First Contact - Marc Kaufman, Jill Tarter, Frank Drake, Seth Shostak (SETI Talks)

[Music] [Music] you okay welcome along ladies and gentlemen to your weekly City seminar series tonight we're joined by by Mike Coffman who's come across to us from the East Coast Marc is the author of a new book called first contact which he's going to talk to us about tonight he is a works at the Washington Post as a national editor and as a science writer and he has also previously worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer he's a journalist of some 30 years of experience this is his first book and it's published by Simon & Schuster and as I mentioned just before mark is only too willing to sign copies for you over on the side here so if you'll join me in welcoming mark thank you so much it's really just an absolute delight to be here especially since there are a fair number of people in the audience who I've interviewed for both my book and for stories and I thank you Jill and Karl and Seth and Frank for for all the help that you've given over the years before I start the presentation just let me tell you a little bit about myself and and how this project began five years ago I knew absolutely nothing about astrobiology I was just starting as a science writer at the post I had done many other things I had been a foreign correspondent a long time and I was sent up to a journalism boot camp at MIT the subject was the universe which we were supposed to learn about in four days and we did indeed learn a great deal about the supermassive black holes and you know how galaxies form and so on all of which was fascinating but what really grabbed me was the last day there was a presentation by a young woman who perhaps made some of you know Sara Seager who suffice it to say was given a who was given tenure and a name chair at age 34 at MIT an unusual thing so she came up and she was talking and one of the first things that she said was that she very firmly believed and not only believed she she had concluded scientifically that in her lifetime life would be found beyond Earth and I remember just doing a double-take not so much because I was not a scientist and and it wasn't the science of it but it was to have someone of that level of authority in that context and you know up there at MIT saying this I thought what a story you know this is something that that people in the field know apparently and as I as I've learned more it is kind of like a generally there is something of a consensus about that but it's something that the public I think does not really know it knows it in the context of you know you do a poll and 50% of people will say that there are aliens out there but they don't know that the science the really good science is being done to push that to push us forward toward an understanding that's based on something that other than what you'd like to be the case so that's it here we go and and you know I have now lived with this very intensely for 303 years or so I know many of you have done for much longer and it is just such an enormous privilege it is it you know what could be better quite clearly human beings either instinctively or through some kind of desire we want there to be life beyond Earth you know you look at in terms of you know where our gods where's heaven in different cultures in the djinns of in Islam angels in a lot of different cultures and then in more recent times you know half of the blockbuster movies that have come out in the last 10 15 years 20 years have been about et people want this to be the case and sometimes I wonder again if it isn't distinctive kind of kind of connection with the reality that we know is out there or simply just a desire but in any case it has been imagined and it has been discussed and there have been some very kind of unfortunate events associated with it the the Inquisition's taking of Giordano Bruno being a clear low point sometimes feelings about this issue get very strong so but there's now something new to humankind there's a you know a real science of ET and it is as I have come to understand that through my reporting and I did go around the globe roughly two times and try to really connect with researchers out in the field but what I've come to understand is that there is a large it's almost like a stealth program going on the I'm not sure why it has not been brought together and and presented in the in the in the vastness that it actually is but across the world there are tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people scientists working on issues related to astrobiology it's a it's a broad discipline it's not that people are astrobiologists per se oftentimes but it is a focus in a way that I think again the public doesn't understand but that is a very important development in in our time and with with that said I there is new science that is that has been coming out over the last 10-15 years but most especially I would say in the last five years or so that really is changing our understanding of what is out there and let me start with with extremophiles which actually turn out to be in the news today black smokers at the bottom of in particularly the Pacific hydrothermal vents with water coming out or that's 700 degrees or so there's no microbial life right there but very close to it in in some very high ranges it's there before before that was discovered it was considered to be impossible you go down two miles in the Taylor glacier or lap two miles and in Taylor but in in the Taylor glacier or two miles down lake vostok in Antarctica and you're going to find microbial life in the ice which again I think most people would not under not imagine to be the case but it is now not only widely understood but it's being studied as an ecological kind of community that there are different kinds of microbes in that they serve different purposes and they're found in virtually every very cold environment like that I spent a lot of time talk thinking about and visiting the the subterranean extra extrema filed world this is Thomas onstott who when he started had absolutely no sponsorship and gave it used his own money to go over to South Africa where he had just on the basis of a hunch and and some of the initial work that he had done he he had surmised that there would be or hypothesized there would be life well below the surface of the earth and by that he I mean miles below and that there would be microbial life and that it would have nothing to do with the surface of the earth and this was a pretty revolutionary idea at the time I mean certainly there's life at the bottom of the sea but the idea that there would be life at the bottom of a mine was something that was it was it was strange enough that he could not get a single person to finance him early on he later did get he'll help of various sorts but that was after coming up with what turns out to be among the most amazing and instructive alot of microbes ever found this is diesel Fedora's or tax evader the Bulge pablor and their this it lived it was it was found I think was about two miles down maybe not quite that that deep by by Tullis on site and Linda Pratt Lisa Pratt and a couple years ago and what it does what it's able to do is survive in in an environment that is totally dark extremely hot and that has no relationship whatsoever with the surface of the earth and hasn't for they think between three and four and and forty million years the three is obviously an error bar that is giving them a lot of latitude there but it's been for an extremely long period of time it is and it has clearly evolved and it is as far as we know something that's quite that that's unique although there's really no reason to think that the same thing doesn't exist right below us it just so happens that he was able to go into the deep mines of South Africa because that's where the mines were and they let him in but the logic of what he found was that these animal these creatures can exist in in a world that is utterly disconnected from the surface and has been for a very long time that picture works out there well but as a journalist and it's a foreign correspondent I of course saw this is a great opportunity to do the same thing and went down went to South Africa and went down to the north and platinum mine tallest onstott wasn't there but some of his colleagues were it was a fascinating experience scary very very hot we went down about a mile and a half and you're walking around in this environment that is extraordinarily hot but it also just appears to be utterly devoid of life I mean it's you know walking through a concrete jungle well though in this case it's granite or whatever and big but because of what onstott and others have found we know that in the rock Fisher's you know in the pools deep inside the rock that there is life that's there and it made it really quite dirty to be walking around there thinking you know that we were not alone that was you know a mile and a half down but I was not alone this is what it's just the news today this is gentleman is agate on burgundy he's the nematode ologist from Ghent yeah a University in Brussels I miss ER in Belgium he was one of the people who I went down with he was looking for complex life down that deep that had never been found before this is entirely new I mean and nematodes if it was understood again exists on the surface of the oceans quite deep but not below not not in this tree not below the surface on the ground here it's generally understood that they live or what was understood that they live up to 25 30 feet he was looking for them at this one and a half to two miles and he was using the same kind of techniques same technology which was relatively simple you go to a borehole you gather the water and then you go back and filter it and you try to find things and lo and behold this is one of the things he found and this the the journal article about this just came out today this is its official name I forget the first part with it but it is Mephisto and thus the worm from hell and this this is not I believe this is not one that he actually found but one that he grew from the others that he found and the they did an enormous amount of work to do to protect against the possibility that this was contamination they went back many times he has descended into the mines I think about 25-30 times and a couple of them were after nature said hey you know we're just not sure that this is really not contaminated you have to go back so he went back again and again and he filtered like just tens of thousands of liters of water and the the the peer reviewers and editors at nature were satisfied and so this came out today saying for the first time ever we are finding complex life at a depth that was perceived to be utterly impossible so what's the importance of that for astrobiology this is a NASA image it is it is saying something that perhaps that I'm sure many of you know that there was a period of time when Mars was most likely warm and/or warmer and wetter that this was during the time when the earth was clearly not habitable and that it just may be that Mars was habitable during that time and this is based on things such as the Phoenix finding of water below the surface I'm an asari of ice below the surface in the Northern Plains the gullies that are found in a lot of different places now and and the deltas as well so there is this consensus near consensus of warm and wet and then there's Mike boomers work on methane which is begin a truly remarkable he has worked on this for 18 years he's is to my mind one of the real Giants of the field who went against a lot of what he was told could be the case as it turns out it was something I Chronicle in the book and tried to do this with a lot of the researchers that I that I wrote about did a little bit about his life he grew up in Amish country and outside of Philadelphia and when he was a young boy he was very kind of outgoing and inquisitive guy and he well he came into conflict with his pastor who had was someone he had been who had gone to see at five days a week since he was born and this was because at age 11 he had his four science class and in the science they told them about evolution and they told them about things like you know how long the world might been here and he went to speak to his pastor the pastor said with it science teachers wrong you know it's either it's either kind of them or us and instead of being kind of crushed by that he used that as an energy that has led him to be kind of an out-of-the-box unconventional thinker ever since and I would have to say that that is something of a character trait I think of a lot of people in the field that that they go into it being told that this is absolutely impossible that these are things that cannot be and then they work at it and work at it and work at it and do the hard science and boom he is what what he discovered and it and his colleagues was the presence of methane being emitted at specific places at specific times there had always been know that there was a little bit of methane in the atmosphere but there wasn't enough to make a big difference and but what he found was was this pattern which raises a lot of interesting questions I mean 90% of methane on earth is biological doesn't mean that this is biological but you now have a a scenario that makes a certain you know that that could lead one to that conclusion all right to step back for a second this is something again as a novice I did not really know but in a lot of this is relatively new information as well but that everything that you need for life as we know it is out there you know and it's broadly out there you know you have complex hydrocarbons these are poly aromatic the PA ages of hydrocarbons right and and they are out there nitrogen is out there oxygen is out there hydrogen is out there water is out there everywhere so it's all there and we now know that there are like zillions of exoplanets you know we've identified five hundred and change and and Kepler has found an additional twelve hundred that are candidates but for the for the planet hunters who are out there the Geoff Marcy's and Paul Butler's and and others it's it's who have now written about this and this is based on their extrapolation of the science is that there is every end staff as well there is every reason to believe that there are billions of exoplanets that that they are common that that solar systems with multiple planets are common that earth sized planets are common that that planets and habitable zones are common now this is not stuff that has been entirely nailed down yet but that's the direction that the science is going in and I think Kepler is going to tell us a lot more about that and and a lot of and some of the ground-based technology research as well but this to my mind changes everything because now you have a canvas on which all those things can fall oh you know the the hydrocarbons and the everything else that we were just describing it's there no reason why I wouldn't fall there in fact we're sure that it did and I'm not sure I have all my zeroes right but this is how big the canvas is I mean as of today you know tomorrow you might have to add three more zeros to it I was speaking to bill Baruch he was the head of the Kepler program and he said that when when he started out ten years ago or so the assumption was that there were a hundred thousand stars in the Milky Way he said now they're assuming 303 one hundred billion stars now they're now they're counting three hundred billion so that's just you know you focus on something you find out and this is this is what you're finding so this is the canvas we have all the material we have life being phenomenally tenacious and so this is the logic that that I that scientists some of them in this room helped me come to during my three years of reporting that life is more tenacious than previously imagined that billions of exoplanets habitable zones probably common molecules and compounds lead in the universe er everywhere if life started once why not again and here's the one that really is the clincher and this was I am honored to say I was as in a conversation with Martin Rees and he was the one who first brought it to my attention where he said you know just from a it's not just probabilistic but it's it's from the point of view of physics that if you have one genesis in our solar system then it could be an anomaly you can never tell I mean it's hard to explain but it could be an anomaly if it turns out that there is microbial life that that has a different origin that's found on Mars or Enceladus or Titan or wherever else then the probability that that life is a common place throughout the universe goes up like this and so that's why all these microbes and this extremely file work and the methane work and all that is so important because it would it would it would take us over a hurdle that's a huge one so life that we'd like to find obviously it's not going to be this maybe this these are the famous snot YZ bacteria from caves who knows but whatever life it is if it's if it's not the life that's in our solar system it's going to be extremely far away and this is where SETI and many of you folks in the in the room come in if we have a situation where we know that there's microbial life that's that's different than or even complex life that's different than Earth's on Mars then and we know that the chances of there be of life being a common place go up like that how do we deal with that how do we you know what sense do we make of it and how do we use it and I went into this as I have to admit and I feel awkward saying it in this room a skeptic of SETI you know I I had as is often said you know anybody they've been looking for you know 40-some years 50 years and and haven't found anything I had the opportunity to speak to to Jill and to Frank and to Seth and others and I went up to Hat Creek and I remember just walking around there and being kind of overcome with the understanding that you know whatever the drawbacks are this actually is the pathway that we have you know if if we could get into a starship and go to Alpha Centauri that would be great but we can't so SETI is is with with all its imperfections is precisely is something that is an essential part of the whole astrobiology picture especially if we find life in our solar system other life I also had the opportunity to to go to Japan and observe a SETI observation there they had 23 different sites this is shouldn't one never saw who hopes someday to be the Carl Sagan of Japan I don't know he's got a long way to go but he he he runs an observatory there he is a charming guy and and is a great organizer and after he did this he came to one of the the latest apps icon gathering and spoke about his work and then helped organize project Dorothy which was an international said he with was 17 16 17 different sites which says to me that there is huge interest out there that there are a lot of different cultures there a lot of different peoples who would love to do this you know who are it who were drawn to this concept now here's my final point in all this after his after his observation and you can see there were a lot of you know reporters there and and it got quite a bit of publicity he kind of he went off into a corner the phone started to ring and it started to ring you know off the hook and you know he would kind of be rolling his eyes and speaking in Japanese so I didn't understand what he was saying but after a while I could tell that this was not a particularly pleasant conversation that he was having and after maybe a half an hour you know a half a dozen nerd or more calls came over and said you know when every we have one of these things and and we have the press I get all these calls with from people saying don't let them know we're here it's dangerous don't let them know now of course he's just listening you know they're not gonna let them know we're here but that brings me to my final thought which is should we let them know and and how are we going to get to the point where where the the search for extraterrestrial life has the same level of science as we're not now finding it in other areas clearly you know Hat Creek and other other advances mean that there's a great deal of terrific science going on in SETI but I don't think that I think would be fair to say that it still is to some extent a matter of belief as to whether or not there is intelligent life out there there's the Drake Equation that will that will lead us to a conclusion but there isn't there isn't specific data and it's there is yeah and in that absence of data there is or the the sparsity of data there is still a lot of room to wonder if there is something out there is it bad you know is it malevolent is it good you know what should we do and that's why the work that is done here I think is so important because it it's helping to bring this also into the same level of science into the same era arena of science and I think that it's on its way to doing that through Oh SETI and and Mehdi you know the messaging and whatever and that it's just a matter of time before that same process is going to be you know the same level is going to be there and as a final pitch it's ridiculous that Hat Creek isn't working don't you think you know it's a great facility it should be it should be you know five times bigger if you know someone who has a real lot of money just tell them to write a check and bring it in here there you go thank you very much okay ladies and gentlemen the format for the rest of the evening is that we're going to have a panel now Jill and Seth and Frank are going to join mine they're going to talk about the topics that Marcus just addressed thank you very much for the plug for the Allen telescope array if some of you don't know the back story on the 15th of April we had to put the telescopes into hibernation because of a lack of funding to operate them our partner University of California Berkley has fallen prey to state budget shortfalls federal NSF funding problems and we had this six-month of continuing resolution that that took out the ability to get new money from the Air Force to do space situational awareness so we are trying very hard to get those telescopes back on the air where they should be but and and we're all very hopeful that that will help but anyone who has any passion about the subject and a little bit of spare change we'd be very happy to to get that support so thank you for telling that story um let me start by saying your last slide obviously is disturbing for me because you said he said he is still grounded in belief you didn't say that astrobiology was grounded in belief and yet the data about microbial or intelligent life elsewhere in the universe absolutely the same there is no in either case and so what we're trying to do is to change this old historical let's ask the priests and the philosophers what we should believe about life and intelligent life in the universe and change that verb to explore and that's true across the board and I guess maybe the fact that you can draw a picture of an ET and make a joke about it where it's kind of hard to get people laughing about a microt is the difference but in in the way that we practice it we don't use the word belief and we do use the verb explore if it were belief if we were actually selling a religion we could probably get this thing funded I hear what you say and and I thought a lot about that that's last slide before before speaking here it was one that I had used in some other venue so I thought well you know let's let's do it here as well and what I was seeking to say was not that that the search for that you folks are involved in is akin to the belief systems of in religion but it feels to me that the the scientific breakthroughs that have occurred in the worlds of extremophiles in the worlds of exoplanets of understanding what's you know the elements that are out there in the in the universe is different than what unfortunately has happened here which is that you've done a great deal but there hasn't been a response so it may be the the use of the word belief was was ill-advised you know it was I was not trying to say that it was you know that that this is a belief system at all but that there are you know half the population that believes that there is life out there but that is not based on the same kind of grounding of science I think well you know you mentioned the fifty years and we have Frank to thank for the first radio observation fifty-one years ago now but when you do the numbers mark that 50 years is equivalent to saying well are there any fish in the ocean let's take an 8 ounce glass and dip it in one of the oceans of the earth and you know are there's a did I catch any fish fish any in there well that experiment could work there are fish that would fit in the glass but if you don't find any fish I think you're not likely to conclude there are no fish in the ocean mm-hmm but numerically that's a really good analogy to what 50 years of being occasionally on the air looking for engineered signals is equivalent to so we haven't done a lot we can do a lot more with new technologies we haven't yet done a lot right and and just on on that ground light I totally agree with it that that this is something that that is extraordinarily valuable and should be done a lot more maybe it's worth pointing out maybe what you were getting at actually first of all let me just preface this by saying most of mark's book is actually about what you might say is conventional astrobiology i hate to use the word conventional because that's somewhat that's discordant with this subject matter but but not SETI and as I look at this panel all three of us are it's a SETI business even though both of the people that work upstairs this Institute are actually doing what you would call astrobiology so I think it's a little bit lamentable that we don't have the astrobiologists sitting up here but what the astrobiologists might say Joe obviously I will defend City to the hilt but is that we do have some data from our - peyote there's even the methane evidence on Mars so it's just the name one thing that marked treats in his book and while that has not conclusively proven that there are bacteria under the surface of Mars that's a tantalizing thing for which I not sure that we have a parallel and setting it okay it's true that so far we don't have any compelling evidence for any life beyond Earth yet but at least the astrobiology people have some data to analyze and that's maybe the difference and the remarkable thing is that you know one signal and then the game is entirely changed and and that isn't the case in some of the other astrobiology so it's kind of a fascinating kind of spin on it yeah Frank um I had a question the the the recent exoplanets findings that Kepler has presented to us do you think that they've been a game changer in the SETI search if you had have had these database of planets back when you did project Phoenix would this have changed your approach yes either and I I think these recent discoveries really do have to be taken to account and change greatly our search strategies up until now we've been searching first for signals from the facility planets of stars like the Sun single stars this was the belief 50 years ago it's place to look was single stars like the Sun well as time has gone on in recent years we realized that in fact the much more numerous kinds of stars the red star the red dwarf stars they're called the M stars are have habitable zones - and could be potential abodes of life and there are ten times more of those than there are stars like our Sun so no longer should we just look at solar-type stars but then just in the last week or so there's been a discovery which i think is is really paradigm changing which is the discovery of what I call rope planets I said I call them rot Wanderers nomads planets that are not in orbit around any star and we know from our modeling of the formation of planetary systems that as they develop and their disks collapse into proto planets and these become planets there will be many close passages of these lesser objects which are on their way to becoming planets and in these closed passages there is a mutual gravitational attraction for sure which we understand perfectly well and this always results in one member of the pair that is passing one past the other one of them being accelerated the other one being decelerated so one of them goes faster the other one goes slower and these chants what we call collisions they're not they're closed passages will occur in a random sequence and since it's random occasionally some star will get accelerated over and over it will just happen to pass with each the other start with the right geometry that is always accelerated and you do this not many times and you get the planet up to escape velocity I mean escape velocity from the planetary system and it goes whooshing out into space and in very little time a few years it has left that system and is no longer bound to it by the gravity and it goes through the galaxy essentially forever as it turns out without ever having a star to illuminate it they're heated it and the modeling indicates that the abundance of these things or the number of these in our galaxy well known let me say it another way that every forming star about one planet gets tossed out and this means there should be a as many of these things as there are stars in our galaxy lands it's true of other galaxies too well that is right I mind a paradigm changing thing because the next question you ask is well does it make any sense that there would be life on these that we might find and your first thought is a good heavens no there's no star like no Sun to power life to energize chlorophyll do all the things that makes life work very well in on our earth but in fact to have life I think we know and that is what your need is basically not very many things you need water it's life like ours and then of course maybe there's many other forms of life you need a source of energy and you need carpark Anik molecules hydrocarbons that sort of thing well these wrote planets and nomads whatever you want to call them have all these things because they came come from the same source disk of gas and dust as did the planets of the solar system so they've got the stuff of life well what about the energy wait a minute there's no star no Sun to shine a lot of energy on them well it turns out planets are born with a great deal of energy in them it's an energy of gravitational collapse which it works to heat the interior planet as it forms and collapses under its own gravity and it turns out the reservoir of energy created by this is enormous we've seen that in our own solar system in both Jupiter and Saturn and actually Neptune and Uranus we believe but clearly in Jupiter and Saturn the amount of energy being released from those objects now after four and a half billion years is much greater than the energy they're receiving from the Sun in the case of Jupiter it's about twice and this is twenty-five percent Jill says okay and and this is both leftover energy from the collapse of the object which made the planet but also there is a huge a source of energy which is radioactive decay of radioactive elements that are are in these planets elements were created in the supernova explosion that enriched the galaxy with radioactive elements and then delivered radioactive elements to every star in the galaxy well maybe there's not 25 percent I think one of them as 50 percent I forget which uh but if you ask the question well doesn't that mean these things get very cold well it turns out that if the object is radiating only say 25 percent or let's say 50 percent because I don't want to miss it close to 50 and 50 percent of the energy that Jupiter and Saturn are radiating the object is oh it was only cools down by 10 degrees and four and a half billion years now this is a long story sorry it went on so long but what this means is that these planets even though the stars never shone on them since their very earliest days are essentially the same temperature as Jupiter and Saturn are today and that situation will occur with any planet that has a very deep atmosphere well when you have that deep atmosphere there's another phenomenon which is when when you go down in an atmosphere the temperature goes up we see that everywhere you go up mountain it gets colder that's a result of very basic physics I won't go into that long story just believe me you can ask me afterwards to explain that it's easy to do which means that if you just go down on the atmosphere a little bit you get temperatures in this room and indeed our radio telescopes have shown that in Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune there are levels in the atmosphere where the temperature is as in this room suitable for life so there are actually habitable zones within planets all of them as long as they have a substantial atmosphere and this means that even the rogue planets could have life and this has been developed and great detailed by some very eminent people like theyd Stevenson at Caltech well life what will it be what will it become I will throw in one thing I've always emphasized whenever I teach astrobiology when it comes to the biology I'm not a great biologist but there's one thing I can see clearly from what we know of biology and that is one of the key qualities that make life so abundant and so efficient effective is that it has two qualities which make it that way one is that life is adaptive it can adapt to conditions as the temperatures on planets change the chemistry changes the amount of water and so forth through what we call evolution in a dance the other one is that life is opportunistic if there is a niche in which life can exist it will get populated life finds a way life is very aggressive in a way it survives it adapts but also it expands into every possible place where it could exist so does that apply to the rogue planets I think it will life will arise there of course it probably it will be bacterial life you know microbial life for sure and then you ask the last question and that is how far can it evolve well to us these are almost unthinkable places you know it's always dark there may be a great deal of weather but it's always dark it's not cold by the way it's just dark would there be intelligent life there well I think you have to fall back on this point that life is adaptive and opportunistic and I would say if that applies throughout the universe we're even gonna find intelligent life there there is a harder question will they have technology we can detect but there you have to begin to speculate I don't think I've been speculating up to this point but whether the creatures of a planet that's always in the dark may not may have a difficulty getting fire real technology you need fire too but knowing the history and the qualities of life if I were betting on this I bet that life will has found a way to develop technology even in these places well that's a long story but it answers the question that the was first asked which is what have we learned and how has it changed our search techniques and what this says is we've got a problem it could well be that the galaxy is just full of technology life-bearing planets we don't know what that technology is maybe they have radio it's not ruled out by any means but the problem now is that this life can be anywhere in the galaxy it's not in orbit around nearby stars aiming your telescope at it single stars in the sky may be a very inefficient way to search what you want to need to do is search the whole galaxy so you change your search methods actually even the designs of your telescope so that they look at more of the sky at once instead of one star at a time and this is the way to do setting it it also reminds us that SETI success may take a very long time because now it's not we're not limited to searching a small group of stars but the holes and that's a technological challenge for us or for any civilization stop there yeah I might say two years ago Peter Gould Reich who's a theoretician at Caltech was asked he was giving a talk on the subject keep in mind we haven't found any of these orphan planets right they're all theoretical okay but he was asked he was says what how many planets were in our solar system when it was formed and his answer was about 40 well now we have eight used to have nine right so that's 1/5 so that means if four-fifths of all the planets are orphan planets so that means instead of having a trillion planets in the galaxy they're you know five trillion Oh five trillion one trillion are the same number for astronomers but my kid there is a recent report that we have seen rogue planets by gravitational microlensing which Jill questions although she's in a minority I believe but microlensing is a very powerful technique which I'd like to talk about because I think it's the way to communicate and we're not able to do it but there have been microlensing and detections of proposed detections of about 35 rogue planets in very little searching and in fact enough circumstances that the discoverers can predict the total number of row planets in the galaxy and it works out to be one point eight planets on average prayers for star which means they're about twice as many rogue planets as there are stars in the galaxy if those observations turned out to be okay yeah I spent last week with a rival microlensing group that's why I'm going to come um actually mark you mentioned the seasonal heterogeneous methane in the Martian atmosphere Seth you mentioned the methane as well I'd love some of our astrobiologists in the audience to address okay you know is it this serpent ization of olivine is it microbes where do we what are people thinking since you wrote your book which a little while ago now and things move on I'm a guess I guess I'm a master of oil which is I'm gonna kick the ball along though because we actually have a talk from Kevin's on Lee who recently published a paper suggesting that the Martian methane signatures that Mike will merit detected might might have been somewhat questionable so it's an ongoing debate and the question will be answered in two parts by the Mars Science Laboratory that lands next year on Mars and that is sensitive to me things so wherever it lands it will get very good pasta billion detections of methane on the surface where it wins and then we have the trace gas orbiter mission that is launching in 2016 where they will also do a very sensitive search for methane and directly a certain weather mic warmers detections which he had to do extremely exacting science in spectroscopy to look through Earth's atmosphere which has plenty of methane and just look at the me thing that was on Mars it's a very difficult measure and it may be that we really have to get the final result from sending a direct method detection mission to Mars and that was certainly my understanding as well and I think that that Mike would agree I recall after going down to Paranal with was Mike heat I spoke with Ed Weiler and this was just during the time when it was they were deciding on the ExoMars architecture and it was his what he told me was that he felt that the science was strong enough that it deserved for them to change their architecture and but that the underlying understanding though is that we really still don't know actually two quick comments first of all thanks for for a great talk mark and for a great panel the the first comment is about Jill's question about the methane on Mars the simple answer of course is we don't know methane can be produced either through geologic activity or through biologic activity but the important thing is that it's through activity and that says that Mars is an active planet it is not a dead planet whether it's alive geologically or biologically or both is the really interesting question and there are some things that could be done for example measuring the carbon-12 to carbon 13 ratio in the methane which Mars Science Lab in principle is capable of doing and if you start seeing interesting things certainly geologically produced methane on earth has a different carbon-12 carbon-13 ratio than biologically produced methane on earth so there's an interesting measurement the other comment was that we do have one datum that potentially provides some information that distinguishes the potential for microbial life on other planets from the potential for intelligent life on other planets and that one datum is that microbial life started on earth very early certainly within the first billion years of Earth's history but maybe much sooner much earlier than that and took four-and-a-half billion years to get to a technological civilization that doesn't mean that one is easy and one is hard or one is likely and one is unlikely but at least there is a line of argument that says well it might mean that microbial life is common and intelligent technological life maybe isn't so common any comments I thank you has anyone worked out a corollary to the direct equation that indicates how likely we will find life out there so would it capsulate maybe the how the where we should look and the Drake equation can be used to produce exactly the results you want to find the problem is that do that calculation you need to know something about the potential technology in its abundance that we would find and we do not know that at all we in particular there's one factor in the equation which is the length of time a civilization is detectable and the idea there is that sure enough when you do I love the first really powerful radio transmitters they're exploited and you need powerful ones because the receivers are not as good yet and as a result you have to transmit a lot of power into space and that makes you detectable but as our civilization is showing as time goes on the power the quality of radio receivers improves and the receiving systems and coding methods work so that you don't need to transmit much power to successfully communicate or to radar successfully and as a result as technology improves a planet gradually becomes fainter in a way and how long that it takes place is the big mystery we're afraid to use ourselves and this is an example where clearly there will be different rates of decay or growth in technological civilization it depends on things like politics abundance of certain materials and the planets and also it depends on even sociology because one way a planet might stay detectable this I'm giving you one example of the state to take very much longer is if they built solar power stations in space these have been designed there's one actually being built now where solar panels just like the ones on people's houses are put into orbit in huge numbers with a total collecting area of say several square kilometers take several square kilometers you can produce as much power as a nuclear power station and the power is transmitted to earth a microwave two antennas on the ground and the big antennas on the ground are about a kilometer in size also and this is all feasible we could do this right now no problem there's a long big question about the financial question is this really financially superior to just building more nuclear power stations or whatever however if those are become the prime source of power and it's a good source of you do it it's clean power and non polluting and all the rest so totally renewable if this is used it turns out no matter how good you build a radio antenna to collect the radiation that's sent down from the the solar power station a little bits reflected there's no such thing as a perfect antenna that captures everything and typically they've returned to space 1% or so of the power that falls on them you know that's that's a very efficient antenna well the typical power station we're talking about her would generate and transmit a power of about a gigawatt 10 to the ninth power watts 1% which is what would be returned to space is ten million watts which is stronger than any transmitter we have now running on earth that power is all lost its wasted but it's trivial compared to what the system is producing so there's that scenario and whether that happens or not we don't know or how often it happens we don't know and there are probably other scenarios and so the end result is that we can't answer your question did you ask about intelligent life reduce finding life in space oh okay I thought you said life in space because Mark and I were talking about this this afternoon a little bit and something that may get lost in the plethora of news stories that you read about astrobiology sometimes you're not even aware that they're about astrobiology and they talk about a new planet that might possibly be in the habitable zone or whatever right and you can impress your neighbors by knowing what a habitable zone is the neighborhood I live in it's not where we talked that the facts are that all of these fall into three categories there's kind of a three-way race to find life in space and one of them one of the horses in that race is SETI obviously a second course in that race is simply to find it nearby that's what NASA and the European Space Agency and so far they're doing you send probes send robotic probes send people whatever it takes to places like Enceladus to Titan to the three moons of Jupiter that are suspected of having liquid water send them to Mars obviously and that's the second horse and the third course would be to send up something like the terrestrial planet finder all of which has been designed but unfortunately it's currently comatose for lack of funding but that would be able to detect oxygen or methane in the atmospheres of planets around other stars now each of these stars I sorry each of these horses has what seems to me a priori a more or less equal chance of success obviously I'm giving SETI the same a priori chances these other schemes and maybe I shouldn't do that but I I do what is the time scale for any of these it depends entirely on funding right and so it's being conservative I'd say within 20 years one of these horses may cross the finish line so maybe that's some sort of answer to you and I usually bet people cup of Starbucks that will happen if you have questions just raise your hand and then we'll come around is anybody um SETI or any other organization looking for any clues other than radio signals because what if there's life but they just haven't gotten to the point of creating radio signals I mean what if it's like a civilization of the Romans or something you know what they're intelligent beings but they don't have the technology to transmit well SETI actually uses technology as a proxy for intelligence right we we can't detect intelligence per se at a distance we all know that you're intelligent because you came here tonight to listen to this stock right we can infer that but in terms of remote detection technology becomes our proxy for intelligence and therefore there is an entry level technology below which we are not sensitive because we're talking about something that can modify its environment in ways that can be sensed over interstellar distances so campfires or Roman warfare technologies aren't detectable at least not with our 21st century technology over interstellar distances so there is something that's happening right now in addition to radio we're looking for optical signals that are obviously engineered and what that turns out to mean is optical signals that are short pulses bright flashes something that might be produced by a laser focused by a big mirror that kind of signal an optical flash that lasts only a billionth of a second as far as we know nature can't make that and just like the radio signals we're searching for our compressed in frequency again because nature can't seem to do that trick so right now early stages even though it's been 50 years it probably is early stages of this SETI endeavor and we're looking for the easy artifacts we'd like to take the optical and move it into the infrared when the technology becomes affordable because the optical light is scattered and absorbed by dust between the stars and so you get limited partway through the galaxy but if you go into the infrared or in the radio those signals are not obscured and they can travel long distances so we're trying those things but you know one thing that you didn't mention tonight is that we were trying to use the technology of the 21st century to find someone else's technology but they may be sending Zeta Ray's and we haven't a clue what Zeta rays are and so there's a bit of this game which is you need to survive as a technological civilization long enough that is we do in order to invent Zeta Ray's and then decide oh that's really good for communication let's search for that so you do what you can you can't ever quite bet on the fact that they're going to have an institute of ancient instruments and be transmitting specifically for the purpose of attracting the attention of emerging technologies but they might that might be what we find rather than leakage radiation it might be a deliberate attempt to attract our attention I think it's a very interesting question whether you could detect the Romans you think about what was the biggest thing that the Romans bill and maybe it was Hadrian's Wall there's a long linear feature but and if you had a telescope that had a mirror more or less the size of the solar system our solar system and that's expensive it's not an asus budget for next year but if you know in principle you could resolve something like that but I probably a better signal would be the way the Nile was controlled every year you know they're growing the grain to feed Rome in Egypt and you know you had this big expanse of chlorophyll chlorophyll turns out to be something that you can detect spectroscopically from space so so maybe if you really had a really good telescope you might see that seasonal change as they're growing the food that was sparingly fed the populace of Rome but better to wait 2,000 years till they operator I was wondering about funding from government sources which is an ancient history here but it's still a major force source of funding for the astronomical community through the National Science Foundation as I have a Senate but in the last list of projects that they were supporting I did not see said he even mentioned and they possibly get it in there slipping in there somewhere with all the billions at this Spang on this new Space Telescope and all the other projects well the I think both within NASA and within NSF and by the way NASA funds a lot more astronomy than NSF budgets are just a lot bigger I think all of our colleagues are going to be facing a really difficult decade the the priorities that have been placed on our budget which is suffering from such a large deficit have not been such that the astronomical sciences are going to be very well favored it will be now technology it will be information technology biotechnology I think astronomy is looking at a flat budget so the the Allen telescope array was actually mentioned in the decadal survey for astronomy and astrophysics for this next decade as a pathfinder to a larger radio telescope called the Square Kilometre Array which if ever bill would also do SETI extraordinarily well so we have to come up with some mix of federal and private funding and endowed funding that has the ability to smooth out this rollercoaster that we've been riding for 50 years there's also kind of the emergence now obviously of the commercial space sector and it's unclear what role they will play in terms of serious science as opposed to just ferrying people back and forth to the space station but I know that there was a symposium recently at MIT and some of the people came out of that feeling that the the commercial space folks were inclined were interested in in doing science and at the very least they hopefully in the future will be able to get observatories up into space much more cheaply than what happens now just a few brief comments one is we have had many programs for the last ten years searching for optical flashes of the kind Jill described one is only one is really in full operation now which is a very powerful one at Harvard University we here at the SETI Institute had one of the best and it ran for ten years we looked at 6,000 stars without seeing a flash but that's not discouraging that one is going into hibernation just the way for the same reasons as the Allen telescope array which is very sad it's a very inexpensive program and yet we can't do it and elsewhere in the world it's the same story so we are looking in other ways when we can through me through whatever part of the spectrum that you're looking at one presumes that the signals to earth and fly by rather quickly is it realistic to look for a reflected signal that might be older coming back from some foreign source so that you could see it a second time hidden I think there's an easy answer to that and that is that reflections cause the signal to be weakened by the fourth power of the distance to the between you and whatever is transmitting the signal and it just makes them very unlikely they're just so weak that if you put any realistic numbers into reflected signals that you just can't detect them so that that is not promising try aiming a flashlight at a ball bearing 10 miles away see how bright it is just me with your system for detecting radio signals detect a spread-spectrum signal that was generated in that way at the other end indeed the analog portion of the system would the digital portion right now is programmed to look for narrowband artifacts we are actually conducting a program called SETI quest looking for new algorithms to detect different kinds of signals where we've been supporting research into what happens to such noise like spread-spectrum wideband signals as they traverse the interstellar medium and are scattered and dispersed and we're trying to see what the interstellar medium tells us about the best communication channel if you're going to send a broadband spectrum a broadband signal what kind of signal what kind of modulation what frequency range higher is probably better so we're looking at what would be and with enough compute power we can start looking for that kind of thing okay we've got a couple more questions and then we'll go to the Stephen Colbert video better I don't want to come very far between us and Stephen Colbert I am kind of curious how visible it would earth be if to a SETI program out there somewhere this has been asked a lot and the question is how far away could we see earth with our SETI equipment and that depends on what you're looking at if you're looking at for example the leakage from television FM radio other high-powered high frequency transmitters then it turns out you can't see it very far even if you use the biggest antennas on earth you might see it at typically a distance of a Lightyear which isn't even the distance to the nearest star so that's not terribly promising however however the radars are much more powerful right and in fact something like the Arecibo radar every time Frank and I do this calculation every three weeks just you know for fun and but it's becoming less fun and you know that's a what two mega watt transmitter on a you know thousand foot diameter antenna if you happen to have the good fortune that somebody is Amy Arecibo at you and you're trying to find it with Arecibo then you can see it my calculations is four hundred light years he says a thousand light years that's a factor of two which doesn't count in astronomy as we've already established so at that point that's that's a significant distance there was a claim a couple of years ago that a telescope being built in Europe called LOFAR which consists of a series of very low frequency antennas very simple things just wires and things that will trip up the local population in Holland in Germany these antennas have spread throughout sorry that's right also the cows so they're more cows and bicycles spread throughout Europe if that operates at frequencies that are used by television FM radio and so forth and the question is could they in fact find the equivalent of I Love Lucy coming from other star systems and you can do that that there was the restore ease in the papers that it could because there were some claims made by people at Harvard but it was only Harvard that that that might be possible but in fact they're off by many orders of magnitude from being able to do that however I think the bottom line here is a very simple statement it's only been a hundred years since Marconi right and it might have been a hundred thousand years since their equivalent of Marconi so I wouldn't judge too severely our capabilities based on what we can do in the transmitting area I would add a cheery note to obsess comments and that is there is a technology we don't have yet which is possible and would make it very easy to detect planets like our own but let no effort at all including I Love Lucy I hope enough for this audience is old enough that what that analog is anyway and that this is to use our Sun as a lens this has been shown to work that's a large number of extrasolar planets have been detected stars focus light just like a lens and it's an incredible lens it's a lens that is the diameter of the Sun so you can just imagine and unfortunately we know exactly how all this works it's all based on general relativity no funny business unless you consider that funny they have a problem with the gravitational lenses the focal point is at a distance which is 500 times the distance from the earth to the Sun you have to put your receiver out there and we don't have the technology to do that well actually we do but we can't afford it and it's it's a difficult project that takes decades to get your system out there but once you get it out there you've got the ability to detect incredibly weak signals and I personally think this is in our future and has been in the future of every civilization that developed technology and we're just a hundred years behind I have to follow up on this because Mark asked actually before the panel discussion it should we talk about Medi which is in other words should we talk about broadcasting because it's a very controversial thing should we in fact broadcast anything this this is kind of an answer to the day in broadcasting because if you're worried about broadcasting it's too late you can broadcasting since the Second World War and the point is that any society that has the capability to come here and ruin your whole day by you know devastating the earth or something similar right they have the capability of certainly going 500 astronomical units from their planet setting up this gravitational lens telescope and then they can pick up not only I Love Lucy they can pick up the streetlamps from Philadelphia okay so that signal that horse has left the barn there's no point in worrying about it well 508 look 500 au it's like 30 to 50 au to Pluto so it's ten times farther than you could get there in a century and a half with the Rockets we can build if you have enough you know TV dinners I was a little interested in the potential downstream implications of the Drake Equation if everything is tremendously successful and perhaps you can actually get good evidence that maybe a billion civilizations that have intelligent life however what are the possibilities that any of them may be two of them would know about each other can you make any estimates of that because it seems to me that if there was two then it would seem to be a good chance of there being like maybe 10 because once two civilizations could get in touch with each other and the chances aren't great because of the technological lifetimes and everything but at some point with such a huge number potentially of intelligence civilizations some of them have to get in touch with each other and have some sort of conversation and and if that's true then suddenly these colossal numbers don't they work the other way around yes that's a good analysis no it's all right hi first a quick comment I tweeted Jill's comment about funding and religion versus science and a friend responded suggesting that if you change the name from extraterrestrial to sky people you might get a lot more but sadly he doesn't make any more money than I do but a question that is so much speculative in nature when I step back and I think about SETI and everything from project Ozma on up it's all of the science trying to detect an artificial case of something that occurs naturally an artificial signal of electromagnetic radiation that occurs that is differentiated by statistics or other analysis from a natural and I was wondering if you what the panel would like to speculate a little bit in the future you know what other kinds of technologies that maybe we haven't thought of that an advanced civilization might be using to manipulate the universe that me we might be able to detect an artificial example of that from a natural example I'm thinking something like maybe manipulating gravity waves or you know once they're proven to exist and things like that what one one bit of SETI that is being done I mean you can do said it by looking for signals you can also do SETI by looking for artifacts right you could Allah you know 2001 you could go dig up the moon and see 30 monoliths buried there not that you learn a whole lot from the monolith by the way but it calls home well there's something ok yeah but there have been there have you was some parasitic SETI experiments there's a guy in to Carrigan who sifts through infrared data from telescopes which are surveying the infrared sky for reasons that have nothing to do with SETI and he's just looking for star systems that have too much infrared because if they have too much infrared maybe they are surrounded by a Dyson swarm a swarm of you know solar collectors because this is a civilization that you know it needs a lot of energy to you know support their gussto grabing lifestyle okay so that's one way you can do it the other thing that I just saw this out to provoke you is that if you think of where we're going the trajectory that we are going to follow we invented radio 100 years ago we invented computers 50 years ago and in another hundred years we may have been thinking machines okay and for thinking machines the thing is not to make big stuff but to make small stuff as Richard Fineman said there's a lot of room at the bottom in other words there are many more magnitudes of scale going below the size of a human then above the size of the Union at least you know in terms of what we can engineer okay so that may be in fact the future for us is in fact devices that are very small and that are not so easy to find at a great distance that's just to provoke you actually another answer to your question is the fact that if you're thinking about a deliberately generated signal we've been talking about things that are obviously engineered so we go for the artifacts as opposed to the spread spectrum which looks more noise like how about a deliberately engineered signal that looks almost natural so that when an emerging technology begins to develop the tools to study their universe and begin to make surveys of the number of pulsars or to look with transit telescopes for exoplanets they might discover and it's gonna be some graduate student or postdoc who's going through a huge database a pulsar that was caught in a survey and one week when it was detected it had one period the next week it had another period and then it went back to the first period it shows up in the survey it gets captured by the data but it takes the researcher looking for anomalies to pull that out and the transit detections in fact there is a lot of information as the planet goes into the limb of a star and egress is from the limb of the star a lot of higher order harmonics which can distinguish a big artificial venetian blind or triangle shape from a round planet so you could engineer this thing and people looking for extrasolar planets would discover your artificial planet people have suggested you could make take Cepheid variables and and shorten the next period and actually come up with a pulsing a a morse code a regular period and a short period and Cepheid variables are you know you can see them to the next galaxies right so by by doing astronomy and exploring the natural universe and just remembering that some anomaly might in fact be an indication of some astroengineering is another way of doing say okay what we're going to close down the questions from the audience but if you do have further questions we will have Marc and the other panelists will stay around at least a couple of hours I know it's probably since that time probably sets bedtime right now it's a sad thing to get sticker out for 15 minutes mark we've heard a lot about communicating science and astrobiology to the public and the difficulties with funding and stuff like this in writing your book as a final question in writing your book what sort of insights have you gone it about communicating the science of astrobiology to to the public first and foremost is that people involved in and really want to get the story out and and that's a wonderful thing for a reporter and and I think is you know speaks well of the endeavor and just in general the the other real significant point the consistent point is that is that the public is really interested I write stories for the post and now we can we can measure you know how many hits we get on stories and it's extremely popular and not not popular people are really interested I mean if the story I did today about the nematodes being found you know quickly went to be the most popular one on our website it doesn't decline but the you know these things happen we have to do it Sarah Palin I think but but but the the basic bottom line is that is that this this these are issues that real that that move people and that they want answers in the you know they're eager to get involved in it in some way they're not necessarily sure how to connect to it but just that mark is a token of our gratitude for you coming along today we have an antique city mug I'll have to convince you that it's there in the box please say yes and please join me in thanking mark and the panel [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: SETI Institute

Views: 57,672

Rating: 4.6938272 out of 5

Keywords: Kaufman, first contact, carl sagan, seti, seti institute, astrobiology, drake equation, frank drake, jill tarter, seth shostak

Id: 0bWK5ES3lTE

Length: 85min 34sec (5134 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 26 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/space_science_talks]

Awesome panel lineup! Has anyone seen the setistars project yet?

[u/imaami]

Brilliant stuff, but I'm having trouble following Frank Drake without his voice putting me to sleep.

[u/andibabi]

I noticed that a friend of mine, Cliff, asked the question at about 1:17:10. I remember he had posted a picture from being there.

[u/[deleted]]

I liked the idea of the Sun being used as a lens. Question though, do spherical aberrations occur in gravitational micro lensing?

[u/danknerd]

Is there a transcript available?