Can We Find Intelligent Life? With Dr. Jill Tarter

the modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence really starts with a landmark paper by philip morrison and giuseppe coconi in 1959. frank drake famously started the first modern study experiment in 1960 as project osma and a number of efforts since have been made by scientists around the globe and are ongoing to try to listen in on technological signals of alien origin if any one of these detects an unambiguous technological signal not made by us then this will be among the greatest discoveries of the entirety of human history and there have been candidate signals perhaps most famously the wow signal of 1977 but nothing conclusive yet but study is particularly fascinating in that it could change in a very short period of time and an unambiguous signal could be picked up one day and there it is we are not alone but the search is only just starting space is unbelievably vast and searching as much of it as is viable is very incomplete we have sampled less than a pond's worth of water in an entire vast ocean and we have a long way to go in a pursuit that could get lucky at any time my guest today is a long-standing and important figure with inseti who continues to search along with many other scientists for the elusive signal that when caught will change the world you have fallen into event horizon with john michael gaudier [Music] in today's episode john is joined by jill tarta jill tato received her bachelor of engineering physics degree with distinction from cornell university and her master's degree and a phd in astronomy from the university of california berkeley she served as project scientist for nasa's seti program the high resolution microwave survey and has conducted numerous observational programs at radio observatories worldwide tarda's work has brought her wide recognition in the scientific community including the lifetime achievement award from women in aerospace and two public service medals from nasa tata is deeply involved in the education of future citizens and scientists in addition to her scientific leadership at nasa and seti institute tata was the principal investigator for two curriculum development projects funded by nsf nasa and others many people are now familiar with her work as portrayed by jodie foster in the movie contact event horizon and my channel are now available as a podcast on apple podcasts spotify and youtube memberships early ad ad-free episodes bonus episodes and sleep focused content sign up now by clicking the links below to your platform of choice dr jill tarter welcome to the program thank you john a pleasure to be here doctor i have been a seti enthusiast for probably 35 years now since i was a teenager maybe even a little bit before and you've been around the whole time you have been in seti maybe longer than anyone now what originally piqued your interest here at what point did you look up at the sky and say i wonder if there's someone out there well for me that was when i was a very young child walking along the beaches of the florida keys the gulf keys and my father was explaining the constellations to me and it was back then those keys were incredibly dark they were uninhabited mostly no street lights nothing like that so the sky was beautiful and i just wondered if somewhere on a planet around one of those stars creature would also be walking along the beach with its parent and seeing the sun our star in its sky it's kind of an interesting thought that maybe one commonality that we would have with alien life is beaches because if liquid water or some solvent of life maybe ammonia or something like that is obviously key to biochemistry so they would probably have beaches right could well be yes now within seti seti is hard and there there's no question that you're you're looking for a needle in a haystack in a universe that emits enormous amounts of radio naturally so what is it that you look for what characteristic is it that you look for in a signal to differentiate it from say just some event in the cosmos is it narrowband signals or is that also not a very good indicator no we use in the radio we use frequency compression the fact that it's a very narrow band feature in the optical we look for time compression we look for a very bright pulse that is also perhaps monochromatic because it's a laser so the frequency compression in the radio is a good bat because when you when nature emits it does so on the basis of multiple atoms or molecules and they have relative motions to one another and so even though a particular atom or molecule might emit at a particular precise single frequency because the ensemble of the emitters is necessary to get enough intensity to have an observable radio feature though the um that will be spread out in frequency space but with technology you can get something to radiate at a precise single frequency that doesn't look like nature at all so in other words say you're looking near the hydrogen line at 14 20 megahertz you'll see hydrogen gas clouds but it sort of smears across the spectrum slightly because of the hydrogen atoms moving right if you have an intentional signal being sent from a transmitter it doesn't do that that's correct that's correct and that's smart by the way it doesn't waste energy so you're you're not broadband you're not leaking energy that way you're being very precise and that screams technology and by the way perhaps in their civilization they like we do here on earth protect the frequencies surrounding that hydrogen line and don't allow transmitters because they want to be able to see the natural sky now the hydrogen line as far as natural radioastronomy goes what is special about it that we we study it just just on a survey basis what is special about that area of the spectrum well hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and it aggregates into clouds and by studying the line we can actually study the motions of those clouds relative to one another so we can look at for example an external galaxy and look at how the emission around the hydrogen line from a region of the galaxy has been either red-shifted or blue shifted relative to its laboratory value we can then see the rotation of the gas in the galaxy we can in fact use that to help us measure the mass of the galaxy as you look out towards the edges and see how rapidly these hydrogen clouds are moving now it was also a point was made long ago i guess by morrison and cacone that alien scientists would also know this hydrogen obviously being the most abundant element in the universe and they had the idea that well maybe that's the ideal place on the dial to put a signal or near it so when you look at the sky with the radio telescope looking for a steady signal so how many channels do you do you use you know how many how many channels are you monitoring and do you sort of center on that line or do you look at others well it depends on when you're asking the question because the technology has changed enormously over the decades that we've been doing this so starting out we had a few we had 100 channels par autocorrelator today there are billions of channels that we can observe simultaneously because of the advances of computing and instrumentation and we prefer not to play this magic frequency game that is g it might be the hydrogen line or pi times the hydrogen line or o h because that's the other piece of water along with hydrogen so we just try and observe all frequencies within what we call the terrestrial microwave window which runs from 1 billion hertz up to 10 billion hertz so 1 to 10 gigahertz frequencies lower than about a gigahertz you begin to pick up excess noise due to synchrotron radiation that is electrons spiraling around the magnetic fields of the milky way galaxy and it gets stronger as you go to lower frequencies much above 10 gigahertz and you start to pick up emission from water vapor and oxygen in the earth's atmosphere so at least from the ground there is this quiet terrestrial microwave window and that's the region of frequency space that we've been trying to explore but as as i said it's you know 10 billion channels now within that are there hopeless frequencies where humans have just emit so much radiation that you just can't even look there yes absolutely there are places where our own technology just totally swamps the natural signature we call them we generally call them bad bands but it is interference from our own technology and it's getting worse over time we're losing more of the spectrum so that has encouraged people to think about putting a telescope in the one location that never has the earth in its sky and that would be on the far side of the moon which is certainly going to be an expensive proposition and even though we would not see the interference from the earth nasa and esa and space faring nations are beginning to think about building what they call a gateway station above the far side of the moon for further exploration and communications back to earth from the far side so although it's quiet now it may not remain quiet forever in these these frequencies that we use very heavily are there advantages to those frequencies that might be universal in other words could it be that the alien signals are at the same frequencies that we use heavily for some reason or is that just arbitrary i mean is it just that we chose those frequencies just because just because or is it are there advantages in those noisy frequencies to actually broadcast at them we've not been able to make any kind of compelling argument about universality certainly we believe that the elemental composition of the universe is the same everywhere but we've not been able as i said to definitively come up with some special frequencies people have made lots of arguments about special frequencies but none of them at least to me are compelling so i think we need to search throughout and when we get above the earth's atmosphere i think we also ought to be going up higher in frequency why is that well because if you get above the atmosphere then you lose the noise from the water vapor and oxygen emissions in the atmosphere and so now you have a clearer look into the cosmos at higher frequencies i see so you remove the opaqueness of the atmosphere and therefore you've got a much much broader palette to look at the spectrum in fact all of it really right yes i think you're still going to be blocked at the low end by synchrotron emission from the galaxy but yes once you get above the earth's atmosphere the higher frequencies have become quieter and accessible the beauty about the synchrotron radiation though is that's something that the aliens could predict so if they want to send out a signal they would know about that and not broadcast there presumably well it's a broadband phenomena so it's it starts to be loud and around the gigahertz and then as you go down in frequency it gets stronger and stronger it is kind of a continuum emission feature rather than a line now the argument is often made and i mean presumably you could eavesdrop on on an alien civilization's internal communications or something like that but the real option here is if the aliens have noticed that earth is screaming biosignatures it has for billions of years and they decide well let's point a transmission directly at that little planet and make ourselves known a beacon and in that situation you know people have made the argument that aliens wouldn't do that we an advanced alien civilization we'd be like ants to them and they wouldn't pay any attention to us and that argument is often made but i don't i disagree with it in that i think that we have scientists on this planet that study ants and we have entire television shows you know national geographic and all that talking about ants and we are very interested in ants and i would think that any life in the universe would be of interest to alien scientists do you agree or disagree no i agree with you on that john i think one of the questions that an advanced technology civilization might be trying to answer is what is the variety of life possible in the cosmos how can things be different elsewhere is there only one way to make biology and maybe on this planet we will answer that question in the laboratory with synthetic biology but we could also answer it by finding examples of life unlike the life that we have here on earth somewhere else so we're going to be looking for life on mars and europa and enceladus in all kinds of different ways and if we were to find life in any of those places particularly mars then there is definitely a second question to be asked which is is it related to life on earth or is it in fact actual second genesis another way of making biology and so i think that's exciting and i think that uh curious technological civilizations elsewhere would like to know um the diversity and complexity of life in the cosmos well naturally one would say that alien scientists would want as complete a picture of the universe as they could possibly get that's that's the point figure it out therefore studying us becomes part of that data set anyway so why wouldn't they be sending if they could sending anthropologists you know human studies or you know even aliens alien scientists that want to study earth's ants you know why wouldn't they send a host of scientists if they want a complete picture of the universe at large assuming that interstellar travel by large macroscopic entities is possible assuming of course we don't know that and that that may be it may be so expensive that it's all telescopes you know that we which makes that doesn't that make it a little bit harder to spot you know that if if civilizations never really see the the the enter you know the energy expense and just the general expense to cross interstellar space and everybody's stay-at-home civilizations doesn't that make study harder it does on the other hand what we've been doing more recently is trying to expand our horizons in terms of what might constitute not a biosignature but a techno signature how might advanced technologies elsewhere be consuming energy to do work of various kinds that might have discernible ramifications with particularly with this huge new suite of large optical and infrared telescopes that will be coming on the air this decade so what is it that they might be doing that we could remotely observe and infer that that was the result of a technology there are a couple of interesting ideas along this line if we we have a geosynchronous belt right which we use for broadcasting and if they on another planet went into this in a really big way and created what's often called a clark belt of of objects that transmit and because the to be geosynchronous the distance has to be the same you could only essentially go to put more stuff up there you can go up and down the plane and that might produce a kind of a ring that would be visible with a sufficiently sensitive telescope so maybe we might detect that another idea that's been suggested and again would be an offshoot of astronomical observing programs would be that an advanced technology which lived in the vicinity of a cepheid variable star a star that expands and gets brighter and then contracts and gets dimmer and then expands again and contracts with a fairly constant period if they were able to orbit some large energy source around such a cepheid variable and they would watch the star expand and contract and it wouldn't normally be ready to expand again but if they inputted a large source of energy they could make this the atmosphere of this cepheid expand prematurely and then what you've actually done is created a morse code that could be seen anywhere across the galaxy actually all the way out to the all the way through the local group of galaxies and you'll have the natural period and then you'll have a short period so you'll have a dot and a dash and you could communicate over vast distances not having to pick out your target because you created an isotropic radiator good science fiction i don't know whether anyone could ever do that but it's an idea so we've had students looking at the 100 year history of the association of variable star observers looking at the history records of cepheids and other pulsing sources to see if we could find this extremely interesting pattern you know the the most often discussed techno signature would be a dyson sphere or a dyson swarm around a star to capture all the energy that it emits for the technological civilization that's on a planet in that system that can have observable consequences we're thinking about various things that we might be able to observe commensally with these new beautiful telescopes and commensal just means eating out of the same bowl so it means it's not parasitic you actually find a way to make copies of the data um we can do that very easily in the radio now and it's getting easier in the optical so that one cohort of scientists can be doing their astronomical observing while another cohort could be analyzing the same data in different ways looking for techno signatures in fact there's a project at the seti institute that's being run um by andrew simeon it's called cosmic and they will be going to the vla the very large array and arranging to make a parallel data stream out of each of those 27 antennas and that data stream can be analyzed for steady signals while the astronomers are doing whatever they're doing with the vla so you can in theory be on the air 24 7 with a very powerful telescope piggybacking and it doesn't cost a thing because the telescope's already taking the data but that creates a mountain of data so how do you sift through all of that data well you build a lot of algorithms and you use fast computers so that you can keep up in near real time and then you you know inevitably end up using machine learning learning to help you sift through this great data stream but i'm excited about that project it's something that i wanted to do 30 years ago thinking about doing it in software as the astronomers were making their radio maps i worked with a gentleman barry clark at the vla and it just was it was just totally out of the question because we couldn't handle the data rates that he'd need so but now new technologies gpus fpgas all this kind of thing allows us to compute fast enough so that this becomes a possibility now this is an odd question so when you first started in city these were the days where you had like the big ear telescope with a receiver that had 10 channels and now we have millions did you back then foresee a day that seti would be this advanced as we are today well i can't say that i could paint a road map but in fact that was one of the things that kept me intrigued and working on seti was the fact that you could see that today we could do our searching better than we could two weeks ago i mean that we could we could see the improvement in compute power and so we didn't get totally overwhelmed by how large the search was in comparison to what we could do because we knew that in the future we could do more and you know moore's law has been around for a long time and and we certainly don't bore that experiment the big ear yielded to my knowledge the best candidate signal yet and unfortunately it was very early in the game 1977 and the wow signal what's your opinion of the wow signal do you think that is uh maybe that was it or maybe it just was interference if i had been running that project you would never have heard of the wow signal because it did not manage to successfully navigate the protocols that were set for deciding whether it was an interesting extraterrestrial signal so the wow signal that i'm sorry the ohio state telescope was built with two receivers and it's basically a transit instrument that is you can't pick up that huge football field and move it around so you you set a declination strip on the sky by moving one moveable piece of the telescope and then you let the sky go overhead and you see what you find and a real signal coming from a distance and traveling at sidereal rate a at which the sky appears to move would have first been picked up in the east receiver left that receiver and then be picked up in the west receiver and left that receiver the signal was only seen in one of the two receivers and they had no way of knowing which and so it did not rise above the threshold for detection of an extraterrestrial signal that they had set and i think that i'm maybe just being too stubborn and dogmatic here but i think if you set up a series of ground rules for what's going to constitute a signal that you're interested in potential candidate then you can't change the rules after you start so the wow signal would not have passed the test and i would have discarded it but by virtue of it being so early you know 1977 it it's it maybe it's more interesting because of that in other words a lack of signals other signals to compare it to so maybe we have a different bar now after decades more work and study right well i i would argue john that they had set this protocol when they began their observing and it was a protocol that they expected could be um fulfilled and this signal you know is very strong but it did not really fulfill the definition that required it to be a point source moving on the sky at sidereal ray so it's just a different opinion i mean i i'm probably the only one that says that is everybody else says oh the wow signal maybe that was it and i think the thing that annoys me is that subsequently astronomers have spent including um the team at the allen telescope array have spent a great deal of telescope time trying to follow up and see if they can re-um acquire that signal and so it it caused it caused a lot of perhaps wasted telescope time now do you find or you know do you see signals like that in other words ones that you discard and say this is this is not do you see those uh yes absolutely as we do um our signal processing in near real time which means that we had a pre-step pipeline and you take data in one step and you'd be analyzing that data in the second step and taking data at a higher frequency at that same second step and then the third step if your analysis pulled up any interesting candidates in the second step you'd um you'd clear the queue and go back and immediately re-observe and we would find many many many signals that um were seen and then when we went to re-observe they were never seen again and so we throw those away or we in doing the analysis we'd see that that same signal had been detected um on more than one telescope so it's it's broadband it's it's interference getting in the side lobes so we throw that away and i consent well it's a radio program so won't do any good i was going to say i could send you a chart that shows of all of the um years of phoenix observing how many signals that we detected how many were discarded because they failed one test or another or another getting all the way down to there's nothing left now what does the process look like exactly when you when you see a signal do you have uh the infrastructure in place when with these telescopes like the allen telescope array do astronomers have the infrastructure in place to see that signal and no immediately i mean does an alarm go off when you see an interesting signal or is it just discovered days later and if you do discover it instantly what's the process do you wag the telescope to see if it's a the source is really localized to a single point in the sky before you tell other astronomers to look at this patches guy how how does the process work there in modern context yeah i mean the computer does all this right you're not sitting there we used to be sitting there babysitting the screens trying to do this and see whether we were finding interesting things but now there's just a set protocol and as i said we do are observing at the seti institute in near real time we don't just record data and look at it later we do this in a stepwise process in near real time so um within 90 seconds which is three stages of the pipeline you know whether there's an interesting candidate there and one that you want to continue to observe and that does not i mean it happens it doesn't happen all that often and in that case you go back and you just re-observe it then you do um i think the number that we're now doing is five subsequent onsource and offsource observations of this interesting candidate from the target on the sky and we require that the signal persists and we keep seeing it when we go back on and we don't see it when we point off and and that shows you that throughout the decades that we've been doing seti we have not actually had sensitivity to transient signals and that's one of the things that can now change it's changing first in the optical there are a couple of um new optical programs that are specifically designed to look for optical flashes transients and um in time we can do it with um the radio part of the spectrum so machine learning and the ability to have sensitivity to transients i think are what are shaping the future of signal analysis now the inability to properly study transient signals is really important because it hammers home the point that we've barely looked yes you know people always say that all we've been doing studies since the 1960s project osmo you know we've been doing it for that long and we haven't seen anything but we have barely even looked is the truth of the matter and we've just started so do you do you how would you characterize that you know how much of the galaxy have we actually looked at with seti okay so when seti turned 50 i did this calculation and i said there are nine different parameters that we're searching through to find an electromagnetic signal assuming that electromagnetic signal is what we should be looking for and i put limits on how much parameter how much you'd have to search in each parameter and then i just multiplied all that together and said okay this is a nine dimensional volume of search space that we need to explore and i'm not good at imagining nine dimensional volumes so i said okay for an analogy let's just say that the full nine dimensional search space that volume is equal to the volume of all the earth's oceans and how much of the ocean have we explored and when seti was 50 the answer was one glass of the ocean when seti turned 60 jason wright and his students at penn state redid that calculation and at that point it was up to like a small hot tub so from a glass of water to a small hot tub in in 10 years and you can imagine that expanding but you can see that the ocean is really vast and there's a lot of work to be done here now the vast ocean as the further away you have a star system the less likely it is you could pick up a signal that's emanating from it so is the focus on close stars right now well within our with our targeted searches that we've been doing we have started close by and and moved out right so we have a machine has to decide okay i finished on that star what am i going to do next and so we have a waiting mechanism for looking at the catalog looking at what's above the horizon and how long is it going to be up there and one of the strongest weights that brings a target up to the top of the list is its distance yes we've been looking from close to far how about really close as in inside the solar system now john von neumann had the idea that you could have a self-replicating probe and you could populate the galaxy within a few million years at sublight speeds comfortably even with robotic probes that that station themselves in every star system in in the milky way and if you did that you could have a very complete picture a complete survey of the milky way and if we had that ability our scientists would certainly want to do that so close artifacts of alien civilizations or close radio signals do you look for those and how does that differ from looking at a distant signal okay the answer is i couldn't find a coke can filled with really advanced electronics in the solar system right now um so we haven't really explored the solar system we we started out by saying what are the what's the minimum number of assumptions i can make and so we started with point source moving on the sky at sidereal rate that automatically excludes anything passing through our solar system but there are other ways of detecting such objects um the infrared uh is one really good candidate and so again jason wright and students at penn state have looked at these satellites which have done four pi steradian mapping of the sky and they've gone through and looked in the data they've done archival data mining looking for evidence of signals in there that don't correspond to a disk around a young star or another infrared source of emissions and they come up with a few indications of potential targets and people will in fact go looking at those if they haven't already so there's it's it's a vast ocean and we just need to continue to improve any tools that we have and pick up any new tools that might give us another way of looking so i'm really excited about this new prospect for commensal observing on these gorgeous new 30 meter class telescopes what if james webb does that offer anything it does and there's certainly folks that are going to be looking at exoplanets right and so we'll we'll very carefully watch those data it's very unrealistic to think that we could ever get enough time on that general purpose telescope which is being written to do which has been built to do everybody's science to be able to actually do a targeted seti survey but we can look at the data that it produces and see if we can do some data mining on these when they go looking for bio signatures around exoplanets and objects in the solar system the value of radio astronomy in seti if if we start looking for things like dyson spheres you know if such things if anyone ever builds anything like that or if it's even possible you're looking for an infrared signature from this thing and that creates an ambiguity because you have proto-planetary disks and all kinds of things that emit infrared in the universe so you may never be able to pick it out but radio astronomy that stands apart in that if you get a technological signal it has a chance of being really unambiguous right yes that's that's correct and people have been thinking about the optical in the infrared and how you would distinguish a disc from a techno signature you know for for a while people were looking at boyajian's star uh this star that has huge dips in its luminosity not the one percent that you'd get from a transiting planet but 20 and they wondered if that might be some indication of a megastructure or some other technology in the end as more data were taken across a wider range of frequencies the community basically has decided that those those drops in intensity are due to dust but we're thinking along those lines anyway and so in in the radio these frequency compressed signals are unambiguously we think techno signatures but on the optical if you found a monochromatic transient right it that could be a laser and um that is going to be harder to explain as a natural phenomenon it's getting to be a pretty interesting candidate for techno signature yeah that would be very unambiguous because natural lasers and mazers and things like that are very rare and they're characteristic in their own right yet if you see one that looks like something we would use in laser communications here on earth then nature's not going to do that right yes now there are people and i'm a skeptic here but there are people that say they're already here and that the the ufo uap phenomenon is is evidence of the presence of an alien civilization i suspect you have similar views on this that to mine but is that something worthwhile to look into to see figure out what are people seeing in the sky and you yourself once saw something yes it's it's worth figuring out what it is but i think there's no data that it has anything to do with extraterrestrial technology before oh well let's see maybe it's only a couple of decades ago high altitude pilots used to report lightning or something strange above these big thunder clouds these these anvil shaped thunderclouds and it took satellites with fast enough time resolution so that we could discover what we now call sprites and elves which is essentially that lightning travels up as well as down but for a while they were really interesting right oh it's a ufo [Music] so it's worth trying to figure out what these things are because you might discover some new physics new atmospheric phenomenon that we were completely unaware of yeah now you yourself had a sighting that you resolved could you tell us that story yeah that was a the most amazing cognizant dissonance my husband and i were flying our plane from the observatory back to the bay area at night and we were flying high so we were under positive control and suddenly we looked and saw this bright light at our two o'clock position and it looked like the headlight of an on-climbing airplane so we called up the center and we said you know what do you have at our two o'clock position because they hadn't informed us of any traffic and i said huh there's nothing there and you know my husband looks at me and i'm looking at him and we're looking and this is light is really there and you know we're saying oh this can't be happening to us you know we're the big skeptics and it went on for minutes uh until finally clouds that we did not know were there a very dark night um separated and allowed allowed us to see the moon shining through a hole in the clouds but for those moments before that resolved it was a strangest feeling so i know that people who see things really believe that they've seen things and they're upset by them or disturbed by them or confused by them and i know what that feels like but in our case we were able to resolve it now we also live in an age of drones that can do amazing things it disturbs me when i see those drones because to me that's even more impressive than all of the accounts of ufos it's like if i didn't know what that was and i saw those drones doing their dance in the sky with lit up like that i would be completely bewildered and i wonder if the increase in ufo sightings is due to stuff like that because we we live in a very different world as far as everyone having access to lighted aerial drones yes and so the olympic opening ceremonies will never be the same right oh no no no this is where and we're it's only going to get you know this is the new fireworks basically are these are these these constellations of drones moving around and they can even form in the shape of a ufo and if you're looking at that in the dark it may look like a solid object with lights on it and um that's that's it's getting muddier is basically what i'm saying as far as um trying to determine if there's something to it or not right our ability to program these swarms is getting so much better yeah it's it's scary almost you know it's beautiful and scary at the same time because that really tells you where we could go with artificial intelligence and that's what we really don't need is artificially intelligent uh drones coming after us and turning on us now in regards to not actually there's a there's a question i want to ask you it's no secret that carl sagan whom you knew based the character of eliara way on you how did you feel about that were you like carl that's not exactly what i wanted or where did you did you embrace it well it's it's funny because carl wrote a book about a woman who does what i do and i was back at cornell at some meeting and carl said uh come on up to the house we're having a cocktail party tonight so i went and he and annie took me aside and they said carl's writing a science fiction book and i said yeah i know we also saw what kind of an advance he got in the new york times last weekend and we're all jealous as hell right and and so and sort of chuckled and she said well you may think you recognize someone in the book but i think you'll like her right i'll let it go with that and then when the book came out carl sent me a pre-publication copy that i read and i'm going wait how did carl know this how does he know you know it was really very um it just struck me as yeah that was me but how did carl know that about me and the answer is that years before i had gone to a conference um sponsored by i think it's the american association of university women who brought into dc 70 newly minted female phds in the stem professions so i walked into a room full of 70 really bright women and it just changed my life i had never done that before i had gotten so used to walking into a room full of men and being the only woman now walking into this room of fabulous women it was it was really mind-altering and so we sat there and did a little bit of amateur psychology trying to ask ourselves what was it that allowed us to get through this very leaky pipeline and succeed and come out the other end with a phd and there were a number of things that were striking about experiences that we had first of all one of the things far in excess of statistical likeliness was that our fathers had been the inspiration for our our curiosity in our determination to do science or engineering and our fathers had died young in my case i was 12 when my dad died and we all learned this very important lesson in a very horrible way which is the carpe diem lesson you know don't put off to tomorrow what you could do today because tomorrow you might not have the opportunity to ask that question and so at a very young age we got good at this some of the other things here was another peculiarity which was that here we are phd's in stem and the great majority of us have either been cheerleaders or drum majorettes in high school in my case it was a drum major because [Music] there were no title it was before title ix and so there weren't any female sports teams that you could compete in and and we were all very competitive and therefore we competed at the only games that were around which was trying out to be a cheerleader or a drum major and we succeeded so again we were all very very competitive and a number of these traits end up showing up in the character that carl built for contact and i remember i sent him a copy of that report you're quite a few years before he actually got around to to writing the book and so i think rather than being it being about me necessarily it's the fact that i am very prototypical of women who succeed in entering male dominated scientific professions over the course of your career has that gotten better meaning that is it is it a young girl listening to programs like this and gets inspired goes and tries to become a scientist is it easier today than it used to be do we are we closing the the gap the in in stem well in some sense we are and in some sense we haven't i um did a program at cornell uh i think it was last year or the year before and i was astonished to find that whereas in my entering class of engineering at cornell i was the one woman out of 300 students that year's class at cornell engineering was 51 women right so we are breaking down some barriers i have worked with a number of undergraduate women in a research experience for undergraduate summer program that we've had at the seti institute for a very long time and i remember telling them that in fact it had gotten better that the um the atmosphere and environment for young women in these predominantly male dominated fields was getting a lot warmer and more inviting and i talked to these women about this maybe a month before jeff marcy hit our screens and i was so appalled um that i actually called them back and told them well i guess i really didn't know what was going on but wish them luck anyway yeah very very disappointing um situation and it you know i hear privately about the amount of um sexual harassment and everything that goes on but it's everywhere you know in the movie industry and everything like that and it's like where was the professionalism now to get back to alien life and ambiguity we are in that situation on this planet in that we're not even sure that there's not a shadow biosphere that earth may have other forms of life that we just haven't seen on a microbial level that could be based on some other chirality or something like that that could be a different a different hand or it's hard to detect microbes and viruses and things like that you need very specific techniques to do it so given that ambiguity of life on earth and that we just don't know do you think that we could ever even recognize an alien civilization say they they perceive time differently than we do so their signals only come every seven years or something like that is does that keep you up at night that we might not be able to actually recognize an alien civilization even if we saw it well yes uh that is a fact and the only thing that i can say or do about that is to continue developing new tools and eventually perhaps we can have something that allows us to look over a data record that is very long and recognized within a pattern that we miss in the moment um so i i think that we all we just need to be building better tools to look at the cosmos in any way that we can i mean one of the best things about allen hills 84001 right when that controversy uh erupted with the claim that some of the structures in that meteorite which had been collected in the allen hills region of antarctica it's not one of the best things that happened there was this explosion of new tools for examining micrograms of material right we just developed technique after technique of observing this very limited amount of specimen and that's served the field really really well so uh i think that i hope that we will continue because we're puzzled or curious about something to develop new tools to look at the cosmos in different ways and eventually say oh well that's not that's almost natural but not really natural one example that i like to give of that is pulsars so rotating neutron stars where their rotational axis and magnetic axis are not aligned so we get this lighthouse beacon passing over us at a very particular period and then what about a pulsar that changes its period abruptly well we've actually seen that happen because of starquakes that change the distribution of mass in the in the system and therefore the moment of inertia but what we've never seen in our database is a pulsar that starts out with a period changes its period to a second period and that goes back to the first period but that could be in our data in our long-term data of of doing pulsar timing measurements and we ought to figure out a way to go looking for that with new tools so now do you anticipate if you found a signal do you anticipate that say it's an intentional signal pointed at us specifically for the reason of contact you know this alien civilization looks at earth and they're like that has a biosphere and it must be one really nice biosphere so there may be intelligent life there so we're gonna send a continuous signal towards them and you pick it up do we have any hope of decoding a message or are we simply going to stumble across some aliens radar yeah well then the message the important message is the answer to the are we alone question which is no uh in terms of are they going to tell us how to build a better super computer or how to live to be 200 years old i don't know and there are other experts in the in the world who have decryption skills that i certainly don't have and the thing that you might consider is if this is deliberately sent they might put effort into making it anti-cryptographic that is easy to interpret or at least easy in terms of their frame of reference so there might be some hope of actually understanding a message because they want it to be understood otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to send it now medi messaging extraterrestrial intelligence so you pick up a signal should we respond what's your opinion on that my opinion is that we're too young as a species and as a technology so if you're going to transmit a message back and your transmitter is on for five minutes well that message returning message is going to go past this civilization you're sending it to in five minutes and be done and they'd have to be looking at us at just the right time in just the right way to see that we said yeah hello back and i think the chances of that are pretty small and transmitting is costly therefore my contention is transmission doesn't make any sense until we can do ten thousand year projects right and just turn the transmitter on and keep it on now that's the way i feel today if we actually got a message and there was some ability to interpret it and it invited a reply then i would have a different answer to your question but just arbitrarily transmitting as the many people would advocate because we want to get their attention and have them then concentrate on us i and they said i don't think we can do a good enough job at it because your transmission has to be long term and we're not yet long-term the future of seti so we live in a world where you have yuri milner's that will put money you know they'll make their money in business and then and then put it into uh study searches and things like that so if someone came up and said jill tarter here is one billion dollars what would you do what set experiments would you do on that scale well i would be i would assume that the billion dollars was going to be spread out over a significant amount of time because um there just isn't a billion dollars worth um engineering and technology that we could do today that would enhance the search greatly there are incremental improvements and i'd love to have those funded but a big here's a cure for cancer kind of campaign big chunk of a billion dollars i i put it into an endowment so that um you could live off the return on that endowment into the future so you could it would be a good way to fund what is likely to be a multi-generational program and i it would be enormously wonderful to have such an endowment because not only do you have the problem of dealing with the best and the brightest of the young engineers and scientists and say come come work with us and you have the problem of well you might not succeed in your working lifetime and that might not be something that you can live with uh personal personality wise but you also then wouldn't have the problem of trying to convince them to become part of this program and also then having to say i'm not sure i can make payroll at the end of the month so an endowment for training our um successors and keeping this work alive over multi generations i think would be wonderful so that's what i do with the billion dollars now my last question for you is okay seth jostak thinks that we're going to find it within 20 years and he's bet the world a cup of coffee over it would you would you bet the cup of coffee rather than betting on it i'd rather build a new instrument just to to look in some other way i'd rather just do the work of trying to get better at the job because i don't think that seth knows or i know or anyone knows and we won't know until we succeed what the answer to the are we alone question is so let's not bet let's just explore the first setting message we get is i want my cup of coffee seth right dr charter we are out of time thank you for joining us today and i hope we can do this again sometime okay john thank you very much thanks for listening i am futurist and science fiction author wrong channel no it's not thanks for listening i am futurist and science fiction author john michael gautier currently hosting event horizon and wondering where anna actually came from one day i had a tablet computer the next i had a boss very disturbing and be sure and that's enough of that youtuber forever like subscribe and hit the bell sell out [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 115,986

Keywords: event horizon, john michael godier, event horizon john michael godier, jill tarter, seti, alien, alien intelligence, intelligent life, Can We Find Intelligent Life?, technosignatures, dr. jill tarter, frank drake

Id: 1tYz8Tjn7z8

Length: 64min 59sec (3899 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021