Are We Alone? The Search for Life in the Universe

[Music] when I agreed to do this talk a couple of days ago will not talk this intro I was sure that I wanted to wear a green alien mask would be super then Valerie talked me out of it and I also couldn't find one that fit but like a lot of people who enjoy green alien masks and SETI I have an interest in math and science and astronomy that dates back to before it was cool and extremely well paid and here we are at extension which what we do is we provide an education to help people expand their horizons and also find new careers so for those of you who are nerdy like me and want to put that math brain to a new career or to extend your career we have classes in data science in machine learning we even have an awesome class coming up in quantum computing I'm told so if any of that floats your boat please come and find me over there in the corner wearing orange usually or check out our website at extension berkeley.edu one more thing in case the aliens come to us and strike the fifth floor of one sixty spear there are two emergency exits two stairwells one just outside stairwell a outside roughly through these walls and one on the other side stairwell B which is beyond the women's bathroom so sort of diagonally across on the other side and with that welcome oh sorry Ashish Mukherjee and I'm a program director at UC Berkeley extension well I did wear my human body suit over my alien infrastructure this was with the cheap model they ran out of George Clooney ones so I'm afraid they just have this little one left it's okay it's getting a bit warm and anyway my name is Simon steel and the director of education outreach at the SETI Institute and I'd like to welcome you on behalf of the Institute and on behalf of our CEO Bill diamund who unfortunately can't be with us tonight so this is a monthly talk lecture series who has been to a xxx talk before okay and I'm assuming by precepts of illumination those who didn't raise their hands have not well welcome usually these talks are down in Menlo Park at SRA International and this is a first time we're up here in the city to to maybe expand our horizons and hopefully yours we are back in Menlo Park next month and if you want to know more about that talk just go to our website for those of you who are new to the SETI Institute in fact a lot of what we do is going to be talked about here at this presentation we have been around for 35 years doing research not just in SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence about the search for life in all its forms in the universe and I think that we will get the full spectrum of of that exploration tonight at this talk I was asked to give one little bit of advertising and again you can go on to the website for this bill wanted me to mention that the the SETI Institute does have a scientific cruise coming up in Alaska its sales at 7:30 so if you've got your bags packed we're ready to roll no it's actually June 26 July 3rd one of our professors professor Lawrence Doyle is going to be the host speaker on that cruise and if you're interested in these sort of cruises of exploration both of the wilderness end of the mind again please do go to our website and take a look at that it should be a wonderful trip I'm strolling the way and belowdecks on that one so anyway I'm going to stop talking I am going to introduce Molly Bentley who is the producer of the SETI Institute radio show and podcast big picture science so we recommend that you take a listen to that they have weekly episodes and again you can go to our website or the big picture science website to find out more about those episodes and I'm gonna hand over to Molly for tonight's talk are we alone the search for life in the universe thank you I'm going to introduce each one of these scientists and then they will give a brief discussion of their areas of research then we'll open it up for discussion up here and then two questions for you so think about the questions that you have for them we'll begin with the woman standing sitting to my left here Natalie Cabral is an astrobiologist and she is the director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute she leads projects in planetary science and astrobiology and she designs exploration strategies for MU for Mars Saturn's moon Titan and the icy moons of the outer solar system she fully embodies her philosophy about the importance of exploration and so her career has had highs and lows she has trekked up the highest volcanoes and she has died to the lowest depths of lakes because these places in the Andes are enough are analogues for Mars and what she wants to know is what the planet looked like billions of years ago and whether it one was once habitable now at the SETI Institute natalie is always friendly in the coffee room when we're refilling our coffee cups but I always sense that she might prefer drinking her coffee brewed over a fire outside her tent in a remote of Chilean desert am I reading you right pretty closely okay her achievements I should say this are not her achievements are not a SETI Institute secret she has accepted an invitation to address the United Nations next week as part of the International Day of women and girls in science please welcome Natalie Cabral thank you very much for the kind introduction and yeah anywhere outside the Institute the what I'm doing at the Institute is I'm just not the only one I am an astrobiologist and there are probably three types of research about life in the universe and insted one is hands on which is in our neighborhood in the solar system another one is yes yeah it is it's outside the solar system and that Sixto plan that we'll talk about that and then there is Seth so what I do is try to understand you know how to explore our solar system what is life how did it started and what kind of instruments and technology we need to to be able to go and detect it so to do that what we do is try and find what we call terrestrial analogs to planetary environment and this is what I do I started my career analyzing Mars data from the Mars missions I am actually a member oh I was because the missed the mission just stopped a member of the tsiyon team of the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and Opportunity and so we first tried to understand if Mars was habitable and this is what other missions are doing in other planetary bodies in the solar system like Cassini did in on Saturn and once we found out that Mars was habitable then the next question is that did life actually appear on Mars so we go back to those places on earth that look like Mars 3.5 billion years ago and see what type of lives actually is surviving out there what kind of instrument does it take to detected and what kind of strategy do we need to deploy to actually fund them out so I spent quite a bit of time in in deserts but also at very high altitude because in those places like in the end is for instance we have volcanoes we have hot springs we have legs that are drying out because unfortunately like in yes like anybody anywhere else the climate is changing and so those legs are evaporating but this is a natural lab where we can go and the reason I actually dive in in those legs is because it gives us an idea of what Mars could have looked like it's an extremely it's an incredible experience but the point is that right there the shock that we have is to realize that anywhere you look on earth we have yet to find a place where life is not so those extreme environment are all inhabited and in the the survival strategies the adaptation strategies are still the same they have been the same since we have the record of life and the cyanobacteria this blue and green algae that we find in those places are the same that we're here on earth 3.5 billion years ago so this is our neighborhood this is our garden this is where we explore an expert we are also learning my kind of signature in different range in different spectrum this life is actually giving out so that we can recognize them in other planet beyond our solar system and I think this is a lot of what those dog is interested in can you do me a favor and just move the clock over here so our little interruption Doug Caldwell is an astronomer at the City Institute and he is the chair of the exoplanet group now that's exoplanet not X planet like Pluto but is Pluto a planet again duck for the record and you'll soon hear that when it comes for searching for alien life exoplanet disco juries are some of the most exciting discoveries around Doug has done in addition to this he's done what many explorers can only dream of he has travelled 3,000 light-years across the galaxy that was the search space of the orbiting NASA Kepler space telescope for which he was the co investigator and that provided us with the first extrasolar planet discovery tonight you'll learn from him about the telescope successor Tess the transiting exoplanet survey satellite and another one after that the James Webb Space Telescope please welcome Doug Caldwell so I apologize in advance I tried to fit all of exoplanet science on one slide in four minutes so but I want to start the with the top in the center there we have this this equation weird-looking equation called the Drake Equation which maybe many of you have heard of and it was it was put together by that one of the founders of the SETI Institute Frank Drake as a way to sort of stimulate discussion about how likely it might be or how many alien civilizations might be out there that we could communicate with I mean it's kind of a driving principle of a lot of the work at the SETI Institute to try and understand different terms of this and it starts with n the number of of alien civilizations are is the rate of star formation and then the next three terms or terms that I'm going to talk about they're kind of the easy ones to solve the rate of star formation we know pretty well there's about five stars per year formed in the Milky Way the next one is the fraction of these stars that have planets the number of those planets or the fraction of those planets that might be in a habitable area somewhere that life could exist and then the number of them that actually have life on them and so in in around 1995 we didn't know of any planets around other stars like the Sun everyone expected there were a lot of them but we didn't know fast forward to 2013 or 14 and we have today something like 4,000 no planets around stars other than the Sun and several thousand other candidates that have a good chance of being planets oh and we now know also that there are more stars more planets than stars in our Milky Way on average each star has more than one planet and and the plot of all those points is is one way to look at those planets and many of those the yellow ones each dot represents a planet that was discovered by Kepler and and the horizontal axis is the distance from its star and so at there I'm sorry it's the orbital period in this one so it's in days the earth would it be at 365 days and the vertical axis is the planets size so you can see on this side there's an earth a Neptune and a Jupiter and what we found that there's a lot of small planets there's a lot of planets at long orbital periods where they might not be too hot because of their star too close to their star but there's this region that sort of highlighted where there aren't that many planets and that's because they're hard to find there and that's where we think the planets that might be likely to have life would be they're not too hot they could have water and so we're trying to find more of them and trying to understand more about them when we find them so the finding parts relatively easy we did it with Kepler which was a telescope that had about a 1 meter mirror about this big the understanding them is much harder and there's two main ways were that people are working to do this one is to we want to see if these planets have atmospheres so they could potentially have life so one way is to look at look through this planet's atmosphere at the star light coming through it and the picture on the bottom there is actually a picture of Pluto which may or may not be a planet but it has an atmosphere and that's a that's a photograph from New Horizons looking back at Pluto it was as it was going away from the Sun and you can see the thin atmosphere actually it's pretty thick around Pluto that the sunlight is shining through and by by looking at that atmosphere you can see what it's made up of what kind of molecules and chemicals it has in it we want to do that with planets around other stars and it's much harder it's a lot easier when you have a telescope right near the planet so the other thing we can do is we can look at a planet directly not the light going through its atmosphere but the light that's coming from the planet are being reflected by the planet that's also very hard because stars are very bright and planets are not very bright relatively and what because they're far away it's very hard to see the planets light next to the stars light so in order to do this we need we need big telescopes some of this work has been done with with Hubble Space Telescope which is a two point four meter mirror so you know about ten feet almost not quite but but there's a there's upcoming telescopes that are gonna be launched in space um James Webb is scheduled for launch about a year from now in March of 2021 and it has what six and a half meter mirror I think so it's a big telescope it's made up of separate segments and it should be able to to observe atmospheres of bigger warmer planets it still can't see atmospheres of planets like the size of the earth and in order to do that we need even bigger telescopes and so there are ideas people are putting forward to build really large telescopes and one one concept is this thing called leVoir which stands for large UV optical IR telescope they're not very imaginative with names but one of it one of the ideas is it could be a 16 meter mirror so like about 50 feet across in space that's a huge undertaking that we don't really know how to do yet but but that's the kind of telescope that would hopefully be able to actually see atmospheres of planets like the earth and measure do they have water do they have carbon dioxide potentially other signs of life like natalie was talking about there are also telescopes that are being built on the ground it's easier to build a really big telescope on the ground that it is in space but you have this problem of the atmosphere but people come up with clever ways to get around that and we're we've currently imaged a bunch of planets around other stars nearby stars they are big planets like the size of Jupiter and so people are working on getting that down with some really extremely large telescopes called elts imaginatively and those would hopefully be able to see things like maybe the size of the earth if it's a warm earth or around a very nearby star and so that's sort of where the science is heading we've we know their planets out there we know there are a lot that are in regions around their stars that be habitable now we want to see are they habitable and do they have life great thanks Doug seth shostack you in the room there he is only physically he's a radio astronomer at the city instituting is the talented co-host of the radio show and podcast big picture science now what I know about Seth from working with him on the radio show is that he's kind of shy he prefers to remain on the sidelines but you wouldn't think that he would be because he has travelled the world to give thousands of public talks about SETI and science he's written nearly as many popular articles on the subject he is the recipient of the Carl Sagan award for the popularization of science and he hasn't yet met a reporter whom he's refused an interview even if that reporter calls late in the afternoon of the radio shows weekly production deadline but perhaps with your encouragement we can get him to open up to you tonight about the search not just for extraterrestrial life but intelligent life and that is the I in SETI welcome seth shostack thank thank you Molly I did I refuse to be interviewed by you is that what prompted this I don't know any now yeah so when I joined the SETI Institute which as I like to say was just before the Crimean War began the only project there the only research project there was SETI looking for intelligent life it was a NASA project lamentably two years after I joined perhaps not due to me but two years after I joined that was killed by the US Congress so ever since then SETI has received no government funding not in this country not in any country so it's it's privately funded and that means that the effort is also somewhat constrained but we're looking for intelligent life now unlike these folks here natalie can find life on mars by for example sending something to mars and picking it up or at least looking for it doug is looking for spectral signatures of maybe oxygen in an atmosphere of an exoplanet did you mention X planet is that sounds like a Monty Python skit right okay involving parents I think so you could one person watches all right in any case that's that's relatively simple if you're interested in it you'll pardon me stupid life that's easy to find you can find it where I live actually so but intelligent life intelligent life is much harder to find because it's gonna be farther away it's less less commonplace okay so we can't go there there's no way we can go there and despite the fact that one third of the public believes otherwise I don't think they're coming here so how can you find it you look for signals and that's what SETI has done since 1960 when Frank Drake the aforementioned Frank Drake did the first SETI experiment he pointed an antenna in West Virginia at a couple of nearby stars hoping to tune in on signals that would be aimed our way okay didn't fine thing but he did hear something but it wasn't the aliens it was the military okay so but we have been following that paradigm ever since now what's happened that's new what's different why is it that I bet everybody a cup of Starbucks that will find et with in 23rd with the next 20 years I have to keep recalibrating because time marches on and my wife is buying Starbucks stock hey I think that the point is that the equipment being used to do the search keeps getting faster that's mostly Moore's law right it's a computer technology but beyond that there are other new developments the SETI Institute as does the University of California Berkeley has a project to look for flashing laser lights in the sky that would tell you somebody's out there and a scheme that I think has quite a number of very obvious advantages would be forget the signals because they might not be sending signals your way I don't think any aliens know you're here because they're in general they're so far away they haven't been able there hasn't been enough time for radar FM radio television all these things to get to them so they don't know that homo sapiens is here you might tell your neighbor that next time they say they've been abducted so they don't know that you're here so they may not be sending anything our way but the universe is three times as old as here so there may be very big things out there and one way to find the aliens at least the more advanced among them would be to look for artifacts look for things that they have constructed the end via you're done okay thank you very much so the scientists here have outlined three different ways that the SETI Institute is looking for life we have they're doing more than that but what we had discussed here is going to Mars either with our Rovers or examining Mars perhaps one day we'll put boots on the ground in Mars we're looking at exoplanets and the chemical signatures around in the atmosphere of these planets and then as Seth said we're also looking for techno signatures so I wonder if I can just if I can hear if we can hear from you an overview of what specifically you're looking for and what is the most hopeful discovery for what you're all are looking for now if I have this right on Mars some of these signatures would be chemical some of them would be technological on Mars the you're looking for perhaps chemical life maybe geologic if you're looking for fossil if we get really lucky maybe it'll be biological with what Doug is explaining it looks like we're looking for chemical signatures and then with what Seth was saying that's a technological signature can you give us an overview and what is the most hopeful scenario for each one of you because I want to start by provoking a little bit things here so we are all all of us the three of us we we are in the scientists in general in the world are looking for life now in the universe wherever it is but the thing is that we don't have a definition for life we don't have a consensus definition for life we don't know what life is and and therefore we don't know exactly if we will be able to recognize it so this is why we're starting with things like well you know the chemistry might be just like us they might be sending signal that we will be able to recognize or we might find signatures that we might be able to recognize in the end so in terms of being hopeful as far as Mars is concerned and n the solar system in general maybe with the exception of Titan the moon of Saturn because the chemistry is very different is that we will be able to recognize the signature of our own life because the components of our own biology they are very common in the solar system in the universe in general they are very common and for Mars as far as mass is concerned we have some common environment at the very beginning of the history of Mars we also have some exchange of material between our Mars and the earth very early on and it is very possible that some material from Mars came to the earth it's just a question of or orbital mechanics mechanics when you have big impacts at the beginning of the solar system when planets are forming materials is ejected if life ever appeared on Mars we might have some of that material landing on earth and and the joke around is that maybe we are the Martians we are seeking out there now so that would be you know on early Mars we can see for fossil we can we should have and the fossils there are four I think Rovers that will be landing or at least will be heading towards Mars this summer and I think it's the first time that I say what are all the countries that Russia the United States the Europe and China will all be on the red planet at the same time so when you talk about fossils you mean literally fossils and they'd dug down dig down dug down that but dig down and and and we might see a fossil of micro yes and no when we are going at least for the Mars 2020 which is the u.s. rover it's going to a place that 3.5 billion years old and that means that by that time on earth we already have fossils of what I call the cyanobacteria the little blue and green algae the stromatolites though guns drugs the thing is though that the history of the environment on Mars and climate is not the same as it was on earth and very very early on you have all sorts of things the atmosphere is disappeared and UV or ultraviolet radiation is coming to the ground and this is UVC this is something that is going to dissociate your DNA this is going to destroy life so whatever is out there on Mars we might have some difficulties finding it at the surface or maybe exposed you know through erosion that's my video that's why we'll be digging let's let's hold that thought there because that's a lot about Mars to process so it is a very exciting time for Mars and for the on planetary scientists that study Mars moving on to these signatures so we're looking at a lot of things in Mars and then that may be in the news soon for Doug and for Seth just just briefly what are the signatures that you're looking for what is the most hopeful thing Doug you talked about all the different kinds of signatures we might find in the atmosphere of these planets these wild some of them are extraordinary planets where they rain there they have methane and they're dark planets or their water weight watery worlds try saying that but what you're looking at is their atmosphere so what's the signature you're looking for what are you looking for - first order we don't really know what we're looking for so we're looking for things that that we see on earth that indicate life so we're looking for water carbon dioxide methane and if we see lots of these chemicals especially if they're in if they're in disequilibrium meaning they have to be resupplied in some way or they would they would not be in the amounts we see that tells us that something is creating these chemicals ongoing and now that could be geology and so there's a lot of people trying to study geology of different worlds and how that could lead to different compositions of atmospheres there's a lot of biologists who are trying to understand what are the what are the signatures of life that we could see around these planets so right now we're really trying to just see are there planets out there with water and carbon dioxide and the chemicals we have in our atmosphere water carbon dioxide methane do you need to see them all if you see if you see oxygen do you think okay there's there's like there are there ways to make oxygen from you know volcanoes and geology so it's it's what's the list again it's water maybe cuz it's a cocktail you're looking for and one one sort of shortcut that might be nice and people have thought about this if we could find chlorophyll arc chlorofluorocarbons worlds and they destroy our ozone layer but there there's something that's a signature of life on earth because we made them and so if we can see some it's almost like a techno signature and you're hearing from the science in solution yeah we're looking for life and but we only have the example of life here and one of the that I don't know if it's a mantra but one of the sayings among astrobiologists we're looking for life as we don't know it so you have to imagine we're looking for what we know but also for what we what we don't know so Seth what is the signature what's the what's the most hopeful prediction within the work that you do well we have a somewhat simpler problem you see they can't even find life this may surprise any of you who've been through the 10th grade because they're they you know told you well it reproduces and it uses energy and it moves around and all these things these are all true but you can find exceptions to all of that so there really isn't any good definition of life but there is a good definition of intelligence if you can build a radio transmitter we consider you're intelligent so you know just fill out the forms that were left on your chairs and we'll consider future invitations carefully so we look but in terms of what kind of signal we're looking for as I say signals are one thing that we do look for artifacts would be something else you know if you saw that somebody had rearranged the stars in their neighborhood into a line or a triangle or something like that you would say you know that doesn't look normal so that would be one indication that there's something out there clever enough to move stars around but the thing we usually look for are what are called narrowband signals the public thinks we're looking for you know the Fibonacci series or prime numbers or the value of pi or something like that and we can't even do that even if you thought it was a good idea because of the nature of the technology that's used so you can't do that what you look for it it's a signal that's at one spot on the dial just like you know when you came in here maybe you were listening to kg o88 10 kilohertz on the dial or KD FC or 103 point I don't want to presume your taste in music or talk radio but it's at one spot on the dial or more or less you know and that's the kind of a signal that a quasar pulsar they don't make signals like that that's a transmitter so if you're getting a signal like that from the sky and it could just be a satellite but if it moves across the sky at the same rate that the Earth turns in other words the same rate that the stars move across the sky then you can say alright let's call the papers that we've seen in the is everyone here or is anyone here has seen the movie contact okay good film you remember how she had the headphones on Jodie Foster for those of you who have not seen the film she wears headphones at some point she's listening for the possible signal are you actually listening are you listening will you hear a sound or is it something that registers on the computer well see the thing is we monitors 72 million channels simultaneously with the Allen telescope array which was presumably up here on the screen that's the current receiver so that would require 36 million pairs of earphones we can't afford all the grad students to put on the earphones we can't afford the popcorn to keep them happy and it would mess up their coffee errors so we don't do that it's all done by computers there's no audio whatsoever I mean the TV people have occasionally asked can we have some audio of what it sounds like to listen for et and the answer is no because we don't have it I'm glad you said that that's something the TV people ask but radio would never ask that a radio reporter would never ask medium now I wonder so all of these methods are working together we were comparing and contrasting them but what I'd like to hear is from one of you our firm a couple of you how the methods work with each other in tandem so if one of you were to pick up an encouraging signal does the other method step in so does Doug look at the planets that were sets of the method that said where if you find a technical if we pick up a signature do you look at the planets how looking at Mars is maybe you check out the planet by going there or would you turn a telescope to Mars could you give us an example of how they work together how you work together to confirm some of these signals well or follow up on them you know there is something much more basic than that I know you want to talk to me no I don't want to talk to you i but the the the thing is that the more stupid life you find microbial life simple life the more we find the more there is a chance that we will find intelligent life and in abundance this is a statistical universe so the more we have small things the greater the chance is that you are going to have bigger and intelligent things so this is one way you know that thing works the other one I already talked about which is basically we learn in a solar system to recognize the different signatures of environment environment favorable to life and try to understand it there is something that's really unambiguously just life so far we don't have anything the only thing is what Doug was saying pollution the thing that we are putting into the atmosphere that's no natural other than that it's really hard I think one synergy we've had is the planets that Kepler and now tests found that are potentially habitable I think go on to the observing list for for Allen telescope but you know in the early days of planetary discovery exoplanet discovery we would look at every new exoplanet system thinking okay that's a hot Jupiter that may not be very interesting for et but on the other hand if there's a big plant there might be a small one we used to do that we don't do that anymore and the reason we don't do that anymore is now we know that roughly one out of every five stars this is a very preliminary estimate but you know this that's what's usually cited by people when they're citing anything one in five stars has a planet that's more or less the same size as the earth presumably the same composition of the as the earth and at the right distance from its home star so the temperatures are of the same salubrious equality as you enjoy here in the Bay Area so those you know because that's such a high percentage right if it's one in five stars they're like 250 billion stars in the Milky Way if it's one in five I mean 50 billion cousins of Earth are out there in our galaxy so you know why be picky we don't we just look at all the nearby ones and something else too is that you're talking about habitable zone and you're talking about planets but what the solar system exploration has been telling us is really that you can be outside of the habitable zone on the moon and still have habitable environments and so we also know that there are way more moons in our solar system that there are planets and much more habitable environment than there are planets in the habitable zone and some of these Moon might be just very interesting places for alien civilization as well to be doing some work in the earth system if anybody saw avatar remember Pandora the inhabitants were modestly intelligent if we if we talked about getting up and personal with alien life I think we have to be prepared for some disappointment that sounds very exciting but some of these places that we're discussing tonight can be visited and and others cannot be visited and there are trade-offs here so if if you go to Mars and we find evidence of life maybe it'll be alive but it's more likely that it'll be evidence of a past life we're keeping ourselves hopeful about that but you one day we could probably put boots on the ground but you probably can't have a philosophical conversation with a microbe maybe you can with an intelligent life but it's unlikely that we can go visit that life and then what what Doug may find these worlds they may find these worlds that are that scream habitability that perhaps perhaps I know that this like it's cream no not literally scream but we may not be able to visit them either so can you talk about some of those those trade offs [Music] kind of golden signals that we might see in exoplanet sciences is we now know that the star nearest to our Sun which is only four light years away has it's actually a system of three stars has planets in the habitable zone around one of stars what's the name of that star systems that's Alpha Centauri and the star Proxima Centauri which is a little tiny cool star is known to have planets in its habitable zone and the other two stars in the system are much more like the Sun and they may or may not have planets and because of their proximity to us relative to other stars those are actually a place where we could image planets like the earth take a picture study their atmosphere which much smaller telescopes like a meter or something so people are thinking about doing that the the the payoff would be huge the problem is there's kind of only one star maybe two or three other really close ones that we could do that too so that's one opportunity where we could find something around a really close star it still would take you know many many tens of thousands of years to get there with technology that we don't yet have so yeah is that is that frustrating at all for you knowing that you probably could never visit some of these incredible worlds have an optimistic guy okay Mars is good enough that's the slogan alright um Seth what about what about what are your thoughts on that well you mean in terms of actually meeting the aliens faced well knowing that if you had a conversation they'd have a face if you had a conversation with one yeah we take a long time probably not on I mean nobody knows how many you know Gallic I'm sorry how many civilizations there are in our galaxy right whether you know intelligent beings right now Frank Drake has frequently quoted the number 10,000 that's his favorite number and but if you ask Frank where'd you get this number Frank and you'd say well you know driving in on highway 17 the other day I just sort of figured it sounded like a good number he admits readily that it's a dead guess but Frank it's a very smart guy and his guests are usually right about almost everything that I've been able to check so if it's ten thousand that means the nearest aliens are on the order of you know a hundred to a thousand light-years away that's the nearest so let's say the five hundred light-years away and we pick up a signal tonight right well we're sitting here so we miss the action and we pick up a signal in it you know we found it now to begin with that you know there's a whole kind of a scheme for dealing with a suspected signal but I won't go into that unless you really want to hear it but if we got that signal and you say okay we're gonna talk back to them hi we're the Earthlings and we got a lot of used cars sitting around San Francisco we'd like to sell to you you know that would take in that case 500 years that signal to get to them and then their response that 500 years additionally so that's a thousand years turn around that's gonna mean you wouldn't accept that with the people you text that's a long time right so it's not gonna be about conversation but as I have said far too often you know I studied Latin in high school and I read Julius Caesar it was 2,000 years for that signal to get to me but it was still interesting modestly so for the people in this audience would you be excited if we did make contact with alien life with an intelligent being yeah what about with a microbe what if we found microbe with that rock your world the same in the same ways so said Natalie that sounds like that may be the most did you say it's more fascinating I thought she says even more fascinating okay I wonder for that we're going to take your questions in just a moment but you know now there I was also being a little bit provocative with you by saying you can't have a philosophical conversation with a microbe I have a feeling you would disagree with that because the microbes even a fossil of a microbe it could tell us something and tell us what that is and then we'll move on to questions soon yeah and you know it's just like everything everything alien everything strange it's just like somebody from another country you find it weird as long as we cannot talk the language cannot speak that language if you start speaking the language of the microbe which which is basically chemistry and then they are going to start telling you a lot about the environment they are coming from about how they were created what's the environment they live in and basically what they went through this is why I'm going back to the end these sometime in the middle of nowhere in the salt lake where it's really hot or really cold all the sudden you find a microbe that has a signature of a very intelligent ooh very high radiation or an adaptation to really cold environment when it's actually hot it is telling you where its genome has been through over time and so it might not be a discussion with Julius Caesar in Latin this is really good right but it is still something that telling telling you something very profound about the environment that life to the paths that like to get to that point and what where the condition of that life at the time it was it was formed so the philosophies for us but you can have a conversation with a microt if you find your doing that too often though good and accept I understand that there are some bottles of champagne and different there used to be in in different refrigerators around the world or around the country in case we did make contact with intelligent life would you pop that bottle of champagne if it's not intelligent life but it was micro but just the evidence of a microbe would you about that Carter's idea Jill tarter headed up the SETI research effort for decades actually and she was the prototype for the Ellie Arroway character in the movie contact but she made sure that there was always a bottle of champagne indeed at the observatories that we were using before we built our own and there I haven't seen a bottle of champagne but in case we found them you know you break out the champagne but I have to tell you that every time I would go to the observatory it was a different bottle of champagne okay but would you pop it if we just found evidence of the microbe in champagne would you ask someone else to pop it this is how it is like pulling teeth maybe if you pop this bottle but what Molly knows that we did in 1997 we picked up a signal that we thought was real nobody was sneaking of a champagne nobody was thinking of a champagne they were thinking what do we do now what they were thinking do you have questions for the scientists up here there's a microphone coming your way with in the hand of Rebecca don't be shy put your hand up signal you have to sit this is all about signaling you have to signal some way I'm going to ask you all to repeat the question because we're trying the question is would space debris interfere with the telescopes that were that we're building to do these searches and and yes it certainly can you might have heard recently there's been some launches by SpaceX to launch a bunch of communication satellites and a lot of astronomers are up in arms because they're they're very bright relatively speaking so a lot of the ground-based telescopes have to deal with them as far as debris in orbit a lot of these telescopes will be far enough away from the earth that that won't be a problem they're gonna be a lagrangian to get away from the earth for just such reasons to get away from the dust and the stuff that's around the earth and the bright light from the earth and moon and then Lagrange point is the point approximately midway between the earth and the moon there's a bunch of Lagrange points but the one that they're gonna be at is is a place based on the gravity of the earth and the Sun there are two places around the earth one closer to the Sun and one further from the Sun where you can put something in orbit and doesn't take very much energy to keep it there so it doesn't drift away from the earth it stays in the same place you can keep talking to it easily other questions certainly for the in the case of the search for intelligent line do you mind repeating the question oh I'm sorry the question was what's the role of artificial intelligence in searching for life and the answer is that you know when you have 72 million channels for your receiver I mean you get stuff all over the place and the question is can you in fact you know do a better job of sorting the wheat from the chaff now there's a gentleman in the audience who helped us to try and develop a system where citizen scientists would do that but you know citizen scientists unfortunately you know take coffee breaks they're unreliable whatever where's a I it's thoroughly unreliable no AI is good opportunity means machine learning so that's already being applied particularly at Berkeley and we will be applying it to our own SETI searches as well but there's another the second there's a part B to that apart too depending on how you number letter things which is isn't it possible that the intelligence that we find somewhere else could be machine intelligence that that's the ultimate trajectory for any evolution I certainly think so so our machines will talk to their machines yes there is a the other part to that is we from what we learn in the solar system we know the type of environments that our planets had very far in the past and we also have the data now from exoplanet and what we're doing is using all of this to model potential what we call coevolution the evolution the coevolution of life and environments we know that we are the product of formally four billion years of evolution on the road planet environment and life evolved the planet is giving you the physical and chemical environment for life to appear but also constraint for the type of life that you will have as soon as life is there it's going to change all of its environment the atmosphere you breathe today is not a result of the environment alone it's a result of some little algae the same one I was talking about shooting oxygen in in the atmosphere and changing it so you have this coevolution going on and we know that life that is going to appear on other planetary environment is going also to be Co evolving with that environment so learning more about exoplanet environment and mixing it with what we know of our own solar system with the help of AI we are now starting to project what type of coevolution could happen on exoplanet or anywhere in the universe but we can't assume that that evolution would unfold in the same way because isn't it true that there's just been a number of happy accidents we might call them that allowed us to be here today in this room talking to each other absolutely right this is why you know thinking that we are going they are there is going to be some convergence because nature find the same solution to the same problem and we can see also on earth a number of time of when the same invention has been made by nature like your eyes it's been invented independently about 20 times on our own planet so they are there are some solution for the same questions on the other hand you would take exactly the two simple and to earth at the same time same environment exactly the same twins but you tweak and event an extinction or an asteroid and today what we are we are first we wouldn't be here and we probably would look very very differently we still don't know we are talking about accident like a stray dog cosmic events etc but we know also that biology is mutating for reasons we don't understand very well and this happened a little less than 1 billion years ago and the results is us otherwise we would be you know happy having these discussions as algae in the pond right now we don't know why complex life all the sudden just but I would have nowhere but it's probably related to stationed in in the biology so there are a number of things you can have exactly the same environment you tweak something at some point and it will change completely the outcome so there are lots of different variables it sounds like if there are other questions while you're thinking of that Seth can you just remind us why the asteroid was so important in the rise of human beings they asked for that wiped out the dinosaurs this is an example of this kind of happy accident although it wasn't happy for the dinosaurs that's doing asteroid mine they get stock well yes I mean some of you may remember 66 million years ago rock slammed into the Yucatan and you know it did away with the dinos most of them anyhow and led for the opportunities for the mammals there were mammals beforehand but you know they were nothing was bigger than 20 pounds right and then suddenly they were big mammals and eventually you so yes having more rocks I mean it's been said that well having too many asteroids might be a bad thing it would wipe out societies there was a book published in 2000 called rare earth in which it was said we are lucky not to have too many asteroids but I would posit that maybe that's wrong maybe what we needed were more asteroids to get rid of the Dinos a little earlier because we wasted 150 mm I mean they wouldn't consider it that way but we wasted 150 million years on the dinosaurs and we'd probably have the cure for death now if it the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out so I think rocks are probably a good thing shake things up numbers game if they were in the same parameters we've really got a pretty good sample as you can see by that plot I had that had lots of points filling it in but we might we've been cut off we're done we might know mines no son well we would what we would hope to do is to push the boundaries of where we can find exoplanets smaller planets around different kinds of stars at longer periods and what I think the main thing that's going to tell us when we start to be able to understand them and if they have atmospheres is what are the range of these conditions that Natalie was talking about do we see planets that are all carbon monoxide atmospheres are all methane or some other you know ammonia or something and and just these different ranges of conditions that will allow us to understand the the possibilities of environments that are out there not just what we see on earth or Venus or Mars so I think that the diversity is what would help just a pause in the in the questions um this brings me to a quotation about exoplanets that I want to I want to run by Doug it's made us you may have found like oh no but I've read that exoplanets are a window into the future and in to the past of Earth and that quote they allow us to simultaneously see earth from cradle to grave what can other planets tell us about our own planet especially planets that are so strange and far away that's true the thing that we you know we know about the earth around the Sun at at four-and-a-half billion years old but we don't know what the earth was like necessarily at a billion years old but we do have exoplanets that are around young stars and much older stars so if we can find more of those and understand you know we co ate all the small planets around young stars look like this or you know and so that that does teach us about the evolution of planets around stars and one question we still have is how soon the planets form and what happens in the early years the the big planets like Jupiter come crashing in and scatter all the little planets out we know that happens in some cases so so understanding you know the evolution of planetary systems we can do that by looking at this snapshot of the sky does that include our own fate the fate of Earth the ultimate fate of Earth I mean I think we have a pretty good idea of the ultimate fate of Earth you know this Suns going to expand and and burn up the earth and in 4 billion years or something like that so we don't know what's gonna happen until that where there's a lot of debate about you know how long are we gonna still be habitable as the sun's warming up some people think we're right at the edge of it you know in in another 20 years well I mean from our own making probably but but as the Sun warms we could be you know the earth is going to become less and less habitable now these are timescales of like billions of years but but we would be able to better understand this by seeing a lot of other instances of Earth's it still it's good to double check your to-do list - what Doug was saying is that we can calibrate this with the history the geological history of the earth because we've been through so many changes the earth today doesn't look anything like what it looked four billion years ago or two billion years ago and right now what astrobiologists are doing is to use the different epochs of Earth when you had the snowball earth or you had a time when we had a co2 atmosphere or methane atmosphere we went through all these times and we can find a record of this in in the geological in the sediment of Earth so I think that this can be calibrated as well with the findings that we have on our earth and and Mars and other buddies of the solar system okay Dyson megastructures do you want to repeat that question and also give a quick definition Seth of what a Dyson well mega structure is well the Dyson Sphere how many people know what a Dyson Sphere is how many people have lived on a Dyson there's just an idea from the British physicist Freeman Dyson about 30 years ago and a very clever one he said look if you really want to solve the energy crisis right you're gonna argue about coal or natural gas and all that stuff but really what you want to do is take a part in Neptune that nobody is using right now take it apart rebuild it as a big shell outside the orbit of Earth line the interior with solar cells so you collect them all four times 10 to the 26 watts from the Sun or at least some fraction of it and then beam them down on a microwave to the earth now you have to be careful so you don't cook a lot of birds and all that sort of stuff but this is not this is not impossible this does not violate physics the capital cost is high right but then again you're not burning anything on the earth anymore right it's totally clean energy so he was suggesting that really advanced societies will have done this and you might be able to find that Dyson Sphere because the outside of it will be a little bit warm you'll get infrared radiation people have looked but Part B BNC yes yes so thank you for that quick explanation of a nice experience do we have the technology or Part B or C as C was do we have the technology right to discover it apart the whole thing was motivated by the discovery of about three years ago what's called tabi star and i think that's what you're referring to right yeah Tabitha who Julian I mean mangle their name again but yeah she noticed that one of the stars in the Kepler sample actually dimmed by 22% at one point that's a lot the Sun never dims by 22% you can go out every day and look at the Sun don't recommend it but you could do it and you would notice that it gets brighter and darker you know sunspots and all that by about 0.01% right so one part in 10,000 but this was 22% what part of five so what was doing it an one suggestion that was made by a gentleman at Penn State was that they built some they're in the process of building a Dyson Sphere they don't have a quite complete and you know the part of it had gotten in front of the start I mean this is not unreasonable it's not a reason but it turned out that if you look carefully when it dimmed the the star got redder and that's dust that's not Klingons does that answer your question especially okay good take another question in just a moment but I I know Natalie wants to take a moment tonight to describe a new multidisciplinary road map are you prepared for that okay okay that was that was that was the moment we'll come back to it the moment will be regained yes sir good question is everyone know what the Fermi paradox is well III do this I just how about hands up if you know that's a good signaling a signal okay don't you want to give a quick quick overview somebody give a quick overview and then answer this just an observation by you and Rico Fermi in 1950 it's a bit apocryphal but he probably did it in which he just looking around at lunch and said well so where is everybody and he wasn't referring to the lack of company at lunch what he was referring to the fact is that you can cross the galaxy you could settle the entire galaxy in 30 or 40 million years almost irrespective of how fast your Rockets are right 30 or 4 million years sounds like a long time if you're waiting for the Muni but 30 or 40 million years is actually very very quick compared to the lifetime of the universe which is 14 billion years so that means it's sort of like when the Spaniards discover America in 1492 whatever within one generation within 30 years there were Spaniards all up and down the coast of the Americas so he was making that analogy he was saying if anybody who wanted to colonize the galaxy in the last fourteen billion years they've had more than enough time to do it so where are they so that's the Fermi paradox they should be everywhere and we don't see them that's I think the second part of your question is what is your relationship to the can you answer that question is that what you were asking them yeah so what's your response to that where are they well one third of the public thinks they're here but I don't but a lot of people do well there there's an entire book by a guy by the name of Webb in which he essentially lists all the possible explanations for this you know one that I particularly like is the fact that the galaxy might be urbanized right so if we blindfold one of you and you're gonna spin you around put you in a plane and then take you 20 miles south of Winnemucca Nevada and then take off the blindfold you won't know where you are and you look around and you won't see anything except you know sagebrush or whatever you say well I don't know where I am but there's obviously no you know no intelligent life here this is not a slur on the great state of Nevada but but that you know that's it so it may be that we're in a part of the galaxy which is not terribly have inhabited I don't know what I believe that or not but I think that the the real thing about the Fermi paradox is to remind yourself that it's a big conclusion namely that nobody's out there based on a very local observation and as I've told Molly many times say you know I look out the back window of my house down in Mountain View and I don't see any bears and yet there's been plenty of time for bears to get to my house so maybe there are no bears in North America there would be the wrong conclusion from a local observation I have to say I've actually never heard you say that something else is that when you think about this think about where we were a hundred years ago our technology so a hundred years ago we are barely starting to fly planes we're you know and today we have telescopes and we have all of this technology and we are listening to signal even if there was a civilization not too far away from us they would have to be looking in the same direction as we are at the same time but also if we are only a hundred years of heart a hundred years apart we might just know that we are here because we cannot yet communicate with each other that doesn't mean that there is nobody around just need that you know we are just maybe not facing each other or maybe we are not at the same time in the same timeframe and it might not be that far apart but there are so many many parameters getting into play I guess quickly sort of my philosophy on that would be you know when we go look for things we really usually don't know what we're gonna find and if we were to decide oh well they must have been here that means they're not there and not bother to look then we don't really know we're missing so in some part I think like well we don't see him yet but but why not keep looking and we'll learn a lot and we've learned a lot of non you know non alien intelligence by by looking seeing oh there's planets everywhere and there you know there's different kinds of planets and so I think I think keeping keeping looking we're gonna learn a lot about our place in the universe without them you were so true because you know I think that one of the greatest things about science is not that science necessarily answers all the question but it turns how to ask better questions and and this is what we do by learning more and if we are staying in place then we'll never know I think we have time for one or two other questions you have any other questions this gentleman here so the question is about false positive intelligent aliens yeah because there have been false positives also for microbes actually on Mars it was a big big science news story in 1996 if you remember that but no well we have had I mean we get signals all the time but the equipment and in particular the software has gotten better and better at recognizing what's for real what's not you get signals with our system about every 10 seconds you get another signal so this very companies but in 1997 I'll tell you this story it only runs for about 30 minutes if I was at home and the phone rings I was having dinner and it was the CEO of the SETI Institute a guy by the name of Tom Pierson at the time and he said Seth I think you ought to get down to the Institute and when your boss calls you at home at dinner and tells you to get down to the office I figure it's not good news right but I went down there and everybody was lined up in front of the computer terminals looking at a signal and this signal they had been following for a while and it looked like the real deal it really did you know because we would do simple tests like move the antennas which was this particular intent was in West Virginia but yeah we'd move it a little bit away from the star system we were looking at and the signal went away and then we moved to back and it came back and we moved it away and went away he came back he went away it came back to me so you know I began looking around for the red phone to see if it was gonna ring we don't have a red phone I kept waiting for the men in black you know they didn't come I waited for you know I waited for the mayor Mountview to call whom I know he didn't call I wait for my mom to call she didn't call nobody called nobody was interested it was incredible there was no secrecy people were you know sending out emails hey don't tell anybody but we finally you know this particular star system set so we had to wait another 12 hours before we could pick it up again and so I went up to my desk and I was wiped out of course but I was sort of sleeping on my desk and my phone finally did rang and it was bill broad one of the science reporters to the New York Times and he said well what about that signal you're following so they already knew about it in New York so I think while there are protocols from what to do in case you find it signal the truth of the matter is it will be in the papers right away and of course the papers that will run at first are the less reliable papers so I believe you will read about this and the checkout line at the supermarket before you hear anything else but the idea there that phrase no secrecy is important so the idea that there could be a detection and then that evidence would be covered up and squirreled away somewhere and we would not hear about it you're saying that's just not possible yeah Americans love that idea they love conspiracies but it isn't possible and in particular the first thing you'd want to do and Jill tarter was about to do this call up somebody in another observatory and say hey would you look in this direction at this range of frequencies and see if you find a signal because you wouldn't believe it yourself it might be a you know Stanford undergraduate prank I know you're all Stanford fans but you know it you'd have to rule that out so there's absolutely no way you could be kept secret we did pick it up again yeah it was a type two civilization they weren't very interesting do you want it just very quickly yes yes we just do address your question as well we have something going on in the solar system right now and that thing is the methane on Mars we have no clue we're here we have no clue because a methane can be geology it can be biology and on earth is usually associated with both so we cannot talk about false positive we can not talk about false negative but something's going on there there as we said there were big missions coming up four of them NASA China Russia and Europe all going to Mars so we want to follow those closely yes sir why do you think they are not showing up [Music] just the signature of a thriving civilization but maybe one that was an once thriving in the throes of some kind of catastrophe sort of that it's kind of that bottleneck and and how does that how does that civilization get through that bottleneck and survive so the interesting question could you find the signal of a civilization that was struggling I'm glad that the gentleman sees the upside and if I might change probably not probably not Cody because you you would need a baseline if you've been measuring for example the infrared emission from the earth over the course of time and you could do that very relatively accurately maybe you would notice that it went up I mean you were there some discussion here about the chlorofluorocarbons and the well maybe you could find those well to begin with it's not easy to find them that's point one but point two is they went away 20 years later right so you need something that lasts for a long time and I take it from your question that you're sanguine that the climate change problem will continue to get worse for the you know at least 10,000 years so you know in that case maybe you could notice I think we'll wrap it up there so the summary right now is they say and maybe I don't know if they say it in radio astronomy but they said in radio stay tuned stay tuned for this news which is something that the City Institute also says of aliens thank you thank you for coming out [Applause]

Channel: SETI Institute

Views: 39,641

Rating: 4.7700348 out of 5

Keywords: SETI, astrobiology

Id: 8T5r0lAdhfM

Length: 70min 14sec (4214 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020