ET is (probably) out there -- get ready - Seth Shostak

was easy out there well I work at the SETI Institute that's almost my name SETI search for extraterrestrial intelligence in other words I look for aliens and when I tell people that at a cocktail party they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face I try to keep my own face somewhat dispassionate now a lot of people think that this is kind of idealistic ridiculous maybe even hopeless but I just want to talk to you a little bit about why I think that the job I have is actually a privilege okay and give you a little bit of the motivation for my getting into this line of work if that's what you call it this thing whoops can we go back hello come in earth there we go alright now this is the Owens Valley radio Observatory behind this year in Nevada's and in 1968 I was working there collecting data for my thesis now it's kind of lonely it's kind of tedious is collecting data so I would amuse myself by taking photos at night of the telescope's or even of myself because you know it at night I would be the only hominid within about 30 miles so here are pictures of myself the observatory had just acquired a new book written by a Russian cosmologists by the name of Joseph Schillaci and then expanded and translated and edited by a little-known Cornell astronomer by name of Carl Sagan and I remember reading that book and at 3:00 in the morning of reading this book and it was explaining how the antennas I was using to measure the dispense of galaxies could also be used to communicate to send bits of information from one star system to another now three o'clock in the morning when you're all alone haven't had much sleep that was a very romantic idea but it was that idea the fact that you could in fact prove that there's somebody out there just using the same technology that appealed to me so much that 20 years later I took a job at the SETI Institute now I have to say that my memory is notoriously porous and I've often wondered whether there was any truth in this story it was just you know miss remembering something but I recently just blew up this old negative of mine and sure enough there you can see the Schloss key and sagan book under that analog calculating device so it's true all right now the idea for doing this it wasn't very old at the time that I made that photo the idea dates from 1961 a young astronomer by the name of Frank Drake used this antenna in West Virginia pointed it at a couple of nearby stars in the hopes of eavesdropping on et now Frank didn't hear anything actually he did but it turned out to be the US Air Force which doesn't count as extraterrestrial intelligence but Drake's idea here became very popular because it was very appealing I'll get back to that and on the basis of this experiment which you didn't didn't succeed we have been doing study ever since not continuously but ever since we still haven't heard anything we still haven't heard anything in fact we don't know about any life beyond Earth but I'm going to suggest to you that that's going to change rather soon and the part of the reason in fact the majority of the reason why I think that's going to change it's that the equipment's getting better this is the Allen telescope array about 350 miles from whatever seat you're in right now this is something that we're using today to search for et and the electronics have gotten very much better - this is Frank Drake's electronics in 1960 this is the Allen telescope array electronics today some pundit with too much time on his hands has reckoned that the new experiments are approximately a hundred trillion times better than they were in 1960 hundred trillion times better that's a degree of an improvement that would look good on your report card okay but something that's not appreciated by the public is in fact that the experiment continues to get better and consequently tends to get faster this little plot and every time you show a plot you lose ten percent of the audience I have 12 of these but whatever what I plotted here is just some metric that shows how fast we're searching in other words we're looking for a needle in a haystack we know how big the haystack is it's the galaxy but we're going through the haystack no longer with the teaspoon but with a skip loader because of this increase in speed in fact those of you who are still conscious and mathematically you know competent will note that this is a semi-log plot in other words the rate of increase is exponential it's exponentially improving now exponential is an overworked word you hear it on the media all the time they don't really know what exponential means but this is exponential in fact it's doubling every 18 months and of course every card-carrying member of the digerati knows that that's Moore's law so this means that over the course of the next 2,000 years we'll be able to look at a million star systems a million star systems looking for signals that would prove somebody's out there well a million star systems is that interesting I mean how many of those star systems have planets and in fact sorry we didn't know the answer to that even as recently as fifteen years ago and in fact we really didn't know it even as recently as six months ago but now we do recent results suggest that virtually every star has planets and more than one they're like you know kittens you get no you get a litter you don't get one kitten you get a bunch okay so in fact this is a pretty accurate estimate of the number of planets in our galaxy just in our galaxy okay and I remind the non astronomy majors among you that our galaxy is only one of a hundred billion that we can see with our telescopes that's a lot of real estate but of course most of these planets are going to be kind of worthless like you know mercury or Neptune Neptune is probably not very big in your life okay so the question is what fraction of these planets are actually suitable for life we don't know the answer to that either but we will learn that answer this year thanks to the NASA's Kepler space telescope and in fact the smart money which is to say the people who work on this project the smart money is suggesting that the fraction of planets that might be suitable for life is maybe one in a thousand one in a hundred something like that well even taking the the pessimistic estimate that it's one in a thousand that means that there are at least a billion cousins of the earth just in our own galaxy okay now I've given you a lot of numbers here but they're mostly big numbers okay so you know keep that in mind there's plenty of real estate plenty of real estate in the universe and if we're the only bit of real estate in which there's some interesting occupants that makes you a miracle I know you like to think you're a miracle but if you do science you learn rather quickly that every time you think you're a miracle you're wrong so probably not the case all right so the bottom line is this because of the increase in speed and because of the vast amount of habitable real estate in the cosmos I figure we're gonna pick up a signal within two dozen years and I feel strongly enough about that to make a bet with you either we're gonna find et in the next two dozen years or I'll buy you a cup of coffee okay so that's not so bad I mean even with two dozen years you open up your brows and there's news of a signal or you know you get a cup of coffee now let me tell you about some aspect of this that people don't think about and that is what what happens suppose that you know the what I say is true I mean who knows but suppose it happens suppose sometime in the next two dozen years we pick up a faint line that tells us we have some cosmic company what is the effect what's the consequence now I might be at ground zero for this I happen to know what the consequence for me would be because we've had false alarms this is 1997 it's a photo I made it about three o'clock in the morning in Mountain View here when we were watching the computer monitors because we picked up a signal that we thought this is the real deal all right and I kept waiting for the men in black to show up right I kept waiting for yeah I kept waiting for my mom to call somebody to call the government to call nobody called nobody called I was so nervous that I couldn't sit down I just wandered around taking photos like this one just for something to do well at 9:30 in the morning with my head down on my desk cause it obviously hadn't slept all night the phone rings and it's the New York Times and I think there's a lesson in that and that lesson is that if we pick up the signal the media the media will be on it faster than a weasel on ball bearings it's gonna be fast okay you can be sure that no secrecy okay that's what happens to me it kind of ruins my whole whole week because whatever I've got planned that week kind of out the window but what about you what's it gonna do to you and the answer is we don't know the answer we don't know what that's gonna do to you're not in the long term and not even very much in the short term I mean that would be a bit like asking Chris Columbus in 1491 hey Chris you know what happens if it turns out that there's a continent between here and Japan where you're sailing to what will be the consequences for Humanity if that turns out to be the case I think Chris probably would offer you some some answer that you might not have understood but it probably wouldn't have been right and I think that to predict what finding et is going to mean we can't predict that either but here a couple of things I can say to begin with it's going to be a society that's away in advance of our own you're not gonna hear from alien Neanderthals they're not building transmitters they're gonna be ahead of us maybe by a few thousand years maybe by a few million years but substantially ahead of us and that means if you can understand anything that they're going to say then you might be able to short-circuit history by getting information from a society that's way beyond our own now you might find out a bit hyperbolic and maybe it is but nonetheless it's conceivable that this will happen in you know you could consider this like I don't know giving Julius Caesar English lessons in the key to the Library of Congress it would change his day all right that's one thing another thing that's for sure going to happen is that it will calibrate us we will know that we're not that miracle right there were just another duck in a row we're not the only kids on the block and I think that that's philosophically a very profound thing to learn we're not a miracle okay the third thing that it might tell you is somewhat vague but I think interesting and important and that is if you find a signal coming from a more advanced society because they will be that will tell you something about our own possibilities that we're not inevitably doomed to self-destruction because they survived their technology we could do it too normally when you look out into the universe you're looking back in time right that's that's interesting to cosmologists but in this sense you actually can look into the future hazily but you can look into the future so those are all the sorts of things that would come from a detection now let me talk a little bit about something that happens even in the meantime and that is SETI I think is important because it's exploration and it's not only exploration its comprehensible exploration now I gotta tell you I'm I'm you know always reading books about explorers I find exploration very interesting Arctic exploration you know people like Magellan almonds and Shackleton you see Franklin down there Scott all these guys it's really nifty exploration they're just doing it because they want to explore it and you might say oh that's kind of a frivolous opportunity but that's not frivolous that's not a frivolous activity because let me think of ants you know most ants are programmed to follow one another along enough in a long line but they're couple ants maybe 1% of those ants that are what they call pioneer ants and they're the ones that wander off they're the ones you find on the kitchen countertop you get got to get them with your thumb before they find their sugar or something okay but those ants even though most of them get wiped out those ants are the ones that are essential to the survival of the hive so exploration is important I also think that exploration is important in terms of being able to address what I think is a critical lack in our society and that's the lack of science literacy the lack of the ability to even understand science now look a lot has been written about the you know the plural state of science literacy in this country right you've heard about it well here's one example in fact polls taken this is this poll was taken 10 years ago it shows like I'm roughly 1/3 of the public thinks that the aliens are not only out there we're looking for them out there but they're here right sailing the skies and their saucers and occasionally abducting people for experiments their parents wouldn't approve of well that would be interesting if it was true in job security for me but I don't think the evidence is very good that's more you know sad and significant but there are other things that people believe that are significant like the efficacy of homeopathy or that evolution is just you know sort of a crazy idea by scientists without any legs or you know evolution they all that sort of thing our global warming these sorts of ideas don't really have any validity that you can't trust the scientists now we got to solve that problem because that's a critically important problem and you you you might say well ok how are we gonna solve that problem with SETI well let me suggest to you that SETI obviously can't solve the problem but it can address the problem it can address the problem by getting young people interested in science look science is hard it has a reputation of being hard and the facts are it is hard and that's the result of 400 years of science right I mean in the 18th century in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library if you could find a library right in the 19th century if you had a basement lab you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home right because it was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up well that's not true anymore today you got to spend years in grad school in postdoc positions just to figure out what the important questions are it's hard there's no doubt about it and in fact here's an example the Higgs boson finding the Higgs boson ask the next 10 people you see on the streets hey do you think it's worthwhile to spend billions of Swiss francs looking for the Higgs boson I bet the answer you're gonna get is well I don't know what the Higgs boson is and I don't know if it's important and probably most of the people wouldn't even know the value of a Swiss franc okay and yet we're spending billions of Swiss francs on this problem okay so that doesn't get people interest in science because they can't comprehend what it's about SETI on the other hand is really simple we're gonna use these big antennas we're gonna try and eavesdrop on signals everybody can understand that yes technologically it's very sophisticated but everybody gets the idea so that's one thing the other thing is it's exciting science it's exciting because we're naturally interested in other intelligent beings and I think that's part of our hardwiring I mean we're hardwired to be interested in beings that might be if you will competitors or if you're the romantic sort possibly even mates okay this is analogous to our interest in things that have big teeth right very interesting things that have big teeth you can see the evolutionary value of that and you can also see the practical consequences by watching watching Animal Planet you notice they make they make very few programs about gerbils it's mostly about things that have big teeth okay so we're interested in these sorts of things right and not just us it's it's it's also kids this allows you to pay it forward by using this subject as a hook to science because SETI involves all kinds of science obviously biology obviously astronomy but also geology also chemistry various scientific disciplines all can be presented in the guise of we're looking for et so to me this is this is interesting and important and in fact it's my policy even though I give a lot of talks to adults you give talks to adults in two days later they're back where they were but if you give talks to kids you know one in 50 of them some light bulb goes off and and I think gee I'd never thought that and then think oh you know read a book or a magazine or whatever they get interested in something now it's my theory supported only by anecdotal personal anecdotal evidence but nonetheless that kids get interested in something between the ages of 8 and 11 you got to get him there so alright give talks adults that's fine but I try and make 10% of the talks that I give try and make those four kids okay I remember when a guy came to our high school actually Rose actually my junior high school I was in sixth grade and he gave some talk all I remember from it was one word electronics there's like Dustin Hoffman in the Graduate right when he said plastics whatever that means plastics all right I think I sell electronics I don't remember anything else in fact I don't remember anything that my sixth grade teacher said all year but I remember electronics and so I got interested in electronics and you know I got a study to get my hand why since I was wiring up stuff here I am at about 15 or something doing that sort of stuff okay that had a big effect on me so that's my point that you can have a big effect on these kids in fact this reminds me I don't know a couple years ago I gave a talk at a school in Palo Alto where there were about a dozen 11 year olds that come to this talk I've been brought in to talk to these kids for an hour 11-year olds they're all sitting in a little semicircle looking up at me with big eyes and I started there was a whiteboard behind me and I started off by writing a one with 22 zeros after it and I said I'd now look the number of stars in the visible universe and this number is so big there's not even a name for it okay and one of these kids shot up his hand and he said watch e there is a name for it it's a sex toy a Quadro Hexter something or other right now that kid was wrong by four or four orders of magnitude but there was no doubt about it these kids were smart okay so I stopped giving the lecture all they wanted to do was ask questions in fact my my last comments to these kids at the end I said you know you kids are smarter than the people I work with now they didn't even care about that what they wanted what they wanted was my email address so they could ask me more questions so let me just say look my job is a privilege because we're in a special time previous generations couldn't do this experiment at all right in another generation down the line I think we will have succeeded so to me it is a privilege and when I look in the mirror you know the facts are that I really don't see myself what I see is the generation behind me these are some kids from the Huff School fourth graders talk there what two weeks ago something like that I think that if you can instill some interest in science and how it works well that's a payoff beyond easy measure thank you very much

Channel: TED-Ed

Views: 219,761

Rating: 4.5117307 out of 5

Keywords: SETI Institute (Organization), SETI, ET \extra terrestrial\, alien, \find, alien\, \evidence, \Seth, Shostak\, universe, TED, TEDx, TEDxSanJoseCA, TED-Ed, \TED, Ed\, TEDEducation

Id: t0m8WdR1FcQ

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 21 2013

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[u/Spadeinfull]

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