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