Speaker 1: I was about to finish my PhD and go off
Speaker 1: to a post dog, Stu Bowyer, an X ray astronomer,
Speaker 1: had a really clever idea. He'd been reading the material
Speaker 1: that had been put out by NASA aims on the
Speaker 1: search for life beyond Earth, and he said, you know,
Speaker 1: UC Berkeley has a radio telescope in northern California, and
Speaker 1: he was clever enough to know that with a radio
Speaker 1: telescope you can make essentially a noiseless copy of the
Speaker 1: voltage coming out of the telescope, and then on your
Speaker 1: copy you could process it looking for engineered signals while
Speaker 1: the astronomers went ahead and did whatever they were going
Speaker 1: to do anyway, So very clever, this idea of observing commensally.
Speaker 1: But he had no money, so he went begging for
Speaker 1: pieces of equipment, and somebody gave him a hundred channel
Speaker 1: p AR auto car. Later, and somebody else gave him
Speaker 1: this old p d P A S computer. So somebody
Speaker 1: pointed out to Stu that I used to work on
Speaker 1: that computer, and he showed up in my office one
Speaker 1: afternoon with a copy of the cyclops report that had
Speaker 1: been done at NASA, Ames saying the way to find
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial intelligence was to build an array of six hundred
Speaker 1: meter telescopes. That never happened, but anyway, he gave me
Speaker 1: that as a recruiting tool, and I read it and
Speaker 1: I just got really hooked. Here I was with potentially
Speaker 1: the right skills, in the right place, at the right
Speaker 1: time to perhaps make a contribution to answering this age
Speaker 1: old question of are we alone? So I worked with
Speaker 1: the PDP eight s again and got a program with
Speaker 1: Stu up and running at that creek, and then, you know,
Speaker 1: as I said, I was hooked, and I've stayed hooked
Speaker 1: ever since. It amazes me how we sometimes see sciences
Speaker 1: as like linear, natural, obvious progression, but so much of
Speaker 1: it depends on random accidents. Who happens to talk to
Speaker 1: who and be inspired by what? And if you ran
Speaker 1: the Earth science a hundred times in, you know, with
Speaker 1: different initial conditions, you might get completely different trajectories of intellectually,
Speaker 1: like where we end up as a species. So you
Speaker 1: mentioned this, the device that wasn't built. What is SETI
Speaker 1: actually doing? What instruments are they using and operating and
Speaker 1: what are they actually listening for right now? Well, set
Speaker 1: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which is a misnomer because
Speaker 1: we don't know how to find intelligence, per say, we
Speaker 1: can't even define it um. What we're doing is trying
Speaker 1: to find evidence that somebody else is using some technology
Speaker 1: that we can discover over the vast distances between the stars.
Speaker 1: And so it started out as using radio telescopes to
Speaker 1: try and find engineered signals, and then over time we
Speaker 1: expanded it into optical searches and infrared searches, and now
Speaker 1: we are trying to do something that we've known that
Speaker 1: we should be doing for the past twenty years, but
Speaker 1: just haven't had the technology to do it, and that
Speaker 1: is to look for transient signals. And the trick there
Speaker 1: is you want to look at all the sky, all
Speaker 1: the time, and at as many frequencies as you possibly can.
Speaker 1: And so now we are finally able to build starting
Speaker 1: in the optical and then moving into the radio telescopes
Speaker 1: that look at tens of thousands of square degrees at
Speaker 1: a time, and in one case, if we can complete
Speaker 1: the instrumentation, all the sky all the time looking for
Speaker 1: these transient signals. So that's the exciting frontier for CET
Speaker 1: today to try and get this sky coverage. And the
Speaker 1: other exciting thing is to begin to look at the
Speaker 1: data in a different way. Historically, we have always looked
Speaker 1: at data and said, is there a signal of this
Speaker 1: description in the data, And we have defined the signals
Speaker 1: that we're interested in as being frequency compressed in the radio,
Speaker 1: or time compressed in the optical, or monochromatic lasers in
Speaker 1: the optical. But now we're beginning to see if we
Speaker 1: can use machine learning to help us find patterns of
Speaker 1: any kind in the data without having to pre describe
Speaker 1: what pattern we're looking for. So we're hoping that algorithms
Speaker 1: in the future will be able to look at data
Speaker 1: voltage is a function of time, intensity is a function
Speaker 1: of time and say there's information content here, or no,
Speaker 1: this is all noise. That's fascinating. If we need artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence to recognize alien intelligence, well that alien intelligence is
Speaker 1: quite likely to be artificial itself by machines, So maybe
Speaker 1: we need machines as interpreters. But still we need to
Speaker 1: somehow train that machine learning. We need to teach it
Speaker 1: the kind of things that we are looking for. We
Speaker 1: can't just we're not raising generic intelligence and say go
Speaker 1: out and find some aliens, right, doesn't there need to
Speaker 1: be some fought in advance for the kinds of things
Speaker 1: we're teaching our machine learning algorithms to find. Well, actually,
Speaker 1: the real problem is how do you get a null set?
Speaker 1: How do you give it data that you know has
Speaker 1: no information content. You know, when you have a data
Speaker 1: set and we've explored it for X, Y and Z,
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean that Q isn't there. So generally to
Speaker 1: get a null set you generated randomly on a computer,
Speaker 1: and then you can give it lots of examples of
Speaker 1: different signals that we have detected or that we generate
Speaker 1: ourselves as the counter. And again it's early days. We're
Speaker 1: very hopeful and we'll see what happens. Right. I suppose
Speaker 1: you can't just take the ABC from the sky and
Speaker 1: say assume there's nothing here, because the whole point is
Speaker 1: to look for data in the sky, so then it
Speaker 1: would learn to ignore signalities there. So you mentioned something fascinating,
Speaker 1: which is thinking about the messages that we would send
Speaker 1: or the ones that we have sent, and know that
Speaker 1: in the early days of space exploration, you know, for example,
Speaker 1: there's a Golden Record. We put on some of our probes,
Speaker 1: and there's a message we sent out via a Recibo.
Speaker 1: How do you look at those messages that we've sent
Speaker 1: sort of with modern eyes, How would you design a
Speaker 1: message to generic aliens now you hope would be observable
Speaker 1: and detectable to the broadest set of intelligence. Well, I
Speaker 1: do something that we haven't done with the Acibo message
Speaker 1: or any of the other messages that we've transmitted, and
Speaker 1: that is I would do it for ten thousand years,
Speaker 1: all right. If you send a finite transmission, then that
Speaker 1: message is going to go past your target in a
Speaker 1: finite amount of time, and the receivers would have to
Speaker 1: be looking at you at just the right time, in
Speaker 1: just the right way as your message flies past in
Speaker 1: order to detect it. And the probability of that is
Speaker 1: pretty small. So I think what you want to do
Speaker 1: is start transmitting and then don't stop right so that
Speaker 1: whenever an emerging technology wakes up and begins to explore
Speaker 1: its environment, your signal will be there for them to
Speaker 1: find when and if they develop the right technologies and
Speaker 1: the right strategy and are motivated to be looking. So
Speaker 1: that's I think what I would do. And the reason
Speaker 1: that I'm not at all enamored of efforts to transmit
Speaker 1: messages today because we're just not grown up enough to
Speaker 1: be able to culturally be able to manage such a
Speaker 1: long term project. It's like just shouting once in the
Speaker 1: night and hoping that somebody hears. You know, it's fascinating
Speaker 1: as our message sort of sweeps across the universe. It's
Speaker 1: always somewhere, but the chances that it happens to arrive
Speaker 1: when some he's listening do seem pretty small. Do you
Speaker 1: think that's something our civilization would ever be capable of
Speaker 1: sending messages for tens of thousands of years? Do you
Speaker 1: think our civilization will last long enough to be able
Speaker 1: to do that? I hope so. And in fact, one
Speaker 1: of the things that I think about is that suppose
Speaker 1: the distribution of lifetimes of technological civilizations or technologies, because
Speaker 1: that's what we're going to find is the technology is bimodal,
Speaker 1: So you have lots of short lived technologies. They emerge,
Speaker 1: develop an either turn themselves off or do themselves in.
Speaker 1: They don't have a very long lifetime when compared to
Speaker 1: the ten billion year history of the Milky Way, galaxy.
Speaker 1: But now there might be an addition, some very long
Speaker 1: lived civilizations, And it might be that the probability of
Speaker 1: transitioning from short lived technology to a long lived technology
Speaker 1: is dependent on discovering other technological civilizations that have made
Speaker 1: it to an old age. And I think that's one
Speaker 1: of the things that today motivates me to continue working
Speaker 1: on this project. How can we have a long future
Speaker 1: for life on this planet? And if so, how and
Speaker 1: that the answer to me is if anybody else has
Speaker 1: made it through, that means we can figure it out too.
Speaker 1: Are you suggesting that discovering a longstanding alien civilization might
Speaker 1: help us build a civilization that's long standing just knowing
Speaker 1: that it's possible. I think that's not unlikely or not impossible.
Speaker 1: If I know that there's a solution to a problem,
Speaker 1: even if I can't figure it out right now, I
Speaker 1: have more motivation to figure out the solution. I know
Speaker 1: it's possible, So how the heck am I going to
Speaker 1: solve it? That's very insporational. I hope that's true. In
Speaker 1: all of these searches were looking for signals, signals generated
Speaker 1: by technologies which in the end are somewhat similar to ours.
Speaker 1: And there seems to be an implicit assumption there that
Speaker 1: you know their information, their messages will be encoded in
Speaker 1: ways that are familiar to us, even if the actual
Speaker 1: code is alien. The fact that they are sending messages
Speaker 1: coded in electromagnetic radiation of some kind assumes that you
Speaker 1: know the civilization is mathematical or scientific. Do you think
Speaker 1: that it's possible for us to imagine aliens in a
Speaker 1: more broad sense, you know, to think about aliens that
Speaker 1: might not do math or might not have a scientific exploration,
Speaker 1: or do you think that we can only search for
Speaker 1: aliens that are sort of similar to us intellectually that
Speaker 1: we could ever communicate with them. Well, they're kind of
Speaker 1: two pieces to that question. One, we have a certain
Speaker 1: amount of technology in the twenty one century, and we
Speaker 1: understand a certain subset of physics, and those are the
Speaker 1: tools we have. We can't use tools that we don't have.
Speaker 1: We can't search for things that we don't yet understand.
Speaker 1: And in terms of another technology, we're actually trying to
Speaker 1: think more broadly than we originally did, So not just
Speaker 1: radio signals or not just optical signals, but something that
Speaker 1: we call a techno signature, something that is the result
Speaker 1: of someone doing something with technology out there. And it's
Speaker 1: particularly important to think about that now because we're moving
Speaker 1: from the generation of ten class optical instruments and a
Speaker 1: hundred elements in inferometers two thirty forty telescopes and interferometers
Speaker 1: like near Cat the square kilometer array that are going
Speaker 1: to have thousands of elements. So our ability to see
Speaker 1: things on the sky is going to improve dramatically, and
Speaker 1: we want to be thinking about, oh, what's that and
Speaker 1: how the what's that might be interpreted in terms of technology,
Speaker 1: So we're thinking about signals that are almost natural or
Speaker 1: things that are obviously engineered. And obviously engineered has been
Speaker 1: the piece that we've been doing us far. But when
Speaker 1: you begin to think about almost natural, you think about
Speaker 1: maybe a pulsar, right, which has a period it's very constant,
Speaker 1: and then it changes its period. Now we've seen that
Speaker 1: in the data because there are star quakes on these
Speaker 1: neutron stars have changed the moment of inertia and change
Speaker 1: the period of the pulse sar. But what we haven't
Speaker 1: seen is a pulsar that starts at one period, changes
Speaker 1: to a second period, and then goes back to the
Speaker 1: first period. But those could well be in our data
Speaker 1: sets as we searched the sky for pulsars, So it's
Speaker 1: almost natural, and we would catch it in a net
Speaker 1: when we're doing an astronomy survey. So another example I
Speaker 1: like to think about is transit. So we've been finding
Speaker 1: all these exoplanets because they cast a shadow on the
Speaker 1: image of the star and change the stellar luminosity as
Speaker 1: the planet transits in front of the star. Now, the
Speaker 1: i AU has declared that planets are spherical, right, and
Speaker 1: so their shadows are going to be circular. But what
Speaker 1: about some giant constructed artifact that's like a Venetian blind
Speaker 1: or a triangle. Well, in the higher order moments of
Speaker 1: the light curve at ingress and egress, you could tell
Speaker 1: the difference if you looked hard enough, between a triangular
Speaker 1: shadow and a circular shadow. So that might be an
Speaker 1: almost natural signal that would in fact ultimately lead us
Speaker 1: to technology. Wow. Fascinating. So we have a whole spectrum
Speaker 1: of things which we classify as natural because we think
Speaker 1: they're not the product of intelligent action. Things are clearly artificial,
Speaker 1: like the signal that says hello, we got your air
Speaker 1: cebra message. Here's our address, and now you're imagining things
Speaker 1: in between, which are subtle evidence of deviations from sort
Speaker 1: of natural evolution of the universe because of intelligent actions.
Speaker 1: You know, we're going to have so many new and
Speaker 1: different eyes on the cosmos that we ought to be
Speaker 1: broadening our thinking. That's fascinating and it seems like a
Speaker 1: very worthwhile It still seems to me to be indicative
Speaker 1: of sort of the way that our minds work. You know,
Speaker 1: we build things that are square, and we build things
Speaker 1: that are symmetric, and we're imagining that maybe aliens could
Speaker 1: do that as well. And I certainly take your point
Speaker 1: that we can't look for things that we don't understand,
Speaker 1: and we can't look for things that we can't imagine.
Speaker 1: Does that frustrate you that you know that might be
Speaker 1: that the spectrum of intelligence aliens out there could be
Speaker 1: so much broader than we can imagine that it might
Speaker 1: make it impossible to ever discover them. Yeah. Well, for
Speaker 1: the longest time, we said, okay, if they have some
Speaker 1: technology that we might be able to detect in some fashion,
Speaker 1: they're going to have to have math, right, can't build
Speaker 1: things without some artificial way to represent them and construct them,
Speaker 1: And so we thought, okay, so that means math is
Speaker 1: the universal language of the cosmos. And then we had
Speaker 1: some really interesting talks at the Cutty Institute by people
Speaker 1: who study the human brain, and they pointed out that, yeah,
Speaker 1: they might well have math and be representing exactly the
Speaker 1: same things that are mathematical programs do, but that our
Speaker 1: math and the way we represent things is inevitably shape
Speaker 1: by the nature and structure of our human brain. And
Speaker 1: so they might well be talking about exactly the same thing,
Speaker 1: the same mathematics, but the representation of it might be
Speaker 1: so different that we don't recognize it as such. So
Speaker 1: now that's so are right now. And if you look
Speaker 1: back at the sort of history of the development of
Speaker 1: mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics, you know there are
Speaker 1: still like big open questions about how to even build
Speaker 1: a mathematical system that's self consistent, and a lot of
Speaker 1: mathematicians practicing mathematicians sort of ignore that and say, look,
Speaker 1: we have a system that mostly works. We can get
Speaker 1: stuff done. But it tells you that if human history
Speaker 1: had gone another way, if a different philosopher had been
Speaker 1: born or been influential, we might all think very differently mathematically,
Speaker 1: And so the spectrum of like possible human explorations of
Speaker 1: you know, ways to think is so potentially broad, and
Speaker 1: it's sort of terrifying to imagine how broad it might
Speaker 1: be when you're including, yeah, well there are anthropologists who
Speaker 1: tell us that there are some very isolated tribal groups
Speaker 1: that don't have a zero in their worldview. So you
Speaker 1: can do what you can do, and you can't do
Speaker 1: what you can't yet do. So you've been working on
Speaker 1: this for a while. How long do you expect that
Speaker 1: this project might take? I mean when LEGO turned on,
Speaker 1: for example, I remember thinking, well, they have no idea
Speaker 1: how common gravitational waves are, and they had no clue
Speaker 1: whether they would wait decades for the first signal, And
Speaker 1: of course they were lucky they heard something almost immediately,
Speaker 1: and it's been a treasure trove. Do you harbor such
Speaker 1: hopes that, you know, if we expand our capabilities to
Speaker 1: listen to the sky, that we might learn something too.
Speaker 1: I don't know about soon. I think this could well
Speaker 1: be a multi generation all exploration. And the reason I
Speaker 1: say that is that the volume that might need to
Speaker 1: be searched, even if an electromagnetic signal is the right
Speaker 1: thing to be looking for. That volume is really vast,
Speaker 1: and so when c turned fifty, I tried to do
Speaker 1: calculation that would show how vast it was and how
Speaker 1: much we had searched to date for an electromagnetic signal. Again,
Speaker 1: assuming that's the right thing to be looking for, there
Speaker 1: are nine different parameters that you have to explore space
Speaker 1: and time and polarization and modulation and intensity, all of us.
Speaker 1: And so I tried to make a guess at what
Speaker 1: the range of each of those parameters might be, and
Speaker 1: then I multiplied them all together some sort of a
Speaker 1: nine dimensional volume. And I'm not any good at visualizing
Speaker 1: nine dimensional volumes. So I said, okay, here's the analogy
Speaker 1: that volume. I'm going to set it equal to the
Speaker 1: volume of all the Earth's oceans and then ask how
Speaker 1: much of the Earth's oceans have we searched in fifty years.
Speaker 1: And at that time the answer was one glass of
Speaker 1: water out of the ocean. Right. That shows you how
Speaker 1: vast the search might need to be. And then when
Speaker 1: city turned sixty, ten years later, the students at Penn State,
Speaker 1: we did the calculation and they said, it's not a glass,
Speaker 1: it's more like a small swimming pool, so that was
Speaker 1: a big improvement over ten years, but still not a
Speaker 1: lot of the oceans. So I think that it might
Speaker 1: be multi generational, either because we haven't yet invented the
Speaker 1: right technology, we don't understand the physics that's involved, or
Speaker 1: simply because the search is so vast it's going to
Speaker 1: take a while. It's getting faster all the time, primarily
Speaker 1: because of Moore's law and the improvements in our computational capabilities,
Speaker 1: but it may have to go on for a while.
Speaker 1: The exciting thing for me about research like that is
Speaker 1: that you just don't know until you begin if you're
Speaker 1: searching for a signal which is obvious or really subtle.
Speaker 1: Like in your ocean analogy, you only need a glass
Speaker 1: of water to find salt, right, but if you're looking
Speaker 1: for a particular fish, you may have to look through
Speaker 1: millions and millions of glasses. And in our case, we
Speaker 1: just don't know right how many civilizations are out there
Speaker 1: they're super rare, or if they're everywhere. So have your
Speaker 1: hope sort of changed over the years that when you
Speaker 1: first got involved in this, in your that first project
Speaker 1: you described using the PDP, did you think I might
Speaker 1: discover aliens tomorrow. If your hopes sort of kept up
Speaker 1: or have they dimmed over the decades, well that's still true.
Speaker 1: We could discover something tomorrow, or it might be my
Speaker 1: granddaughter's generation that succeeds. We don't know, And this is
Speaker 1: one of those questions that you don't know the answer
Speaker 1: until you find the answer. And if anybody you know,
Speaker 1: if I told you anything different, right, that would be
Speaker 1: religion and not science. So no one knows. I still
Speaker 1: think it's worthwhile. Humans have been asking themselves this question
Speaker 1: since we walked out of the caves. We're really intrigued
Speaker 1: with how we fit into the cosmos, how we compare
Speaker 1: something else that might be out there. So every day
Speaker 1: you're looking at information could be the day that you
Speaker 1: get the signal that says wow. And now, like human
Speaker 1: history pivots on that point, before that moment and after
Speaker 1: that moment. So in your career or in the decades
Speaker 1: of that we've been doing this, have there been any
Speaker 1: moments when you thought to yourself, this could be any
Speaker 1: sort of like, oh, this looks real kind of moments. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there have been a few, and they've all turned out
Speaker 1: to be false positives. But some of them took a
Speaker 1: lot longer to dismiss than others. Let's see, we usually
Speaker 1: observe with two widely spaced telescopes, and we require that
Speaker 1: the signal be found at both and that it had
Speaker 1: the appropriate light travel time between them, and that it
Speaker 1: have if it's a narrowband signal, we can require that
Speaker 1: it have a differential Doppler signature that represents the Earth's rotation. Right,
Speaker 1: So we have all these tests that we need to do.
Speaker 1: But back in nineteen I think it was, we were
Speaker 1: using a telescope in green Banquest, Virginia and another one
Speaker 1: in Woodbury, Georgia, and lightning struck the telescope in Georgia
Speaker 1: and went through the electronics and frieda district, so that
Speaker 1: telescope was off the air for days before FedEx could
Speaker 1: get a new dis drive into the facility. But we
Speaker 1: still had time. And that's of course a very racious
Speaker 1: thing on the telescope in green Bank, West Virginia. So
Speaker 1: we kept observing with that one telescope in a manner
Speaker 1: that radio astronomers have often used. They stare at a
Speaker 1: target source and then they look away, and then they
Speaker 1: go back and they differentiate between the on and the
Speaker 1: off source. So we we tried that with the Green
Speaker 1: Bank telescope and sort of like five o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 1: I saw a signal that was clearly artificial. Looked in
Speaker 1: this waterfall plot, as we call it, like a picket fence.
Speaker 1: So I saw multiple frequencies lit up, and the spacing
Speaker 1: between those frequency features was constant. That's not another nature.
Speaker 1: And so I saw this every time I looked at
Speaker 1: the target that we were tracking, and every time we
Speaker 1: pointed the telescope away from that target, it went away.
Speaker 1: And this went on for a while, and then I
Speaker 1: finally got clever idea. I said, okay, we've been observing
Speaker 1: here for a couple of weeks. Let me look through
Speaker 1: all the data that we have taken when looking at
Speaker 1: other parts of the sky and see if we've ever
Speaker 1: seen a signal that has that frequency spacing. Right, that's
Speaker 1: a very significant characteristic. And so I wrote a program
Speaker 1: and it actually compiled me and I ran it, but
Speaker 1: I was in I was excited. I mean I was
Speaker 1: really excited, and so I was sloppy with my output,
Speaker 1: and when I looked at the output, I actually missed
Speaker 1: the fact that, yes, we've seen that particular signature when
Speaker 1: looking in other places on the sky, but you know,
Speaker 1: being excited and I dismissed it. So we continued tracking
Speaker 1: that and I woke up my colleagues, got them to help,
Speaker 1: and finally, as the source set in the west, the
Speaker 1: change in the drift rate that changed with frequency and
Speaker 1: time of the signal was consistent with something that was
Speaker 1: rising to the zenith, not setting on the horizon, and
Speaker 1: so sadly, by the end of the afternoon we knew
Speaker 1: that this wasn't a real extraterrestrial signal. We didn't know
Speaker 1: what it was. It took a while of doing web
Speaker 1: searches and it turned out it was the Soho spacecraft
Speaker 1: in orbit, not around the Earth we would have caught
Speaker 1: that much earlier, but around the sun. And telescopes, like
Speaker 1: human eyes, which have peripheral vision, telescopes have sidelobes where
Speaker 1: the sensitivity is much lower, but it's not zero, And
Speaker 1: so every time I pointed at the target, the Sun
Speaker 1: would be in the sidelo, and when I moved the
Speaker 1: telescope to the different direction, the sun fell out of
Speaker 1: that silo and the sun tracked the Earth's rotation just
Speaker 1: as the target ten, and so it took us a
Speaker 1: while to figure that one out, but it was exciting.
Speaker 1: It was really an enormous amount of adrenaline, and then
Speaker 1: disappointing when we figured it out and we figured out
Speaker 1: a couple of different ways to avoid having that happened
Speaker 1: to us again well as a fascinating moment, because on
Speaker 1: one hand, you desperately want to believe it's sort of
Speaker 1: your scientific fantasy. On the other hand, you want to
Speaker 1: push on it as hard as possible because you definitely
Speaker 1: don't want to announce something if it's not real, and
Speaker 1: so you have to be like the biggest cheerleader and
Speaker 1: also be the biggest skeptic at the same time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: make me a liar exactly. So what would happen and
Speaker 1: walk us through what would happen if you got a
Speaker 1: signal and you were not able to identify as coming
Speaker 1: from any satellite or any nearby object, and all the
Speaker 1: evidence pointed to it coming from another star and it
Speaker 1: seemed sincerely artificial. Is there you know, a real protocol
Speaker 1: sort of politically for what happens in that scenario? Do
Speaker 1: you have to contact US government or are you're allowed
Speaker 1: to talk to scientists from other countries about it. Well,
Speaker 1: when we were ann asked the project, Yeah, there was
Speaker 1: a protocol and it included which associate administrator was going
Speaker 1: to notify in the White House, right, and it was
Speaker 1: that detail. Now that we are philanthropically privately funded and
Speaker 1: the other SETI projects like break through Lists and are
Speaker 1: also privately funded, there is a protocol that we've informally
Speaker 1: agreed upon. It has no enforceability, but basically it says,
Speaker 1: at the discovery site, you try and use another instrument
Speaker 1: now that you know what you're looking for. Probably a
Speaker 1: normal off the shelf Hewlett Packard spectrometer will allow you
Speaker 1: to find that signal. So you try and just detected
Speaker 1: with instrumentation that you didn't build and software that you
Speaker 1: didn't write as a confirmation. And then if you do
Speaker 1: that and you have some more confidence, then indeed you
Speaker 1: do quietly call up the director of some observatory to
Speaker 1: the west and ask for a little bit of discretionary
Speaker 1: time to see, knowing what they're looking for, if they
Speaker 1: can detect the signal, and that's probably your best hedge
Speaker 1: against a hoax and deliberate hopes. And then if you
Speaker 1: get that independent confirmation, then you sit down and figure
Speaker 1: out how you're going to tell the world. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that you might consider doing is sending
Speaker 1: out what used to be called an I A U telegraph,
Speaker 1: something that goes to all the observatories around the world,
Speaker 1: discreetly telling them what you've found and prepping them for
Speaker 1: the fact that there will be a press conference coming
Speaker 1: up very quickly, because what you want to do is
Speaker 1: train up a bunch of professionals who can interpret for
Speaker 1: their local media what's actually been found, and not leave
Speaker 1: the media to make it up for themselves, right, because
Speaker 1: it's probably going to be maybe ambiguous, right, and you
Speaker 1: don't want the media writing their own story, so you'd
Speaker 1: like to give them as much assistance in understanding what's
Speaker 1: really been discovered. And then you tell the world, and
Speaker 1: you want to be very careful that you make sure
Speaker 1: that everyone who's been involved in any way gets appropriate credit.
Speaker 1: Then you hope that the network at the study institute
Speaker 1: or wherever the discovery site is doesn't melt from the
Speaker 1: world trying to get hold of you, and you see
Speaker 1: what happens. So walk through a hypothetical best case scenario.
Speaker 1: Say we see an artificial signal and other people confirm it,
Speaker 1: and we believe that it's there, then what do we do?
Speaker 1: Do we respond? Do you write a message back and
Speaker 1: you spend a decade trying to decode it, understand the
Speaker 1: contents of it, and debate how to respond. Did we
Speaker 1: spend you know, a hundred years going back and forth
Speaker 1: before we learn each other's language and understand each other's mathematics. Oh,
Speaker 1: we've thought about it, and we've held workshops and basically,
Speaker 1: should we respond? And if so, who will speak for Earth?
Speaker 1: And what will they say? And I think the disappointing
Speaker 1: thing for me at the moment is so we've held
Speaker 1: a number of workshops, they haven't really involved very much
Speaker 1: of the world's diverse cultures. It's been sort of pretty
Speaker 1: waspy and pretty male. So we continue to think about this,
Speaker 1: and I continue to try and find a way two
Speaker 1: take this question globally and find appropriate venues to ask
Speaker 1: other cultures in other ways of being and thinking what
Speaker 1: they would do, how they feel. So it's a work
Speaker 1: in progress. You know. Freeman Dyson and here's a lot
Speaker 1: would listen to me talking this is a very very
Speaker 1: highbrow approach to doing things. He would just chuckle and
Speaker 1: he'd say, come on, Jill, if you ever make such
Speaker 1: an announcement, anybody anywhere on the planet that has access
Speaker 1: to a transmit will grab that transmitter and start saying
Speaker 1: whatever the hell they please. And then he, you know,
Speaker 1: with a twinkle in his eye, and said, wouldn't that
Speaker 1: cacophony be about the best representation of the Earth today
Speaker 1: that we could make? That sounds like broadcasting Internet comment
Speaker 1: sections up to aliens essentially. So the thing that's exciting
Speaker 1: but also frustrating to me is that there's so much information,
Speaker 1: you know, impacting the Earth, so much electromagnetic radiation and
Speaker 1: particle radiation that we're just not gathering. When you talk
Speaker 1: about like seeing the whole sky, the information from an
Speaker 1: alien species, from an extra trust intelligence could be hitting
Speaker 1: the Earth like right now at this moment and just
Speaker 1: be you know, absorbed by rocks and concrete and Walmart
Speaker 1: parking lots, etcetera. So I wonder, what would you do
Speaker 1: if you were given you a billion dollar or ten
Speaker 1: billion dollar or an unlimited budget, would be your sort
Speaker 1: of fantasy detector or observatory to accomplish this task. We
Speaker 1: thought about that, and because we can't promise results, because
Speaker 1: we can't say that we're even looking in the right
Speaker 1: way right and maybe we should be looking for zeta raise,
Speaker 1: except we don't know what zata as are. I would
Speaker 1: put that big chunk of money in an endowment, and
Speaker 1: I would live off the interest from that endowment to
Speaker 1: allow for a multi generational x lauration, an opportunity in
Speaker 1: the future to employ technologies that we don't have today.
Speaker 1: That would be my approach to it. There's certainly lots
Speaker 1: of things that we would like to build, and we're
Speaker 1: in the process of building some. And we're also getting
Speaker 1: better at this concept of commensal observing. So in the radio,
Speaker 1: for example, the very large array in Squarana, Mexico is
Speaker 1: probably the most productive radio telescope that we have distrits.
Speaker 1: So one of the people at the SETI Institute, andrewson
Speaker 1: Ian and his team are figuring out a way to
Speaker 1: get the voltage out of all of those antennas and
Speaker 1: build uh commence a program for that, and they'll take
Speaker 1: that and they'll apply it in the future to the
Speaker 1: square kilometer array in South Africa. So there are new
Speaker 1: things we'd like to build. We've got is error of
Speaker 1: going from I think I already mentioned the ten class
Speaker 1: optical telescopes to thirty and forty telescopes, and the large
Speaker 1: Synoptic survey telescope looking at all the sky every few days.
Speaker 1: We need to figure out how we can piggyback on those,
Speaker 1: how we can find things in those data that makes
Speaker 1: people go, huh, what's that. So there's a lot of
Speaker 1: things coming up neutrino detectors, there have been some suggestions
Speaker 1: of how information transferred with neutrinos could impact other parameters
Speaker 1: that are easier to detect than the neutrinos themselves. So
Speaker 1: I'd like to continue pushing all of those things, looking
Speaker 1: at the universe in new ways, looking at archival data
Speaker 1: for things like I think I already explained these almost
Speaker 1: natural signals, and just keep in mind that the conclusion
Speaker 1: that we are alone is so significant that it really
Speaker 1: does require a systematic and very thorough exploration of the
Speaker 1: cosmos before you're willing to make that conclusion. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: give me a lot of money. I'll put in an
Speaker 1: endowment a little of the interest and do lots of
Speaker 1: interesting new things along the way. I'm sure. Well, if
Speaker 1: I was a zillionaire, I would definitely write a big
Speaker 1: check to set. So thinking about you know, our real universe,
Speaker 1: of course, is absolutely fascinating. But there's a lot of
Speaker 1: exploration of this topic in science fiction. And so if
Speaker 1: I could ask you, what is your sort of favorite
Speaker 1: depiction of extraterrestrial contact in movies or in a book,
Speaker 1: your your favorite fictional depiction. Well, Contacted a really great job,
Speaker 1: right because it was written by Carl Sagan, who knew
Speaker 1: the business. I really liked The Arrival because of the
Speaker 1: concept that if you're going to write in circles, you
Speaker 1: need to know the future. I thought that was an
Speaker 1: intriguing concept. And of course everybody is now remembering Rendezvous
Speaker 1: with Rama given the passage of the Muamua through our
Speaker 1: solar system. There's another part that I love. It's called
Speaker 1: Door in Just Summer, and the hero in the book
Speaker 1: lived in this drafty old cottage and it rained a lot,
Speaker 1: and he had a cat named Patronius, and the cat
Speaker 1: kept going to door after door after door, figuring that
Speaker 1: one of those doors is going to open onto sunshine
Speaker 1: rather than rain. So I have a cat named patrons wonderful. Well,
Speaker 1: thanks very much for taking the time to talk to
Speaker 1: us about how humanity is searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, what
Speaker 1: we can do and what we are doing in the future.
Speaker 1: I hope that the project does continue for another ten
Speaker 1: thousand years, and that we managed to put ourselves out
Speaker 1: there and speak to the cosmos and let them know
Speaker 1: that we're here now. Danny, thank you for this opportunity
Speaker 1: to talk to people, because I think it's really important.
Speaker 1: I mean, set He is sometimes seen as unimportant and
Speaker 1: fringe and not having any real tangible value, but I
Speaker 1: disagree with that. I think that if we get to
Speaker 1: talk to people and have them think about life evolving
Speaker 1: somewhere else, it's like holding up a mirror to the
Speaker 1: planet Earth and saying, hey, you, all of you. You
Speaker 1: are all the same when compared to something else that
Speaker 1: might have evolved on a planet around another star. And
Speaker 1: it's important to get that concept across because we face
Speaker 1: so many challenges on this planet in our future, and
Speaker 1: those challenges are going to require global cooperation to find solutions.
Speaker 1: So the more that we can make people think of
Speaker 1: themselves as Earthlings rather than Americans, are Chinese some other thing.
Speaker 1: We're all the same on this point and we all
Speaker 1: have to work together. So I really think Setting has
Speaker 1: a very practical application right now, Well, here's one thing
Speaker 1: who totally agrees with you. So thanks very much for
Speaker 1: devoting your life in your career to this vitally important project.
Speaker 1: All right, have a good day, Thanks for listening, and
Speaker 1: remember that Daniel and Jorge explained The Universe is a
Speaker 1: productional I Heart Radio More podcast for my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio Apple podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite ships.