Seth Shostak on SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) | Singularity University

[Music] well what I was going to do is this is kind of a standard talk here on a little bit about SETI what we're doing to search for extraterrestrial intelligence I think you all know what the acronym means anybody who doesn't know what SETI stands for it's almost my name but that's a bit of a coincidence okay search for extraterrestrial intelligence we're looking for et and not just life in space there a lot of people within a few miles of where you're sitting whose day job is to look for life in space then most of them are concerned with finding things like pond scum under the surface of Mars but we're looking for the kind of life that would hold up inside of the conversation now the the title of this talk was actually motivated by the fact that I very frequently get asked as do my colleagues when you guys gonna succeed you've been at this for a long time right now of course we don't know when we were gonna when we're gonna succeed nonetheless people always give an answer to that question I'd listen to Frank Drake he gives an answer he says ten years he's been saying that for 20 years that I know of Jill tarter says a migrant parent grandkids may find et and so forth so she's a little more conservative in her answer and I was giving an answer as well I'm gonna try and give you what might be a better answer but probably isn't let me just first say that the reason that we think that they're out there is partially just a sunny view of the cosmos that suggests that this planet might not be a miracle that what's happened here may have happened in many places one of the possible bits of evidence for that is can be seen in this photo here which I made in North West Australia a few years ago up in the Pilbara Hills anybody from Australia it's not a place you'd normally go unless you're a cow or a fly but you you see some rock there that rock there's business card in the bottom right I put there for scale that rock is known to be about three and a half billion years old plus or minus a few percent we know that from radioactive dating which was actually the kind of dating that I did in high school so we we know how old that rock is and you can see there's some just a laser pointer it doesn't matter you see these sort of round shapes here look like cauliflower in the rock and the question was what are those things are they just geological formation that happened to give you know ensconced in the rock there or are they the remains of bacterial colonies stromatolites from three and a half billion years ago and the consensus now is it wasn't when I made the photo but today the consensus is these are fossilized bacterial colonies stromatolites bacteria themselves don't make such great fossils of occasionally they may but the mounds they build of course are macroscopic big enough to be fossilized and that's what we see here now the point is you all know the earth is only four and a half billion years old right so three and a half billion years ago which is rather young in the Earth's history there was already life and fairly sophisticated life and that suggests doesn't prove that it certainly suggests that life is not an improbable event because it didn't take very long to get it started okay so like if you go into last casino in Las Vegas he put a quarter in the slot machine he you know $10,000 drops out the bottom you might conclude well gosh that wasn't a very improbable bet now it might have been you might have been they were just lucky because otherwise you wouldn't be suffering through this but on the other hand this is suggestive the other thing that's suggestive of course is merely the size of the universe this is just that one of the many surveys of galaxies of the universe I don't know how many of you are interested in astronomy but every one of the dots here is a galaxy the these areas on the left and right here are just areas that were unavailable to the telescope so they're dark but in fact you can see that the universe is fairly homogeneous in a large sense but rather inhomogeneous on small scales because the galaxies are distributed in filaments and sheets and so forth and so on that all tells you something about how the universe was born but the important point is that there's a lot of real estate out there right our own galaxy has a few hundred billion stars and the number of galaxies we can see is on the order of a hundred billion as well so most of you've multiplied those two numbers together in your head or on the back of the shirt of the guy in front of you that's ten to the twenty two stars in the visible universe the actual universe is of unknown size it might be infinite might not be infinite but in any case it doesn't matter it's still a lot of stuff just in our own universe that's just a close-up of one of these things ten to the eleventh galaxies visible to our telescopes now the other thing that's kind of new in this business and wasn't known when the first SETI experiment was done back in 1960 is how many of these stars have planets because he's not likely to cook up life on stars when I was a kid which was some time before the Crimean War we were told that the way you made planets was to rip stuff out of the Sun that there was another star that you know had a sort of a fender-bender where the Sun didn't actually hit it but it got close pulled out gas and that form the planets that was that was a theory that had a long run even though it turns out that it doesn't work which kind of ended the run but if that were the way planets were made then this is the only solar system in the galaxy because it's very unlikely that two stars get close enough together to have this happen and work it out yourself right you all know the scale of the universe if you reduce the Sun to the size of a ping-pong ball that's a project we leave through the students here for the weekend if you do that then the nearest other star is another ping-pong ball but it's in Salt Lake City all right so what are the chances that those two ping-pong balls are going to get you know within an inch or two of one another just by the random motions as they move very slowly through space obviously it doesn't happen very often in the entire history of the galaxy you might get a collision like that in this neighborhood so you know this was suggesting that planets were rare well we know that's not true thanks to the work of astronomers since 1995 who have found more than 400 planets around other stars and they mostly have found them via this technique here that a little cartoon shows you that well finding the star sorry the planet itself is very difficult because planets are dim right and they're right next to a very bright star and the problem for the telescope's it's not so much that the planets are so dim it's that they're near such a bright stars of the dynamic range is is enormous ly great it's billions to one it's very hard to find that that planet there are instruments being designed they can do that but anyhow that's not the way it's done so far instead of looking for the planet directly you just look for the slow wobble of the star I think mostly you know how this works and that graph there shows you in fact the first planet around a normal star data for that taken up here at lick observatory on Mount Hamilton not very far from where you're sitting and you can see that you know for a couple of hours the star was moving toward you about the speed of which your bicycle goes and there was moving away at about the same speed and then coming close and so forth so they found these planets we found more than four these things now that number isn't really so interesting what's interesting is to know what fraction of stars have planets not how many we found that number just goes up every two weeks okay if you talk to guys like Jeff Marcie I think it's a picture here's Jeff you take two take the talk to guys like this who make a modest living finding these planets and say look Jeff if you had perfect telescopes right so you know infinite signal of noise whatever what fraction of stars do you think would show planets and he can make an estimate of that on the basis of this statistics he has so far and his answer to me at least a few months ago was well maybe half maybe three-quarters well to an astronomer half is the same as all right I mean there's no difference so if you can get something to within a factor two that's really good in astronomy so that means all these stars have planets right so the only question that remains as well how many of these are good plans because a lot of worthless planets around I mean look at Neptune I'm sure Neptune's not big in your life and it's probably not you know a lot of life on Neptune for that matter Pluto is probably if you considered a planet probably not very interesting either so a lot of these planets are going to be like this this one this is a rendition of the the planet found and around that star that I just showed you the data for 51 peg this is actually photo I made in my garage with the tennis balls and things like that but never mind this shows you what it would look like there on the order of a trillion planets in our galaxy that's the consequence of what Geoff Marcy had said how many of them are like the earth well we don't know we've never found a twin of the earth we've never found a planet this really like the earth one that you could say yeah you know this might have liquid oceans thick atmospheres and who knows Klingons I just haven't found because they're very hard to find they don't make enough of a wobble to find them using that technique not with the kind of instruments we have today it's just getting very close to being able to do that the instrument that will find them is being run right out at NASA Ames here and that's the Kepler space telescope and Kepler is finding planets by looking for mini eclipses as a planet gets in front of its star it's the ultimate staring contest Kepler is looking at about a hundred and fifty thousand stars there's a really boring job it is look 150 thousand stars in every thirty seconds it downloads you know the brightness of that stars it just measures the brightness of these stars some of them by chance may have planets that cross in front of them and that reduces the brightness by maybe one part in 10,000 if it's an earth-like planet and if they see that and then they see it again and then they see it a third time now they can compare the intervals and make sure that it's really an orbiting planet and all that sort of thing and that will tell you the mass and the orbit of that planet in other words bottom line this instrument will do something that no other instrument could ever have done and that is to tell you what fraction of stars have worlds sort of like the earth is a very interesting experiment not only because it can tell you that because this is this is like completely analogous to what happened after 1492 right after 1492 within 30 years the Europeans had mapped the globe you could have you could have drawn a globe in 1492 but most of it was blank right you had Europe a bit of Africa and some of Asia but most of the globe was blank thirty years later most of the globe was filled in yeah there are a few things missing like Antarctica and some you know islands here and there but fundamentally it was done one generation did that and that's exactly what Kepler is going to do it's going to answer this question that no previous generation could could answer and no subsequent generation has to answer is you just need to do this once and it'll say okay you know if it really does find 30 or 50 earth-like worlds you work this out that means that a few percent of all stars have planets like the earth that's the smart money is saying that's what it's going to find the smart money being those who you know successfully competed for the project they're all here at Ames well we don't know if they're right but if they are right that's what it'll that's what it'll do and that'll be of course rather intriguing that means of course if that's the right answer then they're on the order of you know hundreds of millions of versaille that numbers wrong actually it's on the order of billions of Earth's in the Milky Way so maybe most of them are just sterile but it would be remarkable if they were all sterile I know if I convinced you now I want to make the argument here that it actually matters there's a question that I think matters in this search for et I tried to motivate why we think they're out there I'm sort of switching gears here because another question you get all the time as well particularly the media people is what do you think et will look like right I just I just went down to LA but three days ago whatever was through some production house down there to be taped for Animal Planet I don't know anything about animals except the ones I eat but they want me on this thing because they want to ask me about the reptilians right a lot of people believe the aliens are reptilians you know why I said that you know if the aliens reptilians when I just put them in a tank in the corner of the room and feed them lettuce the reptiles in general fairly placid because they're kind of cold blood or not but but they do ask they say so what would the real ET be like and the answer to that question is we don't know the answer to that question I mean obviously we don't know the answer to that question but I think it matters to think about this and in fact this may be more germane to the singularity University than you're probably thinking at the moment I'll get back to that I think it matters here's an historical example about why it may matter what he looks like you could say I don't care what he looks like as long he sends a signal that we can pick up so what if he's green gray has four eyes six legs adept eyes doesn't matter it might be interesting to know but who cares all right here you see Percival Lowell in about 1900 now Percival Lowell was a Boston Brahmin or came out of a Boston Brahmin family in any case he went to Harvard he was one of the best students Harvard ever had but on the other hand it was only Harvard so in any case he was interesting studied mathematics but he was interested in astronomy and you know rather than taking a job at a fourth-rate University trying to get to him here he just said the heck with that I got money and he just built his own Observatory I mean why you know he could he can hire himself and he did he actually sent people out to find out the best place to build an observatory something that was in fact a new idea observatories and previous to this is were just built in the center of town right where the university was at least in Europe and that would work back then but of course you know in 1888 or whatever it was Edison you know invented a practical electric light bulb and that kind of downtown areas not so good for astronomy he he was told that the best place was somewhere in South America and he said think again I guess you know he was worried about the cuisine I'm not sure but in any case thinking again turned up Flagstaff so that's where he built this thing he modestly named the observatory the Lowell Observatory so here he is dressed in a suit and a tie in a dark dome all night watching Mars because that's what you would do in 1900 okay he was convinced by Italian astronomers who claimed they saw straight lines crisscrossing the surface of our little ruddy buddy they called them Canali but that's because many of them spoke Italian and it was unclear whether they meant canal e2b canals or whether they met Canali to be just grooves or geological features right in the Italians themselves were very cagey and explaining what they meant and but but Lowell was very sure that these were in fact canals constructed by thinking beings in fact here's some of his handiwork okay now he mapped hundreds of these canals he gave them nice latin names just in case of Martians hadn't bothered just to show you what the real Mars looks like here's a you know a photo of Mars from contemporary probe actually of the same hemisphere and you can see that the dark areas the big dark areas correlate fairly well what don't correlate terribly well are all those straight lines and the question was well what was what was happening here and nobody's absolutely sure but there seems to be a good explanation well what was going wrong with Lowell cuz Lowell Wright was confronted with the fact that the people up here on Mount Hamilton at Lick Observatory they had a bigger telescope and they did not see these canals you might think why didn't they just make photographs and then you could saw us settle the whole matter but photography in astronomy was a very primitive art at that time and these were things you could only see when the atmosphere would clear for a fraction of a second would stabilize and then you could see fine detail your eye was better than photographs at this point so they couldn't verify it that way but the people at Lick Observatory said look we got a bigger scope than yours and we don't see these gosh-darn canals and Lowell's retort to that was you guys are not in Flagstaff here's you know the atmosphere is better here yeah if anybody from Arizona they can tell me but actually what was going on here I mean he you know here contemporary astronomy book there's the surface of Mars as it was known to be a hundred years ago or thought to be in any case and it kinda looks like Venice California Lowell died 1916 still believing that the canals were real and indeed not only did he believe it but he wrote books about this and he was a good writer in addition to being good at everything else you he was they say claimed to be the the brightest student Harvard ever had but this is an illustration from a book in 1908 and used to see the Martians here at a cocktail party you can tell the females cuz they wear you know bows and have long eyelashes which is of course true for every species any case here's the explanation best they could tell because as I say by the time Lowell died 1916 while he believed in this almost nobody else did there was a guy by the name of Edward maunder here is Edward maunder he was you may have heard of the maunder minimum in connection with ice ages and so forth he was a clever sort of guy but he did an experiment which he made drawings of you know sort of a hypothetical Mars that's what you see here on the left and he just put those in the front of a roomful of school kids school boys okay these were I think they were 11 years old whatever and of course they were at various distances depending on where they were sitting in the room and he just had them draw on a sheet of paper what they could see and and and the kids in the front of the class would draw something very similar to you know what was what you see there the kids in the back it was kind of you know obviously they couldn't see all the fine detail but there was a certain distance somewhere in the middle where the boys would connect the dots right so that's telling you something about your retina in your brain which likes to connect the dots that helps you to find edges of imageries images and you know that may help you know catch dinner right it undoubtedly has some survival value to see edges so that's what was happening and that's what monitor maintains was happening too low another way they did they did try this at in Flagstaff they they got a beach ball essentially and drew some canals on it and put it you know down a field then they set up a small terrestrial telescope right and they mimicked the optical situation of actually looking at Mars and they had Lowell look through that and try and map those canals which he did and he got him all wrong but you know it was once more the an illustration of the adage that the boss may not always be right but he is the boss and he told them to stop those experiments anyhow so mondo did it rather independently now my point here is that when we finally went to Mars of course these are the Viking Lander photos in the mid-1970s and you have remember the excitement when these guys plop down onto the surface of you know the rusty dusty surface of Mars and they opened up their shutters many of you were not around for that but it was a very exciting time because nobody knew what they were gonna see there might be little green guys waving you know welcome to Mars could have been like in it could have been something and it was that okay which as it turns out is dead Jim right now norm Horowitz down at JPL at the time who was part of the Viking biology team said that well you he realized the public it and everybody else was kind of disappointed he said well it could be that there's life on Mars that looks like rocks but more likely what this is of rocks in fact we know the rocks okay now the point is that that sound bad but of course today we're we're you know sanguine again about the possibility of Martians mostly from results like this where you see an orbiter for a photo of a of a crater here and here you see it a couple of years later and you see that streak there something is obviously leached out of the side of the crater wall run down this the side of that crater and it could could be broke Rheem could be talcum powder most likely just water okay and that suggests that if you really want to find life on Mars the thing to do is send Bruce Willis to Mars with a bunch of Roughnecks and have them drilled down a couple of hundred feet until they find the liquid aquifers down that we think may exist down there and pull up that muck and look at it under a microscope because if you do that outside here if you do all the whole two miles deep and pull up that muck you'll find microscopic life as well so that's that's the thing now my point in all this is only that it makes a difference how you picture the Martians right because in 1900 the way to find Martians was to use a nine-inch reflect refracting telescope in Flagstaff Arizona today the way you hope to find Martians has send some sort of robotic drilling rig to Mars and go down a couple hundred feet and have a microscope onboard so your image of what the aliens might be like will affect your strategy for finding them so I'll get back to that now intelligent life if you were to grab the next you know 10 scientists off the streets here I don't recommend it but if you're to do it and asking you think there's life in space I suspect nine out of ten of them would say yeah well that sounds reasonable to me right but if you asked about intelligent life the percentage drops a little bit a lot of biologists evolutionary biologists this include Stephen Jay Gould you know he would occasionally write about this we're of the opinion that you know all you had to do was change a little bit of our evolutionary history and you wouldn't be sitting here right for example a very obvious example sixty-five million years ago a rock slams into the Yucatan wipes out the dinos and two-thirds three-quarters of everything else walking around the land now if that rocket arrived ten hours earlier it would have missed the earth and there'd be dinosaurs in Mountain View and you could say wow yeah but the dinosaurs would have gotten smart and there are people who think that that might have happened I mean evolutionary biologists not just have Achatz or dinosaur intelligence and and maybe it would but i but i but I did ask once Niles Eldredge who's a evolutionary biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York I asked him that question with the dinos have gotten smart and he said well he said look the dinos had 150 million years to get smart and didn't what would another 65 million years have done form right now you know that that argument only goes so far he could have said the same thing about you know primates and they did get smart eventually but any case so this is a very controversial thing this is highly contentious just because I give you a million worlds with life well any of them have anything as clever as the average resident of Sunnyvale and we don't know the answer now the public believes that yeah it's happening I'm not going to well maybe I won't now say something about this I should point this out because I don't know how many of you think that the aliens are not only out there but they're here right that there what are there 19 species of greys or something like that right buzzing the countryside occasionally abducting you for experiments your mom wouldn't approve of well that's not a fringe belief right one-third of the American public believes that's true and by the way one third of the public of Australia Japan and Europe does as well in fact here as a result of CNN Time poll made in 2002 do you think a UFO crash-landed Roswell New Mexico in 1947 sixty-five percent of Americans say yes like a Lian's he haven't succumb hundreds of light-years to enjoy some tex-mex cuisine I mean I don't know why they're visiting New Mexico but I am and hundreds of light-years and then the last fifty feet to make a navigation here and crash into the dirt now certainly could happen but I mean that's that's analogous to you driving across the country and then totaling your car on the drive driveway garage door actually a good tab is the U but 65 percent see that's not point six five but that's sixty five percent is the US government hiding the fact that it knows of the existence of aliens eighty percent of Americans say yes the same government that runs the IRS but nonetheless is able to keep this quiet now even if you like to think that the if the feds are keeping the aliens are freeze-dried in stracke stacked up at area 51 or wherever you like every other country has to be doing this too unless you think that the aliens only one of this is in America right so you know I deal with this every day every day I get phone calls and emails from people who are having difficulties with aliens in their personal lives and I can assure you that the people who call me up I mean they're not some are nut cases it was guy yesterday who call from North Miami to say he's in touch with the Lord of the Rings but he sat a stranger on the phone that he didn't email but most of the people are call me up I mean they've seen something and they're just not very good at figuring out what that something might be okay part of the reason why I don't think they're here is you know it's the interstellar travel is rather difficult our Rockets go you know seven eight miles a second so if you want to go to Alpha Centauri and visit the Navi example to buy some unobtainium that numbers slightly wrong it's my thing I worked at out again it's like one hundred ten thousand years one-way trip okay so that's a long time to sit there you know eating bad food off your lap but you can build faster rockets of course but the problem with faster Rockets is they take a lot of energy if you want to go half the speed of light so you get there in ten years you can work it out just use high school physics forget relativity just use high school physics figure out the amount of energy required and it's a really big pile of coal I mean it's it's the amount of energy that the United States burns up in a couple hundred years at the current rate so it's very energetically intensive you say well we'll just use matter antimatter drive like they do in Star Trek and well if you can figure out how to store the antimatter not to mention making it I mean I guess you could because that works but but there are other problems you know when you're going and half the speed a light through the through the galaxy on your way to visit the Navi you know although all the interstellar dust and gas is slamming into the front of your rocket producing high you know very hard radiation that zips through the the rocket and you know essentially kills your right way but hey alright you know these are all technical problems so maybe you can solve them but it's not easy now here's another reason I just mentioned this for the heck of it this is like this whole talk I there's another reason why I don't think we're being visited the question I always ask people think we're being visited why now right why now why are the aliens here just in time to improve your social life by abducting you for these salacious experiments right why is that happening now I mean you know you're it's been here for a billion years and you usually answer you get is well look the aliens are disturbed by our messing up the environment are they're unhappy about the fact that we are we've got nuclear weapons and stuff like that that they have some moral interest in us now that's alien sociology and and the data set for alien sociology is very sparse so we don't really know that and it's you know say you know I don't go in the backyard and separate the ants you guys have been warring for years and I just don't like it don't bother with that so I don't know I mean but that's all you know supposition one doesn't really know if the eccentricities would have any interest in it but the point is that that that argument doesn't matter because they don't know about it here's I Love Lucy first episode was the early 1950s so that signals like 60 light years out into space so any aliens that are coming here now because they don't like Fred Mertz as jokes or something those guys can't be more than 30 light years away because they can't get here faster than the speed of light right so takes 30 years for the signal to get there another 30 years for them to respond come back here that means that there are only 2,000 star systems that have been exposed to our radar to our television to our FM radio all of which leaked off the earth only a couple of thousand stars that are you know only half that distance out so that they've had time to come here and haul you out of your bedroom that's a very small number the chances that there's any alien civilization in the nearest couple of thousand stars strikes me as very small so I this doesn't work for me I think it's safe to say that nobody knows that Homo sapiens exists except residents of this planet nobody knows that they know the earth has life because they've you know they could find the oxygen in our atmosphere that's not much of a trick they could have done that and they could have done that a billion years ago and found it right but I don't know that they would send their rockets just to abduct the trilobite soar breeding experiments that wouldn't work and again I don't know the aliens maybe they would this very controversial thing about whether intelligence is likely and we don't know the only way to answer that whether intelligence is sort of an inevitable evolutionary development or just something that happened here but probably not anywhere else is either to find it somewhere else that answers the question or to figure out how it happened here right why did we get smart okay and there are various I mean there are people who study this not a lot of them but there's some okay now first off our definition of intelligence is very simple straightforward if you can build a radio transmitter you're intelligent okay so you should probably ask the person sitting next to you how well they can do it that but I don't and so here's a guy thirty thousand years after this photos made he's building a radio transmitter so he's intelligent and I never hesitate to say although I've said it many times that you can tell he's intelligent because he's adding some RAM to his computer there okay now the their various mechanisms in evolution that seemed to suggest that the development of intelligence is not a very hard thing to do predator-prey relations you know they ratchet up the intelligence of both the predator and the prey because the stupider prey tend to get caught more often in the stupider predators tend to go hungry every night that kind of thing so you know gazelles and lions are getting smarter together there's increased in cephalization this is a plot from lori moreno who's a biologist down at Emory University in Atlanta and what she's plotted here is the the IQ of toothed whales and dolphins everybody's favorite intelligence species the dolphins I think that people like them because they got this smile on their face all the time ya know she's got their IQs on the basis of either measuring the cranial capacity versus their body weight or maybe she's found some fossilized SAT scores but in any case you can see that this is stupid here and that smart there and this is 50 million years ago and that's today up there so 50 million years ago the Dolphins are pretty dumb right then they developed echolocation their brains get bigger they get smarter and then you know they do various things but you'll notice that some of them continue to get smarter still not all of them someone got stupider again but two million years ago the smartest thing on this planet was a white blank dolphin okay probably not true today but I know so what this is saying is that look here's another species from which we you know our common ancestor where this species goes back quite a ways we're not that closely related to them anymore and yet it was developing more intelligent species are more intelligent you know subspecies obviously other primates have gotten smarter dogs and cats are probably smarter than all the dinosaurs birds some birds are pretty clever they say octopuses are clever although I've never you know seen any great literature from octopuses but still the point is that not only our species got smarter lots of them did and that suggests that suggests that there is nevel evolutionary push for at least some species to develop intelligence okay another idea and I show this only because it's of interest in young people is the idea of Geoffrey Miller here very clever idea in which he says look the reason we got smart was because of the dating behavior of our ancestors which was to signal for Fitness at the canonical example here of the Peacocks right you know the the male's display the females decide like that's the same for us right but it's also true for the Peacocks so the the P hands are sitting around you know looking at these peacocks these male guys and they're walking around they're showing their big blue feathers well guys blue feathers pretty good but this guy's blue feathers are better right so that one gets taken home to mom and the question is what's in it for the peahen to have a peacock with those big blue feathers because after all he only attracts predators right then that's the probably not a good thing but on the other hand he's here he's made it he's made it this far his genes must be good because that's what she's really interested in she wants some index into his genetic makeup so that the chicks will be healthy right and it turns out you know growing those blue feathers is rather metabolically demanding and if the genes had a lot of mutations we wouldn't be able to do it all right so that's the deal now in hominids we don't have blue feathers but our brains are rather intimately could you know dependent on how many mutations are in our genome so if your genomes messed up with a lot of mutations your brain isn't wired up so well so the women are sitting around I mean the guys are passing the brains around all the women they check it out but and the women are saying well you know Bob over here he's kind of interesting but Fred over there he's more interesting they're listening with their ears it's not that they want smart guys like Fred right women aren't really interested intelligence far as I can tell but they're but the deal is that you know fewer mutations and then there's the other factor the fact that he's just walking around right I mean this is like you know this guy tracks predators but he's still here I remember all those Clint Eastwood films where Clint Eastwood rides into some godforsaken western town on a horse and the women all turn out and you sort of wonder why this guy probably had a shower in three months but they do the same thing with Captain Cook you had syphilitic sailors on board his ships and he would keep them on onboard the ship so they didn't infect the local population but the women swam out to the ship I asked an evolution bash why would they do that and she said look they've made it this far they must be good so that's that's a Miller's idea that the you know are rather the males like you got ratcheted up by women who were looking for fewer genetic mutations of course and that means this guy is very popular but the question of course was why did the women get smart and his answer to that is well they were under a lot of pressure of evolutionary pressure as well to be charismatic and interesting to keep the guy from wandering off so there you go all right now the point of all this story which may or may not be the actual story Miller thinks it is and he makes a compelling case but if this or anything like it is correct then intelligence should be pretty common in space because this is just a very simple Darwinian mechanism that could obtain on a lot of planets okay the bottom line we haven't found any compelling evidence any life beyond Earth not even pond scum not even dead pond scum but we're looking so how do we look well go through this fairly quickly I mean one thing you could do is just look for artifacts this is one of the Apollo photos that wasn't released to the public because obviously I did this in Photoshop but clearly this is not a you know there's nothing wrong with this kind of an approach you just look for things in space right that we're left by aliens and we wanted a big advantage of communicating this way leaving a time capsule is that unlike a radio signal a time capsule could be there for a very very long period of time you don't have to have synchronicity you don't have to be broadcasting a signal at the right time that somebody with an antenna will pick it up at the other end this just sits there until they find it okay we've not dug up the moon looking for these things but it's something to do we could look for you know ringed worlds or Dyson swarms or stuff like that all of these things make sense and there's a little bit of an effort to find these things not much of one one could use a better better effort and then of course there's the Jodie Foster approach and this is kind of my day job we told Warner Brothers this is wrong because we were we were listening to 56 million channels simultaneously at the time we said you have to put 28 million pairs of your phones on Jody they didn't do there she is at the VLA which has never been used for SETI but it's very photogenic and the idea here is that we'll just pick up the signals and that you know this was doing the numbers as a one-line calculation and then that was done by a couple of guys at MIT in 1959 and and to their surprise what they did was they essentially said what if you took the biggest radar transmitter on the earth and then the biggest radar antenna receiver combination on the earth and you just aimed them at one another how far could you separate them and still pick up the transmitter with the receiver that was the calculation and it turned out to be light-years that was that was the astounding thing so this works on paper okay now the way you actually observe this is 10 years ago now this is down at Arecibo in Puerto Rico you have a couple of workstations that are doing the monitoring because you have tens of millions of channels and so forth and so on and also they don't require coffee breaks and they can find they can integrate up signals and increase the signal-to-noise in various ways that your eye or your ear could not do so obviously it's all done by computers and in fact you really wouldn't have to sit there once it's all automated in fact it is being automated now you don't want to actually sit there that's very boring the kind of signal we look for narrowband signals if the aliens are deliberately trying to get in touch as opposed to just picking up their cell phones which would be very broadband if you just wanted to get in touch you would put a lot of transmitter energy into a very narrow band right because that makes the signal-to-noise at the receiving end the highest so you look for things like this okay those are kinds of signals by the way that nature does not make clays are as pulsars and so forth you have to worry about those things you never get such a narrowband signal so we look for very narrow band signal someone hurts even less okay now this looks good this is right off the telescope down in Puerto Rico but those are all you know radar sets telecommunications satellites and stuff like that and you have to sort all that out well you would really want to put this whole experiment is on the backside of the moon right which is perpetually shielded from Earth but there's certain problems there with cost okay let me point out again that although this experiment is now a fifty-year-old endeavor it's very intermittent if you add up all the observing time done for SETI in which we looked at in particular targets in the sky it only amounts to a few months of worth of observing and that's because we always had to use somebody else's antenna like this one down to Puerto Rico thousand feet across is a great antenna but it's being used mostly for studying pulsars and quasars sorry not clays arse pulsars in and galaxies so you only get a little bit of observing time well we're trying to try and improve that the bottom line of all this is actually that the number of stars systems looked at carefully for signals as fewer than a thousand it's a very small number Paul Davis has a book out now called the eerie silence but even he will admit that there really isn't an eerie silence we've been trying to find et we've barely scratched the surface in terms of the number of star systems that have been looked at carefully it's not at all surprising we haven't found them so far but this is this kind of discouraging after 50 years we still have fewer than a thousand stars looked at carefully well that's going to change so here's how this is Frank Drake by the way this is a guy who did the first SETI experiment Frank just turned eighty last month or two months ago I guess and he still comes in the office he comes in writes this equation on the board we're not sure what it means but there it is and as I said in the beginning franca and the rest of us frequently asked when we gonna find them now here comes the answer that to begin with we're building our own instruments called the Allen telescope array this is Paul Allen gave the money to get this started okay so the first 42 antennas of an eventual 350 we're financed if I pull out on there about 20 feet across you can see me in this photo either Jupiter over on the right there about 20 feet across this is about a five hour drive from where you're sitting if you have the time you might drive up there and take a look at it's kind of a nifty place I can cover it a very wide range of frequency and because it's an array you can actually make pixels on the sky wherever you want them just by you know computationally and that means you can look at more than one star at a time that speeds up the search the whole thing that's of interest here is not that this is more sensitive than previous searches it's not but it's faster it's much much faster and not only is it faster we'll continue to get faster this is what it looks like all 42 this is some sort of plot showing the speed of SETI searches I just took some index of the speed of our searches ever since Frank Drake's first search in 1960 so these black dots show you know the speed you can see it's going up and those of you who are still conscious may notice that this is a semi-log plot so it's going up exponentially and of course what's fitted here singularity is Moore's law right but it follows Moore's law pretty well because this is mostly digital electronics so when people ask when you gonna find et well look you're looking for a needle in a haystack and the question is when you're gonna hit a needle it only depends on a couple of things how big is the haystack we know that we're looking in the galaxy so we know how many star systems are second how fast are you going through the hay well that tells you and third how many needles are in there well that we don't know right okay well here's here's some guesses of as the number of needles and gives needle number okay this line up here shows you how far out into the galaxy we would be able to search with this thing assuming it was more or less completed in that that year and you can see one hundred light years out two hundred light years out and so forth it just keeps going up but the number of needles is unknown Carl Sagan figured out our probably a million not billions and billions but a million broadcasting societies in the galaxy if he's right and you know by 2015 we might get one I Isaac Asimov figured it was six hundred and seventy thousand for some reason Asimov was able to compute this to two decimal places maybe was brighter than these other guys and but if he's right then it takes a longer twenty twenty something or other and Frank Drake himself figures ten thousand now these are called estimates but in this case estimate is a euphemism for gas because nobody really knows but it is true that this range from over ten thousand to a million is kind of the range estimated by the people who initiated this whole project right so if this project is going to work if it's gonna work at all it's going to work before you all become middle-aged is this isn't something that's gonna take generations either it's gonna work on the next couple dozen years or there's something wrong it could be a lot of things wrong right I mean it could be that you know we need a lot more sensitivity or it could be that we're looking at the wrong part of the spectrum or it could be that there you are out there or it could be that they're not using radio or you know you can make a whole laundry list of things but if the assumptions that were made 50 years ago have any validity have any merit this is going to pay off in your in your lifetimes gonna pay off in the next couple of dozen years okay so we'll find et within 2,000 years soon they're not missing important physics we might be missing important physics I also said how we picture ET matters let me just get back to that because I do think it's slightly relevant for what you guys do and that's this we've always assumed that ET was carbon base you know complex molecules there's the periodic table are limits there's carbon up there carbon you're made mostly of carbon compounds why is that is it because there's a lot of carbon out there in the dirt well there is a lot of carbon out there in the dirt but there's more silicon out there in the dirt than carbon you're not silicon base could it be an accident it's not an accident carbon has four covalent bonds it's a small atom smaller than silicon so you know it hooks up it makes interesting molecules right and life is after all just interesting molecules and if you think of it that way when you wake up in the morning but that's all it is right now you can say well yeah but what about silicon it has four covalent bonds - yeah but it's a bigger atom that the bonds are weaker and so forth the atoms sorry the molecules it makes are not quite as interesting I mean consider carbon hooks up with two oxygen atoms and you get carbon dioxide which is kind of useful particularly if you want to you know heat up the earth you take silicon and you connect it with two oxygen atoms and you get silicon dioxide which is quartz which isn't so interesting for biology right and germanium even less interesting ten ten base life wizard of oz maybe I don't know okay so we always assume that the aliens will be and will have all these sort of properties that we have I mean we could go through them but these are all just simple engineering considerations we assume the aliens you know the little gray guys or something like that here's Hollywood view of some aliens this is district 9 these aliens come to earth or just a social problem arthropods and then the Starship Troopers remember Paul for who Vince film you know the aliens are bad here and of course the Hollywood knows that you don't like insects right because you know they're annoying they compete with you for the food supply they carry disease whatever so he figures if you don't like small insects you really won't like big insects the aliens are big insects of course you know scaling laws if you actually made an insect like this it would collapse under its own weight and you'd have to really awful clean up but any guys did this Hollywood see you oh then that I love these the lazy god aliens the only design that works any one of these guys could walk into a plastic surgeon in Palo Alto and the guy would probably say I can fix that so I'm sure they could got like this moves in next door you know eventually you'll fight them over for dinner all right now that you kind of use your standard alien and Laurie Marino has pointed out that this is just a projection of what we think we're going to become right this is where we're headed we're losing our hair these guys have gone all the way on that don't have big noses or big mouths because they've lost their olfactory sense in their dentition you know and in fact by this point the only real jobs are designing websites so they have big eyes okay well that's interesting but it says more about us and probably says about the aliens all we're interested in as far as the aliens are concerned is that they be intelligent telogen off to build a radio transmitter okay now that's your intelligence he got the little three pound brain which runs at about the power level of a fridge light okay I told my brother this you know I always called you a dim bulb and turns out you are because now 25 watts isn't a whole lot but on the other hand 25 watts is about one third of your entire body power consumption your body runs it 75 to 100 watts all right so what this means here you go to in-n-out burger one-third of all the calories you eat go to keep your brain warm despite the fact that even if you're not thinking of anything like most of the guys right it just keeps your brain warm even though your brain is only 2% of your body weight very expensive to have a brain it is okay so that's our intelligence now you might say well yeah okay that's that's look at the size of the brain maybe maybe the aliens have the same sort of situation they've just gone to bigger brains because that's what we're gonna do right here's a plot of our brain size versus time so three million years ago our ancestors had half kilo one-pound brains million years ago we had two-pound brains and now you have a three pound brain now that last pound was important because when you have a two pound brain you're forced eight and we have a three pound brain you get tenure at Stanford okay and the Assumption here is that well maybe our brains will just continue to get bigger maybe but you know a lot of objections to that to begin with the women will go on strike because they have trouble giving birth to babies as big as their heads are now you say you know I'm gonna have babies that are gonna eventually have 10-pound brains there are some mechanical difficulties with having a very big brain because you know when you twist your head because you want to see what's in the rear view mirror your head twists off and stuff like that all these these sorts of things suggest maybe that won't happen and in case it probably isn't gonna happen because of this this plot you know this one's due to honce marva chat carnegie-mellon all he did was plot the amount of compute power you can buy per thousand dollars ever since 1900 and of course it's going up exponentially headed for their singularity era tierra so so 19 there yep right I mean a lot of people to speak some of this stuff but in 1997 for a thousand dollars you buy the compute power of a spider right today I mean there's no data here but in 2010 whichever curve you take care you buy the compute power of a lizard okay if you're selling car insurance or something and the point here is that by 2020 4000 bucks you buy the compute power of you right now of course it's unclear whether that means you got artificial intelligence because it takes more than just the hardware but on the other hand maybe the maybe the software will catch up this is all your bailiwick so I won't say much about this the point is there's a real time scale argument here and this is it and anybody don't have to hammer you though with this I just made this little graphic showing the evolution of the horse sixty million years ago horse was the size of a collie dog today most horses are the size of a horse now that's what 60 million years of Darwin has done for him you look on the right-hand side I had a 8-bit computer you know in 1977 had to solder it together myself the computer I have at home today is about I've given the the bus width and the speed of the processor I reckon it's 8000 times faster than what I had in 1977 so in other words in 25 35 years we've had 10,000 fold improvement in computers in 60 million years we took a horse from this to that right I don't have to hammer you with this the point is it's only been a hundred years since we invented radio all right so imagine the aliens invent radio so they can go on the air and we can hear them but a hundred years after that 200 years whatever number you want to choose as long as it's not unreasonable they invent their successors all right that's presumably what we're doing in this century okay so the idea that you have aliens that are sort of soft and squishy guys like this just doesn't make any sense because that's very unlikely that you just happen to catch them when they're there in that short interval between inventing radio and inventing something that's a little bit better right now I I suggested this up at the University of Washington once and one of the undergrads said if you invent Thinking Machines won't they kill us and that's a natural optimism of youth of course but I I you know I look I've got goldfish at home and I don't wake up I'm smart in there but I don't wake up in the morning and Saturday kill those guys so I don't know I don't need I don't mean to say I'm what I'm gonna do is win with you when the computers get really sorry I just turned the keyboard around you know you you type whatever that's that's a whole issue that you all can deal with my only point is a timescale argument that I don't think that the aliens gonna be a little soft squishy gray guys you're gonna find some sort of machine intelligence now Kurtis while getting this Eddie is to a couple of months ago you've all heard from Ray and Ray thinks they're all going to be you know nanobots it'll be distributed intelligence that sort of thing out to eat the cosmos right and you know maybe that makes sense you tell me it seems to me that that's a little less likely than putting as much of the compute power as you can into a small space to you know minimize the the the flight time you know between different parts of the intelligence you don't want something way over there when you know when you're trying to think fast so maybe you just build it all out of computron IAM which is from the next plant the next moon over from the Navi I guess I'm showing you that the maximally compact computational material computron your mastery about it in case I don't know but I do know that if this is true as I say very simple time scale argument if there's any truth in this the idea that we should be looking for ET on you know earth-like worlds watery worlds with thick atmospheres and conditions sort of like here maybe very very provincial where would synthetic intelligence go and I don't know the answer to that if you know the answer to that send me an email because I'd like to know the only thing I can think of and we need ask what would they find important right what do you find important in life I know you're all thinking sex and money but it's actually matter and energy which you know on earth we turned into sex and money okay matter and energy if you want matter and energy this part of the galaxy it's okay but it's not great you probably would go to some place where there's a lot more action like the center of the galaxy you've seen in this little infrared photo okay and so maybe we really ought to spend a lot of I'm looking at the galactic center it's kind of unfortunate that it's in the southern hemisphere but hey because that's maybe I mean there's been plenty of time for truly advanced machinery of any sort to get there and maybe that's where the signals are coming from well I think I'm going to stop it there and allow you to ask those questions that you know I've deliberately avoided going into because it's I've spent too long on this so does any is anybody conscious once that's the question yeah and also of you agree with Stephen Hawking that we should not be trying to contact yeah the WoW signal the WoW signal was found 1977 at Ohio State University what happened is they they had a big radio telescope there there wasn't terribly useful for Radio Astronomy so they just use it for SETI it just sits there right in Ohio in Columbus Ohio and the earth would rotate as it turns out it does and you know it would just sort of sweep the sky past this and every morning one of the astronomers would go into the shack where they had the computers and would look at the printout and those days computers computer output was printer and he was going through the print out one day and he finds a signal that looks very much like what you expect from an extraterrestrial source and he wrote Wow next to it that was brilliant to have written Wow next to it because they've been thousands of such signals right but this one has this is the triumph of marketing oh he kept calling it was was truly a bold stroke of a brilliant stroke and it's become famous it has all the characteristics of the signal coming from from beyond earth but I don't think it was edy or in any case it doesn't matter what I think it was a don't because that telescope had a second receiver on it which automatically looked at the same spot on the sky 70 seconds a little over a minute 70 seconds later and it didn't find that signal and it's been looked at many times since with much better equipment never found again so if you see it only once you can say well I don't know what it was and maybe it was et and then he went on vacation I mean you know could be but that's not science so that's the so much for the while signal the other party question was I was even Hawking yeah yeah did you all hear this was like about a month ago when the Discovery Channel had this this show about Stephen Hawking and they resuscitated a statement that he had made tent in one case I think he may have made this statement 20 years ago in which he says well contact with et might not be a good idea because consider what happened to the North American natives when the Europeans first visited them it wasn't it didn't work out so so well for them and and that's certainly something you can learn from our own history I mean you look at even Captain Cook it was under you know he was under orders from the British Admiralty not to interfere with the societies he found in the South Pacific but nonetheless he destroyed their culture simply by sailing into their lagoons with these these ships that have really nifty things like the wheel right and metal in syphilitic sailors and all that Kaiser so you know they figure whatever mojo these guys have is better than ours and they immediately became you know converted and you know their own culture was subsumed into Western and culture to a large extent so that's all that Hawking was saying you know look beware and well doing SETI there's no danger there you're just listening right you tune in your local radio DJ and he doesn't jump into the car and start molesting you because you tuned them in and you don't know that you don't know that right but what Hawking you sing it's but don't broadcast anything back because that's like shouting in the jungle you don't know what's out there you know maybe it's a very very small probability that anything malevolent is out there but on the other hand if you want to be the person responsible for destroying the earth right now I don't buy it in fact I think those of you who want to look it up if you go to new scientists and type in my name you'll find out I wrote a little opinion piece about this about three weeks ago and what I said was this look you know you can worry about that obviously we don't know what the aliens are capable of what they're interested in doing or any of that stuff and maybe you don't want to risk the earth I I know it I didn't note it in there but you know Carl Sagan sent a map of where the earth is out on the Pioneer and Voyager probes right so you know it's like a map of the Stars home you know I'm sure nobody gave Carl Sagan permission to tell the universe where you live but he did those things will never be found by aliens it doesn't matter but a signal might be and if you find a signal coming in you might broadcast back hi where the Earthlings want to join our book club we got some used cars what you know you do all that and he's saying that maybe that's a bad idea well it may or may not be a bad idea but the point was that we've been doing this for 70 years right we've been broadcasting into space willy-nilly for 70 years TV 24/7 all also the cities of Earth had these TVs transmission you say yeah yeah but those signals are very weak by the time they get to the aliens and that's true they are but they're only weep I have you know maybe three or four orders of magnitude below what we would be able to detect at those distances so if you look at the growth in sensitivity of radio telescopes you see that that increases by two orders of magnitude per century if these aliens are capable of mounting an attack on earth they can easily pick up this stuff and in fact they've already gone just a couple hundred earth-sun distances away from their planet and they can use their own star as a gravitational lens which gives them another 10 or 11 orders of magnitude of sensitivity they could I can see how streetlamps frankly and so if you want to really be paranoid about this that's fine but it's too late that horse has left the barn you're gonna lose sleep about this I don't any other questions you wanna get out of here yeah could it be possible that maybe you know we're looking for radio signals maybe because of our development cycles that's not what the aliens out there using because we're starting to learn that quantum computing quantum entanglement allows us to begin to start looking at transmitted information at a quantum level so maybe we're just kind of you know not advanced enough yeah well that's certainly possible like everybody heard the question yeah invite your mic asking whether you heard the question huh yeah I get emails about that essentially every day it's a radio signals we also look for flashing light electromagnetic radiation how yesterday how 20th century that maybe that maybe but that you know it's kind of like telling Chris Columbus hey man forget these wooden ships you know just wait a couple hundred years you'll be able to cross the Atlantic in six hours eating peanuts off your back off your lap you know that doesn't help him and it turns out that would you the wooden ships were good enough the point is this we don't know there may be physics that allow some sort of communication mode that really Trump's those sorts of things we've thought of in which case this may be barking up the wrong arboreal fixture I mean maybe that's true but is that an argument to say well we just won't do this we'll sit on our hands and wait for other physics that doesn't sound like such a good argument to me and as far as quantum entanglement is concerned there's something called Bell's Theorem you may want to look it up it's not clear that you know quantum entanglement will allow you to actually communicate faster than the speed of light quantum entanglement works but in terms of sending information it may not beat the speed of light yeah okay were you involved with that he said well you're asking which custom digital signal one that we used in in in the early 1990s oh it's still being used we use it for the Allen telescope array we're trying to replace it yeah it's still most of it is still being used it is if you're part of the engineering team my I take my hat off to you if I had a hat the guy behind you Oh Paula gee faster than speed of play travel like I had an addict will approach something obviously nothing goes faster than see yeah we know yeah well you you're suggesting why don't we just warp space and then we reduce the distance between us and them and then we get this signal faster which is true if you have you know a black hole at your disposal for warping space adequately to do that yeah well we do it maybe they do I mean that sounds like some science fiction film by Ray Bradbury all right story yeah yeah well who knows they may do that I mean that's sort of like asking what about faster than light travel you know the way to implement that is to warp space you don't really go fast and light just shorten the distance by creating wormholes wormholes as you know we're moles work on on blackboards it's unclear whether they would work in practice I asked a cosmologists about this when I was living in Europe actually about that and I said do you think he could ever in fact use wormholes for travel from one spot in the universe to another or one one era to another in traveling time and he said he doubted it he said because if that were the case then an alien could pop up in the seat next to you and he didn't think that was a nice thing to do so his his take on it was that it wasn't likely to prove practical or possible practical is a different word possible but I don't think anybody knows if you can work it out between now next Tuesday you know well how would we decode the signal first off let me point out to you that in our radio searches it's not true in the optical but the radio searches we integrate for minutes at a time other ways we average the incoming cosmic static for a few minutes that builds up the sensitivities you can find them a much weaker signal but obviously it throws away the information if you took a TV signal right which has a like a 5 megahertz bandwidth you take a TV signal you average it for two minutes well a picture and sound are pretty much gone away all that's left is the fact that you know that there's a transmitter right there's a care okay so we do the same and and if you found that you say okay well let's just change the hardware a little bit so we can see variations that are occurring at a at a microsecond level or a nanosecond level but now you don't have the sensitivity in order to do that you'd have to build an instrument that in the case of a TV signal would be four orders of magnitude bigger so that's a very much bigger antenna on the other hand all of this which is privately funded completely dependent on people like you to fund it I think you would get the money to to build that yeah yeah very quickly okay so let's assume that happens and then they get all these bits coming down and so the question is what do you do with them I think I mean they're two approaches you could just you know turn them over to some experts it sounds like the Dead Sea Scrolls but we still know what the Dead Sea Scrolls said so you know or you could just put them out on the web everybody download them to your hard drive and work on it and I'm not sure that you'd ever figured out I mean who knows and would Neanderthals ever figure out a digital television signal probably not even if he gave it to them they're you know it's not that they were stupid but they probably not figured out and somebody suggested me yeah after 200 years of trying people would start worshipping these bits I mean if they're trying to make it easy for you to figure it out then maybe you would see pictures and things like that and you know a dictionary who knows what they do but I think you in my opinion the best thing you do is just put it all out there let everybody try yeah but there's no sort of systematic way to put a little every try well letting everybody try means that you also let the experts try insofar as they're experts I mean the people who are good at pattern recognition that people good at decoding things you know maybe they'd be amongst those people that got hold of it I mean even think about it the hieroglyphics were decoded very quickly by Shump alone and you know for five years now mind you he was expert in it he also had the rosetta stone all that stuff but they would have figured it out anyhow even without the rosetta stone because there was so much of it it was enormous redundancy there was a lot of material right there there's some codex's from you know middle america that have never been figured out because there isn't much material right so it would help to have a lot i mean people ask what should we broadcast to the aliens you know and even wrote a paper on that i mean the you know might a lot of my colleagues say well we ought to use mathematics so we ought to send them our best music or we ought to send them you know our noblest achievements the heck with all that i brought the paper and i said send them the google servers just send them everything you know somebody said plays a lot of porno on that you so what you think that the aliens would be offended by human porn God nude humans Zork what do you think i but send it because it's so redundant there's so much redundant information that they'll figure a lot of it out that was my suggestion but nobody knows this is a problem down the road you look familiar yeah I saw your cousin once yeah if and when a signal is discovered what is or is there a protocol for notifying the general population of the planet that hey we've got somebody's okay alright you forced me to show these last slides there is a bottle of champagne at the observatories we always keep it there it's really there I made this photo hmm sorry and Arecibo in Puerto Rico but this is what the Allen telescope array - excuse me every time I go to the observatory it's a different bottle of champagne instead I said but actually when you actually get a signal nobody thinks of it I mean everybody figures would be a big cover-up and all that this is a photo I made at the SETI Observer Turk oh sorry the eseni Institute back in 1997 in June this was a made at 3:30 in the morning and we were following a signal that looked like it was the real deal if any of you still have an interest by the way in this subject despite this talk I have a book called confessions of an Alien Hunter and I begin with this signal because it was sort of interesting it showed what happens if we actually get a signal cuz we thought it might be the real deal for about 16 hours turned out it was the Soho solar research satellite this signal was bouncing around the steelwork on the antenna just the right way to mimic mimic et but there we are at 3:30 in the morning and nobody's going out to in-n-out burger nobody's going home to go to sleep we're just sitting there glued to these monitors right at 9:30 the start said we had to wait 12 hours before we could see it again and I was sort of half asleep at my desk and the phone rings and it's in New York Times right they already knew about it there's no secrecy there's no policy of secrecy so what would actually happen is that the media will be all over it and of course the more responsible media will wait until you've confirmed the signal is truly being exit trestle and that might take you a week but the Weekly World News the checkout line press they're not going to wait so you'll read about at first it's Safeway or lucky that's for sure yes Sasha I've seen the reverse of Connors question what if I mean this is assuming that whatever signal was intercepted was intercepted by SETI you know what if there was some crazy you actual person who actually did intercept the signal how would they even know I appreciate your implication that the people at SETI are not crazy and wacky yeah yeah well we've seen that happen actually what if it's somebody out there just the great unwashed and find this signal that could very well happen and very often there's a lot of precedent in science for discoveries being made by people who weren't looking for what it is that was discovered right I mean yeah kind of whatever x-rays the deck that could happen there was a in in I think it was 1999 or 2000 there was an internet claim a claim on the internet some guys website by an amateur astronomer in the UK who said that he had secretly used his employer's dish to look at the star equ pega see and had found a signal he was publishing this and you know I was driving home from well was I had give him some talk down to Monterey or something I was driving up 101 that night this story broke and I was listening to art bill and I'm gonna coast to coast am late night job and he was saying I wish Seth would call me about this I nearly drove off one on one language and I got home my wife said art bells been calling you and I said I figured that now I went on and I said look it looks like a hoax to me well for a week there were all sorts of efforts to figure out whether this was a hoax or not a hoax and it even led some people in Australia to actually use radio telescope time to go verify this thing it was a complete hoax it was obvious there was Oaks to me was so you know you could say but what if that had been real that's really your question what happens then well it's a little it's a little trickier but it'll get out if somebody asks about you I didn't get to the protocols there are protocols here actually in fact I'm the guy in charge of the committee that's revising the protocols all of which is highly emotional but the protocols don't have any force of law they have only minimal practical benefit and all they say is this if you find a signal you verify it you tell the world and you don't respond to it without international console Asian whatever that is and I often ask the committee members I say what is that if you talk to the Swedish chess team is that international consultation yeah nobody knows nobody wants to say UN because they figure the UN couldn't make up their mind soon enough or maybe they won't even be a UN when we find this signal but International Constitution look the only point of that was to assure other countries that if say the u.s. finds a signal I mean we're not the only ones doing SETI but almost if the US finds a signal that they won't hog the information but look and this kind of answers your question too if you find a signal this is not like you know stashing away the evidence at area 51 you can't do that the signal is up in the sky anybody can get to it anybody can get to it and I think that's an important point [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Singularity University

Views: 104,953

Keywords: Singularity University, Singularity Hub, Education, Science, leadership, technology, learning, designing thinking, future forecasting, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, SingularityHub, 3D printing, AI, artificial intelligence, AR, augmented reality, VR, virtual reality, automation, biotechnology, blockchain, computing, CRISPR, entrepreneurship, future, futurist, futurism, future of work, future of learning, genetics, health, healthtech, medtech, fintech, nanotechnology, robotics, talks, SETI, S.E.T.I.

Id: xvm7dB0mOic

Length: 69min 5sec (4145 seconds)

Published: Mon May 07 2018