Searches for Superluminality, Aliens, and Impossible Knowledge with Dr. Robert Nemiroff

you have fallen into event horizon with John Michael Gautier [Music] [Applause] [Music] in today's episode John is joined by dr. Robert Nemerov Jota Nemerov worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center before joining Michigan Tech he has worked on the micro lensing phenomena and is currently trying to limit attributes of our universe with distant gamma-ray bursts whilst also investigating the use of relativistic illumination fronts to orient astronomical nebulae in 1995 he co-created the Astronomy Picture of the day with NASA Robert Nomura welcome to the program now doctor you work in a lot of fields but or a lot areas but one thing that you do is study apparent and actual superluminal events where something either appears to exceed the speed of light or does so under special circumstances such as the speed of light slowing down in a medium like water give us an overview of that yes the famous phrase that nothing can go faster than light but that's actually not not true then my view was very clear from special relativity is you can't take something with mass and accelerated through the speed of light I take the view that nothing with mass can actually move faster than light we have no evidence for anything that has mass moving faster than light just we have no evidence that happens and I believe that but that doesn't mean that nothing can do that because if you take your laser pointer and you flick it across the wall or the moon that spot which has no mass is unlimited in speed as our shadows you can make a shadow there are reflections that can grow really fast also you can people there find a Susu slowdown light in certain media so in water byte is about 1/3 as fast as it is in vacuum but there are physical experiments that slow down light to it so it's effectively stopped so if you walk by that experiment you're walking faster than light so who cares these are is this semantics well there's actually some really cool optical effects that occur let's see one of them so one of my quest slice one of my scientific quests right now is trying to find one of these effects out in the universe and that is a fact called relativistic image doubler where you see something because something is going fast in this feel right either in a medium because it's going it's it came from vacuum let's let the vacuum speed light and went into water which is a which is a third speed light last and so it's still remembering its vacuum speed so it's going fast just a light in water so that what's going to create something called Trank of radiation which is one way to see it so you can look at that and if you have a particle that's coming right toward you in water that came from vacuum or just the atmosphere and it's moving at the speed light in vacuum but it's faster speed alive in water then it's going to be faster than the light it emits through water so if it's you you're gonna be hit by the particle first and only later are you going to be hit by the light that that particle created Trank of light so if you can what you would see then is you would see you'd feel a part of a boom what was that but then you would feel you would see something move away from you it move away so that is one of the strange optical effects of superluminal of the superluminal that things can appear to move away from you instead of moving toward you so let's say now that you had something that comes into the water a particle that comes into the water and it is moving slower than the speed of light in water which happens things move slowly all the time as this came toward you a fool is emitting light you would see it start from far away and move toward you so now let's do something in the middle let's say it comes your particle who comes into the water moving faster than the speed of light in water but it slows down and in the water becomes slower than the speed light water what do you see what you see is relativistic image doublet when it went from super luminous up Lemone you suddenly see two image of this object one comes toward you one goes away and so that is the essence of something called revenue stick image doubling and I think that it's possible to see things like that out in the universe or it's been seen once in the lab but I think it's not only a novelty I think you can tell us about stuff so that's one of my scientific West trying to find places where this might happen in the universe and actually hopefully with the modern technology actually discover it out there what might we learn from it you know when whenever you see relevance to give each that one you know that the speed of the object moving toward you dropped from super superluminal to subliminal so you have a piece of information about the speed of things that you didn't have before if you see something just moving through the universe you don't really know it's because you don't really know its distance usually and you don't know what angle it's moving at but if you see relativistic image doubling you know that it went that it's speed toward you right then was see and that gives you a piece of information that enables you to decode things so also in the lab it can actually help you see three dimensionally and it takes awhile to explain why things like superluminal front and gross missing image online allow you to go from a static photograph where you just see flatness and you don't know death if you were to have the timing information and you can see where the image doubling occurred there you can actually tell three-dimensional information and you can get a three-dimensional phonograph so it could have a lot of infinite lot of use but let me break down another very simple experiment that everyone's done but no one really appreciated very few people appreciated what happened so picture this you go into a dark room completely dark the walls are dark in the in the room somewhere in the room is a light bulb it's off so the rooms done you turn on the light bulb and instantly it goes off after a second or so less than a second all the room walls are completely illuminated so all the room walls went from dark to illuminated now that means that at some point there was a line on the wall that between light and dark that moved that's where the lightness moved across the walls it's easy to show that that light that line always moves faster than light it contains no mass but that is every time you see light move across the surface every time you turn on the light or a variability that goes across room lights or anything in the room the way it goes across that surface is faster than life so with modern technology if you can resolve that you could see how fast these fronts are moving and you can get three-dimensional information so that's one of the goals of this super luminosity happens all around us all the time but our eyes are just too slow to see it our brains take about a tenth of a second to integrate what order I see but with modern technology with superfast cameras these things can actually be picked up so that's uh so my adventures into superluminal so not so I'm we're also trying to find things that out experiments that have superluminal T built into them that aren't really appreciated for instance cosmic ray air showers are like this so a cosmic ray hits the top of the atmosphere and those particles in a pancake come down toward the surface that pancake moves down to the surface typically faster than the speed of light in air therefore if you can see this with your eyes and not with just the particle detectors on the ground if you could see that what you would see is a pair of the images of the shower one goes down and one goes up and I think there's the technology to actually see that one thing about the speed of light is calling it the speed of light is an oversimplification because really what it is is at least of my understanding the point at which you would need infinite energy to move mass but what imposes the speed limit on a massless particle like a photon okay so a photon is um the maximum speed limit is called speed of light but really its fastest that we know things can go things that have things that can carry momentum things that can transfer information the fastest that can go is quote speed of light which really means maximum speed limit now it could be that light has tiny tiny little bit of mats and but it's going so close to the maximum speed limit that we see it as quote speed of light and so that maximum speed limit is also shared by neutrinos and muons and and other fundamental particles that zip around so light itself might not be necessarily important for the maximum speed limit so the phrase speed light might emphasize the role of light too much so Einstein and moretz and Fitzgerald all discovered that there was this is invariant speed limit that the fastest anything can pass you by is this speed which is identified as C and the simplest thing that we have that we can see that does that that seems to travel at speed C D always is is light so we call it speed of light I think I might have gotten a little bit off the track so if you can remind me of the point of your question I can address that that you trusted now there's also the question of time and that time dilates and slows down the faster you go and the closer you get to that speed of light the more dilated it is what how does a photon experience time or does it at all okay so that's a really good question so we don't know so one of the reasons actually I'm pretty good at this right now is because I'm trying to write a book it's called faster the light and it's about how shadows can move faster than light but you can't so I address some of this in am I trying to write this book so some of this is pretty fresh on on my mind okay so does the photon experience time so we don't know we're not photons but as you throw faster as you get closer and closer speed of light Lorentz contraction makes the universe smaller and smaller so you can go to the nearby stars in a short amount of time if you could go fast enough it's really an engineering problem as to how to get to that speed as opposed to a physics problem that is not possible so for photons they're right up near the maximum speed limit at the maximum speed limit there would be infinite the universe will be infinitely compressed but then you get into this battle infinities what is infinitely compressed me what does no passage of time being that's why I prefer to think that photons actually have a tiny tiny tiny little bit about a mass and they don't they do experience time passing a little bit because when you get into these zeros zero time passing infinitely contractive then you just get into strange things that might not really be physically true all we know is that there are as you go faster and faster there's more and more time dilation that the effective mass of objects appears to to to increase without limit but we don't really know at the limit we've never we don't really know what happens at the exact maximum speed now exceeding the speed of light there's this idea of the tachyon where you have a particle that can't ever slow down to the speed of light would time move backwards for such a particle should it exist and as I understand we have no idea if they exist but they're not prohibited by general relativity right so unfortunately I don't like tachyons I don't really study them I think that's I read things about them that the more energy they have the slower they get the things I study that move faster than light are illumination fronts across the room things that generates rankov light ladies are pointers things that create relative is thinking image doubling that that we could see all around us so I'm not a big believer in tachyons it could be that there are massive things or things that have imaginary mass that do move faster than light but as I said we just don't have evidence of that and so it makes for a fun speculation but it's not speculation that I really like to do I like to be in the more here as crazy as it seems but I like to study things moving faster than light I actually am pretty conventional the things I study and admit Tran cough radiation or just lays response these are our conventional things they're illumination fronts on shadows you see in in the Hubble variable nebulae and things like that these are well established phenomena where you can actually see things go faster the light I just don't know much about tachyons and I'm not all that interested because I don't see way of detecting them now regarding Cherenkov radiation this is this is actually something anyone can see by searching a video of a nuclear reactor being pulsed where you get enormous pulse of gorgeous blue light what actually produces what is the mechanism of the production of Cherenkov radiation let's see so when a charged particle moves through a medium that has inherent charges in it like water even though water isn't charged it has protons and electrons so when a charged particle moves moves through that it creates in its wake a coherent in a way to be careful in physics not to use current in the wrong way a way that many of the charges behind it act in a very specific way so the particle that's moving is itself not creating the Trank of radiation the chunk of creation is created and by the medium it's moving through and actually very slightly behind the particle and if you had a medium that had nothing in it or had absolutely no way of differentiating charges then it would not produce track of radiation so it is created by the motion whenever you move a charge you create electromagnetic energy whenever you move a mass you create gravitational radiation so when something moves faster than light when a charged particle is faster light it creates such a it creates light from behind it that is then known as a trying over English sorry it's a little bit redundant but there we go now one thing I have to ask about and it's just a a gut feeling opinion things that can move faster than light we have this idea floating around out there of the Alcubierre warp drive and breaking off a piece of space-time which is not beholden to the speed limit and moving around do you think that that's a step too far or do you think that maybe we might be able to go superluminal with matter using such a method I think it's fun speculation I don't see that as anywhere near the near future it is true that given distance measures that if you were to it is possible for something that goes away from the earth to eventually be moving faster than the speed of light relative to earth because the speed of light is actually a local measurement it is how fast something passes by you locally so when we talk about something cosmological out in the universe there can be distortions of space and time that create apparent superluminal motion in galaxies and things like that and they can actually move outside of our light console so we don't see more recent light emitted by them but things like I don't know how you pronounce his name I see an Albert crumby Drive is really interesting speculation because it's contracting space-time cosmologically in one direction and expanding it back in another then we're not seeing that near future I'm bettin we're going to discover extraterrestrial life in the near future but we're not seeing that anytime soon so unless we discover extraterrestrial life be using it to see well you would think it would be a gigantic burst of gamma rays or something like that as they as they stopped if they could stop we see gigantic bursts of gamma rays is gamma ray bursts do you think that that's on the table possibly I mean one must always look to nature first but right it could be aliens coming out of work people have analyzed gamma-ray bursts possibilities of beacons or something from extraterrestrials and no one's ever been able to show anything I mean again it's this great speculation it makes for good shows like this there's real evidence of that these things apparently are supernova or colliding neutron stars and they don't seem to encode any information that we can find or have some kind of indicative techno signature that we could look for or that we're aware of maybe we don't know how to decode it nothing we can see right now now it's been said that any time one goes faster than light FTL you once you build such a device you have also built a time machine oh that's not actually true that's a that depends on where your observers are whether you're going to come back the same spot it's actually quite complicated there are there are versions where it is true you can come up with experiments or specific sequence of events where that would be true now do you think time travel is at all possible or is that just something that is absolutely prohibited by the universe backwards time travel forwards time travel we obviously have but backwards right so I threw you to what you said it's easy to travel into the future if you watched Planet of the Apes they did that and it's not even controversial so with the twin paradox is like that so you can travel into the future and it's not a problem but the problem is can you travel into the past so some laws of physics the microscopic laws of physics appear to be time invariant so it seems like individual particles there's no rule against it but entropy does seem to indicate that and should be increases in any system that's any closed system of thought in communication with the outside so it should be seems to be an arrow to the future there are other possible arrows to the future so however there are also the general relativity there's possibilities of going in just using the equations of general relativity you could possibly go into the past going around cosmic strings or something like that but we have no evidence of that and that is outside of introduce so if you include entropy which pierced in arrow of time it looks like you're always pointing toward the future but that doesn't mean that no one could think of some way of doing it necessarily modern physics can't give you a time machine right now and I can point out problems that you might have if you had a time machine but that doesn't mean that in the future these problems might be solved therefore it might be of use to look to see if people from the future have ever been here now this is one of the most controversial things I've ever done and people I'm a physics professor there are other people who I've embarrassed who to think that I've done look at something like this so it has an interesting root story so I have my students over under graduates and registered and they would come over in the summer and we would have a poker game back when you could do things like that I can't do it this summer and so at this point we have wild ranging discussions about pretty much anything and I encourage them to be creative and so one of the discussions was if people if something from the future was here how would we know and that oddly enough becomes a scientific question how is it what scientific steps could you go through to ask ok is this from the future if you just say well looks like the future well that's a scientific question well what about it what about its looks makes it seem like us from the future so we started thinking about what is it that would you could do it so one of the things I came up with is knowledge there is knowledge that only becomes available that is not known beforehand that if someone from the future were to come back they could say here's knowledge you don't have that the kind verified as true and you could check and see ok was that true or is that true so far so what we did is we say ok how do you know this isn't happening well no one's come up to me and said oh here's the future lottery numbers there are scams like that or something that will pretend to tell you future lottery numbers or like in the there are movies what's the one with well there's a famous movie where they it's all a show well what is it that so we came up with the idea of knowledge that which which could not be known and so for instance the date of Michael Jackson's death how could someone before that of Nomad if someone in the 1980s CHEP's broadcasting I know that Michael Jackson will die on this day and then he does either they killed him or they arranged for it or they knew something so we came up with a couple interesting things one is comet Ison there was an ISO M there was never a comet Ison before a few years ago never so we started looking on the World Wide Web to see if anyone ever mentioned comet Ison like all I'm sorry I'm in from the wrong time period that comment hasn't been discovered yet you know we really didn't think there would be anything like that because this was you know we're just shooting the breeze this is over a poker discussion but he got kind of fun to do so we found no mention of Comet Ison ever before was declared to be a comet named and but afterwards it was like this spike it's all over the internet it's on Facebook it's on Twitter it's everywhere I'm a nice up before that nothing black nothing so an even more popular one with effects was mentioned by one of the students in the name of Pope Francis all right this makes it even stranger because you get religion involved well there's never been a Pope Francis before the current Pope Francis never ever ever so we decided to go looking on the internet to see if anyone ever mentioned I'm Pope Francis we looked through Google we looked we googled everything we could we looked on Facebook and there are problems baba means who are for instance if you google now Pope Francis and there before there was a Pope Francis you'll find hits because there are advertisements on pages modern advertisements old pages so that doesn't work so if you go to Facebook and you see someone talking about Pope Francis before there was a Pope Francis that doesn't work either because Facebook allows you to backdate posts twitter though as twitter does not so we decided to look on Twitter for any mention of a Pope Francis before those of Pope Francis and we went through years of Twitter and we could find nothing and then well actually we found one thing but somebody was like month before they're speculating so we don't really think that was knowledge before knowledge it was excellent understandable but there was nothing so based on that we could we say that this is the best search for future time travelers yet it doesn't prove that there is no such thing as backward time travel it's nowhere close to a physical proof it's not even you know pervasive evidence but we searched over the widest databases we could the greatest extent that we could and we found nothing so according to this there is no evidence of course in the future is it it and indeed no evidence anywhere because no one has ever come out and credibly anyway said I am from the future and here's what's going to happen it's never happen what people say is who we analyzed some of this so if people say if I go to the into the past I'll go remember the stock market and I'm gonna make a lot of money right so let's say I'm gonna lottery lotteries a big one so let's say you to approach a lottery winner and say hey a lottery where you just won 100 million dollars are you from the future first of all they're not going to want to talk to you second of all they're not gonna do what what are you talking about are you nuts and then so that's not a good way trying to find lottery winners and ask them if they're from the future is not a good way and we came up with a lot of bad ways of searching but the best way we found is actually on Twitter to see if the when there's a sharp break of knowledge if you look before that sharp break when some that piece of knowledge is created if you look before that to see if anyone's mentioning that so far we always find nothing it's silent now this gets into causality because you know causality is really important my question would be is that if if a time traveler did go back and violated causality would we even know about it or would the universe just change seamlessly and account for the new you know situation and we wouldn't know it or ken is it is it something that we would obviously notice you know somebody changed something they assassinated some dictator or something like that would we know that or would we just would history just simply change and we wouldn't perceive it yes we actually did a little more look at that so we we coined things as two times there is fixed time where there's only one timeline and star check does a lot of this where something happens name someone goes back and fixes it up and that's the way it always was so there's only one time one that's a fixed timeline or possibly there is a plastic timeline where things can change and maybe things branch out into other branches of the multiverse or something like that and so we thought of that as a plastic timeline so we asked I forget exactly how we structured this but we had people send us email if they were able to to an address that we only release later so we look for email that is the time dated before a certain time and then if it's a plastic timeline they should tell us that you know and if it's a fixed timeline then they might they might not be able to do that so we've never received I haven't checked several years ago we did this we never never received an email to that address and we actually had a hashtag I think it was hashtag I am a time traveler too and we wanted people to tweet to that hashtag before a certain date and never found anything so you might ask how come there's a - on there because we screwed it up the first time and then there's we found out that you know people actually had that hashtag somewhere else if you put a number after it and you're clear now it seems to me the time travel to use the the tricks of the universe and what general activity laws and all of those things you would need one one idea that I've seen is you would you could build a gigantic cylinder that spans and you know most of the universe Robel universe or something like that and rotate it and be able to sort of take advantage of it and go back in time that way or at least in a sense but we would see that if somebody did it so when you couldn't do it you physically couldn't do it do you think any form of time travel even if it is allowed by physics do you think that it just is impossible to do I generally lean toward it's impossible but then again if I thought it was totally completely impossible I wouldn't do simple tests for it so I'm generally a skeptic in life people think what amount of crazy stuff I do that I believe all these fantastical things and generally I'm pretty conservative I generally don't think these things are possible but I'm kind of curious if they are and why they're not but I generally toe the line and say no I don't think there are those big cylinders I don't think people are circling cosmic strings and coming back you know if that does work I don't think it's possible to travel into the past but I'm not sure now there is one situation a black hole if you're really close to it is time travel possible there or is it impossible because you would simply be spaghettified well if you scan up black holes you can scale down the spaghettification I think you're talking about a rapidly rotating black hole yes so I don't I haven't studied it in great detail I don't know if it's possible to actually do that and come back out it's not a matter of being outside and being spaghettified it's going inside of horizon that you can't get back out of so we don't know of any wormholes it is again a solution to general relativity but we don't know of any testable where things actually go in and come out if you did that actually you might be able to go faster than light because you go in one place about some place else instantly but there's no real minutes the equations have speculations that allow that kind of speculation but there's no evidence for that we've never really seen anything that tells us you could don't that it's just fun to think if you took these equations and you would strap elate them then you yeah there's these extrapolations but we don't have the technology to really explore those extrapolations many times in technology you know it's in physics you come up with these things and there are parts of the physics that we know isn't really physical it's just that's what the equations say but we are equations aren't valid out that far it's quite possible that our equations just aren't valid in those areas they seem to be we can't go there and really explore them now this has happened before because one can sit there and send astronauts to the moon or whatever using Newtonian physics but at some point you tony and physics stops predicting therefore you get to general relativity but general relativity now breaks down on the quantum level so it seems to me that we got really good tools but they're slightly imprecise as opposed to the reality do you think we'll ever be able to hone these down into for lack of a better term perfectly valid theories are perfectly valid models I do believe that there's a better better models beyond in relativity quantum mechanics that have aspects of both however that's a really good way to waste time these days if you want to get lost in mathematics if you want to just spend years of your life investigating symmetries of equations try to combine gravity and quantum mechanics chances are as the thousands of people who've been trying to do that over the past two decades you'll come up with some pretty interesting math and no concrete predictions what I prefer to do is look to see we were on the cutting edge and say okay what's just beyond that cutting edge what is it we can do with today's that's where I prefer to look at that's why I'm sort of I'm so happy about this I think we're getting close to the point where discover extraterrestrial life but I think that is within our technological boundaries I don't it can be you know hundreds of years maybe before humanity or the successor to humanity after the singularity after we merge with silicon or computer devices that gets to a place where gravity and quantum mechanics can be merged to a point where you can actually test that and the question you know has to be asked to that I mean is there unknown physics is there entire areas of physics that we don't know about yet hiding within the relationship between the you know the missing puzzle piece between general relativity and quantum mechanics is there something else there and I thought that's sort of what you don't know the unknown unknowns we don't know but you got to ask you gotta ask yourself well it could be hiding there it's certainly a lot of fun dogs we learn most from pushing the frontiers just one step beyond and asking where is our technology what is our technology allow us to do that we couldn't do before right now we can look for a techni signatures of extraterrestrial civilizations better than we ever have been before the technology is just better it doesn't mean it's there but we can search for it better we can search for bio signatures actually trust feel better than we ever have before that's a frontier that's expanding and it is a very interesting frontier they're our frontiers that we're not really moving injured and they're fun to think about and maybe there will be a surprise discovery that allows us into those frontiers and we don't even know what those frontiers are but I don't know what those are well one interesting thing related to the discovery of life is this this idea of of being able to characterize exoplanet atmospheres and we can answer these questions like an you know a an atmosphere suitable for life survive being so close to a red ball for something like that and we see things perhaps we'll see things starting with James Webb Space Telescope that we'll be able to say you know that planet has really weird levels of oxygen and it has really weird levels of carbon dioxide and methane and it looks a lot like Earth and the fact is the entire galaxy has been able to look at earth with say they have sufficient equipment and say there's probably a biosphere there that's the best explanation for the makeup of that atmosphere in just a few years we're gonna be able to start doing that ourselves and I think it's a good bet we're gonna find it me too a lot of people a lot of top scientists not me so I mean one of the NASA's chief scientist Jim Green believes that within the next 20 years we're probably going to come up across some kind of extraterrestrial life and so there are NASA missions that are looking in that direction and I think it's really exciting I did - especially if it's microbial I have to admit I love the idea of a microbial universe yes doctor year you're hosting a debate which is an anniversary debate of the infamous debate that how big is the universe essentially which which Harlow Shapley Andy burger Curtis yes had and I believe what 1920 and eternal Curtis was correct and and how big do you know the apparent universe was give us some historical overview of that debate actually debated several things they debated one of them was aware our Sun was in our galaxy where Shapley thought that we were away from the center but Curtis thought we were in the center so the generals some of vacation that Curtis just won because the little spiral nebulae they were seeing out there turned out to be external galaxies independent universes that's true the Curtis won that point and that is the point that is arguably the most important in history but there were other points that they that went back and forth on that were actually split so both Shockley and kritis were quite good astronomers and they they talked previously before this so at the 1920 meeting in April 26 they were invited to give their points of view on several things in particular about what these spiral nebulae were and were they little spiral clouds just in our own galaxy in the entire universe or were they other galaxies in their own right and the community the astronomical community was pretty well split they weren't all in one part or all in the other it's kind of unusual that the younger up-and-comer guy Harlow Shapley was the one who is taking sort of the antiquated view that our galaxy is the only galaxy the established journey person of Curtis was saying that oh no no these these things are probably external galaxies so we have a debate site that you go to the link that you'll find on this show in the comments under word of the discussion under the video and it served from NASA so on there you will see that we have Shapley's granddaughter talks about her memories of Harlow Shapley and pepper Curtis is great-great granddaughter and great-grandson are both are speaking about Curtis so they are both very well aware of their heritage and this amazing debate that essentially decided we didn't decide it brought to the front where humanity is in this universe what is our universe and it was a scientific question and it was decided scientifically how big is our universe where are we in universe and that was a hundred years ago on April 26 now fast forward a hundred years it's not 2020 and you're hosting a new version of the debate but with a different question tell us about that well I've been trying for two years to put together hundredth anniversary debate before that I'd put together the 75th anniversary debate in 1995 so that was an in-person event that was held in the exact same auditorium as the 1920 debate and the topic of that debate was the distance Delta gamma-ray bursts and the interesting thing about that was a gamma-ray burst there were two major schools this astronomical community was split our gamma-ray burst in our own galaxy sort of like the spiral nebulae were or a gamma-ray burst far across the universe and the community was pretty well split two on one on the other and so that was a 95 and that was actually solved a few years later just sort of like the shock like Curtis debate was solved a few years later so then there was actually a 96 97 but then I was interest kind of waned and we got tired of being the debate people but we always knew I always knew the hundredth anniversary was coming up so for two years before this April I kept trying to put it together and I kept falling apart and I could go through the it's actually humorous in the ways that it would fall apart but what saved the debate which was an online debate this was not this was not a live event what happened in August on April 26th exactly a hundred years after the 1920 debate was we unveiled a bunch of points of view and we got the topic that I've always wanted the most so we had we had similar topics before instead of the scale of the universe debate we did life in the universe of it so just like a hundred years ago people were debating is our galaxy all that there is or are there other galaxies out there what is the scale of our universe I think one of the biggest questions are you be the biggest scientific question of our time is are we alone in the universe are there what is the that what is the next what is the first way that we will discover life off the earth and there's a lot of investment of time and resources and missions and possibilities that it could be and it's not just a one or another so we have about 15 people or so and they give their they give a few minutes a few slides some you have YouTube videos and they back any of a number of points of view one could be that the first way that we will discover extraterrestrial life will be in our solar system be it Mars or in the oceans under and 7s another way could be with exoplanets out away from our solar system where there is some kind of bias unmistakable bio signature of planet being eclipsing a star and you see something in the atmosphere so that's bio signatures are one major thing another possibility is techno signatures so we have our our summary talk was given by what's online you can still see it by Jill tarter many of you might know as a lasting wonderful man person scientists in this and so she also believes as several people in the who listed their debate preferences and techno signatures that we will learn through some technological we will not have an intelligent lifeform out there and we will either be contacted or find some structure or something that indicates that there is a some high technology out there where as many the bio signatures or more or less microbes the Freeman Dyson did say that we might find fish orbiting Jupiter also also highly reflective Dyson sunflowers as well okay well I think Carl Sagan was a fan of big balloon creatures in Jupiter and Saturn but most of the thought most of the thinking is microbes that we will find microbial life on Titan or on Mars or under Mars more likely some slightly under Mars or in one of the underground seas and one of the moons of the solar system so so we have a lot of people who are actually building missions to go do that and then what they outline some of their logic and that is on a on a website that you can find you can read through all the points of view you can read the history of the shackling Curtis debate you can see the summary by Jill tarter and it's all online for free people to see whatever they want to say there will be links to the stuff in the description below for the audience now what about another scenario where we don't see bio signatures and we don't see techno signatures but instead the biologists are able to create an organism in the laboratory and they they crack the nut of abiogenesis and it turns out to be easy one could then infer that life's everywhere without actually seeing it right yes that would be absolutely fascinating but that would not be off the earth so that the idea is how do we discover extraterrestrial life that's sort of the the focus the debate is that so what you're saying is really really interesting and I don't know enough biology to know how easy it is I don't know if anybody does but I'm not a biologist so I really don't but that that is a certainly fascinating line of inquiry and I would be very interested in reading about what's going on with that and how close people are and I wondered because that actually represents to me so yeah my view and it's has no more validity than anyone else's but my view is that the universe is probably teeming with microbes I don't know about intelligent life and I'm sure it happens but up at there are microbes everywhere but so in my view is that by asking the are we alone question by rephrasing it is life on Earth alone we have two ways to figure that out within my lifetime one is we drill into Europa and find something or Mars or upper atmosphere of Venus or something like that or the biologists are able to tell us a biogenesis is either really easy or really hard but within that's an interesting point that just about the moment that Earth could support life life appears so maybe that suggests that it's easy I also believe that there are microbes everywhere and it's see I think all the indicators are there for it and but in the age this will be decided just as living in 1920 people lived in the age where the retro size of the universe was was known or as decided and there's only one time that happens we probably live in the age when we're going to find out whether we're alone and how common life is and I just forgot that's in law and one could say for just just just under the understand the depth of that this is the greatest question in human history are we alone and the discovery of even a microbe you know independent life of Earth that the solar system may have produced it in several places probably the most important discovery ever in human history wouldn't you agree yes yes it's just it places us biologically in the universe before 1920 we were placed physically in the universe biologically we don't yet really know we're getting close to knowing and so finding that out exactly what it is there might be some twist and turn is just just amazing and it just places us as we've never been placed before so I have a feeling just like if you go back in human history humanity you always considered itself to be the center of everything like like a verdict in principle but here I think we're gonna find out that humans and life on Earth is not that special that it's not that hard that there's actually life in lots of places and so just like we learned that we're not in the center of the universe and the universe isn't centered on the earth or the Sun or the solar system or our galaxy but I think we're going to learn that humanity is not where life the only thing that that's sentient and life is very common outside of I think we're going to go through a series of discoveries of how the great extent of life is now if you had to make a bet regarding the solar system and microbes offers independent life where do you think the best chances for finding it I would say under the surface of Mars we have some experience with Mars we've sort of backing the in the Viking days they thought they discovered life on Mars now it wasn't the only time they thought they discovered life on Mars though because of all the failures were getting to know better how to look for life on Mars specifically we're surely but Mars specifically and we're getting more and more specialized missions that are going there even this year and so I think there with all that focus on Mars and the ability to monitor Mars for some of these things like what's going on with the methane what's creating the methane and digging under the surface and all the the orbiters and Rovers I think that in the next few year we're going to come my guess is microbes are going to discover microbes first under the surface of Mars then we'll find out maybe that Mars is essentially a desert that has very small amounts of life on the surface whereas earth is essentially an oasis with small areas of desert I think Mars are like the opposite of that but it's almost all desert it's hard to find life on the surface but if you know where to look under the surface and maybe slightly places on surface you can find it now that would be something like you know a liquid water aquifer or something like that beneath the surface of Mars and every so often maybe that water varies then you get a bloom of activity underneath the surface which is perhaps responsible for the methane blooms that appear to occur there right it could be that's I'm not gonna I don't really know enough about the biology to go into it very deeply you probably know the biology better than me I'm sort of been an observer for these things and so I listen to the stories I don't know the the deep biology but yeah that sounds reasonable what you're saying that we do know there is frozen water on on Mars liquid not just inclusion carbon dioxide but actually frozen water under the surface of Mars that's a starting point you can get places where it's liquid it's interesting because if you go back you know a number of years we really only had a few candidates that we knew about which were Mars and Europe I believe what's known about in the 1970s that there may have been liquid water underneath the shell of ice but now we have a whole bunch of ice shell moons that appeared and including you know things like like Ganymede even you know where we seem to have this and then on top of that we start looking at places like Venus and we're like well that once may have been rather earth-like with liquid water and maybe that life migrated into the upper atmosphere where it's a little bit considerably more Clement than the surface in fact it's probably the most earth-like environment the upper atmosphere if heinous is probably the most earth-like environment in the solar system and we just had this blossoming of thought on just where you could have my pro-v Oh life in the solar system which to me says good bet we're gonna find it and we're gonna probably find it soon we just have to build the instruments to do it so what do we have coming up that could answer these questions about Mars but also the other worlds well I don't I don't know all the missions I don't necessarily speak for that but I do know we're gonna have a helicopter on Mars pretty soon and the helicopter on Titan in in a few years and they're gonna be able to move around more than we've ever seen before and respond to things that are seen on the surface and possibly go more than a rover like curiosity go further and explore places that that might might have that so yeah there are several missions going to Mars not just from the US in the next few years I don't have a list of them and we've got we live in a golden age of solar system exploration and of the universe exploration gives the deep telescopes we're not going out to do outer universe but we're seeing out to the outer universe you know with Hubble and with Kepler and tests and soon with JWST so we're seeing that but in our solar system where we're exploring we've had satellites spacecraft around every planet and used to be planet or passing by out there and so we've just discovered so much in the past 30 years 50 years about our solar system and we're just we're just keep going and I think we're learning how to learn learning how to look for life and I'm excited about these helicopters to see how they're going to go around yes the Titan copter is probably the most exciting a robotic NASA probe I have ever seen and I've seen them all the way since Voyager died just this idea of a of a like an octocopter I think it's got I think a bottle lids flying around Titan and I wonder I'm like what will the images look like you know I mean what will we see you know things like flying over the Grand Canyon on Titan and I just I can't wait that's a great one that that one actually even excites me more than the James Webb telescope that one doesn't go then we'll probably send another one so I like the idea of exploring by helicopter now we're entering the helicopter age and that's that's really cool cuz that gives us a capability we didn't have before a very big capability now you are also known for creating some we're co-creating something that's I've enjoyed for decades the Astronomy Picture of the Day how did that start okay well thanks for asking so it's APO D nasa.gov that's true enough that you don't have to go look under the video for it so it started 25 years ago so I worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and I had an office mate Jerry by now and we would just we were friends and we would talk about the craziest stuff and this new thing was coming in called mosaic I didn't know what mosaic was and so I had to be loaded on my computer I had to download it onto my computer by FTP I think and then I saw that you could go to certain places where people could put up information about things that they liked so one of the first places I went to was the mst3k site Mystery Science Theater 3000 and that was cool but then we started realizing that this is a whole new way of communication and so Jerry and I would talk about where is this going and so we had the idea we were at the same time we were getting emails mostly comm most communication much communication outside of people who live right around your work right around you was through email so we would get emails with images attached particularly from Hubble but sometimes we get images attached and they were the description was written by the person who sent the email and it was like not only wrong but it was live silly it was sometimes spreading disinformation which is such a big topic to know disinformation and it was like no that's not what that is and so we sort of decided that maybe we should start posting these images on a website like mst3k does and just have a really short description of what it really is not the crazy stuff but some of the stuff were saying and so we discussed that at lunch and then a few launches later it still seemed like a good idea so another coincidence is that NASA Goddard Space Flight Center had a really thick pipe back which was unheard of back then basically you took your phone you either dialed or you punched in your numbers and you put your speaker of your phone ago dude you punk plug it in there but that's not the way NASA Goddard work NASA Goddard worked pretty much like we see it today they had a really thick pipe they can have bandwidth that was almost impossible to saturate I think what's called a t1 line several of them so we could put up websites so we decided that several ideas of this but this is the idea that that took off so we asked the higher-ups at NASA if it was okay that we did this and they said well the web is really for scientists so we don't really want to become involved so you go off and you do that if you want and so we said okay so back in 1995 June so 25 years ago earlier this month we posted our first one and then a couple days went by and then we started everyday we had some interesting discussions like people we weren't well-known at all we had 14 page views on our first day but some of our friends around the lab would come up and they'd say aren't you gonna run out of images so we thought about that and the Ranger series on the moon took hundreds of thousands of pictures of the lunar surface hundreds of thousands so we can run a different picture of a crater pretty much every day and not run out of images so the question in our mind is really when we come up enough interesting images not could we run up come up with enough different images so to our surprise it actually was pretty easy a lot of the major observatories are coming out with stuff NASA had stuff Hubble had stuff and after even a month or two you know we would people would send us stuff sometimes and but we know which made your site to go to sites to go to so we actually didn't have a problem finding a good material and we realized there were some really classic images out there that had been described in a public setting only if you know only if you got an email from them or if you happen to know about that so we started making sure we covered all the major images so that's sort of what we do now if there was an astronomy picture that best summed up today what is it you know then here it is and here's a description of that it's usually a hundred and fifty words or some and we hyperlink best links and we try to write it on a wide range of levels all the way from kids in in middle school can get something out of it too professional scientists you know can follow some more lengths and say oh I didn't know that so so we've been going 25 years we have well over 5,000 images now and we're just in our in a daily routine punching these out and so usually it's a lot of fun do you have over the course of doing this do you have a favorite image from Hubble or something like that and I can tell you mom what - is the pillars of creation the amazing image that Hubble took years ago is there something that within the whole yeah I have some of my favorites it changes over time so if you ask me next year I forgotten what I said this year and so no it's just one so there's one taken by Hubble called UGC which is the galaxy catalog 18 so it's a wild Blackheart it's called UGC a can-can Riley attracting galaxies from Hubble and it's got this starburst ring and it just seems it's got its dynamic because it looks like things are happening it's galaxy sized it's got the old center and the new starburst ring it's got other galaxies around the edge and it just seems very very interesting to me and so our lead on that is what's happening to the spiral galaxy but it looks like a spiral galaxy a little bit but then it doesn't really look like a spiral galaxy once you start looking at it and that's kind of our the most popular type images that we have the images that kind of look familiar but then they kind of don't look familiar and so the question is raised in the viewers mind what's going on so that's the hook then they want to read the caption that maybe they learn something about science and about about that image so another image that is one of my favorite there it is roar over doorway this one actually has a story behind it so if you go to this image you will see what seems to be a mountain but it's actually a big hill and there's this person standing on top of this hill and their hands are outstretched and behind them is this magnificent Aurora and some clouds and below them is this like cities and you can see a sunset off to one side and this seems to me to involve many different things all at once including the concept of even personal human discovery and so to be able to go out and experience Aurora as some of your audience has you know when you really see it at first it might be a little disappointing because it's not as bright as in the pictures but then you realize that you can see through it and then it's kind of green like crack clouds are or not and then it's moving and it's changing and it's it's becomes fascinated so you can sort of these image as husband or or or a very very dark it just seems to have this idea of human discovery not necessarily of discovering something new which a lot of eight pods do or a product we abbreviate for a certain picture of the day but this is a very personal human discovery that is captured by this person and the interesting story was this person was sent this person and their friend person who took the picture agreed that he would climb to the top of this this hill and when he saw Aurora he would raise his arms and so the first thing they did this there were no Aurora and so I think it was the third night of doing this and it's cold up there you know and then suddenly within a few minutes just these amazing Aurora occurred and so they didn't have to communicate over her cellphone or anything like that he just raised his hands and you can see it on top of that that peak and it's just really emotional to me and that brings us full circle because it brings us back to our biological place in the universe and how that relates to our physical place in the universe many times my favorite image is uh tomorrow's image after realize it's composed and we're not gonna go black tomorrow also many times it's the last one when I run not always usually I'm pretty proud of once I've composed or don't but sometimes I compose one and I look at it I read it over and sometimes of it you know that's not so bad and so for at least a few minutes that's like that's baby right now this is my mind changes too well and it has to be said too that we are continuously taking images we haven't stopped so there are new images every day being taken of astronomy so we reject now more than reject maybe fifteen images for every image we run and we live in another golden age a golden age where many people can afford sky monitoring equipment telescopes and see CDs and we live in an age where you can go onto YouTube and you can find out how to process not only these images but humble images and and other images and yeah right now we're getting if we got these images in 1995 we'd say oh my god these are amazing the images today if you were to compare with the 1995 images are just super super spectacular with one exception David Malin was amazing back then and he had his own darkroom techniques so he never knew how to do in the darkroom what many people can do digitally today but now there's so many more people oh yeah we're just getting just I feel bad that we can't run all of these images sometimes we reject an image and I'm like oh man it would have been great if we could have run that one what we do have is we now have other sites on Facebook and we're on social media generally it's trying to picture the day on almost any social media platform so we have something called Facebook sky and Instagram universe view screen where we post images to see how popular they would be a pod does not only run the most popular images we also the most educational the most discovery or ancient images you know the images of that day are the ones but popularity does pie roll because we're interested if it is popular we want you know we want to use that as a hook so then we can describe it right yeah we can't we get so many good images we're posting to a day sometimes more - sometimes different ones to Facebook sky and universe you scream and they're getting you know a lot of likes and stuff like that there - and there's so many good ones that that are popular there that we just can't run as named may innate pods and it's a shame but it's good for us in the sense that we're not running out of material by a long shot things are getting better yeah it continues that I remember in 1995 I was dragging around a Dobsonian 8-inch table Sony and telescope drooling over trying to do astrophotography and really the only thing I could do was you know take pictures of comet hale-bopp or something like that but now used by a digital camera and a relatively inexpensive telescope and you can do Astro photography it's just it's just amazing that's gone from you know film cameras and very very expensive see CDs to what it is today and people all over the world are doing this we're getting images from your name a country they're China in yeah Norway but particularly for Aurora just every place it's Australia it's just so the night sky is a unifier is a theme that the International Astronomical Union IAU has endorsed and I think it's true so one of the things that humanity can all see and appreciate is the night sky and that doesn't no national boundaries I think that's another powerful thing about astronomy and one of the things that we try to exploit that this is that NASA does lead the way with a lot of exploration and the Hubble Space Telescope and seeing the James Webb Space Telescope but we all along with that we were able to show stuff from around the globe that's just amazing and it's a it unites and a temporal sense too because one can sit and imagine 50 thousand years ago you know humans early you know Homo sapiens looking up and seeing basically the same thing we see now and they would tell stories there were all kinds of stories and a lot of these stories are lost there are constellations but the constellations almost every culture had their own their own constellations their own stories of different starting things of the night sky and unfortunately many of those are lost but though but there are some that are recorded and I think it's important to try to record as many of them as possible the fifty thousand years ago people knew the night sky and they knew stories about the night sky that would astound us all and it it is just every time I look up the moon I I think you know it's it's in human timescales it is timeless and it just amazes me that that you know that's one thing that unites us with with ancient people from prehistory is tonight sky comets have stopped wars eclipses have stopped battles yes well having having experienced totality in the 2017 eclipse here in Missouri I can see why that stopped a battle seeing that was very different than looking at a picture of a total solar eclipse actually seeing it happen is spooky and I was visiting a friend in Tennessee and I was the first total solar eclipse I saw myself and that was just amazing it's almost like you know we look at the universe and all you study the universe and we look at it we see is this sort of static thing almost like you know mathematics on the paper but that day the universe came down to earth you know the solar system became very real most about the Eclipse was the pinkness of the of the chromosphere it was shockingly pink I mean if someone I see images sent sent a pod now I'm thinking well maybe they turned up the the color on that but they didn't turn the color up on that when you see a total eclipse and you see around the edges of the moon these prominences they can be shockingly pick bright bright pink and it is just so interesting I think I think what got me that what I noticed was the animals because I was out in a rural area in the woods and the insects and the animals just didn't they got really uneasy and I noticed that and then I just I'd also noticed that I could see Regulus the star you know right near the the Sun and I remember being sort of astonished that that I could see stars that easily during the Eclipse because they were almost as visible as it would be at night and yeah it was really and the human eye is so much better at seeing eclipses than a camera no picture does that justice no picture does a total solar eclipse justice no addicted to the things I want to see totality more now there will be more in the world but the biggest one across the United States coming up is in 2024 will be another total solar eclipse zipping down through much of the north and eastern United States in 2024 so luckily I'm gonna get ya want to be for that I just have to I'm in the path again if I Drive to southern Missouri so I'll get to see it again really looking forward to that all right dr. Nemiroff thank you for appearing with us and I hope you come back sometime soon [Music] oh dear no he's gone so shop really yes they know about subscribing and the Bell leave it no no [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 219,845

Keywords: Alien Life, Time Travelers, Faster than Light, Superluminal Speeds and Searching for Time Travelers, Superluminal, Robert Nemiroff, fermi paradox, physics (field of study), aliens, ufo, space, alien, science, documentary, universe, astrobiology, extraterrestrial, asmr, john michael godier event horizon, event horizon, solar system, NASA, time travel to the past, Is time travel to the past possible?, Can anything go faster than light?, apod, time travel

Id: 5lH9XxjJKho

Length: 72min 55sec (4375 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020