Jill Tarter in conversation with Ana Matronic

well hello blue dot this is animatronic for the blue dot podcast and i am very very honored and excited to be welcoming to a conversation with me about her work dr jill tarter she's an astronomer former director of the center for seti research and she is the scientist who coined the term brown dwarf while researching small mass objects that failed to stably fuse hydrogen for her phd thesis her work in astrobiology and her success as one of the trailblazing female scientists in stem have garnered her achievement awards for many many organizations too long to list right here but she most famously inspired the character ellie airway in the film contact which was based on her work illustrated in the carl sagan novel i am so so excited and honored to speak with you doctor thank you so much for joining us on the podcast oh it's my pleasure um how are you dealing and let's let's speak first where where are we talking to you today i'm in berkeley california and have been in this house four months except yeah grocery runs yes it's a it's a really weird time yes um tell me um i'm actually in your neck of the woods i know you grew up in new york which is where i am right now um in a nice sweltering new york summer and uh but i'm actually from the west coast and spent spent a lot of time in the bay area and i wanted to uh to first talk about what life is like for a uh an extraterrestrial researcher during lockdown how has your work changed do you work from home a lot or and you know how does that how does that manifest now well since it's um there's 50 miles between berkeley and the seti institute i have been working from home for years or many days out of the week so this feels somewhat normal [Music] in in many senses it doesn't matter where i work because the observations that we make are done remotely anyway um so it's you know it's what it is i basically my work is going and going around until this lockdown going around and talking to people about seti and there's a whole team that does the observations and right now we're upgrading the telescope so we're actually not on the air at the allen telescope array but other other teams are working from other observatories around the world and again it's a keyboard and a connection and then you can can do what you need to do can you run me through a typical day in the life of uh of a of a seti researcher what's what's that like um that's like looking at the calendar and seeing what uh meetings are scheduled right and figuring out how to um basically how to do the search better what new things can we do what kinds of different objects might we decide to focus on um what new observatories right who hasn't been playing and and what new frequencies what what new ideas so it's a lot of um teleconferencing and then you know going and making um these runs to observatories to install computing equipment and then uh setting up a schedule and keeping an eye on whether the observing is going the way you think it should but um right now the thing that we're the two things that we're trying to do that haven't been done before um is to use artificial intelligence machine learning neural networks um to look at the data in a way that says there's something in there rather than what we've done for years which is to ask the machines to find a particular type of pattern that we pre-pre-set as something that would indicate us a signal that's engineered and not astrophysical but then that limits right what we will find we won't find what we didn't ask the machine to look for so right now how can we use neural networks excuse me goodness how can we use um machine intelligence to look at the data without these predefined biases and simply say uh you know it looks like that data contains some sort of information and therefore expand the type of signals that we're looking for the other thing that's new and that we've always wanted to do but just didn't have the speed to do it is to be able to look at all the sky all the time and this will allow us to find transient signals right everybody else's observing program um requires that whatever you're looking for has to persist for minutes hours weeks however long your protocol takes you to to re-observe um but now we're beginning to think about looking everywhere all at once and we course we'd love to do it at all frequencies but it's that's getting started in the optical looking for very bright transient flashes somewhere on the sky and uh that's exciting because it's a whole new category of investigation scientific exploration and there's a good chance that we'll find something not just engineered which is what we're looking for but because we haven't been able to do this in the past we may find something that's a new type of astrophysics that wouldn't be a bad booby prize yes that's something that uh you speak on which is uh if if we are visited by um a an alien um life form if we are visited on earth by by an yes extraterrestrial intelligence uh they will probably be so much more advanced than we are um as as in terms of technology because they can actually get here um and observe us and uh they may be teaching us a whole new set of of uh math and science and and bits and pieces of the working um working knowledge that we don't even have right now and uh that's something i i found really interesting in your talks was thinking ahead thinking thinking way way way ahead in terms of technology the other thing that i really enjoyed that you speak of is the idea that if we are contacted by um or visited by another um another life form we will most likely in probably will be interacting with their artificial intelligence can you speak about that a little bit well we we might well first of all um you talk about if we're contacted by or if they come here that just defines that they're far older than we are right and they have advanced technologies that we don't yet possess and therefore um it's quite possible if we look at how things are going here where biological intelligence may be supplanted by machine intelligence that you know basically it's it's hard to send flesh and blood through space a lot easier to send a machine they're they're more durable um and so it's it's quite likely that if interstellar travel is possible and if it happens that it'll be machines that we're interacting with um it and and we just don't yet we're you were nowhere near close enough to thinking about how you would communicate with an intelligence that is not only not human but not biological all right we um there's there's something called metal law that has been studied for a couple of decades people thinking about how you would write the rules for interaction of dealing with something that isn't human and probably doesn't have the same uh might not have the same concepts of ethics and harm and um intention and it's uh it's a really tricky business uh it's it's one of the many things that we are not yet um advanced enough to have figured out some good guidelines for so yeah how do you talk to a machine that we built okay one set of questions how do you talk to a machine that someone else has built with other kinds of constraints and controls and parameters and um different ideas about what is more important what is less harmful it's it's virgin territory i don't i mean we've been thinking about it but we haven't made a lot of progress in how to do it most of your um data does it come still come from the kepler spacecraft that you deal with um the data that we deal with for seti usually comes from radio telescopes or infrared optical telescopes with specifically purpose-built data processing backends what we use what kepler has been so important for all of us is that it has shown us that there are more planets than stars out there and when we started this business we only knew about the planets in our own solar system we had no idea really whether other star systems would have planets and in fact one of the things that we got started as part of seti was kepler itself we started holding workshops about this question of whether planets are common or rare and how you might detect them and actually bill beruki who is the principal investigator for kepler attended those workshops and so very early on said he got involved in this question about whether planets are out there and it turns out fortunately that there are lots of planets and there are many types of there are many planets that are unlike any that we have in our own solar system so planets are plentiful that's good right um and then um in addition to exoplanets the other thing that has uh changed what we think about what might be possible out there is life that we call extremophiles types of life that live in environments that would be totally um unsurvivable for humans but are they're perfectly happy right and it's not only just microbes it's mac it's it's a large-scale life that lives in in ice in boiling battery acid you know huge pressures with no light etc etc so this joint extremophiles and exoplanets have been the game changers in seti and astrobiology over the past few decades and it's you know it's made the cosmos appear to be more bio-friendly than we thought when we started out so that's a good trend it doesn't mean that any of these potentially habitable worlds are actually inhabited we don't know that yet that's going to come this century i think um and we're really eager to to see um how often a habitable world is actually inhabited and the uh to find to find a a habitable planet it's estimated that uh kepler has found somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 million habitable planets in the milky way is that correct well it hasn't actually found 500 million it's found thousands and then you do the statistics and you extrapolate to the whole galaxy yes okay and and um and then the next step is a spacecraft that looks for bio signatures or techno signatures around these other worlds so can you explain explain what that what that is well bio signatures that we could think about looking for remotely would be gases in the atmosphere of a planet when we actually have telescopes with the capability of imaging some of these planets we could look for gases that might be the kind of thing that we have in our atmosphere here so on earth we have at the same time methane and oxygen and those gases are very reactive and if you put them together in a lab they'll immediately turn into carbon dioxide and and water we have biology on the surface of our planet which are emitting those gases so we have bovine flatulence to give us the methane and we have lots of plants in photosynthesis to give us the oxygen and so our atmosphere is out of equilibrium right very noticeably so now that's a hard job right primarily because the planet is so much fainter than this bright star that it's right next to and so we have to develop schemes for separating the light that's reflected off the planet from the light from the star and then being able to have big enough telescopes to collect a lot of photons so that we can actually make this chemical analysis but if we go looking for this kind of chemical disequilibrium and being mindful that the earth's atmosphere has changed profoundly over billions of years of evolution and has changed profoundly because of life evolving that we can probably at some future date look for this chemical biosignature uh and then the other thing we can do is look to see if anybody has done any engineering and technology that would modify the planet in a way that we could uh understand and recognize so in in a kind of a parallel structure we not only want to look for bio signatures for life we want to look for techno signatures for intelligent life so when we get the ability to look at planetary systems i like to use the example of the trappist-1 system which is a very marvelous system that has seven earth-sized planets orbiting a a very faint red star and this is a small system everything would fit inside the orbit of mercury if it were in our solar system but those seven planets are still at different distances from the host star and so they should be at different temperatures right but what happens if when we get the ability to look at and actually image those planets we find out that they're all the same they're all the same temperature right they look identical um you might really be uh inclined to think that that's a lot of astro engineering that some technological civilization that developed on one of those planets and co-evolved with the planet decided that they wanted more real estate and went to the neighboring planets and engineered them to be more suitable anyway and so that's the kind of thing that techno so we talked about seti and that's really been looking for radio and optical and infrared signals but now we're talking about techno signatures as a broader class because we're looking forward to these new observational capabilities that we've never had in the past and that might in fact allow us to see evidence of someone else doing some engineering and modifying their environment and would this also include looking for things like satellites and space stations and things in their orbit correct yeah right but they'd have to be a lot of them right uh so maybe these 60 000 constellation satellites that we're beginning to talk about right um might be detectable but if one or two that's going to be a lot harder wow okay i wanna i wanna switch gears a little bit and take take listeners back and take you back to your childhood and uh take you back because um it says that you and your father looked at the night sky and uh and your your father was a big um big booster of yours and really really inspired you to to learn about astronomy and um i wanna know because i'm very interested in the stories we tell about science and i'm very interested in science fiction and and uh how it manifests itself in the minds of people i'd like to know what your if at all you were interested in science fiction what your favorite stories were when you were young oh i love science fiction still do okay great um in fact the first time i ever could have a pet it was a cat which i named petronius from the door into summer right a science fiction story that i i very much loved um yeah i think science fiction is spectacular uh because it just takes these out of the box ideas and puts them into a situation a story that we can um enjoy and you know uh i am always impressed by the imagination of science fiction writers and i think some of the best writers are also scientists and engineers right they have uh so that's that that's the old-fashioned science fiction not not the um fantasy sort of stuff that's been happening now but um yeah it was great fun still is what are some of your favorite science fiction stories that deal with outer space specifically i'd love to know yeah well i love contact right of course i've besides god what i love about that is that you um you never see the other right so you get to use your own imagination to think about uh what might be there um what they might be like and you're not constrained by some description um moting god's eye i like that one because it talked about how something that was absolutely obvious in front of us we didn't recognize because of a difference in time scales right um the door into summer as i said um lots of azimuth foundation trilogy um all yeah good good things yeah what's your favorite song about space song about space ah you know i'm actually one of these people who's profoundly tone deaf [Laughter] i'm i'm much wrong you don't matter to music much no no i'm much better dancing to music than than thinking about what it's saying so if you could visit any nebula or or solar system or anything where would it be what would you like to see in person well i think i'd really like to go to the nearest stellar system to ours all right um proxima centaur and and the reason for that is um there are multiple stars in that system one of them very similar to the sun one a red dwarf and i think we'd learn so if i only get we now only have a sample of one all right life on this planet and if i only get to have a sample of two to generalize i think i'd like to go the closest system because if we were to find life there so close to us i think we'd have a lot more reason to generalize and say life is ubiquitous right because um if it's very very rare it's unlikely that two stars that are co-located the sun and proxima um would both have life if life in fact were rare but if we go there and we find life then i think we have um a basis for saying indeed life is quite common um how do you think that would change things on earth would we would be would we be better to each other in that sense or would we just be like well we can mess up this planet because there's another one we can go to yeah yeah i don't buy into this plan b right i think yeah we got to figure it out here because if we just plan to go somewhere else we'll just take all the same problems and we'll create a mess there so i really do think that we have to get it right here and that means among other things that we have to begin thinking of ourselves not as americans or californians or europeans we have to begin thinking of ourselves as earthlings and we have to act like that because these challenges that are so daunting are global they don't respect national boundaries we're going to have to find planet-wide solutions by cooperating in order to get out of the messes that we've gotten ourselves into and that's something you always see in science fiction isn't it it's like well on this planet this is how we do things and we have a planetary government and and it always seems like this very planetary mono culture and um and it doesn't really speak to the to the way our planet works that much and it's very highly simplified well um yes yes but i think that that's a necessity right if you're postulating a long-lived civilization you can't be that unless you're husbanding the planet that you live on and you can't have one half of the planet be advanced and the other half not and one have water and the other you really do to be long-lived you really do need global solutions and cooperation even if you have individual cultural norms you still have to uh i think agree on some generalized solutions to keeping the planet habitable what does that say when when i think of um you know global planetary solutions um i think of of uncontacted tribes in the in the amazon rainforest how do we preserve their form of life and then also continue to be a very technologically advanced uh society and planet well is that possible i don't know one thing that we need to do is um make sure that the forest that they live in and the water supplies that they're dependent on are not ruined by logging and pollution and other manifestations of technology i mean they can't continue in their cultural norm unless the environment around them is preserved and so i think that ultimately they're not going to remain unchanged they can in fact i believe have a um a cultural identity but i think that again because we need to husband the planet for a long future they are going to be impacted and oh you know it's it's it's a loss of diversity it's a loss of cultural diversity and that's unhappy on the other hand by becoming more assimilated it's possible that their standard of living and their health will be improved and then we keep then we keep their culture alive in terms of storytelling and videography and musicology all of that but i think ultimately we're not going to have in this you know distinct and very very separated populations we'll just have to [Music] keep that history alive as history as cultural history oh that's interesting interesting it's an interesting things to think about um when you when you think about the the challenges facing us as a as a human race right now what are your and as a scientist what are your biggest concerns well managing population right managing resources water and food managing the climate right and not allowing the planet to overheat and be unsustainable for for any life those are some pretty big challenges and again there's not a national solution to any of them yeah um in um in the u.n i i want to go back to the the notion of this sort of planetary body the u.n actually has a treaty of outer space correct and um so technically no one owns outer space like the ocean it's you said it's like the ocean um can you talk about that a little bit like how how do we legislate what what happens uh when we go out there well first of all we have to get more countries to sign on to that tree um yeah but in recent years it has been determined that while you can't own a piece of another body in space you are allowed to exploit it and to garner resources from it and whether this means that we turn everything out there into a mess that we've made on earth i don't know but it is it is possible to go and mine asteroids for example and one thing that i've thought about is that it might have a beneficial impact on this planet because the mining that we currently do particularly for things like diamonds and other really rare elements is just so horrific and um debases a whole population right it we don't treat our miners well and if indeed these resources were available from a distant body via robotics then in fact we might be able to uh [Music] lift up a population that's basically enslaved right now hmm yeah how do you feel about spacex and and the uh the sort of notion of of a well a a colony on mars and then b something a little bit more like leisure travel to space well that was really big when i was a graduate student this um periodial space colonies and stuff like that um spacex you know i'm pretty sure that we're going to have scientific community on mars i'm not sure that we will have a general population on mars it's pretty hard i mean survival up there is not easy and terraforming if you're talking about that that's going to take 100 000 years to really get a stable if it's possible and i think in the interim you're going to have scientists who are just so excited about understanding how planets work by studying something other than the one we live on uh we might in fact find life on mars either extinct or even extant underground in um local aquifers and and if we do then the whole the whole picture changes i mean do we leave mars to the martians um do we find out and this is really an interesting question do we find out that um we ourselves are martians that in fact with all the rock swapping that what goes on early in the formation of a planetary system that a microbe um that had developed on mars didn't hitch a ride on a rock and come to earth and and seed life here i mean is life on earth related to any life that we might find on mars or is there if we find life there is it a second genesis and again that one to me is the one that's so interesting because just like if we found life on proxima in the proxima centauri system if we find life with a different genesis you know independent origin on two planets in this one solar system it's gonna mean that life is ubiquitous that life is everywhere um so i don't know the answer to that i mean elon has a great vision he wants to save the earth and um but is that the way to do it or is it really going to be that humans co-evolved with this planet now we are ideally suited to living on this planet and that the time scales for changing another planet to be suitable for us and our biosphere um maybe too long to be practical do you know it's a tall order not easy you don't snap your fingers yeah um do you do you watch um ufo footage on youtube do you find yourself uh tinkling in on the internet looking for ufo footage or internet conspiracies about space do you do you get into that at all i avoid that as much as i possibly can i mean when we got when we started um the study institute when we started this whole scientific exploration there was almost universal conflation of seti and ufos and we spent a great deal of time trying to establish our credibility and trying to point out that the um the strategies that we follow the rules that we follow are appropriate to a scientific exploration and it's not just oh here's a great story and well no of course i didn't get a picture and oh well this is something blurry over here or here's a little tick tock from a new um radar system and so we set standards for verification and validation that are appropriate to the magnitude of the kinds of announcements we might want to make one day and so um i think it's really important to keep that boundary between something that is you know just without appropriate evidence and something that is a scientific exploration i i heard you in one in uh one interview say that um if if you knew that life existed elsewhere you wouldn't keep it a secret you would be announcing it no problem we would know yeah yeah well that's the that is the um the mindset of the seti community at least and when you think about that subset that's looking for signals right a signal is not coming to a telescope in california it's coming to the planet earth and so um it's appropriate that that information gets uh distributed and in addition unless you get really lucky and the the source of the signal is at a very towards the poles of the planet so that you can it's what we call circumstellar and you can it's circumpolar rather and you can look at it 24 hours a day um from mid from the equator and mid-latitudes uh you're going to need multiple countries to continue to gather information from that source as the as the planet rotates so i mean no it's the property of humankind you don't keep it seen yeah and this is actually something that you would like um people who aren't scientists to get involved in you want everybody to be searching for intelligent life in the universe can you talk about that well there have been a number of programs um of citizen science kind of things i think the the first and certainly the thing that put citizen science on the map was seti at home which was developed by um researchers at uc berkeley and allowed you to run a program that in the background made use of cpu cycles that you weren't otherwise using on your computer to just to do the same searches for signals um in data that have been recorded at various observatories looking for patterns in frequency and time and this oh this is really really successful as a citizen science project and there have been others since then i tried to use for for a couple of years we used human eyeballs to find signals in portions of the spectrum that we otherwise ignored because there was so much interference from our own technology but the eye is a fantastic filter and so we we did that on i think that uh yeah we'd love to get people involved in our activity and the question is how to do that um in a way that we're now in a different era where when we started with this citizen science kind of activity our our computing was the limiting resource there just wasn't enough computational power but now the computing has increased so amazingly uh but that's not really our limitation anymore and so um there's a tendency to say okay well now the computers are better at this than the humans so let the computers do it and what is it that the humans can do that the computers can't so we're we're trying to rethink how we use people and their amazing processing capabilities in a way that that really honors their their gifts as opposed to a machine i watched a really interesting documentary on people who are flat earthers and one of the uh they interviewed a scientist about flat earthers and his his response was really interesting it was here are these here are these people who ultimately at the at the very at the most basic um most in the most basic ways are seekers and they're seeking knowledge and they're seeking um their they're maybe not not uh engage haven't been engaged in the correct way how do you how do you get people engaged in science and and really um really in the in the scientific materialist sort of you know this is this is this is the established pattern how do you break the how do you break the sort of wishful thinking and the magical thinking out of citizen citizen science yeah how do you how do you contend with magical thinking because you know that you're always thinking about things that are better right in some sense and then the reality that we are in um you basically have to start with the fact that there are some rules that nature is not without rules and rather than just saying well here's the equation for gravitational attraction involve them in some activities that allow them to experiment and i think that's that's really what you need to do is you need to get these people in involved particularly as young people and allow them a range of activities and ways to experiment and then go through the process of what is the best explanation for the actions you just explored yeah and i mean it can't be just whatever you want it to be good old-fashioned scientific method well we when we developed curriculum um interactive curriculum for kids like third grade through ninth grade it was really important to have them be part of setting up the experiments and deciding what you were gonna do right because then they had to own the outcomes right they had to think in advance about well i'm going to do this and we'll see what happens and if this happens it's going to mean this and if that happens it's going to mean something else but but have them involved from the beginning with setting up the framework and figuring out how to interpret what was going to come out what are you looking forward to what's uh what's the trajectory of s of seti over the next uh decade that you uh you can tell us about what are you excited for in the next decade well i think we've we've done some of that um obviously it's going to get faster we're going to be able to search in more ways for different kinds of signals but i think the two the the two directions i want to see it go is to really uh get the ability to be sensitive to transient signals at all kinds of different frequencies so looking at all the sky all the time and then involving machines so that we look for what's there rather than telling the machine to look for this right so i think those are the two directions that that will see a lot of forward progress in the next couple of decades and have there been any um prog uh projects that had to had to go by the wayside because of coronavirus have you been putting anything on pause what are you looking forward to getting back to once this is all over i'm looking forward to getting back to being able to talk in person to my colleagues um we've actually you know if you think about it observatories by their nature are fairly isolated you want to be away from either light pollution or radiofrequency interference and so in these isolated areas you can figure out how to have a small team that is socially you know they become what was it called they become your um coronavirus pod or something like that chores um so the observatories have continued to function um and for the rest you know it's all a keyboard fortunately there haven't well there is there is one thing um we we have a telescope that we want to put um on haleakala in hawaii uh and we are trying to figure out how to deploy that thing when you've got a 14-day quarantine if you're gonna go there so that one has been impacted by the coronavirus that's that's one of our um laser seti all sky all the time telescopes and we haven't figured that one out yet okay all right and then we'll we'll wrap this up our last question if you could um if you could visit anywhere in our solar system what planet or moon would you like to go to enceladus that one's why right because um this tiny little moon right has an icy outer shell that's cracked and in the south pole coming out through those cracks are um there's the effluent from cryo volcanoes so it is it is spewing out into space part of the ocean that exists globally under the ice and so that's kind of a free lunch it's offering you what you know it's a way to explore what's contained in those oceans and possibly i mean there are models for the origin of life on earth which has it arising around some of the the cryo volcanoes or the i'm sorry the black smokers on the bottom of terrestrial oceans that might have been a place for chemistry to turn into biology and if that's happened on something like enceladus then that biology might be contained in the um outflow from that small moon and so you want to fly through it concentrate it figure out what's there amazing there this reminds me of uh of an analogy that you use and i think this is a great way to wrap this up um there's an analogy you use comparing how much of the the um the universe we've mapped and know about versus the ocean can you can you talk about that and this is this was in response to somebody asking why we haven't heard from intelligent life why we haven't found it if it's if it really could be that plentiful then why haven't we found it right and the answer is basically we haven't looked uh in spite of what we've been doing for the past 60 years yes so there are many different parameters that you need to explore uh in this search for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence first of all it signals the right thing to look for hopefully but maybe not maybe we're doing a superb job exactly the wrong thing but if it is electromagnetic signals there are nine parameters that need to be explored there's three dimensions of space there's there's time there's frequency there's polarization um there's the modulation scheme and lastly there's sensitivity you know you don't know how because you don't know how powerful the transmitter is how far away it is you don't know how sensitive your instrument has to be in order to detect it so if you take those nine parameters it's nine dimensional space i'm not good at nine dimensional spaces but i can i can make an estimate of various ranges of those parameters and just multiply it all together and say this is the volume that i have to explore in order to have a chance of finding an electromagnetic signal and then you say by analogy let's take that volume whatever it is and set it equal to the volume of all the earth's oceans and then asks the question okay now we got something that we can visualize how much of the oceans have we actually explored and it turns out that when i did this first one said he was 50 years old it was one eight ounce glass out of the oceans and it was just done by penn state students last year they redid the calculation and it's more like a hot tub now but that's not a lot of exploration you know if you took a glass and scooped it in the ocean and said i wonder if there are any fish in the ocean that glass could capture a small fish but if you don't find a fish when you scoop up that glass of water um you're not likely to conclude that there are no fish in the ocean you're likely to conclude that i have to search more amazing so that's my analogy well that's it's it's perfect and i think it it's a great way to to uh put it in the perspective of for all of our listeners and i just want to thank you so much for joining us and and uh taking the time out to speak with me it was such a great honor and i wish you all the best of luck on your continued search well thank you thank you it's been fun talking with you you

Channel: bluedot festival

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Length: 52min 37sec (3157 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020