Are We About to Discover Intelligent Alien Life? With Adam Frank

[Music] you have fallen into Event Horizon with John Michael [Music] godier John is joined today by Professor Adam Frank Professor Adam Frank received his PhD in physics in 1992 from the University of Washington in 1995 he was a awarded a Hubble Fellowship he joined the University of Rochester as an assistant professor of physics and astronomy in 1996 he was promoted to associate professor in 2000 and to Professor in 2004 Professor Frank's research is in the general area of theoretical astrophysics and in particular the hydrodynamic and Magneto hydrodynamic evolution of matter ejected from Stars he is the author of three books books most recently light of the Stars alien worlds and the fate of the earth Adam Frank welcome back to the program it is great to be back and talking with you guys again now in your new book you you go into uh first uh your own story and how you were became interested in astrobiology and this is something that happened to me too I remember in the 1980s I was just looking at the stars blazing overhead as a 10-year-old round about 1980s 4 85 and wondering is there anybody out there and I still have not answered this question and none of us have so give us a a sort of a feel for what drove Adam Frank to look and think on the concept of alien life well I've been thinking about it yeah since I was 5 years old and the reason why I wrote this book The the little book of aliens was to be able to kind of give people a sense of how far we've come from when I was a kid so for me it began when I was 5 years old literally because I wandered into my dad's office and in his library on the the lower shelf where I could reach he had all of his 1960s pulp sci-fi magazines you know like Isaac aov's astounding stories and I remember looking at those covers with you know their bug eyed monsters and guys in space suits and alien Landscapes and I was like I was done I was like this is it this is this is all I want to know about and so it it's very clear at that moment and you know my dad was a writer but he was really into science and science fiction so he saw my interest and he took me to you know the Hayden planetarium the planetarium in New York City regularly much to the the Chagrin of my sister but uh and he also fed me a steady diet of Science Fiction of great science fiction he would put in my hands you know Dune long before I was really ready for it I is asinof stories I remember him waking me up one night to uh watch late night TV this was back in the 70s and he had he watched we watched a Forbidden Planet together right with its vision of a advanced alien civilization that had disappeared because of their own Folly so for you know this question has just been with me since I was a kid and then when I entered graduate school and you know became an astronomer and never left I I didn't work in and we can talk about why but I never lost the interest in the question and then in this modern era as the exoplanet Revolution began and astrobiology really became a going concern about 10 15 years ago I started my own research program in it and now pretty much it's almost all I do I had a similar experience my dad was an engineer and I loved sci-fi and he was sticking all the books and everything and you know along with my mother who was amateur geologist we're sticking sticking all the books in my hand and I was reading everything I could and watching reruns of Captain Kirk and all of that in the mid 1980s and that really serve to make me wonder but the thing is is that how far we we've come we didn't even know exoplanets existed back then it was still an open question now we have thousands and thousands of confirmed exoplanets you know they're ubiquitous they're everywhere which ticks a box for life in the universe the question is is why don't we see an example of a biosphere from a distance and why is it so ambiguous so ambiguity in the question of aliens how are we going to deal with this how do we how do we how do we proceed with things like the James web Space Telescope and characterizing exoplanet at atmospheres how are we going to nail this down yeah well the interesting thing is about like well why haven't we seen any evidence yet is because we couldn't look I mean that's really the basic we we only you know gained the capacity to look like a few months ago on some level right you know first of all for most of astronomical history we did not have we didn't even know whether there were any planets to look for you know and we believe planets are the basis of life that you need a a surface in order to get the you know have a puddle of water or something to have the chemistry get going the biochemistry get going we didn't know whether were there any planets until 199 95 that's when we discover our first exoplanet and then we start building up this census of exoplanets that took some time but really the most important thing is that in order to find a biosphere you have to be able to see the planet in a way that you know these planets are of course light years away tens hundreds of light years away you need to be able to somehow through the light the imprints in the light be able to get an indication signature that there is a biosphere there and literally we have we haven't had the telescopes to do that until on some level the jwst the jwst is the first telescope that can do this process of that we call atmospheric characterization and even jwst is right on the hairy Edge like it it probably does not have what we need to see a biosphere unless we get really really lucky but it's but it is the first one that has really what need uh on some on any level at all and then the telescopes that are going to follow it in the next 10 20 30 years are really going to have you know they're going to be tuned so what comes after the jwst the next big telescope of this Space Telescope is already what is it called it's called the habitable world's Observatory like astronomy is now Allin and that zillion dollar telescope is going to be tuned to be able to find what we call bios signature or if we're looking for technological life if we're looking for life that you know has industry that harvests energy for uh to to to to do things for a civilization what we call techno signatures so we finally you know we couldn't do it before because we couldn't do it before now in regards to looking at radio the radio astronomers now they're they're in a better position because the radio telescopes have been capable of picking up alien signals the wow signal things like that for many decades earlier than Optical astronomy or infrared astronomy so how in depth have they actually looked in radio for example the bathtub you know of the ocean so what is our survey of looking at Star systems looking for radio signals it seems to me we've barely just started still is that is that a good sense of that yeah that's a great way of characterizing it I mean so I think people have to understand that what we call called classic what I call Classic seti right the classic seti searches where you're you know you're using radio and in particular in the beginning people were really using radio to detect a beacon you know a signal that somebody was purposely you know putting out that was aimed at you right and they that they had to make these assumptions because if you didn't do that if you assume that they were just you know broadcasting in all directions then you ended up needing a uh um uh transmitter that was so powerful it was almost a star so there was this you know underlying the kind of Technologies we had you needed somebody to be beaming a message at you so I'll talk a little bit about that later why you know for me that was always a little bit problematic but it was also the only thing they could do so it was fine but people also have this idea that like oh you know Frank Drake did the first search of this kind classic CTI search in 1960 and since then well of course we've searched the whole sky and we haven't found anything so you know where are they it must be uh that there's no alien life and the problem is with that is it's not true and it's not true for the saddest of sad reasons there has never been a lot of SE a lot of seti searching because there was never money for seti searching so you know because of the giggle factor and we can talk about what the giggle factor is but because seti got associated with UFOs and Little Green Men you know it was always looked upon it was always a little marginal more than a little marginal and so the the pioneers of SEI who were very very brave scientists had to put up with a lot of scorn and also there was just never any funding so if you think of if if you want to add up all the SE searches that have ever been done all the times somebody searched a star for signals of intelligent life if you so imagine that the the stars are you know the sky is an ocean right and you have to search that ocean if you add them all up how much of the ocean has been looked for looked at and the answer turns out to be a hot tub basically we've looked at a hot tub worth of the ocean and yeah and we didn't find any fish so to speak you know and are you then going to say like well there's no fish in the ocean so you know the fact is we've just never searched right there's other than a few Brave Pioneers there never has been much SE searching so you know the claim that you know we've looked and we haven't found is just the great the idea of a great silence there is no great silence because nobody he been a nobody's had the funding to listen so yeah so I think that that that's a really important thing for people to understand because now finally not so you know not only with radio but more so this explosion of what has happened in what I call you know I think the whole field should be called techno signatures and CI is just one part of it with techno signatures this field we are going to be looking we finally have the funding to start looking for Bio signatures and techno signatures and you know Nas is all in on it the astronomical Community is all in on the search for life in the universe and so finally now we're going to start looking it should not be surprising if we find it though because one of the things that bothers me is that you'll get a lot of people saying well we're alone the problem with that is that you can't ever prove in the universe that you're alone you can only prove that you're not alone by picking up some sort of a techno signature so but if you're going to start saying that life on Earth only happen here then you're saying that an organic chemical process which is what life ultimately is is unique to Earth and this is a problem and that that gets into the the uh the scorn factor in that we should statistically be part of a population right in other words we should expect to find a technos signature eventually right well I think you know it's funny because as I talk about in the book right so much of the book is about sort of the balance between uh Alien optimists and alien pessimists so the book starts with the history right which begins you know 2,500 years ago it's amazing how long people have been asking this question you know with sort of the battle between Aristotle who was a pessimist who said the Earth is the only planet in the universe that has life and democratus who an atomist who said no no no every planet every Star is going to have planets and every planet has the possibility for life so that that battle has been going on for a long time and what's remarkable now is you know o over the entire history that 2500 year history it's been just about opinions right there was no data and so it's amazing now is we're about to get data now I am an optimist but I also let's unpack this a little bit right because you look at the night sky and you look at all the exoplanets and you know you're sort of overwhelmed in that paper I wrote with Woody Sullivan back in 2016 where we worked out how many habitable zone planets there were in the universe you know it turns out to be 10 billion trillion planets and each one of those planets is an experiment right Nature has run the experiment in life and possibly civilizations so it's asking a lot to say that every one of those experiments failed right but the problem is until you know we don't really know yet what goes into making life or allowing life to thrive so that you get a you know a biosphere or eventually a technosphere so so if there are one if there are 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets and that's not an inhabited planet that's a planet where life you know where liquid water could form on the surface if the odds per you know per planet is is you know less than one in 10 billion trillion then you've just run out of planets right you know it's a kind of a probabilistic thing now I don't think that's the case right but I you know it's that it's really still my opinion that that's not the case so so the statistics alone while for you and I probably make us lean in the direction of there's got to be life elsewhere until you do the search you just you just don't know and that's what's so exciting that's why I wrote this book is I wanted people to see finally right finally we're going to start getting data and and one last point on this along these lines you know if while you can never prove there's no other life if you you can start putting upper limits you know or limits on it right if we search for a hundred years and we search thousands of stars and we don't find any that's at least beginning to tell us that okay we can't prove there's no other life out there but we are beginning to prove that it's rare right so that's what we'll see now in regards to thinking about alien life and thinking about what we might look for and there's no guarantee that technological alien civilizations look like what we think they will they may be indistinguishable from nature for all we know but things like the cesf scale and the dry Equis do you think they're getting long in the tooth and that we need to rethink just how we look for aliens that is a great question and I think that is what's so exciting about this moment because when you look at all of astrobiology which used to be called exobiology and you know the thinking about life in the universe I'm actually working on a New York Times oped on this exactly this point we've always or almost always thought began with the terrestrial analog right we just tended to think that life whether it's it's smart life or dumb life right so when I make that distinction dumb life I do not mean any disrespect is microbial or forests it's the you know it's the stuff that doesn't build civilation civilizations it's very sophisticated right but I'm just going to use that distinction whether people were thinking about dumb or smart life they just tended to sort of use Earth life as the uh as the example and the template and I think one of the most exciting things that is happening now and I talk about this in the book is because finally we're finally really committing the scientific Community is committing to this search we're starting to systematized right we're starting to look at our ideas and really say like wait a minute right we don't want to get mistaken by the very particular history of Earth's biological lineage so what we what you see a number of people doing in our group so you know I am the principal investigator of NASA's first grant to do to look for techn signatures what everybody's beginning to do is think agnostically what does it mean to plan a search that is agnostic about the life that you find right you're not expecting it to be carbon based you're not expecting it to have DNA you're not if it's a civilization you're not expecting the the you know the minds which built the civilization to use integers as the basis of their you know their mathematics so that's the really exciting thing now and it really stretches the fun part is it really stretches the imagination and so in the book I'm trying to give people some understanding of what this agnostic thinking looks like because that's going to be the best bet at making of whether we find you know looking for for biospheres or technos speres the problem of habitable zones as we see them we think in terms of liquid water on the surface of a planet that's essentially an analog of Earth but we have found from our own solar system that ice shells over oceans is more common so do you think that what the real solution to the front Paradox is is that most intelligent life is locked under ice and completely unaware of the cosmos because I can't see it yeah now is is that a good direction to go but the thing is do we have any hope of ever detecting intelligence under an ey shell Moon outside of our own solar system no well not at least right now I mean that's you know in some sense it's true the habitable zone was a great idea right it's one of those classic ideas you know in the book I talk about how that era of the 1950s from 1950 to 1960 that so much amazing foundational ideas were laid down right and you know no matter if you're no matter how you're interested in life in the universe you got to pay attention to that decade even for the pop culture stuff that got laid down uh so the habitable zone which is the idea that life will need water to get started was a great idea because there really is reasons to think that you know water is pretty amazing as a solvent but as we've seen from our own own our own solar system as you point out we've got at least two or three or four other places where there are oceans huge oceans more water than on Earth on underneath you know uh underneath moons you know with like you said ice covered moons but as you say the problem is that any if a civilization develops under those or in those that we never know or even if you know there's intelligence even a biosphere under those worlds we would never know so I think we just you know if what if we're looking for life at this point on Distant Worlds we have to be shooting for the stuff on worlds that can that have bio you know that have detectable bio signatures so that's a subset and you know maybe we're going to end up missing the boat because of that but you know you can only you can only look where you can look right it's it's the analogy of the the keys under the lamp post and the beginning that's where you look you look for the keys under your lamp post and if you don't find them then then you try and be more ingenious about how to look you know in the dark if we want to answer the ice shell question we're just going to have to conquer the Galaxy that's that's it's simple as that it's the only way that's the only I agree we just we should get started start building those you know those Starships now build the Battle Star Galactica now and then we'll be ready then we can you then then we can we can start you know thinking about it now rogue planets so this galaxy can sit here and toss out rogue planets earthlike planets that are covered in ice again but with geothermal energy they may maintain oceans and that opens up the idea of intergalactic inhabited planets that that I mean how would we ever that then it gets into not being able to prove that you're alone again in other words if you're unless you detect a techos signature you're not going to find a way to know if there is other life in the universe because it's just not going to present itself and you can never know so the only thing we can do is look for techn signatures essentially right and and bio signatur to an extent but that's you know getting close what is the distance limit in other words all right so we're looking for technos signatures in whatever form they might be Arnold louvers or radio signals whatever how far can we look even just within the Moy way before I answer that I just want to talk about how cool rogue planets are because if you're a space pirate like where else do you want to be based but on a rogue Planet you know so um I love the idea of rogue planets but it's a good question right we're not going to especially now you know just to your point though I'm not sure if rogue planets could be Intergalactic because I don't think you'd have to toss a planet out with an escape velocity to get it out of the actual well gravitational well of the Galaxy so I have a feeling those I mean that might happen once or twice I once or twice I don't know but I have a feeling that that most Rogue PLS will be Interstellar not Intergalactic but that'd be an interesting calculation to do whether or not you could ever get the escape Velocity to actually well I think another question would be is if you toss out a star system does its planets go with it I I would assume that they would I think it is I think I've seen papers on that I think that the planets in general do get unless it's super duper violent you'd have to really accelerate a star super fast to unbind its planets so I think that but I'm not that would don't hold me to that would life would life survive an encounter at the center of a galaxy with a super massive black hole in that radiation environment and there's lots of questions cuz tossing planets out H that's that's a yeah it's a whole other whole other um but okay so but to your question of distance I mean at right now right it all depends on the technology you have and so right now I don't you know I'm not gonna I'm gonna I'm sort of making an educated guess I think we're really talking about if we're looking talking about the method of atmospheric characterization which we can unpack more but you know just to sum up atmospheric characterization is the ability to peer into a planet's atmosphere and and uh Det protect signatures in the light like use the light that passes through the atmosphere to look for fingerprints of either biology of you know a biosphere or technology a technosphere and I think the limits are hundreds of light years I don't think you're going to get be able at this point you know you're not going to be able to get to thousands and thousands of Lighty years the the and the reason for that is you just need a lot of photons you need a lot of light to be able to get a really good Spectra to be able to have enough light that you can break it up and compon look at the the the different wavelengths of light you just you know you need a lot of signal basically and to get a lot of signal you need to capture a lot of photons and to capture a lot of photons you you're a lot better off if the thing is closer so I think the next 30 years or so um and some you know maybe one of your listeners will will who knows more about this than I do another astronomer I think we're looking at hundreds you know hundreds to a thousand like years which is the neighborhood right which is like that is still the that is you know just down the street so to speak for the Galaxy yeah that brings into interesting scenarios because anybody in the Galaxy that's that's doing what we're doing and looking the vast majority of the Galaxy basically all of it past you know round about 100 light years has no idea we even here other than if they've looked for bios signatures on this planet well I mean I do you know with bigger telescopes you can go farther I mean at some point hopefully you know if we make it through all the mess that we're in right now you know from possible nuclear war to climate change then maybe AI you know who knows but then you know at some point we may build telescopes that are huge we know we could build interferometers in space that would be able to see out thousands or t thousand so it's right now this is just the technological limitation of our age you know an a civilization that's more advanced than us and I'm even talking like just you know a 100 years 200 500 years would probably be able to detect bios signatures you know across across much further maybe even you know tens of thousands of like years an alien civilization that has a an in interferometer or such you know telescope that um you know is the size of New Jersey in orbit you know and looking at the Milky Way galaxy trying to characterize its exoplanets several million years ago knows about this planet in other words this planet has been screaming its bio signatures for billions of years it we have yeah yeah billions our planet has betrayed us we can't keep quiet at least about the biosphere here so chances are that while we may be ignorant still on the question of of alien biospheres it is possible that someone else in the Galaxy confirmed and answered their R we alone question by looking at Earth is that viable I think that's you know yeah I mean what what reason would you have to not consider that possibility right you have to really have and this is the interesting thing in this moment that we're in where you know as I said so that there was this long history of the giggle factor that any mention of particularly intelligent like the search for intelligent life you know civilizations was met with raised eyebrows and you know a Snicker and you know this was again because of the association with UFOs and what happened in particular was in NASA was a couple times in the 80s and these NASA tried to fund some CTI projects and then some Congressman would stand up and be like we're not going to waste taxpayer dollars on searches for Little Green Men and the funding would get cut of course you know this was like less than a drop in the bucket of the budget um even NASA's budget but you know they were making hay they were getting some political points out of it so NASA was like oh okay we are just not touching this this is a you know Red Hot Chili Pepper and we are not touching this and so yeah the whole search kind of went by the wayside but now it just as you're talking about as you're bringing up you know what why wouldn't we begin to now we know that we could see bio signatures from a distance and here's the interesting thing what would happen if we found a planet with bios signatures let's say like 10 years from now you know the next Space Telescope detects like a beautiful it's oxygen and methane and what is it a sulfur for SMS the the the oh God my brain isn't working right now the stuff that plank didn't put out I'm suddenly it'll come back to me second you know these are all good biospheres if you found uh bio signatures excuse me sulur dimethyl dimethyl sulfide that's what it is dimethyl sulfide it uh so you know and if we found really good evidence of a biosphere what would we do we would you know keep watching we'd build an even bigger telescope then we'd build an even bigger telescope and at some point we'd send a probe right we'd send a robot probe if it was close enough let's let's say it was you know you know within 10 light years we you know if Humanity makes it we would figure out how to you know shoot a probe there and then we do another one and another one after that and another one after that so you know at that point you realize like wow if we have been screaming our biospheres to the or our bio signatures to the Galaxy for three and a half billion years then suddenly solar system set as they call it begins to make sense like maybe we should be looking in the solar system for somebody that came through two billion years ago you know sent a probe and now the probe is just tumbling around somewhere in some orbit or something you know somebody dropped something on the moon and you know they set up a base you know and again this would probably be robots uh set up a base to look you know to to probe Earth's bio biosphere and send information back and that's one I'm doing a project right now with a couple of other people where we're trying to calculate how long the lunar lander is going to be visible right you know and we're using the lunar lander as a proxy for somebody came by a billion years ago dropped a probe on the moon you know and there's very there's no weather on the moon there's only the what they call gardening from microm meteorites but yeah how long would that actually last so should we go look for them on on you know places like the moon oh of course because it's a as you said it's it's like a it's like a locker you know where things can can survive billions of years they they can just sit there but you know another interesting one that's always intrigued me is the idea of as we study asteroids finding one that's really depleted as though it's been mined you know yeah right that's been You by a passing Von noyman probe you know or you remember you remember Arthur C Clark's uh Rama novels where some oh oh my God one of my favorite so some Von noyman Pro passes through a billion years ago doesn't care about Earth it's just looking for raw materials from an asteroid so it can go to the next star system and then we find it and there there it is that's a you know not a very well talked about tech signature but depleted asteroids is interesting the question is is how many do you have to look at right right right but you know the idea of solar system seti is gaining some momentum the the you know the more people are talking about it and again it's sort of like you know what you need is the once your civilization starts doing it right then you're like you know I mean once we do it then it's like okay well we have one example of this happening you why wouldn't we think that it's possible for others to do it you know we did a the group did a paper Jason Wright L it where we looked at We examined the idea of okay what do you think you're going to find first a bio signature or a techno signature and you know there's this assumption this bias that oh you know bio signatures are going to be more common than techno signatures but really that is just a bias and the reason we think that is because oh well you need a biosphere before you make a techno signature that's true but once you make a techno uh technosphere then then the interesting difference between them is biospheres can die right and when a biosphere dies the bio signatures die with it a technosphere can die but if you've put out a bunch of space probes you know uh then its technos speres continue living on um we already have we've we have five you know we have five techno signatures meaning space probes that have already left the solar system right now nobody's it's going to be very hard to find those because you know they have very weak radio Transmissions but there it is there's proof of principles there are bio signatures artifacts that already leaving the solar system from Earth's technosphere Mars has a bunch of Earth's techno signatures on it and right you biospheres you'll never get a bio signature that's left the biosphere techn signatures can leave the technosphere and go create other technos speres or just travel you know travel from place to place so on some level you might expect that technos speres are going to be the first thing you're going to find now I'm not sure if that's true and I'm not going to put my money down anywhere but it really argues that you need to be searching for both bio signatures and techno signatures you shouldn't put your eggs in either basket modeling the expansion of an alien civilization say someone else arose you know many millions of years before we did and has started to colonize the Galaxy it seems that once you start it seems to and I know you've done work in this it seems to exponentially go and we we really should be seeing alien civilizations right in other words the great silence really should not be because once you get to a certain level of Technology you can colonize the Galaxy and it would take you millions of years but if you have millions of years then there you go at sublight speeds so does the fact that we don't see aliens everywhere which is what I think enrio fery asked is you know does that seem strange to you well en Rico fery did not ask do we see them everywhere he wanted to know why don't we see them here now right and if you're into UFOs you'd be like they are here now but you know if you're not into UFOs you're like no they're not here now and various I'm not really wildly bothered by that ver what I what I call the direct F me Paradox the direct F me Paradox is how come they haven't landed on you know Earth or it landed in Washington or Paris and announced themselves and I'm not bothered by that for a number of reasons first of all when did they land right if you know as we showed Gavin Schmitt and I showed in that paper back in 2018 you know if there was a civil if there was a a dinosaur civilization on Earth 500 million years ago or 100 million years ago there'd be zero evidence of it anymore because the Earth gets resurfaced every every couple of million years at all it takes so there'd be no physical evidence of a of a species you know of a civilization that that could have been here for 10,000 years right so you know you have to think about time as well as space so when did they arrive and unless they live forever you know and civilizations in general don't live forever then they wouldn't be around anymore and so when in that work we did so Jonathan Carol and um and I and Jason Wright we did uh we did simulations of this and it is absolutely true that the expansion wave once it gets started will cross the Galaxy pretty quick you know civilization can hop from one place to the other pretty you know pretty quickly on the time scale of the evolution of the Galaxy but if you allow civilizations to die then you actually can end up with holes in the uh where there just is nobody for a few million years or hundreds of millions of years um and in that case then yeah maybe that's where we're living we're living in a a hole nobody's you know maybe somebody visited five you know three billion years ago but but you know there's no evidence of that and right now we're just living in a whole that's not particularly deeply colonized now the other part about why don't we see them that's the what we talked about before what I call the indirect firmy Paradox and that's because we haven't looked right we just haven't looked so so why aren't they here I think there is pretty reasonable answers for why we don't see aliens here right now and then the um why haven't we seen them elsewhere is because we haven't looked the UFO phenomenon which is undoubtedly going to come up in the uh the comments is you know the problem is is that it is really ambiguous you know there's no landing on the White House lawn or anything like that but right it does deserve attention because you know we'd be really stupid if we're looking for alien life and we missed that if that's what that is yeah that would be bad that would be bad so what are your views on that do you think that we really need to take a very serious look at the UFO phenomenon and get rid of the stigma that surrounds it well I think it's good that the pilots in particular you know feel free to you know now there's less stigma for them reporting and I'm you know I'm all for the NASA panel that is going to do the investigation you know most of all because people are really interested so know for that reason uh but you know what I will say so you know this is there's a nuanced answer here the the first answer is there is no evidence hard evidence the kind of evidence that I would be required to produce if I claimed that I found life on an alien planet there is no evidence in existence that links UFOs or uaps to to alien life right so so let's think about the kind of evidence we have um you know it's a lot of blurry photographs it's a lot of stories you know narratives even by people you trust but they're still stories and then you get reports of radar detections right but none of these are are the kinds of evidence that I would be required by my colleagues to produce if I said that I had found alien life and so let's go through this a little bit and think about it right so personal testimony is just there's nothing you can do with per science can't do anything with personal testimony right we know for sure that personal testimony is the worst kind of evidence you know even people who have are are reporting in good faith memory is not a record memory is memory is easily confused memory is you know distorted it's just not a good report if somebody says I saw something move faster than an airplane can move okay what speed are you talking about you know oh I made an estimate that's not what you're going to be able to need to be able to say like oh that was actually moving in a way that a a you know a terrestrial spacecraft couldn't move then you get these images right and and and the thing that really I I always want to emphasize is that you know the images have not improved in quality in you know 70 years even though uh photographic technology has exponentially increased there it's always fuzzy blobs because people send me pictures right and they were like oh what about this and it's like oh another fuzzy blob you know even the stuff on the Navy videos were fuzzy blobs and I want to compare that to the Chinese spy balloon there was this image that the pilot of the of the You2 spy plane or the you I think it was that's what it was but the pilot basically it looks like he literally is holding up a cell phone and taking a selfie because you can see the reflection of his helmet and you can see the Spy balloon right and the image is so clear that you can make out the rivets on the solar panels beneath the payload right and if you know the sky was full of UFOs and amazing aircraft we'd have we'd have you know infinite numbers of images like that and we just don't and then finally there's The Radars which is like look you know if if you want to do science you need to know what your instrument is having somebody tell me yeah we saw it on radar is not the same as saying like Okay show me the radar show me its its history let me un let me take it apart to make sure that it doesn't have um kind of glitches it has there's been some really great sort of reporting or the stories by Phil Meer who's a um Astro engineer about how he you know he for years he worked with radar for he did we worked on various radar systems for NASA and he talks about all the glitches all the Phantom reports all the problems with radar so the answer so the the the emphasis on we just don't have any kind of data yet that would link these um sightings to alien to any reason why we would think they have any kind of really crazy performance characteristics that are linked to aliens but I'm all in favor of doing the science and I have a there's an entire there's a bunch of chapters in the book that talk about UFOs and uaps and there's a whole chapter on what would you need to actually H carry out a true open transparent scientific search of UFOs and uaps which I'm in favor of as am I and the book covers that actually quite well and that was one of the things that impressed me is that you're not afraid as a scientist to say UFO right and yeah which is important that's the first step because in the past there have been scientists that got pillared James McDonald right jayen heck and people like that that looked into it and said you know there might be something here and ended up by that same sort of machine in Congress actually to uh you know shut it down and ridicule it you know little green men and things like that but again I don't like the idea of sitting here saying well this civilization that's surrounding us is unique you know there are no others you there's no way you could ever that's actually the more preposterous claim is that we are alone and you know you just shouldn't we assume that we're not I don't think we should assume that we're not because I can actually imagine a bunch of ways that we are because even if like let's imagine that the universe is constantly popping off civilizations but look at our civilization like you know it's a little questionable about how long we're going to last it's not entirely clear to me that you know 200 years 500 years from now this kind of high-tech Global space fairing civilization is still going to be here and intact so imagine you're constantly spinning off civilizations but none of them last more than a thousand years you know then you just don't overlap you know at the moment we're in ex if that's true then at the moment we're looking there's nobody out there also it's possible that um that civilizations are just hard to make that that intelligence of this kind this kind of intelligence is hard to make I mean you look at Earth's history and you know microbes appeared immediately and technological civilization you know technological civilization took another 3.8 or whatever three and a half billion years so I I agree with you I am I am an optimist about this but I can certainly imagine ways in which you know it's hard to make longlived technological civilizations looking for the trash of past extinct civilizations is another form of a techn signature so if if it really is a situation where it's ships passing in the night but not quite rather it's ships passing a billion years apart a civilization pops up in the Milky Way goes extinct and it doesn't see another civilization for a billion years then it it it should be no surprise that that we don't find anything but at the same time we shouldn't be surprised if we find an artifact you know we find the space jockey from Alien you know and we're like you know so we're we're sitting here I wish they would left I wish I wish rley Scott would have left that a mystery and that we just I know I know the unpacking I know all the new parts of this that that franchise I'm like me you know the first the first two were so good and then almost everything afterwards got stupid it it needed the mystery it needed the mystery and just coming out of nowhere finding the space jockey while you're fighting a a xenomorph and then you find this this ancient alien spacecraft it it just that was great that was great but then then we found out how the sausage was made in later movies but um but that that idea though of looking for defunct equipment from a past civilization just cook into the solar system so is that another way that we could do it rather than you know of course looking on the moon and Mars and you know looking for things preserved there but just moving through the solar system in you know the style of a muua that might be a perfectly valid way to uh look for a techno signature right yeah yeah yeah but actually we don't even have to do it in our own solar system I mean the nice thing again about techno techno signatures as opposed to bio signatures is that exactly techn signatures will you know certain forms that you can imagine will be long lived so we're working on a paper now we have this idea of service worlds right that if you're a civilization and you got a nice habitable planet and there's other planets or moons in your system that are Barren like the moon or Mercury or you know that's a great place to have your industry right why not Park all of your energy collecting and whatever other kinds of activity you want to do on that planet so the idea of a service world a world that has been co-opted for you know because there's nothing living there you can't really do any damage to it to be used just for um for for Te for industry or whatever is I think it's a pretty compelling idea and you know if you if someone built something like that there could be signatures on that that would would last for a very long time so for example imagine you cover half a moon in solar panels right those solar panels are not they're going to degrade slowly but they're not going away and we already know from work that people have done that the reflected light off a solar panel carries a signature of the panel right so that the you know the there is a techno signature uh in reflected light on of solar panels we call the the ultraviolet Edge so for a very long time probably there would be and this this is a calculation that needs to be done you know we're working on just the the slab of metal part for the that project I was telling you about but eventually we should do the um longlived solar panel for the same reason but you know that's a nice example of a techno signature that could last hundreds of millions of years perhaps long after the tech the technosphere right the civiliz ization that built it was gone impossible planets so terraformers so say we go to Mars and over the next 10,000 years we turn it into an earthlike environment if we could you know if it it has the materials we need which that's in question but we we we terraform Mars we suddenly have a very unnatural Planet you know astronomers out in the Galaxy might say well that star system is about 4 and half billion years old or so and it has a planet in it that has an atmosphere that it should not be able to hold on to technos signatures in that regard in other words altered planets seems like a fruitful uh place to look right yeah that's a great idea the tell you the the idea that terraforming which is large scale planetary engineering would be you a very bright techno signature and again there's a I have you know I talk about this in the book and I talk about okay what do you want to do you know if you ended up your planet's a lemon what do you need to do to make it you know to to to turn it into that dream planet that you've always wanted so I run through the sort of the the prospects of what you have to do in terms of right you know if you don't have an atmosphere you got to build an atmosphere and that may require you know tossing com comets at it and crashing them into the the surface or doing things like pumping chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere which you know we know those are problematic on Earth because of the ozone but actually they're very good greenhouse gases so if you wanted a warmer Planet you would put uh cfc's into your planet and chlorocarbons are we wrote a paper on this uh and I talked about it in the book that we could detect those now with you know with um telescopes with the James web Space Telescope we could detect Earth levels of FL chlorofluorocarbons on uh uh nearby nearby planets orbiting nearby Stars so the terraforming becomes a great idea and Jill Tarter right who is just the the the hero of the story of techno signatures she was the one who suggested you know if you see a you see a solar system and you end up with like four worlds that all have the same temperature the same atmospheric pressure the same concentration of chemicals in them of then that's a really clear evidence for that they've been they've been terraformed to you know they've been engineered for a particular kind of climate you know she's so good is there you know there when we find uh our first bio signature or techno signature there needs to be a statue of Jill you know in front of the the building because she's just been incredible so I think that's a great idea right four four you know some number of Worlds stacked in a row all with the same climate that's a techno signature you could extend it out and say nearby star systems so clustering in other words you could you could infer that well they terraformed that star system but they've also terraformed the nearest 10 star systems yeah right right right that would be amazing right if you found a bunch of stars that werein yeah you know that were relatively close to each other and they all had identical climates that would also tell you and that that that gets into unambiguous in other words there's not much of a way to do that without a civilization right right and we could call it the freon civilization because of the CFCs the the freon planet the fre oans the fre oans now looking at dise equilibriums so that's the big thing about Earth is our oxygen disequilibrium in the atmosphere the chemical dis disequilibrium and that seems to be the key is to finding biospheres is when you see that weird disequilibrium of gases and there's no clear way that that could happen but the problem is of course is that nature can produce most of those gases on its own you know sulfur dioxide or something like that it can it can make it you know so you don't need a civilization but when it all goes into disequilibrium is the question so do we have the capability with James web right now to detect dise equilibriums in other words if we put J James web 10 light years away and looked at Earth could we detect the oxygen and the methane and the weirdness of the atmosphere yeah actually there was just a paper by Victoria Meadow's group in Washington that looked actually looked at Earth and looked at did looked at whether or not and I think the answer was yes you could see and I'm not really sure what the limits are but but the conclusion was that like this the ozone the this the the ozone lines you know the the signatures of ozone and oxygen are or so Earth's bio signatures are detectable would be detectable with James Webb and I'm not sure exactly how far out you have to go but certainly with the next generation of space to right you with the habitable World space because that's what it's going to be tuned for so you know disequilibrium is a really interesting thing because like you said you know that you know there are because of photochemistry because of you know light The Starlight or sunlight you can get planets that are have disequilibrium but usually you can tell you oh don't worry you can tell that if you saw it you'd be like oh that's because of you know photons streaming into the into the atmosphere but the kind of disequilibrium we're looking for where life is what's driving the the system the atmospheric system out of equilibrium you know there's there's a range of different ways to look for that and this goes under the rubric of what we were talking about with the agnostic bio signatures or techn signatures so for example Sarah Walker's group at the univers at Arizona State University has done a lot of work in thinking about networks you know using the not the not the molecules themselves but the network of chemical reactions in the atmosphere so you know you'd look at the atmosphere you'd see a bunch of different chemicals and you'd look at their concentrations and from that you could recreate you could build the reaction Network who's you know which chemical is reacting with whom and how strongly and there is a really interesting idea that you can see a very important difference between networks that were come from biology and networks that are like random you there's a very clear difference in in the sort of properties the network Theory properties like who's how many partners you have you know how many how many other chemicals are you connected to it looks very different on average for a biological Network than it does for a chemical Network and that's a beautiful example of of you know the network is reflecting the disequilibrium meaning by disequilibrium all we mean is that there's life and it's doing something it's pushing the network out of where it would be if there was no life you know without it the all the the chemicals reactions would kind of come to equilibrium there' just be you'd be able to tell that like nothing's going on there but here with dise equilibri you're driving it you're pushing new chemicals constantly into the atmosphere which force the the whole network to rearrange so this idea of disequilibrium for biosignatures or techno signatures I think is really important and really interesting and that's a that's a real future for us we're not gonna you know as Sarah likes to say a molecule is not a bios signature right and that's in re response to Like Oxygen I still think oxygen would be great like we find oxygen that's going to be pretty amazing um but you know a molecule alone is not an unambiguous bios signature things like the disequilibrium the the network Theory uh approaches that I think is going to give us the full context life and you you you coined this in your new book the little book of aliens life hijacks a planet where can everybody find your book my book is available online or wherever fine books are sold so you know Barnes & Noble or you know things like that or your local small book shop you should frequent those if you can now my last question for you Adam pertains to another one of your papers the saluan hypothesis does that idea say there's something to the UFOs and it's it's you know there's there's a a signal among the noise which I think there is a signal among the noise and we start to unravel it can we ever prove a close alien actually is an alien because of the Salan hypothesis well right the sorian hypothesis speaks to Ancient Aliens right so the idea there is that look after a couple of million years there will be no physical evidence left over not fossils because you know very very little gets fossilized so you know if you had a civilization lasting 10,000 years which would be a long time compared to how long our technological civilization has lasted there would be nothing left and the surface gets completely redone and there'd be no fossil you know there' really be almost no way to tell that so so that interesting thing is right so for Ancient Aliens no way to tell for even present aliens right even if UFOs what I you know Jacob um hwk Miser makes this point of like let's say you you know you do the kind of search you know the kind of Investigation NASA wants to do and you build you know a network of instruments and you watch the skies with them and you find something moving at Mack 500 that just made a right-hand turn right which you're like whoa that's incredible what would you do next right so you'd be able to say like all right that is moving in a way that no Earthbound or Earth terrestrial craft could operate in and in fact the g-forces of that are so strong that we don't even have metals that wouldn't Shear right but that's all you have what do you do next right you got to do that more science right because again they didn't land on the lawn White House lawn you can't shake their hands you don't have a sample so now you've got to build the next kinds of detectors that could go further and give you another the next level of characterization so the interesting thing is that even if we were to find evidence that UFOs or uaps were non-terrestrial we still just have to keep doing the kinds of science that we're doing with the other stuff too right everybody thinks like well that's it we're done it's like no unless unless unless you want to either shoot one down and apparently if you know they're going to be this high tech they're not going to get shot down or you know or they don't land on on you know make themselves appar visible to us uh and give us you know samples we're just going to have to keep doing the kind of remote sensing science that we doing for the alien planets anyway all right there will be a link to Dr Frank's new book in the description below and Adam's always a pleasure to talk to you and I look forward to the next book are you going to write another one uh I will but first my work right now is getting to um level four of Starship design in Starfield so that's that's my next goal I'm still trying to get past Batman one of the Arkham night I I'm I'm I'm up against a boss and I can't get past oh that's the worst when that happens can always lower the difficulty kind of lame but hey man if you need to do it no it's very lame because I start at the lowest difficulty well then you're really then you're really shy if you can't beat low difficult oh man I'm just not very good at video games even though I love them all right I look forward to next time thanks Adam take [Music] care [Music]

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 154,446

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, Alien Artifacts, Alien probes, lurkers, solar system, NASA, self-replicating spacecraft, Are We About to Discover Intelligent Alien Life?, Adam Frank, the little book of aliens, Are aliens real?, Where are they?

Id: aH0Msstu9AI

Length: 59min 3sec (3543 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2023