Naked Science - Alien Contact

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I just for a moment imagine a universe awash with life where we humans are not the only intelligent beings around what might these alien races look like could we communicate with them or even recognize them as intelligent and what would they make of our violent and dangerous species might they take one peep and decide not to bother with such primitive beings a planetary nursery filled with spiteful galactic infants on the other hand in our imaginary scenario they may enrich us with scientific knowledge beyond our imagination or could an encounter with aliens have a more destructive outcome it could be a bad day for humankind but relax it's just make-believe it could never happen could it welcome to our home the Milky Way our Sun is just one of a few hundred billion stars in this galaxy feeling small and insignificant yet now think of not just one but billions and billions of galaxies and you have the universe but how big is the universe it's impossible to measure it in terms of miles the numbers would be meaningless instead distances in space are measured in lightyears that's the distance light travels in one year and the speed light travels is about 186,000 miles per second try working that out on a calculator to save you the trouble one light year is a distance of nearly six trillion miles light takes 100,000 years just to cross our galaxy that means every time we look up at the stars we are looking back in time it takes millions and millions of years for light to reach us from other galaxies and light from the farthest regions of the universe takes billions of years what we are seeing our events that occurred before the earth even existed when the universe was in its infancy so with such an immense piece of real estate it's no surprise to learn that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on every Beach and desert on planet Earth so what are the chances of us being the only kids on the block the peepers are we're the only ones are we have our know after thousands of years thinking that we are unique scientists are making some astonishing discoveries here on earth in our solar system and in deep space some scientists now believe that we are just a few years away from our first contact we'll know we're not alone between the year 2020 and the year 2025 this will be one of the biggest if not the biggest story of all time and what will he or she look like will they even be a he or a she or could we have already had a close encounter of the Third Kind some people believe that aliens have visited us in the past if they do contact us one of the greatest scientific minds of all time has a dire warning for the human race professor Stephen Hawking may be suffering from motor neuron disease but he holds Lucchese and chair at Cambridge University a post once held by Isaac Newton when Stephen Hawking speaks the scientific world listens the history of advanced race is meeting more primitive people on this planet there's not very happy but they were the same species I think it would be a disaster many scientists accept that Hawking's gut feeling is a valid scenario but human nature is to be inquisitive it's highly unlikely we turn down the opportunity of making contact with an alien race no matter how dangerous it could prove to be and today the thought of life on another planet is no longer just the stuff of pulp novels and Hollywood fantasy for some of the best minds in astronomy it's starting to look like a near certainty naked science asks why scientists are now so confident that we are not alone in all of human history we had never seen a planet beyond the nine in our own solar system a tiny part of this vast universe but in 1995 the discovery of a planet some 40 light-years from Earth 51 peg be rocked the scientific world another planet another solar system another neighborhood in the vastness of space since that day rapidly advancing telescopes and computers have discovered more than a hundred other planets and we know we have only begun to scratch the surface the universe is huge beyond our ability to comprehend it but with our new search tools we can see more of the objects and activity within it there are almost certainly millions of other planets out there naked science travels to the Lick Observatory to meet Deborah Fisher from San Francisco State University she's one of a new breed of scientist a planet hunter thanks to Fisher and a few other astronomers in this field we now know of over 130 planets outside our solar system I find it incredibly humbling to now realize that um you know ours our Sun is really quite common has a system of planets like other stars have a lot of people would like to think that we're very special and unique but I think it's it's very natural and comforting that this is the way you know the universe is named but how do you discover planets light-years away from Earth Debra Fischer monitors distant stars watching their motion if there is a planet orbiting a star it will exert a slight gravitational pull on the star Fischer can measure that gravitational wobble billions of miles away down to a few feet per second an amazing achievement but the planet she's finding are all giant planets more like our own Saturn for life to exist a planet has to match a tough set of criteria from studying our solar system scientists yes that small rocky planets offer the best chances for life as we know it chemicals the building blocks of life needs something to grip onto and a solid surface allows that to happen a planet has to be the right size - much smaller than the size of the earth its gravity won't be strong enough to preserve the atmosphere it would just escape into space it's not just size equally important is location a planet has to be near enough its Sun for liquid water to exist as far as we know liquid water is essential for every form of life - near the Sun like Venus where the surface temperature is a broiling 864 degrees Fahrenheit the water would just boil away to far away and water freezes but on earth liquid water is everywhere more than two-thirds of the surface is covered with it we want to find planets that that might harbor life we want to find planets that are at a distance from the star where it's not so hot that water is vaporized not so cold that water has just locked up in ice but you know just right the Goldilocks zone where water exists in puddles and in June 2004 European scientists found the smallest planet yet outside our solar system it's just 14 times the size of Earth and may have a rocky surface a kind of super earth and where you have a rocky surface there might be liquid water scientists think that this is the largest Iraqi planet can be any bigger and it would collapse it's 50 light years away in the southern constellation Altair it's one of three planets orbiting around a Sun much like ours but the discovery of smaller earth-size planets will require a leap of technology and it's already being built the space telescope the kepler observatory is expected to launch in 2007 mission will survey thousands of our nearest stars when a planet crosses between a star and the telescope the size of the planet can be determined by measuring the amount of star lighted blocks scientists are optimistic they'll find at least 50 earth sized planets within 10 years of the Kepler telescopes launched there is one group of scientists who've been looking for signs of alien life for over 20 years we next traveled to the SETI Institute in California the birthplace of alien hunting SETI is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and this is where some of the best minds in the world are engaged in a complex sophisticated long-term endeavor we meet seth shostack the institute's senior astronomer he's dedicated most of his professional life to searching for alien intelligence my personal interest of course in SETI I think that that goes back to my childhood I can remember when I was 10 years old buying these books about flying saucers for szostak and his colleagues are searching for aliens by listening to the radio it may seem basic but radio is a powerful source of communication radio signals are energy waves radiating out in every direction as well as reaching your radio and TV sets the signals also Lake into space and they have been doing that for the last 72 a hundred years let's just hope our programmers haven't put off any listening aliens these radio waves are traveling outwards at the speed of light it takes just over a second for a signal to reach the moon from Earth sounds fast but given the interstellar distances involved even the speed of light ends up seeming like snail mail if we receive a message from the other side of our galaxy tomorrow it would have been sent 100,000 years ago that long ago on earth some early ancestors of ours were taking their first steps 100,000 years later we've at last become advanced enough to listen out for a message from the stars but where is the best place to try the answer Arecibo in Puerto Rico home to one of the world's largest radio telescopes the Arecibo dish sits in a giant natural crater it's a monumental thousand feet in diameter this dish is so sensitive it could pick up a cellphone as far away as Jupiter since 1997 Arecibo has been home to project Phoenix the SETI Institute scan of about a thousand stars similar to our Sun within 200 light-years of Earth that's the cosmic equivalent of just looking in your backyard but the search has to start somewhere millions of radio channels are scanned simultaneously the universe is alive with radio noise a sort of galactic white noise but these signals traumatic as they may be are random natural events SETI's electronic ears are tuned to hear signals made on purpose signals that indicate life something that stands out a voice calling out through the background chaos of space it would be a constant tone or a slowly varying tone so like a flute tone very purist tone actually you know in a sea of noise I guess you could say it would be like a they're playing a flute note as while standing next to a waterfall naturally occurring signals are spread across a broad part of the spectrum but an artificial transmission like a TV picture or radio broadcast is squeezed into a tiny part of the radio dial a narrowband signal we're just looking for the kind of signal would that would tell us that somebody has built a transmitter we're just looking for the evidence that they their transmitter is on after 40 years of listening out for a message we've heard nothing but this kind of search could take years at the moment we're just taking our first tentative steps but is there anything else we can do naked science next looks at a new form of interstellar communication a light so bright it burns a million times brighter than our Sun we've learned that our galaxy is just one of billions in the universe scientists are now discovering new planets and solar systems but so far we've been waiting patiently for a message if there are any aliens out there it seems they've maintained radio silence but maybe they're trying to contact us some other way naked science next travels to Berkeley in California ish no telescope to meet Dan Wertheimer an alien hunter for the last 25 years there are 200 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and billions of galaxies so it would be bizarre if we're the only ones he's not listening he's looking for a sign in the sky yeah Wertheimer heads up one of Berkeley's optical SETI programs Wow so there's another one so there's a lot of his team is searching for a very bright flash in the sky a pulse that may only last for a billionth of a second the most powerful lasers here on earth can produce a light a million times brighter than our Sun Wertheimer believes that using a laser may be the way that aliens try to catch our attention he thinks that aliens might use lasers to transmit a signal something like Morse code turning the laser on and off in short bursts the advantage of optical signals is that they're very directional they contain a huge contain a huge of information they can send us their whole library Congress all their music poetry literature science medicine perhaps they tell us how to get on the galactic internet communicating with civilizations all throughout the galaxy but how do the scientists tell the difference between starlight and artificial light a laser light flashing for just a billionth of a second would deliver to the telescope up to 10 particles of light called photons and that's very rare from a star even a bright star you don't get so many photons coming into your telescope in a billionth of a second the team monitor each star for a minute and then move on to the next one if there is no flash 10,000 stars have now been scanned but so far Dan Wertheimer has yet to see the light but I'm optimistic in the long run because the technology is changing so fast the telescope's are getting better the detectors are getting better we'll look at more and more stars eventually we'll look at hundreds of millions of stars we're gonna be doing a Sky Survey the Galactic plane so right now Earthlings are kind of in a primitive state we're just learning how we might communicate with ET there was a moment back in the 1960s when Nobel prize-winning British scientist professor Antony Hewish found what might have been an alien transmission from what looked more like a series of clotheslines than a radio receiver he and his team started to detect a regular series of pulses about a second apart what was absolutely amazing about this signal was that it was a succession of sharp pulses as if what we were looking at was a star just simply flashing well astronomical bodies don't do there one possibility obviously of anything artificial signals troops from outer space is that you're dealing with something intelligent and jokingly we call them lgm signals little bee men up there I don't think anybody seriously believed there but it was a possibility quite clearly there were no little green men to be found anywhere Hewish soon realized that what he'd found came from a natural source it was the signature of a dead star called a neutron star these dead stars spin at high speed sending out pulses like a lighthouse beam so if they haven't sent us a message maybe we should get in touch with them over 30 years ago NASA did just that by mailing a letter to the stars from all of us in 1972 the Space Agency launched pioneer 10 after visiting Jupiter the probe journeyed out into deep space today it's eight billion miles from Earth heading for the red star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus the spacecraft is due to reach its destination in a mere two million years if there's anyone home on any nearby planet they'll find a plaque on the side of the craft a greeting card from earth showing the location of planet Earth and a picture of what we look like the symbol for hydrogen the most common element in the universe is also depicted but there is another spacecraft even further away Voyager 1 is now the most distant man-made object in the solar system at some nine billion miles from Earth Voyager 1 is about to leave our solar system destined to wander the stars of the Milky Way perhaps forever if Voyager should encounter any alien beings it too carries a greeting a gold-plated Phonographic record attached to the side of the probe contains images natural sounds and music from Earth symbolic images explain how to play the record and where it comes from if we were to wait until some alien finds one of the space probes and replies it could take millions of years but why are the scientists so positive that there are other intelligent beings in the galaxy it's a simple case of numbers very large numbers it's estimated there are at least 70,000 million million million stars in the universe the big question is how many of those could be home to advance life back in 1961 the father of SETI science Frank Drake came up with an equation for calculating how many alien civilizations there could be in our own galaxy able to contact us Drake asked how many stars are there capable of supporting planets with intelligent life and then how many planets would have radio technology and how long do the civilizations with such technology last one of the problems of course with the Drake Equation is that we can't actually solve it if you will I mean we don't know the values of many of the terms and if there is even one term in that equation that you really don't know at all then then the end result is an answer that you don't know at all nevertheless many scientists believe that even when the most conservative numbers are punched into the equation you still come out with many intelligent civilizations in our galaxy alone but that raises a question one that was highlighted as long ago as 1950 by physicist Enrico Fermi in what became known as family's paradox he asked where is everybody if our galaxy is so crowded why haven't we heard from anyone for an answer we traveled to Denver Colorado to meet planetary scientist David Grinspoon he's an advisor to NASA on space exploration strategy and has studied the search for alien life for 15 years are we alone no we're not alone I'm sure there are other species and other life and even I would say other civilizations out there it's not something I have direct evidence for but I feel like I have a lot of indirect evidence in terms of everything I understand about how we got to be here on earth and everything I understand about what seems to be going on in the rest of the universe Grinspoon has come up with what he calls the seedling hypothesis his analogy is that the universe is like a forest full of mature trees and exotic creatures we earthlings are just tiny seedlings perhaps someday we'll grow into something interesting but right now we're not even noticeable it may be but we might just not be important enough maybe they're just not that interested in us in a universe with perhaps all kinds of creatures and civilizations we're very new to the scene we haven't necessarily accomplished that much or done that much to distinguish us for for somebody who's really been around a long time but there may be a better answer to Fermi's paradox the sheer size of space even for a smarter than average alien the laws of physics are a major stumbling block to interstellar travel a century ago Einstein figured out that faster than speed of light travel was impossible to break the speed of light barrier requires an infinite amount of energy and even if alien spacecraft could approach the speed of light scientist suggests that for every pound a spacecraft weighed a billion pounds of fuel would be needed and traveling around the galaxies at anything less than the speed of light would take millions and millions of years but maybe aliens will be contented to travel round at more modest speeds perhaps they live longer than us even on earth there are life forms that survive far longer than us the Californian redwood trees can live for 2,000 years the fallacy is in thinking that other advanced species would care that something couldn't be done in a human lifetime what if you let the trip take a thousand years or ten thousand years I think there's a chauvinism a temporal chauvinism where if something can't be done in a hundred years or a couple hundred years then it's impossible but perhaps we suffer from environmental chauvinism as well finding it hard to imagine how life could survive in strange conditions and yet some of the strangest environments can be found here on earth next naked science descends into one of the deepest caves in the US and comes face-to-face with an organism that lives in total darkness and survives by eating rice we've learned that scientists believe advanced life could exist elsewhere in the universe so far we have no proof but scientists are making startling new discoveries they're finding microscopic life-forms in the most inhospitable places right here on earth if life can flourish in the most extreme conditions here the possibility of a taking hold elsewhere in the galaxy seems much more likely but even if we do find evidence of microbial life infinitely less intelligent than us why should we care microbes can't tell us the secrets of the universe they can't talk to us planetary scientist David Grinspoon thinks any such discovery would be of huge significance if we find microbial life anywhere in our own solar system that implies a very fertile universe it implies that making life is something that planets do and that implies that there are intelligent species out there in great number some of whom will want to talk to us meet astrobiologist penny Boston she spends her life in some of the darkest most hostile places on earth she's looking for extremophiles microbes that can thrive in places that would kill most other creatures what we're doing in extreme environments on earth is really trying to write a field guide to micro organisms on planets that we've never been for organisms that we don't even know exists yet Carlsbad Caverns New Mexico these are some of the deepest caves in America what could possibly exist down here in zero sunlight the lights may be off but somebody's in penny Boston has found microbes that nourish themselves by literally chomping their way through solid rock rock eaters these are the organisms that managed to liberate small quantities of material from the rock itself that is they chemically react this and during that reaction they get energy from that process and that's the energy that provides the foundation of their life and so they then use that energy just as we eat food at the dinner table and so their ability to survive in an environment that is essentially food free is one of the things that we are focusing on the most intensely and it's not just in deep cave systems that these extremophiles microbes are thriving this is Mono Lake in California it may look beautiful but the salt levels are three times greater than in seawater it's poisonous to humans but it's teeming with microbial life and extremophiles can survive extreme cold - this is the Fox tunnel in Alaska an extremely cold environment but amazingly even here there are microorganisms in the permafrost that can stay frozen for millions of years and they are still alive by warming them up scientists have been able to revive these dormant organisms as much as we can stretch our imaginations in every conceivable direction of the limits of life that makes us better and better prepared to recognize life when we see it wherever we find it elsewhere in our solar system ultimately beyond so what we need is an interplanetary field trip to search for microbial life next we travel to the largest moon of Saturn Titan it's the only moon in the solar system with an atmosphere Titan has an orange haze surrounding it this haze could be concealing carbon-rich lakes and oceans and possibly life right now Titan remains unexplored but a NASA mission will change all that the spacecraft Cassini blasted off from Earth in 1997 when it reaches Titan a probe will descend into the atmosphere at nearly four miles a second Titan is about half the size of Earth but its atmosphere is four times as dense and the temperature is a distinctly chilly - 290 degrees Fahrenheit if the probe survives its landing it will radio its data some 700 million miles across space back to earth scientists think that Titan could be rich in organic chemicals that would have been common on primitive earth when our own life began maybe that means there are microbes here to an even more in hospitable world for life is Europa one of Jupiter's moons at first glance it looks like a dead frozen landscape the entire surface is concealed by a layer of ice but a closer look reveals something amazing photographs taken by the Galileo probe revealed multiple criss-crossing lines covering this icy world there's only one s in the solar system with similar features the frozen Arctic seas on earth where the ice floats on water and is constantly moving that makes scientists believe there is a chance but underneath the icy surface of Europa could be a vast on liquid ocean but what's keeping the ocean from freezing totally it could be kept liquid by the huge forces on the moon Europa is being pulled in different directions by the gravitational forces of Jupiter and the other moons around the planet these tidal forces heat up the moon's core enough to keep the ocean around it liquid eventually NASA hopes to probe even further into Europa's mysteries one idea is to send an orbiter that would scan the surface to confirm whether there is indeed an ocean below the ice once an orbiter locates a thin spot in the ice it may be able to send down a robotic probe looking for life in the water below the hydro bots could then send back digital pictures as it scours the ocean it may find hot spots on the ocean floor called hydrothermal vents these cracks in the ground spout warm nutrient-rich water on earth these vents are home to many simple life-forms perhaps the Hydra BOTS could find Europa as fertile as our ocean floor might our nearest aliens be living here but the best candidate for past or present life in our solar system is Mars in recent years and Armada of spacecraft has been sent to Mars NASA's Mars rover mission has found evidence of volcanic activity wind effects and most importantly indications in the veins of some rocks that sometime in the past Mars did have water underground in liquid form and where there is water on earth there is life so many scientists believe it's possible Mars did at one time host some form of life scientists believe with the evidence they've gathered from our planet in the solar system that life exists elsewhere in the universe but what might such creatures look like next naked science meets the aliens we've learned there may be water elsewhere in our solar system we've seen evidence of life-forms we had no idea could exist here on earth now naked science asks what could alien beings look like four years Hollywood's version of an alien was to put a suit down a person but now with computer graphics becoming more and more sophisticated designers are no longer constrained by the human form and really use their imaginations Joel Hagen from Modesto California is a designer who's worked for NASA as an imagery specialist it's so easy to think that a human form that our own form is the ideal form for an intelligent being I think that this is just part of the inevitable anthropocentric view that we have of things we try to think of what an intelligent creature would look like it generally winds up looking kind of like ourselves with hands eyes ears a head and walking around the idea for this one would be a fairly low gravity planet so I gave him some long fairly spindly legs I was envisioning sort of a jungle environment this kind of odd scissor like appendage that I've given it here it has the ability actually to to completely crouch down there strong winds or scissor itself up very high to be able to work with things in its environment back on earth there are many who believe we don't need to go looking on other planets to find evidence of alien intelligence one survey found that over half the population of the United States believes that we have been visited by alien beings is there any possibility that they're right we next travel to Wiltshire in England where strange things began to happen to the wheat fields one summer the crop circle phenomenon was born some believed that these intricate patterns were landing sites of alien spacecraft others suggested they may be messages left by extraterrestrials or navigation devices made and used by aliens it's even been suggested they may be created by powerful winds and to give the theory credibility it's been called the plasma vortex theory John Limburg has another explanation they're just hoaxes and how does he know because he's one of the world's leading circle makers he and his team are responsible for some of the most complex and sophisticated crop circles ever seen we wanted to create circles that was so big and so complex the people would once again question that these things are man-made and to prove once and for all they are made by humans Lundberg has agreed to create four naked science our very own crop circle this circle will take about 90 minutes to create first he marks out the circumference of his circle he uses a 300 foot surveyors tape to measure out the pattern the design is worked out in advance on computer the crop circulars secret weapon is a stock stopper a 4-foot plank of wood they use to flatten the crop and there's not a single alien in sight but even though Lundberg openly demonstrates the secrets behind crop circles there are a few diehards who still believe that these are alien in origin formation that we've created here is actually been made in daylight and so the researchers to say that this is not the correct kind of test conditions because obviously we've got daylight which enables us to to make the circle easier and obviously these are things that they put forward as being part of the genuine article it's not just crop circles that have been thought to be signs of alien visitation here in the Peruvian desert about 250 miles south of Lima is a plane covering nearly 200 square miles it contains a series of perfectly straight lines this grand geometric form is on a scale so large it can only be truly appreciated from the air the longest line goes nine miles across the plane in and around the lines are strange symbols and pictures of beasts archeologists believe that these lines date back to 200 BC the forms are so difficult to see from the ground it wasn't until the 1930s that aircraft surveying for water were able to make them so how did they get there and what are they there for the Swiss writer Erich von däniken made his fortune by suggesting this was a giant landing strip for alien spacecraft the only trouble with that theory is the desert floor here is soft earth and loose stoned hardly suitable for landing any heavy aircraft or flying saucers so if it's not a private airstrip for alien visitors what is it most researchers think that it's some form of giant site of worship the straight lines may be pathways linking a series of shrines and the figures were probably not meant for human eyes but for their gods but for those who seriously believe we've been visited this is the ultimate proof an unidentified flying object or UFO the first modern-day UFO was spotted in 1947 near Mount Rainier Washington it was described as a saucer skipping over water and from that description the flying saucer was born the myth was fed by a series of sci-fi movies and the belief that aliens had visited us in flying saucers just grew and grew even as late as 1996 a poll conducted in the United States showed that nearly three-quarters of the population believe that the government is covering up information about UFOs and this is the possible reason why the supposed UFO crash at New Mexico in 1947 has entered American folklore for many it was the ultimate conspiracy theory an alien spacecraft crashes in the desert and alien bodies are removed from the crash site to be examined by autopsy all this is covered up by the government and remains top-secret to this day the truth something did crash in the desert and there were bodies but it wasn't alien in origin it was a high-altitude military balloon test the bodies that eyewitnesses claimed to have seen were dummies but how do we explain a way that countless UFO sightings and filmed evidence once again naked science enlists the expert skills of hoax Buster John lund Berg we've used a kind of technique that's undoubtedly be has been used by many people in the past to perpetrate UFO hoaxes and it simply is a matter of building a small-scale model and then having that suspended on a rig and a bit of fishing wire so we can actually have the craft up in the sky with the surrounding clouds a story and a landscape and to be honest it's it's it's quite easy to do it's not difficult to choose and then with some clever manipulation on his laptop Lindbergh produces the perfect UFO picture but there are always some people who will never be convinced that such pictures are the work of hoaxers if you are coming forward and showing that you've actually perpetrated your hopes your immediacy my that community as a heretic is seem to be attacking their belief system and they will do intellectual double back somersaults to basically explain away you and your hopes we've learned that there is no hard evidence we've ever been visited by aliens but next naked science reveals a moment when the scientific world believed we might have made first contact this is the sound of our universe it's alive with cosmic noise a constant barrage of galactic white noise August 15 1977 Ohio State University this is project big year its aim to scan the galaxies and listen out for an alien species it's the middle of the night as the scientists catch up on their sleep suddenly the computers pick up a signal it's coming from somewhere in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius over 200 light-years away but this is no ordinary signal there is no known natural phenomenon to explain it this blip looks like a mark of Technology perhaps a sound of intelligent life it lasts for 72 seconds and then goes silent it's so striking the first scientists to see the computer printout wrote down one word Wow but the WoW signal as it came to be known has never been heard again researchers recently pointed the dishes of the Very Large Array in New Mexico in the direction of the WoW signal but all they heard was silence it remains one of astronomy's most thrilling and inexplicable moments will it someday maybe even thousands of years from now mark the start of a profound new chapter in human life or will it be remembered as just another computer malfunction for now it's a mystery with thrilling possibilities and planetary scientist David Grinspoon thinks it may well have been alien in origin it remains quite possible that the while signal was a genuine detection of some kind of extraterrestrial intelligence my sort of fantasy scenario for the WoW signal is that it was a snippet of conversation perhaps between two ships between two aliens that wasn't really directed at us we just happened to first second be in the right spot to to eavesdrop on although the WoW signal has never been repeated there is a chance that aliens are already transmitting and we're just looking in the wrong places for us to have a realistic chance of finding alien intelligence we need to scan not thousands of stars but Millions but how can we achieve that sort of scale naked science next travels to Northern California to the site of the Allan array it's the new permanent home for the SETI Institute scholastic sweep although currently there are only a few operating eventually there will be 350 dishes covering this site all of them able to run 24 hours a day 365 days a year scanning the Stars for signs of intelligent life the city search has been running for the last two decades in that time thousands of stars have been scanned with this new array the SETI Institute will be able to search millions of stars in the next twenty years alone with that sort of capability the Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak is for the first time confident enough to make a prediction for naked science so given the capabilities of this telescope and how many star systems it's going to be looking at in the next two decades I think that we're going to hear extraterrestrials by the year 2025 and in fact all the action is in the last five years so my bet is we'll know we're not alone sometime between the year 2020 and the year 2025 and how will it change us the day we discover we're not alone in the universe I suspect this will be one of the biggest if not the biggest story of all time I think that if you were a resident of Earth in the 30th century and you look back on the 21st century you know you wouldn't remember anything about the wars or the technology or the political infighting or any of that stuff what you would remember was that's when they finally shattered this this this ball of Latian that was around this planet that's when they finally found that there were others out there but just how life-changing will a signal from another species be if as most scientists agree they'll never visit us there's little we'll be able to do about it well it would be frustrating in a certain sense to learn that they're out there but we can never have to way communication because they're so far away but I think that even that scenario would still have a very profound effect simply because the knowledge would be there would always be there from that point in history on that there is somebody out there but there are a number of scientists who think we should be very wary of contact with aliens professor Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University is one of the world's leading cosmologists he fears our very existence may be threatened if aliens show up but it may already be too late as we've already heard for the last hundred years we have been transmitting radio signals and they've been leaking off the planet at the speed of light one day if there is intelligent life out there someone or something will know we are here but perhaps advanced civilizations will have evolved to the point where conquest and wars are a thing of the past let's hope that if they ever come they come in peace you

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Channel: Naked Science

Views: 4,703,384

Rating: 4.389926 out of 5

Keywords: ufo, universe, atheist, autopsy, strange, flying, saucer, extraterrestrial, life, complex, cgi, learn, truth, fields, scientific, intelligence, astronomy, theory, first, site, planet, knowledge, close, earth, facts, humanity, phenomenon, attack, sighting, explained, mayan, prophecy, unique, discovery, professor, stephen, hawkins, disaster, prediction, london, telescope, invasion, wikileaks, area, 51, secrets, government, conspiracy, nasa, creature, symbols, elysium, god, answers, arecibo, observatory, noise, search, signal, evolution, space, xfiles

Id: fkd3BVM7b94

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 50min 15sec (3015 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2013

Reddit Comments

Where's the science? Ah, it's shying away, doesn't like it here in this confused endless list of "But, ALIENS!" sciency facts cutted together from the archiv narrated erroneously in the way of an advertisement, completed with a barrage of all samples from the sci-fiesk soundbank.

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/cineradar 📅︎︎ Nov 27 2014 🗫︎ replies