Are There Alien Artifacts in Our Solar System? with Dr. James Benford

our standard view of study at least from a scientific perspective has generally been one of distance ever since cocconi and Morrison released their landmark paper in 1959 describing how we might search for artificial radio beacons emanating from deep space we have generally envisioned that a provable detection of an alien civilization would come in the form of a distant verifiable radio signal but there's also been a trend in recent years towards things like a non radio techno signatures of alien civilizations and even bio signatures emanating from life itself on exoplanets what is usually left out is the idea that such contact may come from much much closer perhaps even within our own solar system or even the vicinity of Earth the big problem with this kind of idea is distance and time here we ask an alien civilization to send a probe across vast distances of space and time to sit here indefinitely waiting for us to contact it or some similar scenario while most of these scenarios are more fiction than reality there are ways for it to be possible my guest today suggests that not only is it possible but it may be just as likely for us to find evidence of alien civilizations within our own solar system as it is that we might find them by other means you have fallen into event horizon with John Michael Cody a [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] in today's episode John is joined by dr. James Benford dr. Benford studied physics at the University of Oklahoma and in 1969 received a PhD in physics from the University of California at San Diego he then worked at physics international in 1983 he investigated the use of post power technology for high-power microwave generation dr. Benford developed a variety of microwave sources and very high power levels built the largest high-power microwave experimental facility in the US and developed a research group working in the areas of microwave source physics microwave beam propagation and microwave effects on electronics his current interests include face control of high power arrays by phase locking of oscillators his past experience includes work on electromagnetic launchers post power design system studies and the use of electron beams for many applications dr. James Benford welcome to the program glad to be here now doctor you are an advocate for a very interesting area of SETI and a somewhat new area of study looking for artifacts within the solar system that alien civilizations might have left here now this is an idea that goes back a long way to ronald Bracewell and maybe even before where someone might have stationed something in the solar system to eventually perhaps establish contact with us now can you give us an overview of how likely is that in the context of SETI at large well I argue in my latest work that it's about as likely as as listening to beacons for success that is that beacons can be detected at great range but but you have to catch the signal as it flies past and so that you're limited by how long they broadcast artifacts on the other hand would come from relatively nearby for the stars that are passing by say within 10 light years but on the other hand once they're here they'll stay here because they certainly aren't going to go back and they would probably stay on objects close to Earth such as the moon or the Year by Lagrange earth Trojans at the Lagrange points and also the corbels which are surrounded enter have only recently been discovered so the coal orbitals now these are seem like natural places to perhaps place such I probe and it reminds me I think of how we look at Radio City with the 1420 megahertz watering hole is perhaps a natural place to put a radio signal and it seems to me that the co orbitals are natural places to put a probe now could you give us an overview of these different types of co-orbiting the they do fall into several classes they're called into what is called Horseshoe orbit that approaches earth about once a year and they're going to come closest or in that kind of orbit there are the the Trojans that is the are those are stable points about 6/10 7:00 a.m. in miles away from Earth but are stable for long periods of time and then there's the quasi satellites which are very close and appear to be second or third moons of Earth because for a while typically for tens of thousands of years they're they circle the Earth but they're actually simply going around the Sun at the same break the earth is and so appear to us to be orbiting around us because they go slight through the year it goes like inward toward the Sun and slightly outward and therefore they appear to orbit the earth at distances that are on the order of ten to a hundred times as far away as the moon now I remember some years ago it's been a while there was a a candidate asteroid that was seen that at first looked somewhat unnatural to the point everyone wondered if it was a spent booster that would no one knew about or if it was perhaps a brace ball probe but it turned out to just be a rock but what do you remember that and what what class was that in that was in a that was in the classroom a Corbett 'el and they thought in fact it might have been left over from the Apollo program in because the rocket had propelled the spacecraft toward the moon was then allowed to fly on and go into orbit around the Sun and some of them come back occasionally that one was in fact turned out to be simply something that had been expelled from the asteroid belt and was passing by just about the right speed to match speed with earth the real discovery in this area took place about 1997 when the thing we now called kyrenia came very close to Earth and his thought of this there in that class of Korbel class of being second or third universe because they'll be around for quite a while maybe several thousand years it will be and comes pretty close to within about ten million kilometers of Earth on a pretty regular basis that was discovered 23 years ago many others have been discovered since that time that fall into that class now how would we know that they are asteroids as opposed to objects of alien origin well first of all you look at them and you see if you if they have the spectra of a rock then they're probably a rock on the other hand a spacecraft coming out of interstellar space could launch itself onto such a rock and we would think it was all rock if it were only a spacecraft then it our spacecraft are very noticeably different because they're highly reflective to keep the temperature down and so they are much brighter and they would have a metallic spectrum so far everything has been looked at is a rock but that's only one or two objects most of them have not been we have not looked at the spectrum at all and so we really don't know what they're made of we do know that so far none of them have been bright objects but they've all been rather dark which is what asteroids are typically there are things that we might be able to do if these things are passing close that might provoke a response could we paint this thing with radar from say Arecibo could we do that and perhaps activate it if such a thing was found or could we listen passively you know with with radio telescopes or or are these things just simply not suitable for that kind of investigation oh they're entirely suitable for that the radio telescopes we use for the SETI purpose now could listen to them optical and infrared telescopes can image them a planetary radar which we use to investigate asteroids could ping them and in fact get a return signal from the nearest of them the majority are too far away for a return signal with our contemporary radars but we can we could certainly have a program of observations and and passively watch them we can have active planetary radar to investigate the properties of the objects and we conduct could conduct active simultaneous radar painting and SETI listening to see if we get a response that would be a more advanced phase and of course the ultimate advanced phase is to launch a robotic probe and missions to actually look at them and in this regard the Chinese are planning to send a probe to the nearest of the carbonyls a few years hence should we do that do you think it's safe because it's a different thing if you get a radio signal from nine light-years away and you say well we could respond to that that's people you know question that enough with with Mehdi but this would be an object that's very close to us to earth so do you think it's prudent to do that do you think we we actually should proactively do that or because there's just no reason not to because it already knows we're here Oh or should we play it safe if such a thing was ever discovered well you put it very well they would be here to look at Earth so they surely know we're here so we cannot in fact announce ourselves because we're already radiating plenty of electromagnetic radiation and in fact a good sized telescope could image could see our cities in fact even the small telescope would see on the night side of Earth the illumination of the cities the so there's there's nothing to lose from from doing this the basic question of many is do we really want the aliens to know about us that's a question you can ask about responding to a signal from a distant start but to talk about worrying about something that's already here to look at us seems to me to be overly conservative shall we say it also has to be said that Earth gives us a way anyway with its biosphere and that we have been visible because of the oxygen in the atmosphere for a very very long time so what's what are the limits on how far away a civilization that's studying earth as an exoplanet could actually send such a probe you know I would imagine it's very difficult to send it across the galaxy but what is the radius where this seems likely and not too expensive to actually do for an alien civilization watching this world very good question and because the galaxy is you know 100,000 light years across we have concepts for interstellar probes that would go at satans of speed of light and you could therefore do a say a mission to earth from the nearby stars in timescales of about a century that is it take about that long to get here and then they could reside for a long time the real question is how long is the attention span of the people sending the probe because once you've launched something to attend the speed of light it can come a long way you just have to be willing to listen to the return signal for a long time once it gets there so that was those are three centuries later you should be prepared to listen to what it records there's nothing comparable to that time scale in the history of humanity because the longest voyage represent anything on on earth is only a thousand days that's from England to Australia but the longest voyage in space is of course the the voyagers themselves which have been flying now for about forty-five years almost and have gone a fair distance out toward the nearby stars but it would take them many millennia to get to a star the the key thing is what velocity can you get the probe to we have reasonable concepts for a few tenths of the speed of light beyond that it's energetically very different a different matter and very difficult would be a very much more advanced technology than we would know how to do I think we can build quotes at a tenth of the speed of light that arranged this century for sure and we'll do so there is a program now you know the starshot project sponsored by the breakthrough foundation this purlins to send probes to Alpha Centauri in a couple of decades from now that to ticinese B light using a being driven sail so that's the our present concept for how you send something that was a flyby ignition now to stop and stay in the in the destination star system you need to decelerate which means some were it's a more difficult problem you could use Rockets of course but rocket equation is pretty prohibited for doing that it means it would be the such a starship would be the biggest object we've ever built but the and also always the most expensive on the order of 50 to 100 billion dollars per ship but the if you use sails you could use a superconducting loop which carrying a current interacts with the magnetic field of the galaxies and the target star to decelerate and that deceleration would take a few decades but then that's the timescale of travelling to nearby stars so I would say the range about which your original question was what's the range over which they manned launch to us and I think it's its tenth of like years probably but we have to recall and this is not widely known the stars come mirrors quite often and in fact we had a very recent visitor soldiers star came within eight tenths of a light year 70,000 years ago flicks inside the Oort cloud and such close visitors we get something coming within a light universe about every half a million years and coming within 10 light years about every five thousand years which is let's put it this way since the end of the last ice age and the rise of civilization two stars have come to have newly come into it within ten light years of Earth that's that's an interesting point she also start particularly because we may not have we may not have heard the last of that encounter because as I recall if it disturbed any comets from the Oort cloud they're not here yet oh yes but those kinds of encounters I remember that there's a there's actually another star that is spectrally so similar to the Sun that it probably formed within the same nebula as I remember it's a very sun-like star so at one point that star was close to the Sun or these other ones and once you get to a certain period of time in the past you can't tell what stars passed by so you could have had a civilization that passed by here a billion years ago and planted these sorts of artifacts right yes that's that's the easy thing be the great virtue of looking for artifacts is there lingering endurance long after they've gone dead and the Stars past they would still be lodged where they landed annika orbital or the trojan instructions or the moon and they consume therefore we're talking here about an ET i archaeology the earth has been observable as a biosphere from a couple of billion years these stars have passed by and we Oh the base will probe idea of 50 years ago was well another civilization would come to look at our civilization I think it's much more likely they came to look at the biosphere which may by listeners may be quite rare but this one this visor is observable from thousands of light-years away because all you have to do is to get a spectrum of the atmosphere and see that it's out of equilibrium has a lot of oxygen in it and therefore they could have been sending probes for billions of years so you can put those numbers together as I have done very recently you find out that the probability of finding an artifact and the probability of listening to a beacon from that is the SETI approach our about roughly equal and therefore we really should be have as part of the program looking for artifacts the other advantage we have right now is that in contrast to proposals made about this matter fifty years ago we now have a very robust will develop probe technology for exploring asteroids the moons of the planets planetary surfaces we're very good at to advocate good cameras good probes and we have many ways it's very easy for us to go out into the solar system there there are planetary probes launched every year so we're now able to do something that 50 years ago was difficult and it's early state the Drake Equation what can one plug in regarding the solar system what can one plug in to determine a probability at all well what I've done is to compare the two methods that's listening to the Stars or looking for artifacts what I've gone to take a write out an equation a record rates equation and compare it to the standard Drake equation by taking the ratio of the two now in both cases the presumption is that a advance civilization exists on around other stars so if you take the ratio all those factors that lead up to civilization cancel out ones in the denominator in the numerator and therefore they cancel out you're left with only a few other things you've left with two factors basically what's the fraction of those stars that would send probes divided by the fraction of them that would just build beacons but not send probes that's a number that's got to be less than one but we don't know what it is on the other hand the other factor that remains is the time that the lurker would be that this probe a this alien probe would be in the solar system divided by the time that the et civilization would radiate toward us that number is surely very much larger than one because once they're here they'll stay where as beacons will be on only as long as they have the patience to radiate at this solar system therefore it comes out that the it's at least as likely that we would find an artifact that we would hear a beacon so I'm arguing that although it's great for us to be listening to the Stars we really have another possibility that we ought to be looking at and we can now do and that is let's look at the objects near us and perhaps even send probes to these objects and see if there's if anything's come to look at us now what of the moon it seems to me that the moon might be a natural place to put some sort of monitoring station to look at you know essentially a arthur c clarke type monolith is the moon suitable or is it's just subject to just too many problems like lunar gardening and things like that that might damage the probe over a long period of time or is it the same in space you know i would imagine you're it's gonna get damaged in space just as much what how is the moon as a candidate to look for any type of signals for evidence it's it's actually a very good candidate because something would live on the moon stay on the moon for a long time it takes a long time to erode away say assumably bill space probe and the other thing is that we have very high resolutions for the graphs of the room now millions of them approximately 2 million made by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in the last 11 years very very few of those have been looked at because of limited manpower and and we haven't developed an AI that would inspect them to first order to see if there's anything that looks artificial on them all that we've really done but those photographs is look at at the objects we've already put on the moon such as the Apollo Landers where we can see things like Neil Armstrong's footprints with the resolution is down to about a foot you see and the other thing we look at is interesting pieces of geology but the vast majority of the surface of the Moon we have photographed and had not looked at so it's a very good candidate there are some negatives to it the the moon is in shadow half of the month so it's cold and the any probe that would be active there would have to have energy storage operate through that night of two weeks it could be solar-powered but it would have to be able to store half of the solar energy so moreover the probes going if it would respond to us it would surely have done so by now respond to the many transmissions we made to the moon for communication with our orders and Landers so it's clearly not responding but it still could be there good I would say so it's the probability is that it's dead that is not an incident operative so the moon is a very good candidate I think because it's been there for many billions of years and it's a pretty secure location but we haven't looked well at it adequately to find something that say would be on this on the scale of a automobile or a house we haven't really looked at the photographs we already have we were talking earlier about star shot now star shot let's reverse this say we're a civilization that is in the Alpha Centauri system is this idea simply too small realistically for them to detect or does this actually present a techno signature to the civilization that the probe is moving towards you're sure you're asking would would if we saw a starshot probe coming through would we be able to detect it yes yes essentially no because of the Star Trek probe is going we'll be on the order of less than 10 meters in size very diaphanous and flying at such a speed that it will pass through the solar system in a matter of a few hours so the fact that we have recently seen two objects come out of interstellar space the first Mulla Mulla and the second a comet clearly intercept from interstellar space and departing to interstellar space but we didn't catch them until they'd been around for quite a while and in fact were who was on its way out by the time we saw it and that's a big object relatively speaking compared to a star shot amumu is on the scale of a hundred meters or so and Sarah for much larger than the star shot pro two will be but going the floor of course now regarding oh mama do you think that there was an enormous controversy I suppose that it might have been an artificial war of artificial origin what's your view you think it's a non-starter or maybe III think it's likely in a natural object I don't have a strong opinion about it my friend avi lobe of Harvard has advocated that we look strongly at this question and there I completely agree with him we need to think about how we're going to identify such objects because we've now got that ability to see them and we need to be able to decide what what distinguishes an artificial object from a natural object and what we have to do if we wanted to intercept one some work has been done on that but we do not have the fast response probe launch capability that we would need to in order to catch up with such a thing now on the other hand if we build a star shot it would be able to launch probes that are fast enough to catch up and follow such such objects readily in fact even in the early stages of the development of starshot it would be able to send small light probes with a camera on it to match velocities and see well these objects were now that's interesting star shot will not only give us the ability to head off to explore Alpha Centauri but also it's useful to catch up to interstellar objects I have never heard that before I don't think anyone myself has ever said it it uh well look we we have instrumentation coming online the LSST I think now called the vir ribbon observatory is what going to it seems like that is going to reveal interstellar objects to the point that we may not even be able to keep up with how many of them there actually are and which is gonna be exciting of course but what do you think about the idea of you mentioned dr. Loeb what do you think about his idea that maybe civilizations leave buoys at the local standard of rest the Galactica local standard of rest and that our solar system runs into them instead of a less efficient way of doing it as opposed to just planting them as your star system passes by or or even one could say Von Neumanns probes you know where they self replicate and apparently can colonize the entire galaxy remotely what makes the most sense to you energy wise if you're an alien civilization you're gonna say I want to do this economically you know this this surveillance what's the best way I think sending a probe directly to solar systems of interest that you can identify from astronomy is the most efficient thing to do Devon northern probes of course if they existed would already be here and they aren't so I think that they have a shutoff mechanism it means them from endless replication probably if they ever existed the placing a buoy so to speak and letting stars come past presumes that you can make something it's going to exist for long enough I'm going to maintain itself for long enough to own astronomical timescales and I think that's rather doubtful it's certainly not the first thing one would do because right now we have pros at most last a few decades you can argue that we could probably try with present technology to make something with last century but the idea of lasting force a million years is a technology that would require the probe to repair itself and that means a pretty sizable probe and I think that that's is a more advanced technique than then early civilization sensor ourselves can contemplate doing so a very advanced society might have a whole network of fate of objects around the galaxy looking at everything in which case why haven't they would surely have noticed us and we haven't heard from them so we were back at the Fermi paradox again what of the other collection points that might be possible for artifacts what if Jupiter you know and are there other places we might look that are further away than near Earth yes and of course there one over R squared that is a means that you've got to have a much bigger aperture to observers from far away recall that our images of planets were very poor until we were able to actually send probes they're never discovered all kinds of interesting things so you you really want to get up close and personal with an object to find out what's there so Jupiter's not particularly interesting I think to place a program because of the enormous amount of radiation in his magnetosphere would be damaging to electronics they were pretty sure we don't see anything there on a very limited basis of approach we've sent but I think they yeah if you come all the way from another star why would you stand off at a great distance why wouldn't you get close to your subject like the moon or the earth Trojans or the carbonyls it's just so much easier to see things that way what of I had to bring up a science fiction and we have to take a break in a minute but what is what what happens at earth long ago wasn't really that interesting and they were more interested in Mars or perhaps an I shall moon like Europa or something like that should we look for those just as much as we look for ones that monitor earth well certainly certainly you that would argue that we should look at Phobos and Deimos the moons of Mars and see if there's anything sitting on them now the limited photography we have had from I believe a Russian probe that went very close to it there is that we didn't see anything artificial there but of course you might look on the surface of Mars too and there we have photographs with resolution down to about six meters as I recall over almost the entire surface of Mars now on the other hand like the moon we haven't looked at most of them there's just so many of them we've looked very interesting geology but we haven't looked at many other photographs because there it's just a big planet it's got a big area much bigger area than the moon and on that we have to take a break I'm joined today by dr. James Benford we'll be back in a moment and we're back with Jim Benford now doctor it seems to me one way to identify an object especially if it's a dead object an extinct artifact is of course spectra what would you expect from the spectrum taken of an of an interstellar probe I mean well what might that look like that sets its so apart from anything natural or would it actually accumulate dust over time and be indistinguishable until you actually dusted it off I don't know what would make just stick to it actually the initial signature of when you look at something like our probes is you see something it's very metallic it's made of metal if you saw a signature that looks like a rock it's probably a rock because you we don't build any the anything out of silicates we do build solar panels which are not metal at least not entirely metal and there are some other things but the maybe the biggest signature is something you don't think about is that is Clint you know proulx are angular if you look at them they've got a dish and flat surfaces and round surfaces and so you get what is known in radar as glinting and you can detect an artificial object by the fact that they say the return signal and light or radar or go through substantial oscillations as the object rotates or your angle to the rub a little bit changes if it's moving across the field of view so glinting is a way of detecting artificial objects that we have used in order to relocate some of our probes that we've lost in particular JPL recently identified rediscovered dead orbiters around the moon by getting a radar signal that had a lot of glint in it and were able to re-establish what its orbit was and that's a probe that's a quarter of a million miles away roughly and dimension of one or two meters typically and so that that's a technique that you can use to identify an artificial object these glinting because the asteroids and other such objects tend to be roundish don't have strong angular features as I recall what we discussed earlier that asteroid sort of glinted in since in a rather odd way which is why everyone wondered if it was man-made yes right that's right that is a an indicator of artificiality does it's not a absolutely final slam-dunk indicator but that isn't it wasn't unusual object because it seemed to be a long cylindrical and there you you recall of course the great novel by Arthur Clarke Rama in which a large cylinder we should have named it Rama we should have you know in fact I called it the shard because there's a building in London that looks very much like a little blood it's called the shard I've seen it yeah absolutely it's probably it probably is a of a larger object that gods has somehow disrupted and some of it flew off out of its solar system and loop is are there any other candidates you've ever heard of for pointing well yes these certainly we've seen glinting in the discarded Apollo rockets that have come back again decades later you see those as looking metallic and glinting so we have been we've told we've been able to understand an artificial object from these observational techniques in the past now to phrase it another way we have the great unexplained Wow signal within radio astronomy that we don't know what that was but maybe have any radio transmissions ever been detected throughout the history of radio that might have been one of these probes saying something or or at least reflecting on radio there is historically phenomena of reflected radio signals I shouldn't say reflected but radio signals which broadcast on earth say in the 1920s and moments later come we get an echo well sir and at a time at a transit time is much longer than it would take to go anywhere on earth and those have never been completely explained that that was about a century ago and it's there's still a bit of a mystery and people have thought that it was some kind of phenomena of the waves getting trapped in the magnetosphere and then being detected again of course back a century ago we didn't know there was a magnitude here so it was not a phenomena that we would have thought of at the time are these still seen now I remember these are called long delayed echoes do I don't know ham radio operators or anybody you'll still see these yes they are does anybody look or is it is it just something that's fallen off the radar oh it's largely fallen off very few people in astronomy I've ever heard of of in fact I had lunch last year with Martin Rees the idea of College London and formerly the Royal astronomer and told him about this he'd never heard of it although is a deep history in astronomy and that's true of every in fact every astronomer I've talked to about those return signals has not heard of it previously so yes people do still see them or hear them and but nobody's published anything about them in quite some time I think the last paper about that was in the 80s and they they really haven't been thought of as too surprising although we never but we've never did a research program to actually find out if we could prove where they came from and and substantiate this idea that their echoes come produced by the magnetosphere that's not been really resolved doesn't there seem to be a certain logic though to the idea that a probe receiving a signal from a planet might repeat it back in an unnatural way such as a delay and say they're gonna know this is the initial message because there's no other way that this could happen except artificially right well that would be the idea I mean the simplest way to respond to a two messages to send it back of course the next simplest way is to if you say photographed it is to simply transmit the image in some fashion that could be easily interpreted so there are several things you can do to respond you don't have to know an alien language in order to respond to an alien message you can do things like to repeat the message repeat the message with some change to it that indicates intelligent activity for example somehow invert invert the oscillations and change the phase and things like that so there are a lot of ways you could respond if we ever heard anything that we thought was artificial now it seems to me that it would be significantly easier to send a message from very close like this rather than trying to send a message with radio long distance of the interstellar medium so a closed probe could do things like count down prime numbers or something like that much more easily recognizably than a distant radio signal right well of course yes well one over R squared is a really tough law that is the fact that you'd have to have four times as much power to produce the same signal strength at twice the distance they so of building a beacon to transmit over say 100 light years would cost on the order of a billion dollars that's for it to be really observable by today's radio telescopes but having a probe near Earth say uh glued or we know that transmitters from the Apollo Landers were easily detected on earth and they were at the level of watts really not very powerful because of that one over R squared so you could do send some very sophisticated messages detailed messages with fairly low power toward Earth from a short distance whatever what I'm calling astronomically short distance that is if a probe is present and active assuming that and it's looking at us right now do you think it's likely time for it to activate and say Here I am or do you think it might be waiting for something in our future that we haven't done yet are we already contact about we're contacting us or can you think of some some point in the future that might activate such a probe that we haven't done yet well the immediate thing we could do that I'm really recommending is that we start using our radars to paint nearby corners with the moon with a message and see if we get anything back now we know we spent many messages to the moon to to control our own objects there we're not getting anything back so that's probably not that's not a good idea but the carbonyls which are hard to see we only discovered in the last decades most of them [Music] are completely unexplored that is we don't have images of them we've taken a spectrum of only one of them and then we haven't even found about 15 or 20 of them we don't know much about them except where they are their points of light in photographic images but sending a message to them pinging them so to speak and listening to response would be the very first thing we think of doing with in fact it might be worthwhile since there might be probes out in the earth Trojan orbit to send a signal out there and see if you get any return signal no one's done that no another another thing that strikes me regarding this is that okay go back to the scenario where you're an alien civilization passing by you know you're on a star system that's just passing by this one that has this interesting exoplanet on it that's probably going to produce a civilization at some point it seems to me that number one I mean communications times are completely different for this because you don't have to bounce radio waves back and forth you know over you know you can download the data later but the communication is almost instant if the probes right here which opens up interesting possibilities I think because what if that probe has been sitting there somehow for billions of years and the ultimate message is here is the entire natural history of your planet you know photographs of dinosaurs or something like that you know footage even or whatever what do you think a civilization could give us through communication with such probe well they could tell us about themselves I think the best message that you send is view remember the old phrase you never get a second chance to make a first impression I think we if we were to send a message about ourselves I'd send a series of images because images are interpretable and they've got to be visual beings in order to be space travelers and I'd say the images of things like the Taj Mahal you know beautiful things I'd say here's the best we've done yeah an image of a Moroccan lifting off an image of the pyramids the Eiffel Tower images are beauty that Mona Lisa a Picasso I mean there are just a lot of images we could send and that's that's what I would do I'd send ask yourself this what would you like to receive and that tells you what you'd like to you should say I often wonder if if if we ever found a a passive artifact a dead artifact that some civilization sent us you know in our case we we essentially sent out some space probes but we also sent out a Tesla so some wandering civilization passing through you know and however many years billions of years or millions of you're actually probably less than that but they're gonna find a car and they're gonna be like what were they thinking so I also often wonder if we just find a piece of concrete rebar concrete or something passing through the solar system or a piece of trash you know because civilizations seem to produce an enormous amount of trash do you think that such an encounter might end up being ignominiously that or do you think it's gonna be some really really carefully planned thing or do you think it's possible we might just find some alien trash well we might well well my favorite that is the the concepts for details concepts that we made first are for our starships Daedalus and Icarus and Firefly all have fuel tanks that they discard along the way and those fuel tanks will fly through the alien solar system as well and that they might actually be bigger than the payload that eventually gets there and so if we saw a constantly a bunch of flying objects which were almost the same but in cylindrical and we might not even notice the payload that they launched they because they show up after the payloads already flown through and they're much bigger than so that's the kind of trash that would be interesting to find and intercept but of course they just be an empty container an empty container would answer the question though we are not alone so it would be the the most in the most important empty container yes in human history yes right clearly artificial clearly an alien and and clearly ancient all of those who could apply and would be a great discovery you've also worked in SETI and in the past and further things like for example I think you were wrote a paper on pulsars yes on how would you distinguish between a pulsar and an artificial beacon tell us about that well pulse arts were first discovered thought to be artificial maybe even the but we don't know that well we think that they're associated with spinning compact objects and on the other hand light let's think of it this way how do we signal to the distance that there is an object here we owe the obvious thing is the lighthouse right the lighthouse goes off and on its you want to make a post thing that the post image posts a signal that would be noticed a little own thing about not lighthouses is that each one of them rotates at a slightly different frequency so if you measure the period you know what the lighthouse is you know where you are they're not all the same so I think pulsars should be looked at as potentially artificial and there's actually some people who have looked into that fairly extensively and come to a conclusion that there they certainly have a changing spectrum spectral distribution and that's probably due to the physical origin of the radiation but they don't they haven't there they nobody's ever looked for signalling they never listen nobody's looked for a modulation so I don't know if that's possible and these are very remote possibility but it's a remote possibility we are to think over because we have observed many thousands of pulsars and we I think some efforts should be made to try to understand if there's any sign of artificial hell in the India of them after all they could be all for the most part natural but some of them artificial they're by the way pulsars are now considered to be probably the best way to navigate interstellar space because we know where they are we love their period and you know exactly when they come on off so we can use it to triangulate the location of a ship it's going through the interstellar space I think as far as what we're talking about earlier with things that have been forgotten I think a lot of people probably don't realize that the questions of the artificiality of pulsars has never been closed that is still an open question yes now of course the closer astronomers would would denigrate that idea because there's a default in astronomy everything is assumed to be natural and nothing is thought to be artificial except what things we clear do and that's that's a kind of a bias that dishonours have that truly there must be a naturalness of explanation and yet the the evidence today in contrast to half a century ago is that we would think that life is fairly common in the universe but we haven't really changed our thinking to increase our recognition of what an artificial object would be what do you think of the WoW signal my friend Robert Gray who has spent a lot of time there written entire book about it Singh said it's just a deep mystery that we also keep listening and we also see if we ever pick up anything and thus far they have expanded the parameter space they've looked at but they have still not seen it again it's too bad that in those days when we saw it I think that was back in the 70s we didn't have sufficient instrumentation to see if there was ever there was a message encoded in it which is what you would expect if it were artificial on the other hand I've always thought that there was another possible explanation that it's really the key to radiation from something like star shot that is a powerful beam that hits assailant accelerates it and some of the beam goes is being somewhat bigger than the sail and we see the leakage of that over interstellar distances and we we see it only transiently and the we may not be in alignment where we would see another one for another ten years because they're sending beams off in various directions depending on the mission that is a possibility that astronomers really don't like because they're not really set up to look for transients they see a lot of transients in yesterday's astronomical radio observation but they don't they don't they don't repeat they don't think of them as possible SETI signals but I think that leakage radiation from power beaming is going to be much more luminous than beacons for example because they're very powerful they have to accelerate an object and they are very directed so I've actually written a paper with my son about that and pointed out that it's broke most highly observable thing we could do we do star shot we'd be visible across the galaxy and yet the SETI community is not really set up to look for such language so you think there are biases within how well of course there are I mean how does one look for something that they've never seen before you know such as an alien signal so you think there are biases within SETI into you know we should broaden our approach much much more oh yes has been so far oh yes definitely there's a bias that everything is certainly natural and not artificial there's a bias that we look for steady signals and until recently very narrowband signals when in fact that's not the way you build a beacon you make it repetitive you haven't been with sufficient real message on there are lots of biases because you see where did his bodies come from well astronomers are observers but beacons or power beaming what we call the beamers of high power are are built by people who build things not observe things so they have a very different perspective and astronomers tend to have the perspective of listeners but the objects they're listening for in SETI would be built by engineers not astronomers say a probe all right there's two ways to think of an alien civilization you can think of it as a positive thing that it wants to communicate and it wants to collect data and it wants to figure out if it's alone in the universe or it could say I want all of this material you know that's present in this galaxy for the eventualities that this galaxy is going to die you know along with the rest of the universe what chance do you think that a probe a malicious one that might detect us at a certain level of technology and EMP us back to the Stone Age do you think that that's an equally possible scenario or do you think it's not likely well I knowing how difficult it are so travel is at our present level of technology it would seem like a remote possibility from our point of view now however it's a choice of whether or not to say respond to a signal the so called Metis question is something that we ought to have a discussion about as a society I don't mean just us insider who think about these things but the greater society she would be prepared to have some protocol for how we respond that has general agreement and so we would know what to do after all it the way the way thing to do done in the Earth's politics it would take us years to reach agreement if we received a signal now so we should be doing we should be talking about that now and be ready as this pandemic has us being ready for things is a whole lot better and then whistling Dixie and pretending it'll never happen absolutely and this is what we're talking about is very different from some distant radio signal or detection of a techno signature or bio signature light-years away this would be right here and it could pose a threat to global security potentially and so you say we should be discussing this right now and it's an imperative right yeah I think so it doesn't responding to a beacon would not involve great resources some resources for sure but nothing on this highest scale of real catastrophe is like hurricanes video so I think we want to talk about what we would do there has been some discussion but it's really insider discussions and and the that's that's where this way the humans never really talked about it seriously and I I think we should we should put together conferences symposia of people knowledgeable in all of the sciences including the social sciences and people who were then understanding of the political theater and and the economics to discuss this from many perspectives and that would gradually that discussion would gradually diffuse into the population and people would get familiar with the arguments so we'd be further along the road toward making a choice in case something should be detected and now that there is a big program the breakthrough listen program sponsored by the Bateson foundation the same people who sponsor a star shot of spending 10 million a year listening the probability of finding it whatever that is is certainly much greater than it used to be so we ought to be preparing for what we would do if we found it now variably and I'll preface this and that I am a skeptic but I invariably people are going to leave comments about the UFO phenomenon do you think we should take a look at that or do you think it's just bunk I I find it very hard to think of it as incredible if certainly the idea of it is baseships and zipping around near Earth and not being detected by the all the radars and all the observers we have now seeing this to lack credibility the only explanations that could be that could fit with that fact are that they are somehow time machines are coming out of hyperspace or some other technology is so advanced that it fits Clarke's law that is sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic UFOs appear to be kind of magical they the observations that are reported show them moving at very high speeds and high accelerations that we couldn't build an object to do so I think there either don't exist they're all illusions of some kind or they're very advanced and we are not going to be able to understand the word detector yet now to close this out dr. what is your gut feeling on finding an alien artifact in the solar system do you think it's likely or do you think it's unlikely but should we look for what's your gut feeling do you think that the solution of the Fermi paradox is that we don't we're not looking close enough yes I do agree with the latter that is I think look for an entire class of possibilities the artifacts and I argue in this community that that's a roughly equal probability to listening to beacons and we're certainly doing that so we should be looking for artifacts also feel that we will be doing good as strana because we'll be studying objects near us objects like the corals that we know essentially nothing about so it's a net positive I think they really might be there and the fact that they might have been there for a very long time we'll tell us something about the history of the universe and the fact is we do have a sampling of one we are a civilization and if there's anyone else out there we are their alien civilization and we are their answer to the Fermi paradox so the fact that we exist and can even look for this kind of thing suggests that you know why not why not yes well we've got exists as proof it's us all right doctor we are out of time thank you very much for appearing with us and I hope someday you'll come back and we'll have another discussion like this so here we arrive at distance again if some distant light years away signal were detected that proved the existence of other civilizations in the Milky Way would that be all that surprising I don't think so I think most people are at least receptive to the idea that we may not be alone and I'm not sure that the predictions of social upheaval that have surfaced over the years would actually play out indeed a radio signal from a distant alien civilization would capture the attention of the world but there would also come a time where it leaves the news cycle at least until more information about that civilization is gleaned something that could easily take centuries it's the we know they have radar scenario where we know a few things but not a lot 50 years later we still know little else but again think about distance what if the detection were close what if it were on the moon this is a question well asked in science fiction and pop culture but would we really be so comfortable with something of alien origin that close to us it's a very interesting question to ponder indeed John oh you the same John as on your other channel what you appear to have two channels John some even say three yeah that's the baryonic matter jmg does he ever have it easy he just writes science monologues at night over cups of tea and goes with it I on the other hand have to do deep research and talk to guests it's not as easy as you think how did you do that you you both have bids John the ante universe and the normal universe I think you are the same or at least one of you is the evil John yeah I wonder who that's gonna be That's not me three but anyway that was just Spock ruining beard styles there is no rule in the universe that says that alternative universe copies of humans can't both have beers yes John you keep believing that it keeps the channels consistent well I'll just get a physicist in here to explain it to you Anna you could cut the subversion in this room with a knife and on that note join us next week for a very special show indeed see you then [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 880,567

Rating: 4.7316585 out of 5

Keywords: fermi paradox, enrico fermi (academic), physics (field of study), aliens, ufo, space, alien, space ship, planet, science, documentary, universe, astrobiology, extraterrestrial, life in the universe, asmr, john michael godier event horizon, event horizon, Are There Alien Artifacts in Our Solar System?, Alien Artifacts, Alien probes, Jim Benford, James Benford, Gregory Benford, lurkers, solar system, NASA, Looking for Lurkers: Co-orbiters as SETI Observables, self-replicating spacecraft

Id: HCR0eYqDpT4

Length: 62min 43sec (3763 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020