Is Anyone out There: The Hundred-Million Dollar "Breakthrough: Listen" Project

good evening everyone my name is Andrew frack no I'm the Astronomy professor here at Foothill College and it's my pleasure to welcome everyone here in the Smithwick theatre and everyone viewing us on the web to this lecture lecture in the 17th annual Silicon Valley astronomy lecture series this series is a free set of lectures in Los Altos Hills post sponsored by the NASA Ames Research Center the Foothill College astronomy program the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and the SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence Institute in Mountain View were very grateful for the help of all these organizations it's a great pleasure for me tonight to introduce a very exciting speaker and a very exciting topic many of you may have heard that a billionaire here in Silicon Valley has donated a hundred million dollars to the University of California Berkeley to speed up and enhance the search for civilizations out among the stars and it's a wonderful privilege for all of us tonight to welcome the chief scientist for this project dr. dan Wertheimer he is not only the chief scientist at the Berkeley SETI Research Center overseeing SETI at home the 100 million dollar breakthrough listen project that he'll tell us about and several other SETI programs but he also directs the Center for astronomy signal processing and electronics research at the University of California at Berkeley and is associate director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center dr. word himer has been an associate professor in the engineering and physics department at San Francisco State University a visiting professor at Beijing Normal University and at the University of st. Charles in Marseilles and the earth verse University in Budapest he has taught at universities in addition to this in Peru Egypt Ghana Ethiopia Zimbabwe UK and and Kenya so this is a man who not only knows his way around the skies but knows his way around the world as well and he's always been very much dedicated to public education in science in addition to a scientific work so ladies and gentlemen speaking about is anyone out there among the stars the hundred million dollar breakthrough lissome project it's a great pleasure for me to introduce dr. Dan wartime well thank you very much for coming tonight it's great to see such a big crowd I want to talk to you about this question are we alone is anybody out there before I do I just want to say a few words about the guy who introduced me Andy frack Noi has been it's we're just blessed to have him on this planet he is amazing science teacher and teaches these critical thinking skills which i think are crucial for the success of our planet on our democracy and he's been working on SETI for I think 40 years or so he's on our advisory board he's on the board of the City Institute and and he did this lecture series and it's great that he's organized all of us and teaching us about science so thank you Andy um so so this question are we alone I think it's a it's a profound question people have been asking it for a few hundred thousand years and this may be a kind of special time a special generation where we might have a chance of answering this question in your lifetime so we should start thinking about what the possible scenarios are and and how it might affect us in our civilization I think the answer to the question is profound either way if we find out that the universe is teeming with life and other civilizations we could get on the galactic internet there may be some civilizations that are billions of years ahead of us you know our Sun is about five billion years old some stars are ten billion years old so work on a middle age so there could be very advanced civilizations out there we could learn what's in our future said he's called the archaeology of the future that we could learn from advanced civilizations how they got through their bottleneck when they were killing each other when they had nuclear weapons biological weapons chemical weapons Donald Trump how did they get through that so but I think it's also profound the other way what if we find out that we are alone I think that's very interesting and it means if we're alone that means life is incredibly precious and we better take really good care of life on this planet okay so how are we going to answer this question one possibility is the theoretical approach this is called the Drake Equation and you can just calculate the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy and all you have to do is multiply all these things together and you know how many civilizations in the galaxy so the problem with this theoretical approach is that we don't have any idea what any of these numbers are so it's a way of taking a big question are we alone and breaking it up into a lot of smaller questions but also very difficult questions about how many planets are there so the first part of equation is about stars and planets as you go further down the equation it gets harder and harder to answer the question we starting to know about planets in our galaxy the next thing about about the equation is how many of those planets have the right environment this little is for environment like how many of them we call Goldilocks plan it's the right temperature where you might have liquid water not too far away from there's Starwood's too cold or too close where it's too hot the right chemicals then the next thing this L is for life if you have a good plan at a Goldilocks planet how often does it does life get started we really don't know how often that happens it happened very quickly on earth but that doesn't mean necessarily it happens quickly in other places the next thing is even more unknown if you get life this is for intelligence so if you get life started on a planet how often do you get intelligence that happened a few times here on earth it may have in other places we don't know the next thing is the c is for communication if you have intelligence do they develop communication technologies do they have lasers or radio or radar something some way that we could detect their presence and then the last factor is even more unknown how long do they live L is for longevity so I mentioned that our star is a few billion years old it's going to be around another few billion years so you could imagine very advanced civilizations there that lasts billions of years we're just beginning we're just kind of entering this communicative era where we're just beginning to learn how we might communicate with other civilizations if they're out there I mentioned that one of the factors in the Drake Equation is planets and if you would ask Andy and me 20 years ago are there planets going around other stars we say well we think so but we really don't know this is a very recent discovery and the reason it took so long to find out the answer the question are there planets going around other stars is because planets are little dinky things a million earths could fit inside the Sun and planets don't give off light and this they're right next to this really bright thing they're next to it's like looking next to a bright star it's like looking for a firefly next to a searchlight so turned out it was a really hard problem and only in the last twenty years are we beginning to get a sense of how many planets are out there and the way they were first found is this depicted in this slide that they're found indirectly you can't see the planet but when the planet goes around the star the star gets pull the planet pulls on the star a little bit so here's the planet going around the star and here's the star kind of wiggling a little bit and if you see a star way dueling that betrays the presence of a planet and you can see it wiggling because when the point when the star moves a little bit moves away from you the colors change a little bit's called the Doppler shift it gets a little redder when it's moving toward you gets a little bluer and this is a little depiction of how that you can see that the star is wiggling up and down and over the years and and it's actually got two motions it's got a kind of quick wiggle and then a slow wiggle anybody know why that might happen why there would be two kinds of Wiggles two planets good good shouting there yeah so there's a planet going around kind of at this speed and then a planet in closer to the star that's going up and down moving it quicker and now we know about stars that have many many planets I think there was a recent discovery of one with seven planets going around it so there's another way to find planets this is just a few years old it's called the Kepler spacecraft it's a telescope that NASA launched in this space it was built here at Ames Research Center down the road and it is very hard to see but this little black dot if you can see it in front of this star so what happens when the planet gets in front of the star is this the star dims down a little bit you can't actually see the planet but you can see the star dimming down if we're lucky enough to get the the planet crosses in front of the star and what Kepler is is that it's just a camera and it looked at a few hundred thousand stars looking for this dimming and the dimming tells you that there's a planet going around especially if it's a periodic dimming if you see a dim and then another few years later you see at them again or a few days later depending on how long it takes for the planet to go around and Kepler found a huge number of planets going around their stars getting in front of their stars and in the stars would dim and from the little area that Kepler looked at on the sky and you extrapolate they if the galaxy is the same everywhere which we think it is Kepler found about 3,000 planets that means that there are about a trillion planets in the Milky Way galaxy that's more planets than there are stars that's about five times more planets than there are stars a lot of planets a lot of places for life this is all brand new in the last few years that we're learning there's tons of places for - the and the other optimistic thing is that some of these planets are in the Goldilocks zone you might have seen this in the news just last week or a couple weeks ago the Trappist one system is a it's a dim star but there are seven planets going around it and three of them are in that Goldilocks zone not too hot not too cold and their little dinky planets like like us probably rocky planets may be liquid water so anyway there are a lot of places for life well the next question is what if you have a good planet does life get started and we don't know exactly how that happened but here's a little picture we think it might get started in something called a primordial soup and maybe in a tide pool or something like that and people have done experiments where they simulate the early conditions on our planet so when the earth was just forming that what they put in here was some methane ammonia water hydrogen and they also put in some sparks to simulate lightning we know that lightning was around when the earth is forming and you don't get gorillas crawling out of this thing but you do get the basic building blocks of life the amino acids things that you NRMA made a pretty complicated organic molecules so even though we don't understand that the complicated details of how self-replicating molecules RNA and maybe DNA formed we're beginning to understand that process and as I mentioned that it happened very quickly on earth as soon as the earth cooled down life popped up simply simple life and so the fact that happened fairly quickly on earth gives us somewhat optimistic that it might happen quickly on other places as well there may even be life in our own solar system just aren't right next to us is a moon going around Jupiter called Europa and what's exciting about Europa is that it's got a liquid ocean so this blue in this cutaway view is a liquid ocean and one problem is it's covered with ice so this white stuff here that you see in this artist's depiction is is ice and ice is about 30 miles thick and we'd like to find out if there's something swimming around down there in the warm ocean below the ice and I go to elementary schools and I talk to the kids about how are we going to get through the eye because we really don't know how we going to see if there's something swimming down there and even in elementary schools the boys give different answers than the girls so that the boys usually suggest machine guns or bombs the girls are usually a little more clever they want to melt their way through with mirrors that focus the sun's radiation onto the ice or lenses or something like that but it's interesting that early on there's a difference in how to get through the ice so this and there's another moon in our solar system that might make the job a little easier maybe we don't need bombs and machine guns so this is a moon called Enceladus it's going around Saturn and it's got the same deal it's got a liquid ocean that the blue is a liquid ocean but it's covered with ice but the nice thing about Enceladus is that there are fissures cracks in the ice and there are plumes of water squirting out through the cracks in the ice and it would be very nice to fly a spacecraft through those plumes and maybe we could detect if there is some biological some single-celled creatures or something so we don't maybe have to bomb our way through the ice and Enceladus so that's a very exciting mission that the Europeans are thinking about and NASA as well okay so that's a little bit about primitive life but I want to talk to you about advanced life and how we might get in get in touch with advanced civilizations that have a technology radio or lasers and you probably know the field is called SETI which is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and Andy and I are not the first people to think about City it goes back a few hundred years maybe a few thousand years but Gauss the mathematician 200 years ago suggested that we get in touch with et by making a large geometric structure on the planet a right triangle maybe three four five miles on a side and big square of dirt big square of water and big square of wheat and et would look down with their big telescope and see that we knew about the Pythagorean theorem and this was a very clever idea at the time you might laugh right now but it's a clever idea at the time but the the unfortunate part of this this is a cool idea at the time but it was not funded and then Vaughn Letran also a couple hundred years ago he suggested that we get in touch with et by digging a ditch a circular ditch 20 miles across and filling the ditch with kerosene and then use this match not to scale to make a bright circle of light a circle of fire and again it was the same idea et would look down and see this bright circle of light I think they were going to turn the fire on and off put it out put on maybe kind of more Morse code and it was a cool idea unfortunately was it met with a kind of similar similar fate and the next idea was Charles crow almost 200 years ago he suggested that we get in touch with the Martians by having several mirrors to reflect the sunlight to the Martians by the way these are my beautiful art drawings I was a great art student as you can tell so these so he had several mirrors one where he lived in Paris and the others to outline the shape of the Ursa Major and then the Martians would see these very bright lights from the mirrors reflecting and maybe they would get in touch and I think you can guess what happened with that project so the first funded project was to send pornography into space some of you might recognize this this is a plaque on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft and on this plaque this was very controversial by the way these two people were originally holding hands and NASA thought that wasn't a good idea because then et would think it was one creature so they don't hold hands anymore so on the bottom of this plaque is the solar system and here's the Sun and Mercury and Venus and then earth and you can see the spacecraft leaving the earth and then here's the spacecraft with the same kind of scale as the is the humans and then these are directions to nearby pulsars so they can find out where we live and come and eat us or do whatever they want so anyway that was the first funded SETI project so one of the big ideas in SETI is that Earthlings send off a lot of radio and television and radar signals out into space and this is a plot of television power leaving the earth as a function of time 1940 1950 1960 and you can see the earth is getting brighter and brighter this is a logarithmic scale if you note that is and and we now have been sending television out for about 70 years the early TV shows I Love Lucy and Ed Sullivan left the earth seven years ago have now gone past about 10,000 stars and the nearby stars have seen the Simpsons luckily the Donald Trump stuff hasn't gotten to the nearest stars so so we're sending out all this stuff radio FM radio goes right out through the atmosphere at traveling at the speed of light television radar signals GPS navigational signals all that stuff leaves the earth and we've even sent messages intentionally almost everything that Earthlings send is this unintentional the television obviously wasn't meant to go out and and go past other planets but it does there have been a few intentional messages these are very controversial most people including Andy and myself think that it's not a good idea for Earthlings to deliberately transmit messages because we don't know what's out there and maybe like shouting in a forest and it may be we'd like to think that other civilizations are peaceful and they're all going to live together happily but we don't know that so we think the right thing to do at least for now because we're an emerging civilization is just listen do it what we said he is just passive we're listening to see what's out there but some people think it's a good idea to transmit and this is an example of a message that was sent in the 70s and we think a good way to communicate they're not going to speak English is pictures and they're probably going to be able to perceive their environment in two or three dimensions and this is an example of this message that was sent and here you can see the the solar system with the Sun and Mercury and Venus and Earth is tipped toward the person this is DNA some amino acids as telescope so anyway so it's just it was really meant I think as a message more to Earthlings that we're getting in the game here we're starting to learn how we might communicate and detect other civilization we start thinking about the ramifications so you can imagine if if we're sending out signals then we could also look for signals with we're doing at Berkeley and at the SETI Institute and many other groups are looking for these signals either we could find an artifact of their technology that wasn't really meant for us but we could detect maybe something like their television or something or if we're very lucky maybe a deliberate signal maybe they've seen oxygen our atmosphere if they're nearby they've seen I Love Lucy and they send a deliberate signal if they send a deliberate signal I think it will be pretty easy to decode the message they'll make it anti cryptographic there are lots of language lessons and pictures in mathematics if we get some sort of artifact from their civilization my guesses will never quite be able to figure out what they're talking about or but we'll know they're out there we'll know a little bit about them but we won't be able to really know much about their civilization okay well as I mention I'm not the first guy to think about this the early radio pioneers the Tesla and Marconi both did SETI searches they look for radio signals from et and both of them thought that they found radio signals from ETS and there were big headlines in the newspapers it turns out they didn't know this at the time but they were listening to distant lightning bolts thousands of miles away and the lightning bolts went to go through the ionosphere they they turn into these Whistler noises up and they heard these chirping noises and they thought it was et but it was it turned out to be distant lightning bolts but they were it was an exciting thing at the time um so at Berkeley as Andy mentioned we have a thing called the Berkeley City Research Center and there are about two dozen people students in engineering and physics and computer science and astronomy and professionals program errs and astronomers working together to try to answer this question are we alone we have funding from the breakthrough foundation which is not very far from here and that's called the listen break the breakthrough listen project which I'll tell you about we also have some funding from the National Science Foundation and from NASA and from individual donors and also some companies that are mostly nearby here who are helping us out by donating equipment and some of the chips and things that we use we have a lot of different experiments that we're doing looking for radio signals and also looking for laser signals in the infrared and at visible wavelengths we're trying to cover lots of different try to do a lot of different experiments because it's very hard to predict what et might be doing but mostly it's looking for technology we call them techno signatures either the kind of things that are transmitted by a.m. or FM radio or maybe lasers or we're looking for kind of either artifacts or maybe deliberate kind of signals from their technology so one of the problems in SETI is that we don't know what frequency et might be transmitting at we don't know what channel and what you want to do instead is look at as many frequencies as you can as many channels as you can and in the early days of SETI we couldn't look at it very much of the spectrum of the radio spectrum and so we had to kind of guess where et would be transmitting and we thought a good place to look was this thing called the microwave window frequencies between about 1 and 10 gigahertz where the universe is very quiet if you tune your radio in that region of the the radio spectrum you'll hear a kind of static but it's quite quiet and so et wouldn't have to turn up their transmitting power we could detect them relatively easy because it's a quiet place in the spectrum it's called the microwave window now we're branching out a little bit and we're searching in many places in the electromagnetic spectrum not just searching for radio waves we have different telescopes at radio wavelengths but also we think lasers might be a good way to communicate infrared lasers or visible lasers there's lots of pros and cons we don't know what wavelength or what frequency what channel et might be transmitting on if they're transmitting at all so we're trying to branch out and do different searches using different kinds of telescopes at different frequencies well the very first project that we did in SETI at Berkeley was was funded by NASA and NASA requires that you use acronyms so our our first project is called Serendip search for extraterrestrial radio missions from near by developed intelligent populations and the very first telescope that we used is located in Northern California near Mount lassen it's called the Hat Creek radio Observatory it's this this dish this is a radio telescope a big radio antenna to look for these signals we use this in the 70s and this this is about 85 feet across and while we were using this antenna to look for radio signals from et this is what happened to that telescope so this this is the dish it used to be up here on this pedestal and so okay we said well we can't use that that antenna anymore so we went to this telescope this is a bigger telescope it's 300 feet across and I don't know if you can see but there's a full-size jogger down here this is in Green Bank West Virginia and while we were using this telescope to look for et this is what happened to that telescope and you might ask how why is this happening to Dan and his colleagues at Berkeley and we were wondering about that and then the answer according to the world weekly news is that the aliens did not want to be discovered this is the headline zapped by hostile space aliens so they destroy these two telescopes that keep us from discovering them so that's an interesting idea and we are testing this zap theory at this telescope so some of you might recognize this this is the world's largest radio telescope although the Chinese are building a bigger one right now but this thing is in Arecibo Puerto Rico it's called the Arecibo telescope and it is a thousand feet across and it holds about 10 billion bowls of cornflakes although we haven't actually tried that and so this doesn't look shiny to you but if you're a radio wave it's a it's got an aluminum surface and the radio waves bounce off this mirror and they're collected at a focus up here and we've got equipment that it's running at this telescope 24 hours a day while astronomers are pointing it to whatever they want to point out galaxies stars they're studying all kinds of things we go along for a ride looking for et so we don't usually use this telescope just to ourselves - we don't get the point we let other people point it but we don't know where to look anyway so that works out pretty well and but so far it hasn't been zapped by hostile space aliens but it is kind of built into the ground you might have seen this telescope in James Bond Goldeneye it was in that in that movie it it they show it coming up out of the water which doesn't do and they say it's in Cuba which it isn't but the other movie that it was featured in that you might have seen is a movie called contact which was originally a book written by Carl Sagan and it's a great book and a great movie I recommend it if you haven't seen it and the only difference between that movie and real life is that Jodie Foster finds et and we haven't but on that it's a pretty accurate description Carl Sagan worked in our group for about a year he took a sabbatical with us so he's an expert on SETI so I wanted to tell you about this new project that we're doing that Annie mentioned the breakthrough the breakthrough listen SETI project and it is spectacular it's beyond our wildest dreams and we just launched it about a year ago we're just getting started on this thing but it's way bigger than anything that we've ever done or anybody's ever done we expect to spend a hundred million dollars over ten years ten million dollars a year we're starting with three telescopes a couple of radio telescopes so I'll show you and an optical telescope to look for laser signals the one we're using is at Lick Observatory which is right near here about an hour up in Mount Hamilton some of you may have been there if you haven't been there I recommend it's a beautiful Drive and they have evenings where you can look through the telescope and see what's going on up there we're planning to do a million stars but we're just getting started and look at a whole thousands of galaxies and I'll tell you a little bit about what's going on with this new project now so these are the three telescopes that we're starting with this is the one that's looking for laser signals it's called the automatic planet finder which is usually used to search for new planets but we're also using it to search for laser signals from other civilizations and that's the one at Lick Observatory which is right near here on Mount Hamilton and then we've also used this Green Bank observatory so that telescope that I showed you that collapse the big one when when that collapsed there was a very powerful Senator in West Virginia and he said I want to build an even bigger telescope this is called the Robert Byrd Green Bank telescope and it's a and we've got a lot of telescope time so before when we were doing setting before breakthrough listen one of the big problems is it was very hard to get telescope time everybody wants to use these huge telescopes and we're lucky if you get a day or two a year on these telescopes and now we got a huge amount of time on these telescopes so we can really do a much more thorough search point the telescope where we want it nearby stars and look at a lot of different frequencies so that's a huge change for us and we've also got a lot of time on this Parkes telescope which is in Australia the reason that it's important to have a telescope in the southern hemisphere is because this these two can only see the stars in the northern hemisphere a little bit in the South but not if you go way down and there's a lot of interesting things in the South that a very nearest star you can only see from the stars Alpha Centauri the center of the galaxy you can only see from the southern hemisphere so anyway so most of Seti projects that we and other people have done have been done from the northern part of the sky because that's where most telescopes are but anyway this will be a new thing for us is to look at some of the southern stars and galaxies and other things in the south and as I mentioned we're planning to look at a million stars although we're just getting started and a thousand galaxies so it's a very ambitious project these are the stars that we've looked at so far we were just now getting started looking in the south so you see most of these stars are in the northern part of the sky the ones that we've done so far and we've looked at about a little more than a thousand stars the different colors are the different kinds of stars weather indicating the temperature of the star some are hotter than our Sun some are colder than our Sun and anyway so we're learning how to do this and it's a it's an ambitious program this is an example of the data that's coming from the observatory that's looking for laser signals and this is the kind of thing that gets our attention it's a narrow signal at some frequency or some wavelength that's that's what you might see from a laser from a from a distant civilization and unfortunate I wish I could tell you we found et but we know it's not a laser signal because when you look closely at the CCD image it's coming in at an angle and that turned out to be a cosmic ray it turns out UK tional II the CCDs can detect these cosmic rays coming from other places in the sky and luckily when the cosmic rays come in they you can usually figure it out because they come in at some weird angle where you'd expect a laser line to be kind of vertical on the CCD and so we can kind of tell the difference between these false alarms from cosmic rays so so far no signals from et if you are good at computers are interested in this there's a lot of data that we are collecting in this new project - listen SETI program and the we're trying to make the data available on the we've got a big website and places where you can look at this data and help us figure out how to analyze it we've got examples of soft software that we use and examples of how you can read the data and we're trying to get people especially people who are have some computing skills or interested in data analysis we want to get the community involved not just the scientific community but I think a lot of people around here in Silicon Valley have a lot of skills that we'd like to hope to get people involved I want to tell you a little bit about the kind of signals that we look for so I mentioned that the one of the big problems in SETI is we don't know what frequency et might be broadcasting on so what this plot is is a how strong the signals are at different frequencies this is frequency number two million versus three 4101 this is a frequency I can't read it but anyways free two million to Ocean City four thousand nine hundred fifty nine and here at this frequency is a strong signal that's the kind of thing that gets our attention it's like kind of tuning your radio dial across the spectrum and you're looking at the signal strength meter and it's some channel some frequency the signal strength Peter goes up that's what we're seeing here it's a little different than tuning the radio dial because what we want to do is listen to many many channels at once so this is like having millions of radios on your desk each one tuned to different frequencies so you don't have to tune here then here then here like a police scanner one one channel at a time but you can listen to a whole bunch at once so it just speeds up the process anyway that's the kind of thing that we're looking for and I wish I could tell you that was et but it was a satellite going over the telescope and there's a big problem in SETI that we're looking for radio signals from extraterrestrials but we find a lot of radio signals from terrestrials that we call radio frequency pollution or radio frequency interference and we these telescopes are usually far away from people in Green Bank West Virginia's far away from civilization but civilization is encroaching and people have transmitters and cell phones in their pocket you're not supposed to use cellphones when you're near Green Bank but people do or they have wireless or something cameras give off radiation satellites fly over and it's getting harder and harder to do SETI from the earth we may eventually have to do SETI from the backside of the Moon where the moon would act like a big shield from all the radio pollution and television pollution radar signals coming from the earth that will be incredibly expensive if we have to move to the moon to do these kind of experiments so this may be a kind of unique window in our history where we have the kind of technology or at least we're developing the kind of technology where we might be able to detect DT we can do it from the surface of the planet with these ground-based radio telescopes that are relatively cheap if we have to go to the back side of the Moon that's going to be really expensive maybe unaffordable another kind of signal that we look forward to discriminate between whether the signal is from earth terrestrial interference radio frequency interference radio pollution or whether it might be coming from et is what we do is we point the telescope to a star and then for a few minutes and then we move away from the star and then we go back to the star and then we move away from the star and then we go back and we do that three times just kind of off on off on off on and then we see do we only see the signal when we were pointing at the star and you can see there's something that got our attention here you can see this yellow stuff and we only saw it when the telescope is pointed to the star we did not see it when we moved away from the star and that is gets our attention because it's probably not coming from a television station which you'd expect to be kind of on no matter where you're pointing the telescope so that's one way we can discriminate against this radio pollution problem but it's not a great way it's getting harder and harder to do this another kind of signal that we want to look for is what we call a drifting signal and these are examples of drifting signals that are changing and frequency this one's going this one's going the other way now why would that happen if a transmitter is on a planet that's spinning around or going around a star that introduces an acceleration is called a Doppler shift some of you may know about that and the even if the transmitter itself is at a constant frequency the way that it would come to our telescope is we because of this acceleration because of the movement of the transmitter you get this this chirping signal and we don't know what frequency we don't know the slope how it would be cheap how it would be chirping so we want to look for these kind of things and you can see them with your eye I think pretty easily you can see these patterns but we have about 100 million of these things to look at every second we have a lot of data to go through to look for these kind of chirping or drifting signals another thing that we want to look for is a pulsing signal this is a bit bit bit bit and and I've circled them here and it's pretty easy for you to see it when I've circled them but if I remove those circles actually pretty hard for your item to find that repeating pattern and it's pretty easy for computers to do this to look for these repeating pulses but we have about 100 million of these things to look at every second so we need a lot of computing power to look for these different kinds of signals and one of the projects that we're doing to how to kind of gather a lot of computing power is to ask people around the world that have laptop computers or desktop computers if they can help us analyze the data and some of you may know about this project it's called the SETI at home project anybody here running the SETI at home project oh great a lot of you already know about this you can go to sleep for the next couple minutes so the way the setting home works is we record data at Arecibo or now we're using the Green Bay Bank and the Parkes telescope in Australia and we we take that data and we break it up into little pieces everybody gets a different part of the sky to work on and then we record it at the National Energon supercomputing Center and then we we have about a couple of petabytes of data and then we send that data out to volunteers around the world if you have a computer or now you can actually do it on your phone you can help us analyze data from the world's largest telescope if you have an Android phone and what you do is you download the SETI at home screensaver and it's not just an ordinary screensaver it doesn't just put up pretty pictures of goldfish swimming around on your screen when you go out for a cup of coffee the screensaver pops up this is a free program by the way you can download google sette and you'll find the setting home project you can download then when it pops up on your screen what it does is it connects to our computer at Berkeley and over the internet you'll get one of these chunks of data recorded the world's largest telescope you'll get a you'll get one part of the sky somebody also get a different part of sky everybody gets a different chunk of data and then what it does is it goes through all that data looking at all the different frequencies for those pulsing waveforms and drifting waveforms and all the different kinds of signal types looking for something that might be interesting on the screen it reminds you kind of what part of the sky you're looking at and what frequency band you're looking at it reminds you what your name is and how much work you've done and then it shows you the most interesting signals and when it's finished analyzing that piece of data we call it a work unit that you've been assigned it might take a few days then it'll send the results of that data analysis back to our computer at Berkeley and your name is attached so if you find et then you might get the Nobel Prize although I it's not I don't make that decision and and so we've got a lot of people helping us analyzing this data from these three telescopes this is a little animation of the data coming out from Berkeley the yellow dots are different parts of the sky that we're sending out we call them the work units out to the volunteers around the world and then when they're done analyzing the data the blue dots are over going over the internet sending the results of that data analysis from their home computers back to Berkeley where we build up a big database and try to figure out what's interesting and what we should go back and look at and who should get the Nobel Prize so now I said you might get the Nobel Prize but I wanted to warn you that you might not get rich because there are about eight million people who have downloaded the study at home screensaver the Nobel Prize about a million half dollars if you have to split it with all these volunteers in 226 countries it's about 20 cents per person so we're very grateful to the people here and others who are participating in SETI at home they built one of the biggest supercomputers on the planet they donated a thousand years of computing time of day that means if we had just a single computer it would take us a thousand years to do what the volunteers do in one day for us and it's made the search incredibly powerful much more sensitive than anything we could have used it looks for a lot of different signal types and so I would encourage you if you're interested in SETI to help us in this hunt for other civilizations and download the city home screensaver if you want you don't have to do this but if you want to participate inside at home an optional thing is to join a team and there are thousands of teams primary duties junior colleges universities small medium large sized companies and the teams you can make your own team you can make the Foothill College team the team's compete with each other in somewhat friendly ways here's Intel's donated 1300 years and Microsoft has donated 2000 years and this competition has led to some interesting behavior some people build these big computers in their basements that are clusters of very fast computers so that their names will bubble up near the top of the website they'll get a lot of credit and you can go to this website called SETI farmed org and you can see these guys and they're all guys um as far as I can figure out there there are no women that do this this there's another guy computing with his SETI cluster I don't know why he's got these bolt cutters with it in that pose so anyway this has been up a great project for SETI because it's made the search very powerful and it's gotten the public involved and even though we haven't found et one of the things I'm happy about is that a lot of kids are running this in schools and this question are we alone is something that a lot of kids are interested in it touches on all different areas as you address this question you can get the kids interested in astronomy and evolution and how's life get started in chemistry and physics it touches on a lot of different areas in science and we developed a curriculum from the with the Lawrence Hall of Science to try to get kids engaged while they participate in setting home thinking about this question are we alone and learning about different aspects of the sciences that it touches on the the SETI at home project led us to kind of branch out and think about not just using your home computer to do SETI but could you use your home computer to do other kinds of scientific supercomputing projects and we developed this software open source software so that you can now use your home computer to participate in a hundred different science projects you can look for cancer drugs or HIV drugs or malaria drugs you can do global warming research on your home computer you can find new planets there and you can allocate how you want your spare computing cycles to be used you can say you want 30% of your spare computing time to do SETI and 20% for malaria drugs you pick your favorite projects this is set at home this is climate prediction this is a gravity wave looking for new pulsars this is something called Astro pulse looking for fast radio bursts this is protein folding and you can participate in the projects that that you're interested in and the idea is kind of the democratization of scientific computing power and there are a billion kind of computers out there and a lot of that it turns out most of the computing power on the planet are is in small computers it's the computers that you and I own or in the things that are in your pocket right now and it's called edge resource aggregation we get a lot of people participating you'd think that the supercomputing is really in these giant centers where there are supercomputers but that's not true it's the stuff that you and I own that projects volunteer computing led us to also think about using the public to do things that computers are not very good at it turns out computers are not very good at pattern recognition things that your eye and brains are good at our first project we call it thinking at home we did a project called Stardust at home this was a spacecraft that we worked on with NASA to go out near a comet and scoop up some of the dust in the comet's tail and we also scooped up some of the dust that was around four and a half billion years ago when the planets were forming to see how the planets were forming and this this spacecraft the start of spacecraft came back landed it's a sample return mission landed in the desert in Utah on a parachute and we brought the samples back to our lab and their little microscopic particles from from four and a half billion years old when the planets were forming and there are also particles in that aerogel foam in our lab that are from the comet that we flew through and we wanted to find these particles in the aerogel foam the thing that scooped it up and and then we wanted to figure out what they're made of and it turned out finding these little microscopic particles in these big sheets of aerogel was a big problem we thought we would need thousands of students looking through thousands of microscopes for years what we did is we made a millions and millions of photographs on this automated microscope it can move around and different focus eps and we sent these photographs out to the public and you can help us find the little dust particles it's called Stardust at home and you do a little training what the particles look like and then you run this kind of virtual microscope on your home computer and we had about 70,000 people sign up and they found particles we're still running it if you want to participate particles that we never would have found if we just did it at Berkeley and we're beginning to learn from this how the planets formed and how these dust particles stuck together and a little bit about how comets are made and how the tail in the nucleus forms and this is all due to kind of citizen science and and now there are a lot of citizen science projects not just our projects but many different things that you can participate in I want to get back to SETI for a second I want to say some of the new things that we're working on this project is called interplanetary eavesdropping and the idea is if two planets if there's our machines or beings on two planets they might be sending messages back and forth and now with a coupler spacecraft we know exactly when these two planets are in line with earth and if there are messages going back and forth between two exoplanets we can schedule our observations and point and maybe intercept communication going back and forth like right now you know that there are Rovers going around on Mars and there's communication between Mars and Earth maybe there's something like that in a distant exoplanet communication going back forth and we're trying to intercept those kind of messages scheduling it when those two planets are in line this is the project we're doing it Lick Observatory not too far from here looking for for laser signals that's Frank Drake from the Drake Equation and Shelly Wright is now a professor at UC San Diego that's me and my youth and the director of the observatory gemstone we're also looking for infrared signals this is a project that was built by Charlie Townes who invented the laser got a nobel prize he died recently at 99.5 - we round up to a hundred and and Charlie when he invented the laser he thought it would be a good idea - that would might be a good way to communicate between the stars and at the time lasers when he invented the laser lasers were little things like this laser pointer not very powerful but now there you there are big lasers that could easily communicate across the galaxy so we're trying to follow up on Charlie's ideas well we haven't found DT and I'm a little uncomfortable with bragging about SETI spin-offs it's like NASA saying give us more money because we invented tang and velcro but what we haven't found et so all I can talk about are kind of what have we found on the way these spin-offs and I and we have found some interesting things so one of the things that we found it turns out the instruments that we developed for SETI turned out to be very valuable in radio astronomy and we made a bunch of discoveries or other people have used these instruments to find one of the things that they found are these things called fast radio bursts that we don't understand it's a whole new phenomena there are extremely powerful explosions they're the brightest thing in the universe they last a thousand of a second they come from a billion light years away we don't really know what's causing them but they're we think they're going to be very useful to try to understand the universe we think we can actually use these fast radio bursts to weigh the cosmos to measure the density the baryon density of the cosmos because they're these extremely bright powerful pulses and the way they propagate through the intergalactic medium as they come to us tells us something about what's between us and these distant galaxies another thing we found or actually I shouldn't say we but the instruments that we developed originally for SETI were used by our colleagues to find a planet made out of solid diamond my wife is very interested in this discovery we use the instruments that we developed to make the first maps of the Gallic of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy so these instruments have turned out to be very useful the most massive pulsar a lot of new discoveries have been made with the instrumentation we developed they also mostly they've been used in astronomy but recently they've been used in other fields in medical imaging and we use the the setting instruments to get data out of somebody's brain and we hope eventually that can be used to control a prosthetic arm with an implant that will rate with a radio length and you can control a prosthetic arm that's kind of distant research but we're using the city instruments to learn how to get data out of somebody's brain with an embedded array I want to say a few words about what we're thinking about kind of long term for future SETI experiments so one of the things we want to do is use bigger even bigger telescopes because the signals are likely to be very weak and so you need a big telescope so it turns out China is building this huge thing bigger than Arecibo it's called the fast it's a five hundred meters across the Arecibo telescope is three hundred meters it's a made out of thousands of aluminum panels and they finally they just finished building the thing and we are working with them to try to get a SETI experiment there we're actually going to do as a survey where we scan the sky and well we're kind of raster scanning the sky we're going to be doing lots of things looking for new pulsars making a map of the hydrogen the galaxy looking for these new fast radio bursts that we don't understand and at the same time looking for radio signals from from et so we're going to do five experiments simultaneously all sharing the sky scanning the sky together another new thing that I'm excited about is instead of one giant dish we are learning how to build telescopes out of lots of little dishes and the SETI Institute in Berkeley developed kind of the pioneering prototype of this we put together 42 dishes and now we're building something in South Africa with 352 dishes this is we haven't built this yet we've got 39 dishes each one of them is 14 meters but this is kind of a new way to build big telescopes instead of building them as huge dishes you make them out of lots of lots of little dishes you can stamp them out like hot tubs we think this is kind of the future of radio astronomy and so we're building this now we just got funded from the National Science Foundation and from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to build this we're not building it for SETI specifically we're building it to understand how the first stars and galaxies formed ten billion years ago but we will also try to do some SETI experiments on this telescope and that's leading up that's a prototype for this thing called the Square Kilometre Array which is a huge international project that'll probably have 4,000 dishes and will be built over the next decade or so and and we're just starting to get mostly the Europeans and the South Africans and the Australians a little bit of the US but that's a grand vision for SETI is this huge international telescope that will be built in Australia and in the desert in South Africa away from people and their transmitters so we haven't found signals there's no evidence of ET yet but I'm optimistic that if there are signals out there that that this might happen in the near future and the reason I'm optimistic so I've been looking for ET for 40 years now longer the reason I'm optimistic is we're not doing the same experiment that we did 40 years ago so in the 70s I built a thing that I was very proud of at the time that had a hundred channels I was in the homebrew Computer Club with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and I learned how to build these things and everybody in that club got rich except me because because I was interested in using these new computer chips to do SETI I didn't think about building something that other people could use and I could sell but anyway I built this thing that could listen to a hundred channel they're very proud of it and at the time it seemed like better than anybody else and then we built in 280 65,000 channels and then four million channels and now we're up to about a hundred billion channels not because I'm getting smarter it's all coming out of Silicon Valley right around here are the all these companies and this Moore's law has made the instruments more and more powerful almost by a factor of two every year this geometric increase amazing increase in capabilities in computing and SETI the telescope's are getting better but mostly it's the computing power this is a graph of computing power as a function of time and you can see right now computers are as smart as smart as a lizard or a guppy but if this trend keeps growing this exponential trend it's been going on for a long time it's an economic law it's not a physics law but if it keeps going and people keep investing in Silicon Valley then computers will be as smart as humans in 2030 or 2040 that's called the singularity it'll be very good for SETI we'll be able to do much more thorough searches and see if there are these radio or optical signals out there it might not be good for humanity when computers can start designing themselves and they get faster and faster but it'll be good for SETI but we should be careful about what might happen in our future when computers are that smart okay so in the long run there are some even bolder ideas so one of the ideas that but this is maybe a hundred years away is that you could build a huge telescope if you could use the Sun as a lens so the Sun has gravity and sine predicted this a hundred years ago that the Sun works like a lens and collects the the waves either radio waves or light waves and they come to a focus and you could use the Sun as a huge telescope as a gravitational lens that would be way bigger than anything we've got on this planet a telescope the size of the Sun now there's a problem is that the focus is way out beyond Pluto you got to put the camera out there we don't know how to do that but that if we could do that you could read license plates on an extrasolar planet so don't hold your breath on that that's you know for your kids or their your kids kids um so anyway I'm optimistic that if there are signals out there from other civilizations either artifacts of their technology or maybe I doubt this but maybe they're deliberately sending a signal but I think artifacts it may happen in our lifetimes so I'm optimistic in the long run I'm optimistic about life out there I think it would be kind of bizarre for the only ones but we really won't know until until we're searching and I think Earthlings are just learning how to do it this is a very exciting time where we have a chance of finding out the answer to this question are we alone well if you've been asleep I have one slide for you here's kind of a summary slide so no et so far still working on it so that's kind of the summary of this whole talk but I'm not done I got I got two more three more slides I want to tell you I so kind of a fun thing instead at home is there are a lot of people that want to help us out and they have a lot of really cool ideas of how to do this a big open source project and they helped us write the code and add new features and new ways to look for signals and speed it up and they get the bugs out of the code and they send us money some people help us which funds the students and and the people that work on it and they give us equipment some people do writing about SETI or they compose music about city and some people send us haikus about and there are thousands of haikus that people have sent us but don't worry I'm not going to read you thousands of hi cuz I just want to read you a couple and this is the first haiku is from Paula Cook a Duke University searching for life answers are revealed about ourselves and this is the last slide and the last haiku Dan signer 1 million Earthlings bounded by optimism leave their PCs on well thank you very much here please hi I just had a question about power I guess for the telescope that we have today are we able to pick up artifacts equivalent to the power that the earth is emitting at any reasonable yeah that's a that's a really interesting question so Earth sends off a lot of different kinds of signals it turns out that the television signals that we transmit are not very powerful and they would need a really big telescope and they would have to be pretty close to detect them now we transmit things that are much more powerful one of the things that Earthlings transmitters something called bemuse ballistic missile early warning radar systems the Russians have these to look for incoming missiles the US has them in Alaska to look for incoming missiles and these things are a little more powerful because they sweep across the sky so they're kind of in a fan beam and those would be easier to detect we've had those we've been sending those for about 50 years and then the most powerful thing that Earthlings send is that that big telescope that I showed you the Arecibo dish the biggest telescope on the planet although China is building a bigger one but but that thing that's a thousand feet across it not only can listen it's not only just a receiver but it's got a transmitter all that wasn't meant for SETI it was meant to bounce signals off asteroids and study the atmosphere in planets but that transmitter could be seen it's a it's a mega watt transmitter connected to a huge telescope that could be seen detected on the other side of the galaxy that's a hundred thousand light years away so if Arecibo sent a message a hundred and then you'd have to wait a hundred thousand years it would go across the galaxy if they had an Arecibo on the other side of the galaxy they could detect that but but it you know it's not the kind of communication between individuals it's not like hi how's your mom it's like here's our library Congress all our music poetry literature medicine you know please send us yours because these messages to that far take a long time thank you follow-up to that question I guess is we lose some of this information and those signals that they dissipate yeah so um these signals do get weaker they never stop they go out at the speed of light but they get weaker and weaker as they expand and have to cover a larger volume or area of the sphere as they get weaker and weaker they get weaker with this with the square of the distance it's the inverse square law and so the further away you are the bigger telescope you need or you have to stare at it longer but they keep traveling at the speed of light that can't be recalled be careful what you say when you're on TV or radio I think remember the movie there was the government was funding this and then somebody in the Congress said well we can't do that because we know the world is only six thousand years old why are we doing this and is any government funding and the second question is there any pushback from the anti science community um yeah so the government funding has been kind of on and off in 1992 said he was given the Golden Fleece award there was a Senator Proxmire and then there was a guy senator brian from nevada and at the time they wanted to say that they were cutting cutting costs you know they pointed to expensive toilet seats on aircraft and they thought said he to search for I think they called it a Huntford little green man or something like that it was nothing in the NASA budget you know as a penny a person or something or less but that was an example of something that they thought was frivolous and the funding went away for a while so the funding the government funding comes and goes and we've had we've had pretty good luck getting some modest funding from the National Science Foundation and from NASA and then there's private funding and and that comes and goes depending on the economy and who's interested but we're extremely lucky now to have our neighbor who owns a mountain nearby the he is one of the key guys behind the breakthrough foundation that they give away these breakthrough prizes like Nobel Prizes and their very first science project that they're funding is the breakthrough listens program and now they're starting to fund other science projects as well you might have heard this starshot project try to get a spacecraft to the nearest star at the 20% of speed of light very exciting so they've got some variant they like to fund these very high-risk high-reward ambitious science projects we're very lucky we kind of struck gold it's a spectacular new program second question is any pushback from the anti science community oh they're you know they're so I think you guys might know better but my sense is that the public is excited about this question are we alone and most of the public thinks it's good because it's not very expensive as I mentioned less than a penny a person and most people would be happy to have there a little bit of their tax money to go for these this kind of interesting question there are a few people that think it's a waste of time there this site there's a small minority of scientists most of the scientists think it's a good idea to do this to do these kind of searches but there are a few people that think that life is either unique on this planet or incredibly rare that the the biological processes are just there's something very unusual that happened on earth and we don't really know but some people think and sometimes it's a religious motivation a lot of religions I think are comfortable with this idea that life could be elsewhere and they you know we used to think that that the God only kind of looked after life on this planet but I think a lot of religions are comfortable with this concept that that that there could be life on a lot of places and it's not so geocentric okay let me weak tell you what I think I heard tonight and see whether you agree previously unthought-of SETI is being kind of separate from other astronomical activity but what I think I heard is that what we're really looking for was said he and the rest of astronomy is any kind of signals or information from space that can really be thought of as an integrated part of astronomical research would you would you agree with that statement yeah I'm I guess I kind of have three with what you just suggested I mean we are looking for very specific kinds of signals but we're we're also we work very closely with other astronomers that are making maps of the galaxy looking at pulsars looking at gravitational waves and all this technology that we developed for SETI is starting to get used by a lot of people so we're in very close collaboration with other astronomers who either use our data to make maps of the galaxy or we use their data so we're we're tightly integrated into the Astronomy community thank you Dan thanks for a very interesting talk I have one question let's be optimistic and assume in our lifetime we detect extraterrestrial and intelligent signal I'd imagine you guys have thought about it for quite a while what would be the protocol and how would that be announced or would the government immediately classify it with project Bluebook or something else so there is a protocol that we and other groups have signed but the protocol is just kind of the first part and the first part of the protocol is that before you make a big announcement gain some confidence that you found something interesting because if we find a signal it might be like a bug in our software or some something wrong with the equipment a graduate student playing a prank on us or something like that so what the protocol says is before you make an announcement ask a different group to see if they can detect it as well with a different group different people different telescope different different software different equipment and if you have two telescopes looking at it you can kind of triangulate on it and measure the distance to the thing and make sure it's not something that is man-made that's a satellite or something that was built by humanity and we know at that point that it is a very distant signal that it doesn't come from a human origin now we might not know it's from another civilization you some of you might know the story of Jocelyn Bell who discovered she didn't know it at the time she discovered this whole new phenomena called pulsars and at the time they were called lgm1 lgm two little green men one little green man - they didn't know what they were they turned out to be a whole new very exciting Astrophysical phenomena I can imagine we discover some new kind of signal that hadn't been anticipated we will be kind of we're not sure so I think if we can get to independent confirmation from another group what we will do and what other groups have agreed to do is that we will at that point publish everything we know about the signal on the web and other places the coordinates the frequencies any kind of data that we've gathered and but we probably won't say this is definitely you know give us a Nobel Prize we found DT it'll be sought we would probably say we found a really interesting signal we don't know what it is it might be a new civilization might be some new Astrophysical phenomena and then at that point I think people from all over the world will start looking at this because we can't track it with our own telescope the earth is rotating other people start looking at and hopefully everybody will share data and try to figure out what this thing is thank you thank you for talking was not only interesting but also very comfortable it turns out decades ago I heard Francis Drake give a talk and introduced his equation and it's clear that the factor f sub-p has changed substantially since he gave that talk do you know how much that factor is actually changed and have any others changed as dramatically either up or down in magnitude um yeah so the in the Drake Equation as you pointed out one of the very first factors is how many planets are there and and at the time that Frank Drake put that equation together in the 60s to organize a conference nobody knew how many planets we knew about planets going around other stars but we had no idea whether there were other planets around other stars so now we know that planets are more common than stars and there are even lots of good planets there are billions of good planets in our own Milky Way galaxy there 100 billion other galaxies so that factor is kind of the only one that we really know about now about how many planets are that that way is the one factor in the Drake Equation that astronomers pretty much agree on how many planets there are and how many are at a good distance from their Sun and and we know a little bit about how many rocky planets but we don't know how much how many planets have the right conditions the right chemicals for life do they have liquid water all the right things that make up you and you and me so so we're unfortunately the Drake Equation the rest of the factors in the Drake Equation we still really don't know and we just the only way to solve this problem maybe is to go out and look we can't really get at it from the from from the direct equation but you're right about the the planet thing we do after Frank wrote this equation we finally got that very first factor pretty well pinned down thank you for a very interesting talk now I think I heard you say that you're more optimistic about overhearing a communication than receiving a signal deliberately broadcast the little wee et is basically saying yes we're here now the trend in communication seems to be towards spread spectrum and encoding and encryption and all these things so to paraphrase Arthur Clarke seems to me any sufficiently advanced communication is indistinguishable from noise yeah so that's a very astute question that you're a Silicon Valley radio engineer yeah they go back to that plot that I showed of the radio power leaving the earth you might have noticed the clever people might have seen that we were growing very fast we're still growing exponentially but that exponent has changed we're not growing as fast or not or the power the radio power leaving the earth is still going up but but maybe maybe as your question alluded to that maybe eventually Earthlings will not be sending so much stuff out into space maybe we'll be more efficient about it we'll go to very directed communication with you know fibers or and right now these television signals are broadcast every which way which is kind of a waste of power and then as you pointed out we're going to broadband communication kind of spread spectrum communication those kinds of communications as you pointed out are much harder for us to detect the narrowband original kind of TV broadcasts FM broadcasts relatively easy for us to detect it they're all doing spread-spectrum that's going to be hard thing for us to find of course if they're doing it deliberately then they're not going to deliberately kind of spread their signal out over lots of different frequencies so we're radar signals on the other hand we'll probably be kind of a lot of power at one frequency we're fine maybe they'll have some kind of thing that looks at their spacecraft going around their planet or looking making sure that asteroids aren't going to smash into their planet or something like that some kind of radar thing that might be easier to detect than this advanced communication that you're asking about which could be very hard for us to detect thank you three more questions go ahead got in a little air I was wondering earlier on you talked about scanning galaxies and that really surprised me because it seems like they're very far away the signals be very still very faint what's the rationale for doing that versus just focusing upon our own galaxy yeah that's a very interesting question should we look at kind of the nearby stars because the signals are going to may be stronger or should we look at more distant things the advantage of looking at something far away like a galaxy is that there are a few hundred billion stars in the galaxy so just in one telescope pointing you look at a hundred billion stars but then the signals have to be much stronger than the nearby stars so this is a question about how advanced civilizations are and are some very advanced and are some not so advanced maybe they're just emerging like us we don't know the answer to that question so some people think we should look at faraway things look for the very brightest advanced civilization some people think we should if you look at the nearby if you look out at night at the stars the brightest stars are not the nearest stars it turns out because some stars are much brighter than other stars turns out that the bright stars in the sky are not nearby there it's just because although they're incredibly bright stars thousands of star thousands of times brighter than our Sun they're much rare but those are the ones that are the brightest stars in the sky that are much further away than the nearby stars the nearby stars tend to be very dim and all some of them are just you can't even see him even though they're really nearby they're just way do more than the Sun so if he might be like that maybe maybe the first thing we find will be a super advanced super bright powerful civilization that's way far away or maybe it be in our own backyard we don't know thank you very much for the talk so assuming if we don't hear anything from you know et and the next five to ten years there's a bunch of people saying that we should send out micro SATs you know you're you know they're saying alright let's just throw hundreds of thousands of these like some sized satellites my question is should we go for things that you know systems where someone thought it was a Dyson Sphere or someone you know the Trappist thing where there's just a bunch of potentially habitable planets what are your thoughts on how do we target yeah I wish I knew the answer that question my personal philosophy is that we don't know what the right thing to target is we used to think that we should target nearby stars that are like our Sun we call them g-type stars that are a few billion years old but now we know just kind of recently that there could be planets going around the most common kind of stars that are much dimmer than our star these dwarf stars and that trap is this planetary system that was just discovered has seven planets going around this little dwarf star that and three of those planets are good so now I think and some people also agree with me that we should be targeting lots of different kinds of stars and not just stars that are just like our Sun day it may be naive to think that you have to have something just like Earth and just like our star to get life started and so I think the kind of the best strategy in SETI is a multiple strategy don't put your eggs in a lot of baskets into one basket try look for infrared signals radio signals different kinds of frequencies different kinds of signals lots of different targets because it's very hard to anticipate what another civilization might be doing an example of that is the the experiments that I showed you that were dreamt up 200 years ago now we think that's silly you know why mirrors and smoke signals and stuff like that and so if you ask me 200 years from now it might be something maybe people will be laughing at what I was talking about right now 200 years from now so you got to kind of think outside the box and try a lot of different strategies is my kind of personal philosophy on that thank you I think we have one more question thanks for the talk so you mentioned that for the next 10 years the listen project you would be using telescopes in three different places one in the Lick Observatory one in West Virginia and the other one in Australia and also the area of telescopes in in South Africa so is there any plan to build an array of the area of integrated telescopes located in different parts of the world yeah that would talk to each other and also scan different parts of the sky yeah that is an interesting question because this this problem of radio frequency interference is getting to be a more this radio pollution coming from our civilization is is it getting to be harder and harder so we think that one of the ways to solve that problem is just what you said if you have two observatories far away from each other maybe on different continents and they're both pointed at the same star and both of those observatories pick up the signal then we can be pretty confident it's not from our human civilization that that kind of experiment where you have two different telescopes --is it's kind of an expensive thing to do right now it's a tricky thing to do but it's something that I think we're going to need to do and we're one of the next experiments we want to do in SETI is use this thing in South Africa that's made of lots of telescopes and we can begin to kind of do that although it's not widely spread across different continents it is spread out over many kilometres and that'll help us figure out what's interference and what might be a candidate signal from another civilization so I I wanted to thank you and I wanted to say that if you have more questions I'm happy to answer them informally if you want to come up and somebody asked about other breakthrough projects and mentioned this starshot thing this is another thing that the breakthrough prize foundation is funding which is this idea that you could get to a nearby star in this case Proxima Centauri the nearest star that's four light-years away and you can do it by putting a sail in in space and using this very powerful laser to propel this sail it's about four meters across it you put this incredibly powerfully gigawatt laser on that sail for about two and during those 2 minutes it accelerates to 20% the speed of light and that means you can get to the nearest star in 20 years in your lifetime and send back images of exoplanets on the nearest star so that's called star shot that's a very exciting new program don't hold your breath on that but but it's a fun new thing thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: SVAstronomyLectures

Views: 143,152

Keywords: astronomy, science, astrophysics, science news, SETI, Breakthrough: Listen, Dan Werthimer, life in the universe, extraterrestrial life, ET, aliens, astrobiology, Berkeley SETI, optical SETI, exoplanets, SETI@home, search for extra-terrestrial intelligence

Id: Bwj2ylnqHrw

Length: 78min 14sec (4694 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 29 2017