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