Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for ET

you [Music] good evening everybody good evening Belle diamond welcome to the Church of the city is know first of all a big welcome to all of you and a big THANK YOU and I know that among those of you in our audience are many of the fans and supporters and longtime attendees of the SETI talks series that we've been doing really on a weekly basis since 2007 and for those for the faithful you know that the SETI talks are all recorded and they're all archived on our YouTube channel SETI talks and we have over 400 hour-long lectures in all the various scientific disciplines associated with the work of the Institute from astronomy and astrophysics to exoplanets to planetary exploration and climate at Geoscience and of course not least of which is our SETI research so I'm delighted to be telling you because again our regular followers will be aware that for the last couple of months we've been on a hiatus from the SETI talks because unfortunately and the last menu we were in which was the beautiful auditorium at Microsoft Silicon Valley campus inexplicably Microsoft is taking what to me looks like a brand-new beautiful building and tearing it down to build a more brand-new beautiful building and I would voluntary to just take the old one and they wouldn't have to tear it down save some money but that didn't work out so we've been for the last couple of months looking for a new venue and I'm very pleased to report that we have found one I'm also pleased absolutely we're very excited also pleased to tell you that it's a secret still because everybody likes secrets it's probably a conspiracy theory it might be fake news but in actual fact we have found a new home it's on the Palo Alto Menlo Park border it's a beautiful auditorium we're just waiting to sign the agreement and until I get that signed I don't want to actually say what it is but that will be done in the next week to ten days and we already have a schedule we will be going back in actually with steady talks starting in August actually the cadence is going to change as I think I'd mentioned a lot of our earlier talks from weekly to monthly and we're going from daytime to evening because we found that the daytime slot just meant that too many people couldn't make the talks and the evening session which will probably start around the same kind of timeframe should allow more people to be able to attend the talks and we're going to be doing a lot more fun activities a lot more things like panel discussions on topical matters of our science and work and those of our colleagues in other places like NASA and elsewhere so we're looking forward to having a really eventful and impactful series of lectures in August again for those of you who have attended our talks in the past you may remember that once a year the undergraduate summer interns who are part of what's called the REU program the research experience for undergrads who spend the summer working with scientists on a one-on-one basis at the SETI Institute supporting their research we'll be doing what we call lightning talks so they'll be standing up in front of the audience to give quick summary descriptions of the science and research that they've helped support over their summer and they always do an amazing job and we always have an amazing group of students and we do again this year so we're very fortunate to have them and I'm also I have to say we're very fortunate to have a bunch of scientists who are always excited about being mentors to these young people every summer and it's a really wonderful program so the August event will be the REU students lightning talk presentations for their summer internship in September the next talk will be for those of you who are following space stuff how many know of you know what's happening to Cassini in September a couple of hands a couple of hundred hands okay we have some subject matter experts here so the Cassini space mission is coming to an end on September 15 when the Cassini space probe will go in a spectacular crash landing down onto the surface or lack of surface of Saturn so that's going to be a spectacular event and that week we are going to be putting on a panel session about the Cassini mission we've had SETI scientists publishing a lot of papers on Cassini including papers about Saturn's rings and about the moon Enceladus etc so that should be another fun program that will be the September 1 so look for the city events to be starting up again in August in the evening we'll send out all the usual warnings and social media alerts and emails etc and again the first talk will be our undergraduate so we're very excited about that meanwhile we have a really fun event an evening plan for you tonight we're really delighted and honored to have two amazing people sitting on stage and a third standing off to the right to educate and lighten and inform us so those of you who don't know Jill tarter please leave now but by a book before you do but by a book for some stupid that's right yes that's right by a book medley anyway dr. Jill tarter as many of you know is one of the pioneers of Seti research one of the pioneering women astronomers and radio astronomers in the world really a leader in pioneer on many levels and has had a lifelong career of of incredible productivity and and interest and intrigue and not the least of which was captured at least in part let's say the first part by the movie contact where Jill's real-life activities was the inspiration for the character portrayed by Jodie Foster in that movie contact and that movie by the way is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year so that's a it's a very timely event to be coinciding with tonight's event and a wonderful author very accomplished author and writer Sarah skulls has written a book on a biography about Jill's life and work called surprisingly enough making contact which is what we're still endeavoring to do and we will we will mark my words but so tonight we have a wonderful opportunity to hear directly from Jill and from Sarah about the book about Jill's work and we are also honored to have a wonderful master of ceremonies to conduct us through this evening's activity dr. seth shostack to my right so says please come on [Applause] so Seth is a senior astronomer at the Institute and a fellow of the Institute is also the host of our radio program big picture science which is both a weekly radio program that you can catch on various NPR stations around the country but also a podcast very popular wonderful general science program so if you don't know about it now you do and you definitely want to check it out so with all without further ado I will turn this over to Seth to lead us through the discussion and thanks very much okay if the event this evening is sharp its snappy so we're going to get right into it I'm going to stay here behind the lectern for this while we grill the two of these guests here like mess of onions and try and get some of the background on this book making contact Jill tarter and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence so for my first question is to you Sara this is your first book so what drew you to this subject matter was it Jill was it SETI was it the you know the sail ability of the idea well you know it mostly it came to me in the dream flash I happen to watch the movie contact like which came out when I was 12 years old and since it's the 20th anniversary how old I am and had a huge impact on me I was really obsessed with it in the way that only a 12 year old can be and then I grew up as one buzz and I was working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank West Virginia one day I was driving a bus and Jill tarter over here left her purse on it and I had the extreme pleasure of returning it and so then a few years later I was working at a magazine I wanted to write a book I didn't know what to write about and then somehow it dawned on me that this person whose fictional life had had so much of an impact on me was a real person no one had written a book about her had given her her purse back said hey one time I give you your purse back and I write your biography and she said yes nobody said who's going to want to receipt a book about me she did say that up until like yesterday well well obviously people eighths would as it is it's doing very well on Amazon ranking you should go to Amazon check it out but I don't want to get too much into the mechanics of this there but let me ask you further question how did you deal with the problem that confronts anybody who writes a book and is problematic in a way is writing a manuscript and that is getting a publisher to show interest and actually printing and distributing the book did you write some sample chapters was it the idea of Jill tarter did they like the idea what was it people are very interested in the idea of role models and these women like Jill who people like me admired growing up and people confronting obstacles and then I mean you have all seen the internet people love aliens and people love searching for them it's a popular topic and so I think publishers were interested in that that said we did get some interesting rejections asking if for instance Jill tarter knew when she would find aliens and could we publish the book at that point what's my favorite but we I wrote a sample chapter I did a few interviews with Jill enough to get kind of a broad outline of things and then convinced everyone that it was a great idea they say you shouldn't give up until you've gotten 30 rejection slips I take it you didn't get there I didn't get 30 but I yeah that's what you think it's not to give up later so in the end Pegasus books it's a major publisher elected to publish the bio what was their reasoning what did they think where did they think the market lay was it as you say the interest in alien SETI that kind of thing I think it was honestly the mix of the interest between aliens and Injil herself and we were lucky enough that Jessica case who is the editor and the deputy publisher at Pegasus had wanted to be an astronaut when she was a kid and was very interested in this personally and so she was biased in a way that really helped us out kill what did you think of this a biography or you're not one that you know goes around saying hey I'm Jill tarter kind of thing especially written by somebody as well-known as Sarah I mean she was an editor at astronomy magazine for many people in the audience probably are familiar with astronomy magazine what was your reaction yeah I was really skeptical that that this book could interest many people but Sarah was very persistent and willing to take a risk I mean she literally to come live in California for 2e working with me on this book and I love her writing boy and it was been it's been fun the whole project well you say it's been fun I mean can you elaborate a little bit on how you did this did you just sit down for hours at a time with Sarah did she call you on the phone did you you know I don't know what were there written questions she'd email you how did she get the info I have bookcases in my office and across the top of all of those are photograph album from the time that when I was very young and he has my old family pictures in it and our that's my life in photographs and we sat without and went through them and I said oh this was this meeting and this is what we did here in and and Sarah took a lot so I recorded what was tough about and we spent a lot of hours looking at a lot of pictures it's something that's striking about the book is that a lot of it takes place as you say you know I haven't I'm not trying to you know garrison everybody here but decades ago right yeah and and there's a lot of detail I mean you know there's who what people said how they acted that kind of thing and so you were dying to be obviously made a big enough impression on you that you were able to relate them to Sarah right and when pieces were missing I actually sat there and tried to write it myself in Sarah's voice and then fix it up but it yeah and when someone appeared in the book and was going to be saying something I would also go to them and say did you say this what it say and then old newspaper clippings for a little while I got in New York Times archives subscription and would look up you know what are the New York Times have to say about this event when it happened if if it was important enough to be in the New York Times okay this is sort of to both of you but I'll start with you Sarah certainly a light motif and making contact which is assume the obvious pun is the fact that Jill was not just a steady pioneer but she was boldly going where women were not encouraged to go so it's really about breaking down barriers right I mean that that's really underpins a lot of the story yes absolutely I think that Jill tarter is a pioneer in a lot of ways from you know being basically the the only woman in her major at Cornell University and then when a few women astronomers in a field that itself was kind of on the edges of stuff she can probably speak to that difficulty better than I can but if you read the book you'll find out that unfortunately a lot of that hasn't changed exactly some of the difficulties that women face in science yeah we found was getting a lot better but we've seen in the past couple years that maybe that's not quite right yet I did have a wonderful time in Norway three weeks ago oh you saw that all right but what tell them not everybody ah well unless you dare was a festival I'll star mustn't on time Norway a great putting together stars and music it's was the fourth time we'd done it the first three times we're in Tenerife Spain but they are big on musicians astronauts Nobel laureate kind of think as one noblest an economist who had two opportunities on the stage to make remarks that were not very kind to women and after the second one I had to stand up and ask him why II used his time on the stage to piss off half the world's population and he didn't have any idea what I was talking about it was now it was so totally the bias was so unconscious that even one of the claim to him by Neil deGrasse Tyson he had done it it didn't ya so what I was thinking about was the in astronomy this past couple of years have been kind of a rough ride for young women when we have been exposing and shaming male professors who have been using their power over students with your male or female so I thought things had gotten much better but still got a ways to go however in Norway of the people that came up and said thank you for making those remarks half of them were young men so Norway's on the write-back evening was sponsored by Norway by the but but you know actually your mentors at least in school right they were there weren't any women among them no there weren't and I was very fortunate to have a John Billingham and Barney Oliver as as mentors Don's wife was a renowned cardiologist at Stanford Don was very sensitive to gender issues Barney not so much in corporate warlord but he really cared about SETI and since I was willing to do the work he cared about me and I was really fortunate I had a hero though two heroes that were female Admiral Grace Hopper all right it's better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission right and Margaret herbage who at one time was the astronomer royal in in the UK and when she came to this country she was denied access to the telescopes on the mountains because it and had women up there and the disturbed really good upset the guys and so she having been turned down lunch she said to her husband Jeffrey okay you apply for the time when he got it she went along as his night assistant and after a couple of years of this uh she applied under her own name and they said look we told you and she said I've been on the mountain for two years you haven't even noticed to give it up right and so Margaret has been a big hero of mine and I was fortunate to get to spend some time with her there been articles in the papers including the national papers in the past couple of weeks about the glass ceiling for women even here in the Silicon Valley which we'd like to think is enlightened but and so I just sort of like your take if you look at the landscape today how do you see it I mean I think the same are they better are they much better or do we have a long way to go well as I said a couple minutes ago I was I mislead myself or allowed myself to be misled to be thinking that at least in my profession things were much better things are better but not much better and in the Silicon Valley I think we've been seeing that it's a really rough road or for young women in in pursuit of technology and that kind of entrepreneurship here Sarah tell us some of the things that Gill said about trying to be a scientist without a y-chromosome which I'm told by my wife is mostly leads to defects in behavior you know that's another y-chromosome be fake what were some of the stories he told you that most impressed you the one that has stuck with me the most because I was also a physics undergraduate like Jill was Jill attended Cornell University to get a engineering physics degree and all of the boys were in one dorm on one side of campus and the girls were in another side and the boys would take home these very difficult problem sets and they would all go in some great boy room together and work on them and get the solutions together but Jill wasn't allowed over there and she had to just do it on her own and so she had to be better than the people who could work together on it and I think that she really carried that with her in a lot of situations where maybe there was a boys club over here explicitly as a dorm or not and just had to always be a little bit of a step bub which is true of a lot of when other women in other fields and also minorities are very it's just not as easy and one of the problems with that kind of relationship is that I never was part of a team until I had to lead one that's a very bad way to learn how to get the best out of the team I was struck by the fact that well when SETI began there was a lot of optimism right I mean some of the early study pioneers and after all you are a SETI pioneer you know they thought all we have to do is rig up an antenna and look a little bit carefully at this guy and we may find that this guy is filled with signals it doesn't seem to be filled with strong signals that much it seems we can say even Frank Drake you know he was doing project Ozma he picked up something in the second story looked at and he tells me that his reaction was could it be this easy well apparently it's not yet that was not et unfortunate it may not be that easy but given the fact that you've dedicated your career to this quest how do you look on this SETI efforts i mean don't people ask you all the time even you spent your career doing this we still haven't picked up this signal don't you have regrets about that oh no no no regrets at all I've gotten to spend a life trying to answer a question that humanity's been asking forever in are we alone and I've gotten to be part of the start of an exploration I may not be there at the end but I've gotten some the opportunity to start something that I think is really important you know when I was a postdoc I was working on brown dwarfs little stars that don't have enough mass to burn hydrogen to helium and the cores stabili and so they eventually just go out and and I started a postdoc at NASA Ames and I was having a great time but you know occasionally I'd walk and I walk along and think why is the public paying my salary to do this I'm I'm enthralled I think this is great I'd like to know the answers but gee I have a National Research Council fellowship so the taxpayers are paying my salary and you know once I began to start working on SETI I never had that thought again because I knew that people out there in general were really interested in what I was doing some of them thought I was absolutely wrong some of them were completely convinced that there's no other life beyond Earth some of them believe they'd already encountered it but nobody I never had to feel that I was doing something that was only for my benefit I always find the people who say we were being visited that's job security it said not me but let me ask you this because you know when I first came to the SETI Institute which was just before the civil war started I have to say that - member hired you you were there after I think I met you in the night late 1970s we did a SETI experiment in Europe in 1980 right but you know people would ask the public would ask would ask you that guy's Frank Drake they'd ask you know Peter Bacchus we think so when are you going to find the signal as you know I figured people with a who knows but almost everybody had an answer it was the number of years until they were going to retire as I could tell but what do you say now I mean what are we going to do this do you have an answer or is it still you know nobody knows I don't know and I've always said I don't know I've even been bold enough to confess that we may be working extremely hard doing a very good job at looking for exactly the wrong thing there may be some technology out there that we haven't invented that we don't know about yet that is actually what's needed to do this job and to succeed so I don't know the answer to that question I just usually quote the last sentence of the 1959 paper by Philip Morrison and Giuseppi cocconi which is um the probability of success is difficult to estimate but if we never search the chance of success is zero so I'm I'm into the searching Sara final question for you it seemed to me that there was a sort of a structural problem you had to confront in writing this book maybe that if you were writing about I don't know the higgs-boson just to name something you know there's the prediction and then there's the experiment the whole story about building the equipment and doing the experiments opens on and then in the end they find the Higgs boson but here the quest is still ongoing so how did you decide to deal with or is it says are they here well during Bill Peters yes no that I mean it would have been a lot easier of a book to write if you guys had found extraterrestrial intelligence but I kind you're hoping we would the - I thought it would be really great thanks a lot I I kind of I wasn't sure when I set out to do it how I was going to confront that problem of your you know building toward this this climactic is never going to happen and I kind of as time went along took my cue from hell Jill has thought about her own career she retired a few years ago as I'm sure you all know and you know like Seth mentioned everyone started out a little more optimistic maybe about how contact might happen and when it might happen and everyone has had to kind of come to their own realizations of making meaning of their careers even if they don't find that and Jill has correct me if I'm wrong about this it's weird to talk about you and third-person when you're sitting around here come come to the idea that study is a good way to have a very cosmic perspective of how big the universe is how small we are how much more like everyone here and on earth is than whatever we might find out there and that it's a good way to frame thinking about that and get people having a bigger perspective which is not as good a plot device as finding aliens but I like to think it worked pretty well yeah I like I like what you did to end the book which is to talk to the next generation and you gave me a sense of legacy of having passed along some encouragement and enthusiasm the other thing is that somewhere along the line of my career I started to think about okay maybe I won't find the signal I can do the best job that I can I really can't control that but if I can leave this field financially stronger than we started if we can find a way by the time that I'm finished cheerleading to have a stable financial funding for this kind of exploration which may indeed be multi-generational then I will have done something pretty damn good and I can feel very good about this great and wala was mentioned the Jill is retired that that's you know she's being exceptionally modest there because in fact he was still very much involved so there's still a chance here you may be the second additions here I just want anybody this little discussion by saying you know this is exploration of course you know that and pioneers and exploration are the people we remember right circumnavigating the globe Ferdinand Magellan he didn't quite make it back himself entirely but he had the bad form to get involved in some domestic dispute in the Philippines but you know who remembers who was the second person whose expedition circumnavigated to close anybody he shouted out if you know Frank Drake that's right in that spot go to Ghana Pentagon is a good guess but wrong okay it is yeah it was frankly that was 58 years later I believe something like that so he remember that you remember the pioneers so one of the great things that's likely to happen in the 21st century along with understanding biology inventing artificial intelligence I assume that's going to be great great for the machines but one of the things that we will do I think is find life in space right and when that when that story actually does come back there'll be a resurgence in the sales of making contact I'm quite sure that's when the second edition comes out yes all right we're going to leave it here a bit of an applause for our two guests appear you we're going to talk about new directions for SETI and to discuss that we have build build diamonds going to come back up we're going to have Jill and let's see who else do we have we have me but how Gerry harp Gerry come on up Gerry's a director of the city effort at the Institute these days okay thank you sir okay this is going to be this is a fairly short but preforming and what we would like to do is talk about some of the things that are happening in SETI at the Institute today some of the things that you can support we're going to talk a little bit later about optical SETI so not so much about that but some of the ways that we can improve SETI now you might say improves that it does that mean if you haven't found anything and you know two weeks later you still haven't found anything is that an improvement and so the metric I think for improving SETI is speeding up the search right you like to say that you know you go to the ocean you take out a glass full of water you don't find any you know I don't know bowhead whales or something and you conclude there are no whales in this ocean right okay fair enough but she's emphasizing the fact that the sample size has been very small for SETI research despite the fact that it's a fairly old endeavor now we still haven't you know finally think I think largely I think most people would say largely because we haven't you know it's hard to believe they're not out there but you know we haven't we haven't done what we can to speed up the search so let's talk about some of these things cherry I mean this gonna be free for me so everybody can talk as they wish but tell us a little bit about how we might do that by not building more antennas but by improving the ones we've got yeah it's working out today that we're you know we're as you know we're using only a very small fraction of the data that comes out of telescope like 1/100 of 1% and so if we can get that up to 1% but the factor of 100 improvement that would be huge we're still not using all of the the data that actually are coming from the telescope because we just don't have the computer processing to process all that data so really what we're limited by right now is just how fast we can process the data so good you know so we built Jerry's talking about the telescope array in Northern California at the Hat Creek observatory and so we built this telescope to be a Moore's Law machine we expected at the beginning that we would be terribly overwhelmed by this mass of data that we can collect due to some very innovative feeds and receivers designed by Jack Welsh my husband and Berkeley and midlife for the array we'd probably be well matched we could swallow all the data that it presents end of life we'd be data starved that's how we envisioned this and that's what we are trying to do is continue we've got fabulous antennas and receivers and continue to improve the backend processing so that we can in fact access and analyze all the data that are coming in just by way of example the refers I should also point out that Jack Welsh is not only her husband and not only a pioneer actually in the development of radio telescopes but also it principally involved in the design of the Allen telescope array and the second generation of feeds for that array that have been supported by another honored guests here tonight Franklin Antonio and and Jack is here tonight so a shout out to Jack but we put out about 54 terabytes of data per day and as Jerry said we're only just scratching the surface of what we do with our real-time data analysis using fast Fourier transforms of that data there's an advantage to doing real-time data processing in that if we get a so-called WoW signal we don't have to wait till morning to find out as happened back at the Ohio State but with new tools and I think I can maybe get Jerry to talk a little bit about those new tools and a partnership we have with IBM we have a new set of eyes and basically a new series of analytical capabilities that maybe will tell us we've actually already found something of interest elaborate on that a little Jerry yeah so one way that we can look at the data differently is to take a large quantity of data stored on a disk and then put up into the cloud and then do kinds of processing on the data that are impossible to do in real time and we can also we're testing ideas for looking for planetary alignments whenever two planets line up with respect to our view from Earth we imagine that if there's communication going between those two planets like maybe this is a civilization that's happening both Bannock of the traffic system folks right well yeah there there are such systems and so when when that alignment happens we might be in a perfect position to capture their communication signals because it just blows by the other planet and some of it reaches our telescope so we're trying a lot of a thing Oh machine learning I have to say it was it was years before I could even imagine our machine learning might actually be able to apply to this problem but we had a hackathon event and we are currently doing a code challenge principally with IBM but also another industrial partners and to to develop to see you know to try some ideas with machine learning so we brought in some of the best people people whose job it is to do machine learning in Silicon Valley into all volunteers and in a couple of days they were able to put together programs that were astonishingly good at categorizing signals this is something that you know I've been working on my whole career you know but it's it's machine learning is really changing the game a lot of ways one thing that maybe not everybody in the audience understands is that the backend as it's called which is you know the analysis part of the Allen telescope array make certain assumptions about what kind of signal to look for and it is designed to do that in specialized hardware and software so you know we have Moore's law here in the valley tell us how we could change that so we do better than one part in 10 to the fourth of the data well we have said that what we're looking for is signals that are obviously engineered and in the radio we've taken that to mean signals that are complete that are extremely compressed in frequency they occupy only one or two channels on the radio dial because natural Astrophysical emissions are our broadband they cover many frequencies our communications technologies our broadband cover many frequencies but these artifacts would be telling us that this is not something that mother nature created this is something that was engineered well somewhere between those extremely simple artifacts and extremely complex efficient almost noise like broadband signals there's there's quite a range and what we're talking to do is that we can use machine learning to move us along and allow us to detect not only the artifacts but signals that have information content and are spread out in frequency but in fact have structure that isn't anything that's natural and that's what we're trying to learn to do with the machine learning deep learning kinds of programs and if we can figure out how to do that then we look and say how can we make it more efficient so that instead of having to save a lot of data and process it offline we can actually move this up the pipeline and make it part of our real-time signal processing these classification schemes maybe you could also explain why it is that real-time has such an advantage not everybody does real-time science the wild signal was found as you say by you know a recorded data collection system yeah I spent my whole career so I need to say no more well success because when you see something once and you have no way of following up on it immediately you you can't you really are stymied on how to say whether that was of interest or just noise or interference and so what we do is is we observe multiple targets mostly stars that are nearby at this point it's it's stars that are very nearby and we look at multiple targets at once we require that any signals that are found we can immediately that is it within 90 seconds begin to follow up on them again we do test to make sure that the signal is seen in only one of the three directions we're looking and isn't coming in scattering into the telescope and seen in more than one beam we do all of these these tests autumn in an automated fashion but we do it to be sensitive to signals whose persistence is limited is there's a fabric all correctly there's like six layers of filtering and analytics that I'll complete culminate in a decision that says this is interesting whether you've yet further explanation or not and and for those events that happen only once but it could actually be a distant laser accelerating a spacecraft and just having to pass over our our telescope four systems four signals that are transient we've known since we wrote SETI 2020 back at the turn of the century that what we should and do is try and build a system that looks at all the sky all the time so don't want to be not home when the phone rings are they right exactly and and we're still trying to figure out how to do that in the radio we're again compute limited right now and you'll hear a little bit later about how we might be doing in the optical for those of you who don't know the the WoW signal there's a story about it on our website if you're if you're curious but it's a kind of famous event that happened at Ohio State in 1970 2077 and for those of you old enough like Seth and me and others who came from the Civil War you remember data printouts on that green and white print out sheets that that's how we interfaced and interacted with computers in those days that was the graphic user interface as it were and one morning this of researchers at Ohio State who were doing this Radio Astronomy said he work came and looked at the printout and there were some numbers there that stood out as being anomalous - compared to anything else and the scientists wrote in the margins Wow with a couple of exclamation points and that has since been known as the WoW signal and of course it was never found again in spite of many efforts but that's why what as Jill is saying you know all-sky all the time but also real time is so important this endeavor now incidentally about the while the 40th anniversary of that event is coming up in August and so in honor of that we've been doing some new kinds of observations on that part of the sky where we're looking at rather a large patch of sky around the direction where the telescope was pointed when the wireless signal was observed and we're doing kind of new kinds of analysis and new ways of looking at other possibilities that other explanations of the WoW signal that maybe haven't been tested yet other hypotheses about what it could have been and I won't give you the answer yet so you'll have to wait but yeah lintel Narayana Allen telescope array is doing Wow Redux right right so yeah well maybe there'll be another round Wow - sometimes the second film is better yeah Kari I want to get back to this matter of improving the performance of the existing equipment I mean obviously if you're going to improve the speed of Seti you could build more antennas alright that's one way to go that would improve sensitivity that would have a lot of benefits but aluminum doesn't get cheaper with time whereas things like you know computing power does so here's a way to improve things by two orders of magnitude maybe a factor of 100 right now is that like can you make an analogy would say if you gave Captain Cook look we're going to take that old hole yours you know that thing runs on sales we're going to give you a steam-powered ship and it's a hundred times faster only 100 times faster but you know what do you found more islands for unit time I mean is is this going to make the difference a factor hundred is a big factor yeah well although we don't know when we're going to find the signal there's some period of time that we're going to have to search until we find it and so we want to get through that period of time as quickly as possible so if we can search quickly then we can look at enough stars and eventually find that signal after having done the requisite amount of work with our telescope as it is we we know that we can improve it by a factor of a hundred and that means bringing that time when we find the signal 100 times closer to us and time this is also a little bit book like Jill's marvelous analogy with the measuring cup it's one thing if you stick the measuring cup in the ocean and find no whales but it's another if you can stick a thousand or a million or ten million measuring cups at at the same time well probability goes up quite a bit faster and more compelling way to look well bill in some ways I mean we're talking about new hardware and new software to run on that new hardware right I mean we have things like the kind of specialized computers that run video games it's over the highest technologies always with video games it's easy yes yeah and you know this is this is this is a project that we should do a factor of 100 is not to be sneezed at do we have the talent and the money to do this not yet we you know undertaking the advancements of these instruments is not only a technological challenge and every human resource challenge it's also a financial challenge so the since NASA at this time does not fund zeti endeavors per se they fund a lot of the research we do at the SETI Institute but our radio and optical SETI projects are funded by philanthropic interests and the general public and so if you're going to do things like invest in advancing the technology on the back end of these telescopes or if you want to do more dishes to your point aluminum's the same price about as it was when we built the instrument you know these things take capital investment I'd say you know we're short on both the capital investment and the and resources in order to really you know give this a hundred or a thousand fold increase and that has nothing to do with the quality of our resources they're extraordinary but just the quantity just you know what kind of what number of people are what kind of talent we're talking also about new kinds of talent new kinds of technology it's digital signal processing it's machine learning it's software and programming it's digital electronics and logic digital signal processing and so forth so there's a lot that goes into this endeavor and and of course it you know like so many endeavors money makes it happen ok I want to thank our panel for giving us look into the crystal ball what's coming down the pike for setting what could come down the pike thank you very much [Applause] okay this is Elliot Gillum and I'd like to say you're a director at the SETI Institute but you're not an employee so I maybe you should explain take a CLE because this is mostly I just want you to tell what it is that we're doing here we have a fundraising campaign on IndieGoGo it's called laser SETI laser se and you know it's an optical SETI experiment under that that means we're not looking for radio signals with this experiment we're looking for flashing lights in the sky but more than just flashing lights in the sky laser lights in the sky and that's a critical difference why look for laser flashes anybody here it's Mike there we go microphones on now there's lots of reasons to look for lasers one we don't know many of the parameters of the SETI search and that includes what frequency of light they might use and there's lots of reasons why they might use lasers we use lasers for tons of things in our technology today they might use it to signal us they might use it to accelerate spacecraft because beam propulsion happens to circumvent some of the great difficulties in accelerating spacecraft to to high velocities thanks to Einstein and we might be looking we might be looking at the very short laser flashes in the radio regime if you're on the air for a you know microsecond or something I mean that's going to be hard to find but with a laser flash that might be possible to find yeah so the they could be pointing a laser at us full time or they could be just pinging once a day once a year once a century they could be doing as Jill referenced earlier powering a spacecraft where you want the beam to fully cover the sail otherwise you've wasted the mass of the sail so the beam is necessarily going to spill out around the sail and so as as the spacecraft passes between us and the source of the laser we would see the beam hit us twice the part that spills over on the far near side and then the far side and so we would see two brief flashes as as the spacecraft passed between between us and that would be depending on exactly where they are and what they're doing it might last a millisecond it might last a second but it's a it's a fascinating possibility that I think is worth considering and particularly because it doesn't require them to be trying to contact us they could just be doing their own thing trying to get from A to B about their interplanetary business well let's say something about that that the question of alien sociology get a lot of questions about alien sociology and as Chris Chad the SETI Institute years ago said well the data set on alien sociology is very sparse okay okay true enough but on the other hand you know the radio experiments do make the assumption that they're kind of relentlessly targeting the earth when I say relentlessly at least four minutes right they're targeting us with a signal and you might think yeah of course they're going to do that but why would they do that right they if they're more than 70 light years away none of our signals have reached them right you know before the war we didn't have the high frequency high powered signals that could reach them so if they're more than 70 light years away and let's face it most of the universe is then they might not have any reason to target us other than the fact that there's oxygen in the atmosphere so they know there's life here but they don't know if there's anything intelligent so as a high school science fair project somebody has a big laser and they ping the earth every two weeks something we could could not find with the current optical SETI experiments now currently the the best optical SETI experiments look at targets for roughly a minute and so they it's it's reasonable that you could repoint a mirror and and hit lots of targets within a minute so it's it's a valid exclusion of the parameter space to say we are not being pinged this often but they make a trade-off because they have a very small field of view it's a little little bigger than the size of the the Sun of the moon and so they want to they want to look around and not not a place too much on one part of the sky but that means they can't look for very long and though it's easy to miss so it could be short years ago I remember Jack Welch is here in the audiences as mentioned once said well if I were among the aliens and I wanted to contact the Earthlings I would probably want to make a signal so strong even a cow could detect it and for a while there was a project called cow City not Tau Ceti that's a difference but Cal City and in a way I mean on something that's so bright in the sky but obviously there's nothing that is that bright the cows have not reported anything they don't publish but there could be something going off you know for a microsecond in almost any part of this guy any part of this guy you know a microsecond every two two weeks just a little flash the same brightness is a six magnitude star 5th magnitude star and we wouldn't know so tell me what this new instrument laser said he is trying to fund could do well so it it's designed to be the most practical way to cover all the sky all the time so we placed cameras in observatories around the world it only takes six observatories three in each hemisphere to see this guy once we want to have 12 because that way if we see a signal we have a lot more confidence if it's something transient like Jill said in the radio it's a lot harder to know that a signal that you receive just for a brief flash really came from there and wasn't just an airplane that happened to be at the right point and light up his transponder or something like that and so if we're going to look for a transient signal and be able to say this is it and hang our reputation on it then we want to be able to know with extremely high confidence don't tell me how where where is this project stay I mean we have this IndieGoGo campaign you're trying to raise $100,000 to fund this but it you know it isn't just pie in the sky good idea you've been working on this for a while yeah it's actually not even our first good idea we have we just on this project I should be clear we started out with with one way of doing it and we think we've improved the idea so that we get even cheaper even more robust to be able to sit out in the field because if you're going to have all this travel these instruments out in the field for years staring at the sky you want them to work reliably and so we we try to minimize the cost for doing this and make sure that the science is going to be reliable if we if we get the flash and so let's say let's not just say let's presume that we'll be able to get the money to build this equipment you're the guy in charge when are these things going to be scanning this guy looking for those short bright flashes I guess that that has to do with exactly when the money comes in if someone were to write a check right now I would say great let me go build the first and second observatories really prove out the thing I don't want to go spend two million dollars on hardware until I know it's absolutely going to work so I would I would do it in in two phases if I if I had you know that that bank account that you slammed in with all the money if if the money comes in slower than that then there's intermediary phases that that will will go through to prove out the instrument do as much science as we can and try to keep building on on that learning okay Scrooge McDuck I think yes yes everybody's forgotten Scrooge McDuck ended here a Bitcoin heart can't swim in our digital currency yeah okay so within a couple years we could no definitely yeah and you've tried out a prototype I mean you know that the scheme works right because the problem with optical SETI so far is people have used photomultiplier tubes plenty of people in the audience who know what that is it's very fast you can see very sharp pulses very short pulses but you know you get one pixel on the sky and the idea here is not to get one pixel on the sky yeah so we try it out lots of ideas on paper we built two of them so we have a prototype of our current generation device that has a very wide field of view it's a very robust instrument it's easy to build and maintain and we can we could build that out relatively quickly kind of this as quickly as we ordered the parts and could get on airplanes but so it can see a huge fraction of the sky with the specialized readout that we do is this very high time resolution great well you've all heard him laser SETI just go to IndieGoGo right laser SETI meters IV org or steady down here oh we have the video clip I forget yes nevermind okay we can run the video it's 40 minutes can we do that I mean it's impossible yeah there we go are they out there the alien creatures in the movies are fictional but can we find the real ones we have never found life beyond Earth never but there's a new way to search one that the SETI Institute and you could make possible that the aliens know we're here there hasn't been enough time for our FM radio our radar our television to reach them but they will know that there's oxygen in Earth's atmosphere they will know that this planet is encrusted with biology that might be incentive enough for them to paint earth with a signal to see if anyone's at home and that signal could be the flash of a laser which can be seen from light-years away powerful lasers for signaling could be built by any advanced society they could use them to propel their spacecraft and the thing is that brief flashes of light should have in the blink of an eye could be in our skies right now and we wouldn't know it the SETI experiments that look for brief light signals examine only one star system at a time that's like looking for a needle in a haystack using tweezers but that's yesterday's technology and there's a better way a much better way I spent the last two years designing the ideal device for practical all-sky survey with novel optics and specialized processing we can leverage off-the-shelf hardware to minimize cost while still being able to detect pulses shorter than a millisecond with the array of these spread throughout the globe we can monitor the entire night sky continuously for the first time ever in the universe as vast as we know ours to be it's difficult to believe they're not out there that's why we're intent on raising $100,000 to build and test prototypes for this revolutionary new telescope all right the next thing on the agenda Thank You Elliott but don't go anywhere because we're going to have some Q&A so all the panelists should come on up here because you make it one of those questions that you know you'd never heard before so oh okay all right we do have a mic up here if you have a question you have to sort of line up yeah there's two microphones so so the bad news with events like this is they never come for free there's do things that happen nowadays with increasing frequency no matter what you're doing and that includes going to Walgreens to get contact lens solution that is you're either going to get a promotion or you're going to get a survey to ask you how the experience was so we're going to spare you the survey but we do want to promote this amazing new project this optical SETI project called laser City so as was mentioned it's an IndieGoGo campaign that is now live it went live today it's already I think closing in on the first $20,000 and we're very very excited yeah [Music] very excited about this project and it really is a game changer in the world of Seti not only does it for the first time really bring in a comprehensive way a new modality if you will or a new search arena in terms of different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum being surveyed but it is something that does this across the entire sky all the time all over the planet and that's never been done before with any technology not with radio not with optical so this is really groundbreaking and profound work I'd like to think that in the 33 years of the Institute's history it's not the first good idea but but it's right up there it's a great idea so if you go to if you just remember laser SETI org that'll take you to the India gogo page and take a look the videos there there's for the Star Trek fans there's a couple of nice supportive remarks from levar burton and and it's a really wonderful project making that project happen means we deploy the first observatory we test out the the instrumentation the electronics the signal processing and we make this a reality and then we deployed this globally for what really could be a game changer in the SETI world so remember lazer city org please take a look at it and you know let your friends know use your amazing social media contacts and let the world know about this so thanks Elliot for for that it's an exciting project and I think now we've got some questions we've got some panelists ready to answer so why don't we start with you good evening I have a question for Jill a sort of a career question but also a science question so from memory the Drake Equation has like six or seven seven variables and when you started your career they were well we thought we knew the first one about like the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy and we were wrong I think and as and nothing about the others nothing at all and now we've got like I think the first three we've got a pretty good handle the number of stars and percentage that have planets the percentage that are earth sized things and I have zone but the you know that's three out of seven and even though the other four are like complete unknowns we it feels like we should have a better handle on the probability or the number of alien civilizations but I think it's still like no closer than when you started or does it feel like you have a better handle on the asymptotes well the Drake Equation is a wonderful way to organize our ignorance but you can't calculate anything with it because there are so many unknown terms what I can say is that over my career the universe has begun to appear more bio-friendly right exoplanets planets outnumber stars extremophiles we know that life can live in conditions which we would have said when I was a student are absolutely uninhabitable so those two factors mean that there's potentially a lot a lot of habitable real estate out there but today just as back when we started we don't yet know if any of it is inhabited either by microbes or mathematicians so could have gone the other way I think we could be it could have been that planets are very rare that have been that indeed what we thought about life when I was a student that really narrow range of being able to to to make a living was right but it was dead wrong and so there's a lot of possibilities and if you know it is populated with a lot of mathematicians they're also probably doing the math and since the Kepler mission is now told us that you know the number of planets and the habitable zone of their sun-like star is something in the billions you know the odds are pretty good maybe we'll meet those mathematician microbes there you go you're on this side yeah that's really it laser beams no matter what still diverged not as rapidly as other sources of light and so a farther away a star is where they're launching laser-beam the weaker it's going to be with the time we get here so have you sort of worked out a parameter space of how far away it has to be and if it's that far away how hard powerful does the beam have to be yeah i've run through a number of scenarios you're right they're all all light sources fall off with r-squared with Optical you can focus beams many many many times narrower than with with radio from a thousand light-years away we could eliminate some area about the size of the orbit of Mars and so that's a significant advantage when you when you look at the how far away could you detect a signal the problem is you have you have an unknown we don't know how big their laser is the focusing is is actually much easier the question is really how many photons do they put into the into the laser and we can do the math for what we could do and that that works out to be thousands of stars around us but if you imagine that they've you know we harness what is it 1% of the sun's energy is kind of the energy budget of the earth if you imagine a more advanced society having you know 10% 100 percent you know more you could imagine much more powerful lasers and in fact that's what we're already planning on doing with with a we humanity I should be the Royal we focusing what is it ten million ten kilowatt lasers to accelerate a spacecraft at 20% of the speed of light and lasers that bright can be seen extremely far away and in fact some people already talking about illuminating to the event horizon if you imagine that technology extended a little bit beyond what we can do that you could eliminate everything along a line of sight so that's that's what we don't know in the technology we have now today on earth which we haven't deployed in this manner but it theoretically could be between combination of telescopes with big mirrors and powerful lasers which we have built we know that we could outshine the Sun by a factor of 10,000 times so we can make a pretty bright beacon of our own just you know where we are where let's say a hundred years into technology as a civilization thank you yes I can't think of any correlation but maybe you guys can is there any reason to think that if you have a place for an optical signal you might look for a radio signal or vice versa so if you found a signal in one of your systems you'd look for in the other system actually that's a good idea and there's a group in Japan that has started doing that they're running observing campaigns with both optical and radio telescopes looking at the same sources at the same time yeah that's right yeah so we have simultaneously observed with optical instruments and with our radio tell that's the you know the traffic system if you saw the New York Times headline few months back where the this planetary system in a stars of 40 light years from here was discovered with seven planets around at least three of which are in the habitable zone or believed to be in habitable zone of That star and so that was an optical observation and we've been using the Allen telescope array to probe that system including some of the things Jerry was talking about before looking at those alignments of planets and seeing if we could snoop in on some conversations one quick comment Phil and I were in engineering physics together at Cornell she fired away the most famous person from our class and we're very proud Gill I'm John Faulkner and I'm happy to tell you that a few short years ago Bob crafts and I and my partner had breakfast with Margaret Burbidge and her daughter Sarah in the hotel Wycombe which we went to right up until Bob's unfortunate death two years ago for massive opera extravaganzas and as recently as within the last month my friend and former graduate student contemporary and the Fred Hoyle giant narlikar and his wife Mangala had a meal prepared by Sarah Burbidge in her home with Margaret present and Margaret does remember a few significant events he's in her upper 90s right now and one of the things she remembers is that when she was appointed the director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory for the first time the title of astronomer royal of Great Britain was detached from that position and given to a man Graham Smith of Manchester and if I may add something else I knew or knew of both Seth and you when each of you were separately graduate students Seth I knew in the between 64 and 66 at Caltech and you I cannot remember the first time I met you but anyway you were at that time both what my disabled adult daughter Sarah would say it was when you was little graduate students now but I also think I know something nomic about you that perhaps few people in the audience here or your professional colleagues might know and that is that jill has the almost unique experience of writing her first paper that was also her last paper now let me explain how her first paper became her last paper because she did actually publish many more papers unfortunately in the year that I came to Santa Cruz to start the group in theoretical astrophysics they are in 1969 Jill's supervisor a very famous expert in stellar structure and evolution unfortunately died of a heart attack but there were four students left who decided they would write a final paper to come out of the group and their names were tartar Schweitzer Alan and Lee Bert but if you order them in the right direction it becomes the acronym L a s T so her first paper was the last paper there we are in time thank you so I had a question how do you know that the signal that you're getting is not like space Deborah's which every switch is still alive and it still has some activity going on that's something that we struggle with knowing that the detected signal is actually coming from someone else's technology not our own or that it's not coming from a natural source of emission the part of the answer is the type of signals that we look for we're pretty sure that they can't be generated by nature and then as to discriminating between their technology and our own technology we go to a lot of different lengths to do that we've we've simultaneously observed with widely separated telescopes that allows us to use the Earth's rotation to determine whether something's coming from a long distance on the sky we now use an interferometer which helps us again localize the source and discriminate against something that's near and our own satellites for example but that is indeed probably our biggest challenge with whatever compute power we have we're having to allocate a significant fraction of it to doing this discrimination job - just to make sure that it isn't our own technology that we discover though are not yet certain from where it's coming from well we have sent we have had what we call false positives that is we have detected signals that we thought or exactly what we were looking for unfortunately as we continue to observe them or longer times we finally figured out that it was human may man-made technologies and so no we haven't yet detected a signal from an extraterrestrial technology that's a great question and then I'll do it what's that I want to add some piece of that so that's one of the things where we you know we have to worry about any optical as well but looking all the time I think it's actually more likely that we'll find something new and natural no one's ever pointed an instrument at the sky like this covered this much sky and so one of the things I like about SETI is it forces you to learn all about nature so that you can find something that is extra natural and so it's it's I think that's something you always have to be prepared for and it's more statistically it's the more likely outcome we found zero signals and lots of new nature so where's the young scientist who asked that question okay so that was a great question the address of the Institute is 189 Ornato Avenue in Mountain View so I'm expecting your resume and I can assure you that I was not asking such perceptive questions at urate so will we look forward to working with you ok great question evening Michael moon a question for all of you it occurs to me that most of what we know about our history as a species comes not from signals of the be written on clay tablets or papyrus or anything else but from detritus and so I'm wondering what avenues are being explored to find say the remnants of k2 civilization through infrared detection or and something larger now that lie goes online evidences of the civilization that are not to get to arthur c clarke on you right but indistinguishable from magic want to take that one set not not a whole heck of a lot but there's an economist actually in Virginia Hansen is his name right I think he's at George Mason it may have the affiliation incorrect but he has suggested your idea in a in a series of papers and talks and he's saying what in other universes three times is always here so there could be a sort of civilizations out there that go from one star system to another and they leave their garbage because it's too expensive to carted away right and the kind of garbage that he was suggesting we might be able to find would be radioactive waste that's one thing okay more specifically the idea of waste II infrared observations there have been some people who sort of analyzed the results from infrared telescopes of which there are many of course in space and try to see look does this star have an excess of infrared maybe it's a you know type two civilization as you say and so this is the waste heat from the Dyson swarm or something like that that's been suggested for the case of Trappist one you know it may be that not Travis $1000 yes KIC a46 28:51 if you know better that way but so that's been done too but the problem there is that of course a lot of stars have a lot of infrared radiation because they have dust around them and so forth but the idea is a very good one there's a great talk in the in the Institute colloquium series by Jason Wright on this topic w RI gh T I encourage you one of the study talks yes yeah one of the 400 out there only on YouTube and I'll just quickly correct Seth it's actually 846 2852 thank you for playing [Laughter] hi I was um you asked the question you mentioned earlier that if if if somebody does signal s you really don't you want to make sure that your home when somebody calls you have any type of digital auditory or visual answering machine to to capture the data because what if your for instance that your have a signal in your 24 book already you know the spanning somewhere else in the universe and they've been trained how do you how do you manage that I think you may have answered it earlier there are you doing yeah well you know astronomers are always taking pictures of the sky in various ways and those images go back hundreds of years that we can go back and look at them and look for like when they discover tabi star they went back to learn if if it had been dipping for a long time and indeed it seemed to have been dimming for the last hundred years so we have that kind of data however the difficulty is that there's so much information that you can get from the sky as a function of time a huge range of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation and all possible time scales from nanoseconds to years and in order to probe all of that space well we can't afford to store all the data that's really what did you it gets back to the whole issue though as well of you know the compelling science or idea behind this all sky all the time optical survey at least this is for the first time some way of surveying all of the sky for signals of some kind all of the time that hasn't been done in radio frequency that's very difficult to do if you have two point antennas at even regions of the sky let alone individual points of light in the sky there's a lot of sky to cover there's a lot of time to cover so it's you know the point you raise is is a huge challenge but again that's one of the exciting things the laser SETI project but also the Allen telescope array is the only instrument in the world that's doing radio said he work 365 days a year there's nothing no other instrument on the planet that's doing that and Jerry said we can't afford to store all the data but we do store data on every signal that is detected and with the machine learning what we've been trying to do is take years of data and see if there's any correlation with signals found at one frequency and signals found at another frequency we're calculating the density of signals found as a function of position on the sky and and so we're looking for we've kept data about things we found and now we're looking for additional patterns in those data alright so if our panelists and audience will endure we'll just take these last questions for people who have already come up but then we were holding you over so we appreciate you all right thank you for coming here tonight and I have two questions first question for a writer writer and Jill as well doing this process what have you learned from each other like you you really appreciate as a women like sometimes we are see little girls and they feel like I'm I'm not worse than a boy or like I can do whatever I can do who have you seen from each other like you appreciate that aspect of being a woman hmm let us start I love Sarah's writing voice it is um it's extremely energetic and she makes up words and I I have just been in awe of how fast she can write thank you and I think I would say I have learned you know said he hasn't had an easy road since it started it's had as you as you might have gathered some funding troubles in the past some political troubles and there were a lot of times when Jill and her colleagues could have quit doing what they're doing but instead they kept doing it and as a person who was writing a book which is less difficult than doing study but still pretty hard and you can you can also quit any time I don't know if it's a keeping going I guess the chill did a good job of that my second question is about a definition of intelligence la oh gosh are you happy no not knowing that that's like have we changed the standard of standard of definition looking for intelligent signals like what you say radiation signals or anything maybe even among the radio signal data they have that definition of standard evolved from the first day that he has been said and if there has evolved once you start using machine learning to mind data to analyze that data how are you going to guide a machine learning process if we guide them that machine learning will be very biased by our human destination of intelligence we might ignore some actually we might have already found something well actually intelligence in this sense is a bit of a misnomer we call it the search for extraterrestrial intelligence but we don't know how to find intelligence what we do is use technology as our proxy for intelligence so we're looking for evidence of someone else's technology and certainly there may be technologies that we don't yet understand and wouldn't wouldn't recognize but if we find something that says technology we will infer that at some time at anyway intelligent technologists created that technology so we sort of you know duck around this very important question about what is intelligence and what might be missed because we don't define it broadly enough we're searching for technology I would add that we are guilty of looking for ourselves so back in when Frank Drake's day p.m. radio was big and so obviously the question we're admitting a.m. radio signal something similar to that course then FM was invented and then you know we have satellites now that have very very complex ways of communicating and so we have always tried to devise methods to find things that we can create however there's a hope that with unguided machine writing basically we just throw all of our data at the machine and let it tell us what's interesting that maybe we can expand into signals that we haven't thought of and go ahead on and someone who is actually thinking about the code that does the detecting for the optical SETI project on the drive here I can say that there's there's kind of a balance of on some level you're looking for things you don't understand detector you're you're trying to build you're trying to throw away all the things you think you understand and it's easier to throw away airplanes than it is to throw away nature that we don't know yet and so you have to sort of it depends on the instrument I would say but you have to strike this balance of how naive can I be and how much knowledge do I have to insert in order to make sure that I don't just build an airplane detector or a cloud detector or a moon detector certainly there's a you know a lot of difference between microbes which is perhaps what we're most likely to first find in terms of life beyond Earth and we might find it very close by and technology or you know civilizations or beings capable of making their presence known through technology there's an awful lot of biology on earth that its communicative and intelligent but not technological so there are researchers at the SETI Institute who are also trying to probe those very same questions for example is it possible that certain types of complex biology and intelligent biology leave a detectable imprint for example in their atmosphere that we could if we could identify that fingerprint say and then detect from a great distance and we now know where to look because there's lots of exoplanets and we can probe their atmospheres with instrumentation might we be able to find by signatures or evidence of life complex life and perhaps even intelligent life without yet being able to see evidence of technology so where we're trying to probe that intelligent spectrum if you will from you know the very simplest of organisms on up to complex biology and it and intelligence in its broadest definitions alright thank you Oh dr. Carter um I have not met you yet name is Adam Glickman um I come here with unusual what should we send to the moon this year that's a half kilogram in weight and could be split between two two hundred gram module but hold on that's still too big how about if maybe study has they were somewhere between 20 grams and 50 what might be possible and then what might be possible with a hundred gram chip of wildness I believe that to it magic imagination especially around new material new principles new frequencies perchance I'm wondering whether we could send some sort of mylar structure folded that could unfold with some kind of tensioning ring into a parabolic reflector to help us do moonbounce calibrations of our equipment a moon bounce guys it has been at an unusual moon bounce location I won't answer name where is gung-ho to retry that again oh okay thank you and thanks for the answer this is real I think we have a very strong chance of hitting the moon with a soft landing with a collaborative staging wien a pharma biotech study of course and there seems to be various labs of quite interested in what can we do in this valley with the unusual fun great ass - that's what I'm about here alright my name again had him Glickman thanks Adam thank you pleasure meeting him good man hi I just want to give you a question about like a planet that was discovered last year around Proxima Centauri B and it was it's 4.2 light years away or 25 trillion miles away I just wanna say like he how he was talking about like it could only take like 20 years is still a little bit of a while that by then I was talking about is like if we could like free spins inside so then they won't like age at all and then when they get there they like won't feel a difference at all do you want to go mall are humans would be advantageous it's a great idea how about this we'll just increase your lifespan to 150 and then it won't seem so bad nobody knows how to put you to sleep for you know 25 50 years and have you wake up yeah well Hollywood Hollywood has faster than light travel but yeah that's an interesting but remember these plans to send something to Proxima Centauri right they are going to send something about the size of a 50-cent piece right it's very small so but they might send a whole lot of them yeah they sent alarm to some of them but you know if you want to go along then we have to dice you up into I would like that or you can figure out how to build bigger lasers so we can launch bigger space and by the way I figured out through the mathematical microbes they're called algebra that's it I've been waiting all night for something that bad didn't take too long a great question though and another recruit so I don't want you dicing up our recruits if you don't mind again so how am I supposed to follow that one [Laughter] I was just wondering since there's getting to be more and more broad surveys like dark energy survey LSST is coming and they have public the data will be public is there any way that you folks can use that and make other people spend all the money on building stuff and getting and keeping the data data mining is going to be a big part of our future and yes so that's you're absolutely correct there are a lot of new instruments coming online and the question is at what cadence do they or the data are they going to be sensitive to very short time scales but we should be we should be mining all kinds of databases they're there I know SST is one other big focus is history so I don't know if it'll be but if the champions on the microsecond time or two hour now that's one of the ideas on that we did on paper atlases tea covers this guy once every three days and it doesn't have any spectral capability and so all you would know is that there was a flash and how would you know that that flash just wasn't a high altitude airplane or satellite glint or things like that that's why the spectroscopy is built into our instrument there's other ideas we've looked at we're like how about dizzy sorry the dark energy spectroscopic instrument I don't think I'm familiar with that one okay and I was thinking of other satellite telescopes that they usually take a number of exposures and throw out the transients in order to build the clearer common picture and so one of the things I've when I spoken with engineers on projects like that is to say well could you give us the transients and maybe we did that you know that there which one is it I can't remember now it is one that has a really wide field of view oh it's test that's one test has a really wide field-of-view and uses FPGAs for processing the data and so I thought well maybe after they do their first round of data we could get some part of the silicon-silicon on the FPGA to look at the different frames that they integrate and and start to do something that way but it's it's tricky because most traditional instruments even traditional radio telescopes are really not set up to throw away the false positives and so that's really what it comes down to in a lot of cases is you could we might have already gathered the pulse if you know it may be that maybe we didn't recognize it because maybe we just couldn't tell it from something else last question okay I'll try to make it a good one right now our society is mired in the technology of chemical rockets eventually we're going to want to get beyond that and we're going to be tired of taking the year to get to Mars or ten years to get to Saturn or things like that so we're going to move on to the next generation of rocketry which would be vision based rockets fusion based rockets and eventually at a matter based Rockets all three of which have one signal in common namely gobs of gamma radiation coming out the nozzle and it occurred to me that this might be a detectable signal for you folks since it tends to be fairly concentrated it also has the advantage of lasting for depending on what kind of burn you're doing several days several weeks a month something like that so that might be an indication of an intermediate class spacefaring Society indeed when gamma-ray burst sources were first detected but those are way too powerful I'm Way beloved well alright but I was going to tell you that several researchers did try to line them up in four-dimensional space-time to see if they were the accelerations on trajectories of spacecraft and I might also say that there has been if you will library research to explore this idea where people went through the gamma ray Explorer data to see if they could find something but if you do the numbers unfortunately it turns out that it's very hard to find a rocket that's using these kinds of propulsions from very far away and I say very far away the limits were like one Lightyear not not terribly great so all right well that includes our Q&A and it includes the the formal part of our evening again I want to thank you all so much for coming I want to thank our panelists of course most especially especially our author saris goals and Jill and Seth MC work with the singular exception of the bad pun yes yes so a couple of things there are steel books for sale outside Jill and Sarah will be here signing books for a little bit we do need to get them to dinner so but if you have a book and you'd like to design it they'll be doing that for a few minutes after the talk and I would remind you all that because this is now part of our ongoing study talks lecture series this will be uploaded to our YouTube channel in the coming day so you'll be able to find it here tomorrow afternoon for those of you follow us on Facebook we've been doing now a regular series of Facebook live events for the past several weeks and we try to make those events fun and lively and give an opportunity to meet the different scientists both our researchers at NASA Ames researchers out in the field and at the Institute and tomorrow's Facebook live event and two o'clock in the afternoon we'll be gentle and Sarah again talking about the book so you've had a chance but maybe your friends would like to to tune into that so that's a Facebook event tomorrow at two o'clock and again you can always find out what's going on at the SETI Institute by visiting us at SETI org we'd love to have you come and look and see what's going on we always have interesting stories about our science and commentary and perspectives on the work of our colleagues elsewhere so come often and and visit us and again we'll be doing the SETI talks starting up again in August and we'll be announcing that venue in the coming days with the next SETI talk being our REU students and their lightning talk series so we hope all of you will be able to come back and enjoy that and support those students who are over there giggling in fear right now as we speak thank you again all very much you

Channel: SETI Institute

Views: 26,369

Rating: 4.5135136 out of 5

Keywords: Elliot Gillum, Jill Tarter, Making Contact, Sarah Scoles

Id: RQgTWjyT1sQ

Length: 95min 17sec (5717 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2017