Are We Alone? When Will Earthlings Find ET? | Dan Werthimer | TEDxSFState

[Applause] thank thanks very much so I want to talk to you about this question are we alone is anybody out there it's a question that humans have been asking for a few hundred thousand years and maybe in this century we have a chance of answering the question the field is called SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and there been lots of ideas over the years about how we might get in touch with et some of the early ideas Gauss the mathematician suggested that we get in touch with et by making large geometric structures on the planet a right triangle maybe three four five miles on a side a big square of dirt a big square of water and a big square of wheat and et would look down and see that we knew about the Pythagorean theorem and maybe they would get in touch it was a great idea at the time unfortunately was not funded and then Charles crow suggested that we get in touch with the Martians by no no I'm sorry he suggested we get in touch with et by digging a circular ditch 20 miles across and fill the ditch with kerosene and then use this match not to scale to make a bright a bright circle of light a bright circle of fire and then et again would look down and see this bright circle and maybe they would get in touch and I think you might be able to guess what happened with this met with a similar fate and then Charles crow suggested we get in touch with the Martians by using large mirrors to reflect the sunlight to the Martians actually several mirrors one where he lived in Paris and the others to outline the shape of the Big Dipper and I think you guess what happened here the first funded project in said he was to send pornography into space so this is a plaque you might have seen it on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft that left the earth in the early 70s and these are very controversial originally they were holding hands and NASA decided that that was not a good idea because et if they found this plaque they would think it was one creature so they don't hold hands right now and here's the solar system in the Sun and Mercury Venus and here is Earth and you can see the spacecraft leaving the earth traveling at about a hundred thousand miles an hour going out to the stars and then these are directions this is a map so that if ET wants to know where we live and they want to come and eat us they'll know exactly where we live so that was the first funded project one of the big questions in SETI is are there good planets out there going around other stars and if you had asked me 20 years ago are there planets going on other stars I would said I don't know nobody knew at that 20 years ago but that has all changed largely due to work here at San Francisco State University they pioneered how to find these little dinky planets a planets are hard to find because they're little they're very tiny a million earths could fit inside this the Sun and they're right next to this really bright thing so they're really hard to find and that work was pioneered here and it led to this thing called Kepler which the way that Kepler found planets was to look and see if a planet goes in front of a star I know you see this little black dot here but that is a planet going in front of the star and you can't actually see the planet what from the Kepler spacecraft but what you can see is that the light dims down a little bit when the planet gets in front the light dims down if you see a star that dims down a little bit say what's going on well that betrays the presence of the planet and if it goes around periodically every few months or every year or whatever then you really know that you found a planet and Kepler found thousands of planets and here's an example of some of the planets going around their stars and you can see that a lot of the planets are in multi-planet systems six seven eight planets and now we know that there are more planets than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy there are about 1 trillion planets in our Milky Way galaxy and if you're not happy with the trillion planets there are about a hundred billion other galaxies besides the Milky Way galaxy that we live in a lot of places and a lot of those planets are little dinky things like Earth little rocky planets and we think a lot of them have liquid water we call them Goldilocks planets if this if the planet is too far from the star it's going to be cold if it's if it's too close it's going to be too hot if it's at the right distance it's a Goldilocks planet ok you got we have a lot of planet well what about life how often does life get started we don't really know we don't understand all the details of how the chemistry turns into self-replicating molecules but we are optimistic about primitive life and the reason we're optimistic is because life got started on earth very early the oldest rocks you can find have micro fossils as soon as the earth cooled down it looked like life popped up so even though we don't understand the details because it happened quickly here on earth we think it's going to happen quickly on other planets as well and so there the universe is probably teeming with simple life we don't know how often it evolves to become intelligent and we could communicate but it's probably teeming with simple life there may even be life in our own solar system so this is a moon going around Jupiter called Europa this is a cutaway view and you can see that it has a liquid ocean this blue stuff is liquid water it's heated by tidal forces and maybe there's something swimming around down there in the ocean the problem is we can't tell because this white stuff is ice it's covered with ice the it's even though it's warm water it's covered with ice it's about 30 miles thick of ice and we don't know how to get through the ice so when I give talks at elementary schools I ask the kids how are we going to get through the ice and I tell them we don't really know NASA doesn't know how to do it and the boys have a different answer than the girls the boys say machine guns or bombs they're kind of like Donald Trump and the girls are the girls are usually a little more clever and and not as violent they want to melt their way through the ice like use mirrors to focus the sun's rays and heat heat the ice anyway it's interesting at elementary school already there's a kind of separation there unfortunately okay so there and there's a lot of other moons and even in our own solar system we might find primitive life what about how are we going to find intelligent life so one of the ideas is that Earthlings are sending off a lot of radio and television out into space and we've been transmitting television signals now for about 70 years the early shows like I Love Lucy and Ed Sullivan traveling out now there are 70 light-years out they've gone past about 10,000 stars and the nearby stars have seen the Simpsons so they haven't seen Donald Trump yet so the this is a plot of television power leaving their 1940 1959-60 and you can see we're getting brighter and brighter and we're brighter than the Sun now at television frequencies so if we are transmitting messages that go out traveling at the speed of light much faster than our Rockets maybe et does that too and we've even sent messages intentionally this was a message transmitted in the 70s we think that pictures are a good way to communicate they're not going to speak English or Portuguese but we think pictures images might be they're going to be able to perceive their environment or two or three dimensions and so this was a picture with with a person and a DNA molecule and the solar system maybe you can see the Sun and Mercury Venus and the earth tip toward the person radio telescope anyway that is an example of how you might start up a conversation math is another good way prime numbers two plus two equals four stuff like that okay so we are sending off radio signals out into space we want to find out if ETS doing that too if they have television or radar or radio so in order to do that we need a big radio antenna we call them a radio telescope this is a one that we started using in the 70s it's an 85 feet across and while we were using this telescope to look for et this is what happened to it this is the dish it used to be up here on the pedestal so we move to a different telescope we moved to this telescope this is another radio telescope in West Virginia this is 300 feet across one of the world's largest telescopes and while we were using this telescope to look for radio signals from et this is what happened to that telescope and you might ask why did that happen to Dan why did both telescopes that he was using to look for et get destroyed well the answer according to the world weekly news is that the aliens did not want to be discovered and they zapped the telescope zapped by hostile space aliens so we're testing this idea the Zap idea at this telescope this is the world's largest radio telescope it's in Puerto Rico it's a thousand feet across it's called the Arecibo telescope it holds 10 billion bowls of cornflakes although we haven't actually tried that yet and so far it has not been zapped by hostile space aliens although it's a little harder to zap you might have seen it in the James Bond movie Goldeneye although in Goldeneye they say it's in Cuba which is not and it comes out of the water which it doesn't but it was also in the movie contact which was a book written by Carl Sagan who used to work in our group anyway the so we collect a huge amount of data at this telescope petabytes many petabytes of data and the problem we have is that it's a it's so much data we can't analyze it all ourselves or the computers that we have even the supercomputer that we have at Berkeley so we are asking volunteers all around the world to help us if you have a computer a laptop or a desktop or an Android phone you can help us analyze the data and the way it works is that we sent we store the data and then we break it up into little pieces so you if you want to help us analyze the data you run a little screen saver program called the SETI at home screen saver program you download this free program if you want to find it and help us look for et Google SETI SETI and you'll find SETI at home and you can download this program and you can volunteer to help us analyze the data and the way it works is that everybody gets a different part of the sky so you'll get one part of the sky you'll get a different part a different piece of the data and then when you go out for a cup of coffee the screen saver pops up on your computer just like a but instead of just putting pretty pictures of goldfish swimming around on your screen it's actually going through the data that you've been assigned looking for all the different frequencies and signal types and when it's done it might take a few days it'll send the results whatever you find whatever your screensaver finds any strong signals it finds it sends the results back to our computer at Berkeley and your name is attached to that data so if you find ET you get the Nobel Prize although it's actually not mine to decide but you might get it so this is a little animation of the data that's going out from Berkeley to the all the volunteers around the world the yellow dots are the data that we're sending out the blue dots are when they're finished analyzing the data then they send back the results and they form one of the biggest supercomputers on the planet they're about eight million people who are helping us out they're spread out in 226 countries and it's made the search incredibly sensitive and much more powerful by our wildest dreams and we're very grateful to the city home volunteers and I hope if you're not running set at home you'll go and download this thing and help us look for et the software that we developed the SETI software is open-source software and it's being now used by a lot of different science projects so you can at home now instead of just doing SETI you can look for malaria drugs and cancer drugs and HIV drugs this is a program you can run to search for black holes this is global warming climate prediction this is looking at pulsars and gravitational waves this is protein and you can allocate how you want your computers to be used you can say I want 20% of my spare computing cycles to go for SETI and 30% for malaria research and and you can participate in your favorite projects so this is a brand new thing that we're doing this year we ran into a billionaire and the breakthrough prize Foundation and they gave us a lot of money to do a huge SETI program and we're just starting with three telescopes in fact one of the telescopes that we're using we're just launching today so we've started losing this thing at Lick Observatory looking for laser signals Lick Observatory some of you might know is near San Jose up east on Mount Hamilton and we're looking for laser signals there and then we're using a telescope the one that collapsed in West Virginia they built a new one and we're using this one in West Virginia and then the thing that we're launching today that we're really excited about is a telescope in Australia called a Parkes telescope the reason we're all excited about this thing that we're starting today is that the if et's lurking in the south these other telescopes that we've been using are in the north so if it's one of the southern stars we would have missed them this is very little work has been done in in Australia and looking at the southern star so we're really excited about that we're going to look at a million stars and a thousand galaxies it's big new powerful project we're really excited about another thing that we're excited about is a brand new telescope that's being built in China this is going to be even bigger than the one in Puerto Rico it's 500 meters across and you can see it's made out of little panels and now it's all finished and they're just starting to use it and we're hoping to work with the Chinese to do SETI this is a this is kind of longer-term 10 or 20 years away we're learning how to build instead of one big dish build a telescope out of lots of little dishes maybe thousands of little dishes and this is being built in South Africa and Australia a lot of countries are getting together and we think that'll be a spectacular way to look for very faint signals making a giant telescope out of lots of little telescopes the other thing we're excited about is that computing power is getting better and better a lot of you know about Moore's law and right now this is a plot of computing power as a function of time and right now computers are about as smart as a lizard or a guppy if when if this trend keeps going computers will be as smart as humans in about 30 years that's called a singularity watch out could be good could be bad but in any case we will be able to do some very good SETI experiments right now we're just getting in the game we're learning how to do it we can't do all the frequencies and do a thorough search but if computing power keeps going the telescope's keep getting better I'm optimistic in the long run if there are radio signals out there could be found maybe in your generation maybe in the next generation okay if you've been asleep this is really the only slide you have to remember no et so far we're still working on it however that is not my last slide I've got I got three more so I wanted to tell you a little bit about the SETI at home volunteers the settied home volunteers have helped us enormous lee they built one of the biggest computers on the planet made a very sensitive search but they also helped us write the software it's a big open source project they helped make it go faster report it to new platforms they just got it working on Android they get the bugs out they also send us money the donations come from the volunteers which is great because it keeps the students working on the analyzing the data keeps the students fed then they also send in literature and music and some send haikus and thousands of people have sent us haikus about SETI but don't worry I'm not going to read you thousands of haikus I'm just going to read you a couple of haikus so the pollak cook at Duke University searching for life answers are revealed about ourselves and this is the last slide the last haiku 1 million Earthlings bounded by optimism leave their pcs on well thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 672,847

Rating: 4.0618415 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Science (hard), Astronomy, Computers, Engineering, Exploration, Ideas, Innovation, Physics, Science, Space, Technology

Id: CmtEWBz_2kE

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 09 2016