The Consequences of Finding ET's Signal

[Music] my name is Bill diamond I'm the CEO of the SETI Institute and I'm very delighted to have you all here with us tonight we have a fun program that I think you're going to enjoy but before we launch into tonight's program I want to talk about something else very briefly that we are launching which of course is something that is familiar to anybody in the nonprofit space as we are and that is our end-of-year campaign where we tried desperately to raise those last bit of funds that allow us to continue putting on programs like this for the public such as SETI talks things like big picture science which is a marvelous radio program and podcast from the SETI Institute and in fact the the host and co-producer of that show dr. seth shostack who is our own senior astronomers on the panel tonight so you can you can meet Seth if you've never had that opportunity before but there's a number of programs and education and outreach and actually even research that for which we rely on public support and philanthropic support and of course principle among those is our namesake activity of SETI endeavors or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence where we use the Allen telescope array based up in Hat Creek in Northern California and other instruments and radio telescopes around the world to search for signs of technology and intelligence elsewhere in our galaxy so that work is also not covered by any government funding or government sources a lot of our research is supported by NASA but much of it is not so we're very grateful for any help that we get from the public we have something fun and different tonight that we're offering which is it's easy for anybody with the cellphone who didn't put it in airplane mode but just kind of turn the noise off to make a donation to the night even to the Institute so not even even a 5 or $10 donation is very welcome very much appreciated and you know a bunch of those go a long way to supporting the work we do if you would like to do that you can just send a text message with a figure like 10 or a word like gift to the number indicated up there and a very simple process will take you through making a small donation to the Institute's so if you're up for that now or later we'd certainly be very grateful either way we're delighted to have you here and and thank you very much for coming I want to talk about some other just a few little fun things that are going on this time of year in spite of the holidays almost upon us there's a lot of science and activity at the SETI Institute that is we're busy with right now and and have been in recent weeks just to run through some of these very quickly so this is our own head of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the Institute dr. Natalie Cabral in the atacama desert in the Andes Mountains of Chile as part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute team so the picture down here with that red looking water that's algae sitting on the top of a volcanic crater at about 20,000 feet in the Andes and they take samples of the life that exists in that crater to try to understand how life forms and how life survives under harsh environments and how that informs us about looking for life elsewhere in the universe and that team was in the field for a month they just got back at the end of November in time for the holidays another mission osiris-rex just had something happened very recently on December 3rd that spacecraft which was launched back in September of 2016 arrived at this very interesting roundish asteroid called Ben Yu and this is a very interesting mission which is a sample return mission it's the first of its kind for the United States Japan has had two such missions take place but this one is really quite ambitious they're bringing back more material than ever it's a mission that again launched in 2016 arrived on December 3rd and after spending some time studying the asteroid mapping the asteroid in detail the spacecraft as you can sort of see in that upper right-hand picture will extend an arm down onto the surface scoop up or vacuum up some regular material from that surface put it in a little carrier pack on the side of the spacecraft actually you can see that white round small white round discs on the left side of the lower picture and the spacecraft will return to Earth and in on September 24th of 2023 it will drop off that package into the Utah and scientists including John Marshall from the SETI Institute are among the team of researchers waiting for the arrival of that material to study some of the early in materials left over from the formation of our own solar system that'll teach us a lot about the formation of planets and indeed the the story of life in the universe very exciting and interesting mission Dale Anderson is another SETI Institute scientists his research is another example of research that is done with private funding this is Dale at Lake Untersee in Antarctica and that's also Dale and lower-left diving through up to 3 meters of ice into the waters below and what they look for are the mounds of reddish material you see in the right this is cyanobacteria and again they're trying to understand biology or life in extreme environments and how that informs us about the study for life in the universe in the field called astrobiology so this is among the work being done and actually just today his team left after many many weeks in the field or I should say on the ice to return to Cape Town and then ultimately to the United States so some very interesting work that Dale and his team do last but not least I want to just mention this spacecraft New Horizons anybody remember the New Horizons flyby of Pluto back in 2015 how exciting that was so here's a spacecraft that launched in 2006 so it took nine years just to get to its destination for a seven-minute flyby how's that for an investment in time and money but that spacecraft they decided not to just end the mission there they thought well what else can we look at as this spacecraft continues on into the abyss or actually the edges of our solar system and they found in a path that they could direct the spacecraft to without any major change in course they found a an asteroid and the so called Kuiper belt at the outer edges of our solar system that they could intersect with and purely by chance that intersection is going to happen on New Year's Eve in fact it'll be New Year's Day on the East Coast it's passing by at 12:35 a.m. Eastern Time on New Year's Day which will be 935 in the evening New Year's Eve here in California so if you're around and if you're you know not already too far into the champagne then definitely check this out it's going to be fun mark Showalter is the lead scientist from the SETI Institute he's the lead scientist for New Horizons on what is called the hazards avoidance team this is a very important team that makes sure they don't hit anything on the way to the target or the target doesn't have anything too close to it that they need to worry about NASA just released a press release today you can see it on the NASA website you can see it on our web site and it includes a quote from from mark Showalter talking about how the team made the decision based on the data that they found indicating that there's really no hazards too close to the asteroid to worry about that they're going to go by the closest possible flyby point marked by that little X in the closer circle these are a collection of images hundreds of images that have been put together to buy the camera system onboard the spacecraft itself to form that little picture and that's why you don't see sharp little stars in the background but they're going to do that flyby on New Year's Eve it will be pretty spectacular and there is the hazards avoidance team and like any team you would expect dealing with hazards they have hard hats on except the leader of the team which is in the middle with the arrow over his head Allen Stern who is the principal investigator for the entire New Horizons mission he's not wearing his hard hat I've already had modest him for that mark Showalter is on the right with the arrow over his head and in fact as a result of his doing the same job for the Pluto flyby he discovered two new moons of Pluto Kerberos and Styx that had never been observed before identified before so mark is our our moon finding astronomer and planetary sciences so just a few little updates on the kind of things that we're doing at the SETI Institute it's it's not just SETI but it is certainly tonight's subject is is SETI so let's jump right in as we would say tonight's topic should be a fun one it's fine Messaging et so what so for more than four decades actually it's closer to six decades if the math is done right astronomers have been searching for techno signatures or signals coming from distant technological civilizations the first SETI searches began in the 1960s actually 1960 by Frank Drake of the SETI Institute by searching for extraterrestrial radio waves and they have more recently expanded to include optical or visible signals such as powerful laser pulses that we could detect with our own optical instruments so the field and the search is accelerating it's evolving with the development of new antenna arrays there are new networks of telescopes getting built all the time that will soon be capable of looking at and listening to the entire sky everywhere all the time and it is impossible to know however when we will get our first contact and what this message might say let alone if we could understand it however one thing is clear at such time as such a discovery is made this will have a transformative impact on all of humankind it's an interesting question to ask what will that impact be what will happen then with the will the detection of et be dangerous or beneficial for humankind will it change everything including our place in the universe and our sense of that or will it simply continue our life just being happy that we know we're not alone we've got some interesting people to answer that question and discuss it this evening so let me introduce right away Giulia de Meredith's from who's an astrobiologist and science communicator at the University of California Berkeley and the SETI Research Center I would also like to introduce Doug vaca who is the president of Medi or messaging SETI and formerly a scientist at the SETI Institute Elliot Gillum who's the director of the laser SETI or optical SETI program at the SETI Institute and our own dr. seth shostack senior astronomer and fellow of the SETI Institute gentlemen and Julia welcome and thank you very much and let me also call Frank up here Frank Marchese who you know and love we will be providing subtitles for Frank as he delivers his entire talk in French but take over the help thank you all right thank you very much thank you for being here so before I'm not gonna give a speech okay I just I'm very happy we have these wonderful speakers and people have been searching for Haiti and messaging 84 years for some of them so I'm just gonna start by view Julia and please give us kind of introduction or what your research is all about and I'm putting your slide if you want should I stand or you squat all right I'm ready okay hi my name is Julia demarinis and I have exquisite amount of affiliations that I should touch on just a little bit if you could just click the next few I am a 2018 national and geographic Grosvenor teacher fellow so I do some education along with some science research I do I starting in January it will be a part-time employee of the UC Berkeley City Research Center I do some education at the Chabot space and Science Center located in the Oakland Hills and I'm a research scientist with the Blue Marble space Institute of science and so I do some education to underserved communities all around the world using space science as a means to communicate and empower the next generation of planetary stewards through the ad astra Academy all right so this evening we're gonna be hearing a lot about Metis and messaging extraterrestrial intelligence and whether or not we should or shouldn't and yeah say they and there's this great city email list going on and every time there's a question about Medi there's about like at least I don't know ten reply alls with oh you should see my latest paper latest paper and I'm just going to follow suit and say that in the last six days me and my pup my co-author dr. Chelsea Horomia have taken have been looking into Medi from an ethical perspective she assist at Spring Hill College in Mobile Alabama so stay tuned for that so that's kind of where my arguments for against Mehdi come into play so one of our views is that we believe that we should have a consensus if we're going to be communicating to to space on behalf of all earth there should be a consensus of whether or not we should or shouldn't and what that message should say yeah so there's a few philosophers in the past that have been studying this and one of these is what are do humans share any moral values as a whole not just one civilization versus another so we believe that we have an obligation to gain informed consent from humanity before engaging in this practice of sending intentional MIDI signals yeah and basically this just will ensure that our many protocols and debates are culturally informed and I just wanted to end with this funny tweet that let's never forget that we as a species made our glorious debut on to the Galactic stage by sending unsolicited nudes a mixtape and directions back to our place thank you so Doug I have your slides to give me a few seconds I'd like to follow up builds observation and then echo funds Oh this is not something we can do you can sing the signal to extraterrestrials but not to the audience now you can hear okay when bill gave an introduction to the session he made the point that it's been almost 60 years now that scientists have been engaged in steady and the question we ask in Madi messaging extraterrestrial intelligence is what happens if there are a lot of civilizations out there but they're doing exactly what we are right now simply listening and not transmitting if so it could be very quiet universe and so the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi put it like this in 1950 he was thinking about well if in fact there is intelligent life in the cosmos why haven't we made contact as he put it where are they now one solution to what's been called the Fermi paradox why we haven't made contact with them is that in fact they may be out there perhaps even more widespread than we imagine but it's called the zoo hypothesis that they're watching us much like we watch animals in a zoo but imagine we go to the San Francisco Zoo someday and we're looking at a bunch of zebras and all of a sudden one of those zebras turns toward us and starts pounding out a series of prime numbers I would argue that would establish a radically different relationship between us and the zebra and in part we would be pulled to want to reply well that's what we're trying to do with many of sending intentional signals to other stars in the hope of eliciting a response as an example of the facilities we use this is the I scat transmitter the European incoherence scatter antenna that's located in trim so Norway it's location north of the Arctic Circle it's actually best known as a tourist location people like to go there to look at the Northern Light but those same Northern Lights can be studied scientifically by sending radio signals and some small fraction bounce back and it lets the scientists examine the structure and the composition of the aurora borealis well we use this transmitter in 2007 for our first transmissions and next slide as our target was a nearby star called Lloyd ins star we chose it because it is the closest star that could be targeted from that transmitter north of the Arctic Circle that at the time of our transmission has the closest star known to have a earth-like planet in the habitable zone so just at the right distance it could support liquid water so that became our target and we sent a binary signal we can talk about the message but but the essence of the message was we created a message that would draw upon the only thing that we and the extraterrestrials have in common the radio signal itself so we communicated about essential characteristics of that radio signal time frequency by reference to the signal itself next one so that you know ultimately what we are saying is hello to the universe and attempting to diversify the strategies we use to make first contact thank you so you also have you slide give me a few seconds so I tried to make slides as not dense as I could and and I did pretty well for me but I'm gonna miss pretty pretty quickly apologies for that so to answer the question about so what I thought there actually have been some major advances in the last decade or so that are worth pointing out they I think most people are familiar with exoplanets and extremophiles but we're now getting to the point that we can start can get the atmospheres and detect signals there we've got probes on on bodies in our solar system that I now look at the search for life as a race between we're going to find algae we don't know where it might be in our solar system it might be in another one but I think the the my personal opinion is that the this the scientific direction for life in the universe is is kind of like the Higgs boson before before we actually found it is we're pretty sure we know we're heading the right direction it's just a matter of time and so that really frames the SETI question differently because we don't know that intelligence necessarily evolves from life we don't know how long it survives in its environment and we don't know how long it is recognizable to a civilization of our technological infancy the second point I wanted to make is that since we found no life in the in the terms of machine learning or criminal forensics we have no priors and that means making any assumptions is very dangerous and so when I look at SETI experiments I think anything that anytime you assume more than physics it's it's highly dubious and and needs to be questioned efficiency is debatable some pure efficiency can can creep in sometimes but biology technology psychology all of these things are extremely speculative when we try to extrapolate from what we know about even the incredible diversity we have on earth it's still only one bio system I also want to touch on the the highest level of classification of Seti signals there we call beacons someone intentionally reaching out like a like a medi beacon versus interception is there's signals that been bouncing off or transmitted from this planet for billions of years the Sun bounces photons we send radar waves we make transmissions of all sorts we fire lasers to help improve telescopes focus on the sky we do all sorts of things that are detectable at astronomical distances and I'll get into one interesting scenario in a second but I think I look at it more as the cats out of the bag and so it's it's really I think said he is is a where money is better spent personally but I think that's the interesting debate to have then just to get a little bit on the complexity of Seti there's what if you got a signal what would it look like it could be anything from a particle to rock to what's called a bliss and Jill Tartars fond of referring to that as the nine dimensional haystack and that's really just when you look at photons but when you get down to it I think besides the implications of a said e-discovery as well as the fact that you miss 100% of the shots you don't take so that's that's good reason to do steady at all pretty much every study experiment I've ever seen I would categorize as a new nature detector which we we're looking for for things but we don't think are there in nature and then if we find stuff well usually we find new nature but we think that that's that may be artificially generated for some reason and that makes it a SETI experiment versus a slightly larger class of moving on the one scenario I wanted it to touch on was that if you want to get around in this universe there's the distance between stars is really big and that means you might want to go some fraction of the speed of light and there's really only two ways that we know of what the physics we know and one of them is using the energy density of matter antimatter the other is not to carry your fuel with you where there's already a project undertaken by an organization here today that is wants to accelerate a spacecraft at 20% of the speed of light using 10,000 ten megawatt lasers all focused on this light sail spacecraft and that generates an extremely strong signal that could be seen across the the known universe potentially if you've depending on this the sensitive sensitivity of your detector and this is something that a species might do just for its own benefit rather than necessarily being part of wanting to reach out so very briefly we're moving into the age of time domain astronomy where we've know we've had hints that the the sky changes but it's really the information age that powers our ability to analyze it frequently enough to find things that change more rapidly or sorry less rapidly than a pulsar which is what you're looking at in the upper right but more rapidly than every million years which is still a revolution there other sorts of things fast radio bursts they're thought to be thousands of them occurring on the sky every night where these are extra galactic explosions we think that generate enormous ly powerful radio bursts that last a few milliseconds but you have to have the confidence to find these things since you don't know where they're coming from and when they're going to arrive you can't say well I found something but I can't show you it to you that's not science science is repeatable untestable and you have to be able to distinguish the fast radio bursts from the Perry tones which is when they open the microwave here the radio telescope and a little bit of noise squeaks into the telescope there LIGO I think many people in this audience might be familiar with found gravitational ways and they did that by having two observatories they planned ahead of time and said even though we we know what we're looking for we're gonna have two of these that when we see the same signal at the same time not only will it allow us to get some idea of where it came from but you know it'll be enough to to really show that we did what we think we did rather than we just happened to get a signal that looked like we thought we would get a signal so my project our project of the SETI Institute is to build a global network of camera systems called laser SETI it's a unique instrument where we have a very high time resolution we have spectral resolution we have low cost because we want to make sure it actually gets done as opposed to you needs a billion dollars to finish it you can see it here on the bottom it's going to go out on to this guys in the next couple months yeah you can even it looks like the animation is playing and there's already some secondary science we think lined up where we think it's useful to study meteors a couple different kinds of phenomenon from planetary protection to protecting our ability to get stuff off the planet which is nice to make sure that before the telescope is even live we're already doing good meat-and-potatoes science in addition to our SETI experiment having built a unique instrument thank you so now we're gonna finish with says who has been extremely minimalist for once this one picture yes in order to make it simpler for the audience I'm using the same photo that Doug use which by the way is copyrighted I was going to show you some freeze-dried stacked-up aliens but I knew that this audience was not mature enough to see that I'm not gonna talk about SETI or how we do it because I think that the the point of tonight was to talk about what happens if there's success okay and a number of years ago I was at a conference in Berkeley which I think it's a suburb of Emeryville I'm not quite sure what Berkeley but there was to be a debate about whether said he could be dangerous and so he flipped a coin and I I got I'm lost which meant that I had to argue that said he could be dangerous so rather quickly I had to think of ways it could be dangerous the only thing I could think of was the fact that if you understood anything in a message then suddenly you're confronted with information from a society that's far more advanced than yours is and I thought maybe that stagers imagine you take Julius Caesar you teach him a little English she take him to the Library of Congress you know it's that dangerous form he might get very discouraged and you know put a put a gun to his head if he knows what a gun is so that was the only thing I could think of now in terms of the reaction to a detection let me point out that there are people in the audience who are very expert on this and you might consider Margaret Race over there at the SETI Institute but also Steve dick in the second row former NASA historian it's just written a book on this subject so if you're still interested despite this evening you might you might want to consider that let me just provoke you by saying that if you grab the next 10 people off the streets of Menlo Park and ask them what do you think would happen if the SETI Institute were to pick up a signal tonight I think eight out of ten of them will say what they say to me all the time and email we wouldn't hear about it that the feds would swoop down on the Institute they're in lovely Mountain View try and find a park place to park and then come in and shut it all down okay and when you when you're rejoinder is why would they do that this would be the most interesting scientific result of all time and by the way I did a survey of science writers many years ago and it said how important would this story be and every one of them said it would be the biggest story of all time except one guy who said second only to the assassination of JFK would be you jerk why would they cook that quiet and the answer is you couldn't handle the news and I asked you do you feel that way I mean if you heard tomorrow that we did pick up a signal from 500 light-years away would you say that's it I'm gonna liquidate my IRA are you gonna you know that's the I'm not gonna go to work I'm not going to talk to my relatives that's it I'm just gonna ride in the streets sure thirty percent of you would say that but most of you wouldn't so and I hope we get to discuss what the actual reaction would be to this kind of news thank you sis so before we start about the reaction of the signal let me ask you a kind of a question that most people my age has been have been asking I grew up with the with SETI basically when I basically started being interesting in astronomy but started talking about 30 and we still did not discover any signal so my question for SAS and foil your specifically is why did not see did not detect anything yet do you think we really truly searching properly do you think we basically being wrong for 40 years and the way we are doing it may be too limited or may we start we should start thinking outside the box for both of you first and then okay cool Judea and stug please okay look if you look at the limits of what we could detect now it turns out that if the aliens have an antenna that's broadcasting in all directions then they have to have a transmitter power that's on the order of 10 to the 15 10 to the 16 10 to the 17 watts depends on how far away they are okay now that that's a number that probably exceeds your PG&E bill but 10 to the 16 watts is a thousand times as much energy as all humanity uses okay so that's a lot of it that's a very expensive electric bill for the Klingons and so you could say look they're probably lots of transmissions but ours our searches are not sensitive enough now they might you know aim the signal your way and that beats this rap but then they need to know you're here and I would argue that they don't yet know that we're here so that might be why they don't know we're here we've been here for like two million as a humanoid species so they could have predicted already a billion years ago that earth was they could find oxygen in our atmosphere a billion years ago but are you gonna set up a big transmitting experiment to send radio messages to lettuce I mean maybe I don't have French feel about the food but you touched the idea of having a very limited way of searching life life one is that they don't have to signal us intentionally with this propulsion idea I touched on when you every time you launch a spacecraft you light up a whole swath of sky and so depict you know if you're doing that every day of the year you're gonna you know out of the ecliptic plane for instance and you're gonna light up a whole disk around your star system or maybe even 360 degrees in both directions so there's lots of ways to detect something that is just going about its own business second the history of SETI experiments and there are people people that here better to confirm this many of them when they started operating within the first we poor year of operation they they sort of exceeded the what we call face based coverage of all previous study experiments because you bring out new technology and it has a million more channels or it has a thousand times as much sensitivity or it looks at a new wavelength that's never been looked at before or you know it looks at a million stars instead of a thousand stars or laser SETI which is gonna look in between the stars all sorts of things that this exponential growth is trying to catch up with this enormous 9 dimensional problem of where is it coming from when is it coming what color is it what how often does it show up all sorts of these things you could you could turn your telescope and all of a sudden the signal comes in and bounces and you know there's all sorts of ways to not detect and so until we've covered any of reasonable fraction laser said he was designed to be the first all sky all the time saying let's just take that as the given and then we'll see what we might find and we already think there's some science to be found and if there's new natural things out there then certainly there could be new artificial things that just no one has seen or maybe they saw and they just thought it was a flash and they can't prove anything and they're not crazy so they walked away going on so flash look let me highlight one element of what elliot has said which is that the SETI Institute laser said he will be all sky all the time that is a radical breakthrough because past searches have have been intermittent so if you're given the kind of energetic constraints that Seth is mentioning reasonable strategies you don't transmit continuously but for the targeted searches that have dominated settings so far that's what we count on you look at a star for a few minutes you don't find anything you move on to the next one so the only way that succeeds is if they're transmitting all the time when you shift to an all the time survey you can get something that is you know maybe they have this little turret and they come around and and send laser signals you know once every year that could be picked up conceivably by this sort of directional all the time sir so I think you know those are the sort of advances that make it plausible to me you know when people talk about the Fermi paradox I don't see a paradox it's just we've just started searching and so I I would be shocked if we would have found anything this early in the game but you know the whole rationale between of adding additional strategies is maybe the assumptions were making are wrong so the first 40 years of SETI it was radio only than 20 years ago in addition of optical SETI at many international we see active transmissions as a next step of diversifying their strategies I just wanted to add on to what everyone said is that I think there's a quote by Jill tarter who says that if you go into the ocean to the ocean and take a cup of seawater and you don't see any fish does that mean there's no fish in the ocean so we're still pretty in our nascent stages of our search and kind of we don't if there's a unknown unknown out there we don't know how they're transmitting or if they are at all so it's we we know what we do we we have been transmitting radio signals for the last 100 or so years but we don't know if that's universal so there could be other signals currently beamed at us in some way that we just aren't noticing there's a dr. Paul Davies talks about a shadow biosphere maybe there's this shadow form of life that we just can't can't perceive with our current technology so that's something else to think about so is there anybody working on this shadow biosphere I mean the resists theory that 10% of the life on our planet may be in not detectable on our own planet there was a paper published in the 70s about this represent the paper from the 70s so I can't find you the reference is there anybody I've been trying ready to go outside of the box I think outside the box and trying to detect the shadow biosphere but by definition it's tough because we're looking for life as we don't know it but if we don't know what it is how do we for it so you know there are people like Chris McKay at NASA Ames who will step back and say what are the essential characteristic that life has to happen maybe metabolic processes and so when you plan expeditions of other planets and moons in our solar system you think about alternative biochemistry that you know they may not be structurally the same as ours but they function in the same sort of way and so you can see similar processes so that's one strategy but again I think the best we can do is nudge a little bit from life as we do know it I think many of you may have seen this story this week about the life that was found you know to two miles one mile below the surface you always figured okay there's life down there but it's gonna all gonna be single cell but it's not they pulled up some nematodes which is to say worms right I am I'll down I assume they have DNA maybe that's where the shadow biosphere is it was an estimate by I guess it was Tommy gold you know 20 years ago or something on it ten years ago and he figured that the total mass of life a mile down exceeded the total mass of life on the surface you might be wrong but that that was an interesting calculation so the discover the study of life elsewhere may help us to find life different life on our own planet basically that's kind of an interesting idea let's move on on this topic and we one of the title is so what so can you elaborate a little bit what do you think you personally as a researcher will be the impact of having a technological signal I'm not talking about fighting a finding aliens I'm talking about getting a signal a signal that proved there is intelligence somewhere in our galaxy could be any type of signal you don't have to detail it but just give me the what you what do you think will be the reaction of the public of the scientists and everybody else I start with you Julia yeah so I think there would be a spike in liquor sales everyone myself yeah so I think as probably most people in this room one of the things you probably stay up late thinking about it you know are we alone and I think it's a fundamental human question that every every kind of human has thought about once in their lives so to get a glimpse that we might not be alone I think would be fundamentally shifting where we are I think it would really yeah be a cause for a lot of parties but I think it would just I personally I think it would give me a sense that there are beings out there that have evolved and gone through their adolescent technology to sustain themselves and be harmonious with their planet to survive or they're coming to look to eat are all I didn't go there water one of the two but I think I yeah I think it would give me a sense of ease that there are there are others out there and yeah so I like to say that my my thought is my hope would be that it would help reduce tribalism because in group psychology is a very deep part of a primate psychology that there's us and there's them and we protect us and we don't like them and if you just open a newspaper today I'm pretty sure you've seen that and so as soon as there's them out there then I'm hopeful that that that would cause a subconscious shift for people to look at the whole planet as an us instead of having to subdivide the whole planet I don't know I haven't talked to a psychologist who could really talk about the subconscious effects of that because obviously there'd be a number of things going on at that point but that would be and the other point I'll make is I think it's a discovery that happened slowly I hope everyone in this room has seen contact where BAM but my thought is it's science we get a signal we got to analyze it we've got to get other people to receive the signal we've got to get other people to look at the data think what it could be what else might what are other possible explanations like I think it's a process that takes years not days and so I think that the whole riots liquidate your IRA don't the work thing probably is is unlikely to happen well I have to disagree with you a little bit because we've in a sense run only to make it interesting but we've run that experiment we've run it both for non intelligent life and to some extent for intelligent life not intelligent 1996 big science news story microbes from Mars remember the Martian meteorite alh84001 right picked up in the Antarctic there Martians inside now if you look at the New York Times the headlines were you know the font was bigger than the front page which was quite a trick and maybe you didn't see the serifs and for four days that was the deal okay but on the editorial page did anybody care any interview that's right nobody cared there was one op-ed piece by Stephen Jay Gould and he was complaining that it wasn't intelligent life it's just dead pond scum right so to think that the public is gonna go crazy right now intelligent life is clearly a different thing but I think that the emedia on the basis of what we've had we've had some false alarms on the basis of the immediate reaction it's that the media are there right away the government doesn't care the Pentagon doesn't call my mom never called but the media do call the media do call and and that means that within 24 hours it's going to be all over the media right anybody dispute that and so the immediate reaction will be tell us more right and the long-term reaction is the thing that you don't know because if you can decode anything then suddenly you're in touch with a society that is obviously much more advanced than you are that's why you're hearing them not the other way round and that could be very disruptive but you know the equipment is actually not set up to get the the messages anyhow so all you know is that at that star system X light-years away there's somebody with a transmitter that's what you know I admire your opinion that everybody will start singing Kumbaya and I'm gonna see if I can copyright that but I don't think there's any historic precedent for that I don't think so just because the the Incas found out that there were all these civilizations on the other side of the water they didn't say well alright let's stop fighting now to be clear I don't think that there I think there will be a I don't wanna use a double negative I think there will be a media frenzy because that can happen from a tweet it doesn't take much the but I think in terms of people on the street they'll still go you know like it'll be a thing and you read about it and there'll be new shows and blogs and stuff like that but it won't be you know except for the people who you know how I've spent decades on this it won't be you know go party in the streets i you know i i'm even more skeptical about a big media burst there'll be some interest for a day or two but you know that the example of the Martian meteorite yes big news in the New York Times but I recall the discussion among the editorial board of Time magazine when they had to decide what is the critical issue you know Bill Clinton came out for that press release and said we don't know for sure but this is credible this could be from Mars what was the cover story Jack Kemp was selected as the vice presidential Republican nominee because that was the thing that matters it's the thing that matters in our daily lives so yeah I agree with Elliot about the impact being long-term because I think that's not only is it going to take a long time to really be clear about this is an artificial signal but if there's any message in it at all you know as much as I would like to think that they are going to send us the periodic table or prime numbers or the Fibonacci series or something we expect I suspect it would be something very different and so them I suspect whatever we think those messages are saying are going to say more about us than the aliens in a sense it's like a cosmic ink blot test and we just project our hopes and desires onto this ambiguous message that we're getting as opposed to really knowing what they're saying so I think I do have hope that over the course of a long time spans maybe decades or centuries it can help us understand ourselves better and I think that's where the big payoff comes but it's not gonna be immediately so I'm very surprised Doug that she did not say well what I will do is to sit and to start thinking about an answer if we get a signal I'm assuming that do you you will start thinking about something to start to tell them well yes so and I think that's one of the benefit of the work that we're doing transmitting right now so the example I gave of our transmissions to loit and star I mean the only way that works is if the entire galaxy is populated and just pain any nearby neighbors enough to get a response I think that's not the realistic scenario realistically we need to do that thousands or millions of times but along the way we've got to get concrete about what we're going to say and you know Julia you had mentioned the ideal of getting international consensus I love that I mean my my dream is that Antonio Guterres secretary-general of the UN says let's get together and finally make a decision the problem I have is I don't see that realistically happening so I think the challenge we face I think that people who are in favor of transmitting and opposed to transmitting often have the same ideals so this should be something that is globally discussed as broad as input as possible I think the challenges were what are the mechanisms for doing that and are we better off waiting until we have seven billion people coming to agreement on something or a broadly international body like the United Nations or are we better with an incremental approach of getting more and more people through the concrete act of transmitting and so I come down on the latter side many would come down in the former I'd like to point out that I think it's incompatible the if there's a message with content I don't think will decode it quickly and if we may have even trouble finding it because it may look like static or all sorts of signals that we we have today if it's a signal that that's a beacon that's meant to be a hello this is clearly not nature thing then it doesn't have content and there's no message to get excited about yet and maybe that's coming but and it may be as why not include a message in the beacon well it could you know let's not draw in contact too much it could be like a header where you say prime numbers and then you start sending information but for a moment let's say that I was looking at the whole spectrum of signals from everything sent unintentionally to a hello to a message with content you're right you could have a hybrid message that says hello and then here some content but for the sake of simplicity a pure message two of the three categories don't have anything to respond to other than existence the third category and and doesn't have anything to get excited about the third category I don't think that with so there's a number of professors that give this in as a test to their students to develop anti cryptographic messages messages that can be deciphered if you don't know anything about the message and every everything that I've seen that we always fail to decode our own anti cryptographic messages and so even assuming that that the Klingon send us a message meant to be decoded which may not be because maybe they're waiting for us to get smart enough to have a certain kind of number theory or something but even if it is anti cryptographic I think it'll take time to decode so excluding the hybrid message for a moment I think there's an incompatibility between getting excited and having time to calm down about it something surprise me I mean I'm not supposed to pay too much debate but I would say if I receive a phone call and I don't know what to if I receive a phone call and I don't know what to say but I want to say I'm here I'm just gonna repeat the message for instance why don't we just think and simply do that we just repeat the message saying yeah we receive you we don't take any risk we're just repeating what they tell at all well just say we just sign say yes we're here you could do that but you're taking a risk by just turning on the transmitter that that's the point what's the protocol for controlling every radio telescope on the planet or every laser on the planet there is so I mean there's gonna be some some guy in Argentina who's you know had too much to drink that night and goes out to the radio telescope but I mean what's I there's there's no there's no way to control who speaks for Earth is there I think the auto to the residents of Buenos Aires I mean that's true and but that's the argument about whether Medi is dangerous and that's a completely different thing anything Julie wants to say something about that but indeed I mean SFO is broadcasting as we sit here a signal that it's very easy to show it that would be impossible for us to find with our SETI experiment even at the distance of Alpha Centauri right but if you're a society that could threaten the earth with some sort of terrible fate then you have bigger antennas and it's pretty easy to show that with very modest improvements on the kind of technology we have they can pick up the radars from Earth those are the strong signals they're not very interesting the message isn't very interesting but on the other hand they tell them that we are here but if we think this is dangerous then you have to shut down all the radars Franck to your question why not just someone you you get a phone call you say hello and that's it and they know you've heard them well that's a boring conversation and so especially and it's fine you know if you're you know calling someone in France and maybe they'll call again tomorrow but you know even targeting this nearby star 12 light-years away 24 years for a round-trip exchange more realistically hundreds or thousands of years so that's the motivation of trying to pack something into it and you know I think you're right Elliot that it could really be hard to understand even the content but maybe that's why sending our messages even if they don't understand all the nuances we're not as good as anti cryptography as we think but at least they say oh these humans they've got this fixation on binary numbers now let's send us something they this they might like so I think at least it helps to establish the communication because you know realistically the way we communicate with one another is it this iterative process it's back and forth we make a lot of mistakes and the big difference here though is the distances between the interlocutors we add on to what Doug said here and say well what's the why are we transmitting into space and not just testing it on human groups why not try and just decode these message get really good at practicing before trying to speak on behalf of all of Earth I think we we can do both but I think there is you know if you look at the history of SETI there have been people saying for 50 years let's have international consultation and discussion and agreement before we transmit anything and you can take that stance but if you do if you really mean broad-based international consultation you've decided not to transmit I mean if that comes if the concern is there is a way I've heard some people say it even if there's a one in a billion chance that something bad might happen then you shouldn't do it well you know you could make that same case then for SETI because you know if we do detect a signal since there's no way to regulate responses we're going to be automatically replying so it becomes a slippery slope and well of course maybe traditional astronomical research is how we'll make contact we know we have a history of that we we find undiscovered things so you know maybe the Hubble could have detected something does that mean we shouldn't have sent it up so I think we we can have those discussions but we can also be transmitting at the same time I think there's sometimes a sense that it's more dangerous to do something than not do some something but that's not at all the case I mean think about it from our daily life if you choose not to be vaccinated that's actually more dangerous than being vaccinated and so we have this tendency of thinking of actions are dangerous and then when we imagine what are the risks of scenarios that are a lot of unknowns about the cognitive psychologists tell us we're biased by the most vivid images that come to mind I mean what could be more vivid than marauding aliens but just because it's vivid doesn't mean it makes sense I think this argument that you know we're already detectable is the compelling response there and so our intention in transmitting is not to let them know for the first time we're here but to signal intentionality the beacon that you're talking about okay Franken we have to say just we're gonna open the floor for questions so if you have questions let's start lining up please and success go ahead how many you would be down with the idea of sending messages into space good literally okay and how many of you would say not over my inert life-form okay so those were they interested come to Medi org and check out what we're doing how many are now but nobody there might be you've been have to ask why they're not voting okay let's take the first question from the audience okay how's that yeah okay thank you so in the most optimistic scenario say either in response to a MIDI signal we send or just we pick up something that's like 15 light years away 20 light years away and we decode it and you know it's some kind of you know opening salvo and a communication and we can respond and we can maybe have a conversation that you know each way is maybe 20 years but you know we could have a conversation what do you want to say what what did the four be I know what I would say I would say did you happen to receive those lost Doctor Who episodes when we transmitted them we seem to have lost the original maybe you could send those back to us that'd be great but other than that what would you guys say to ET if you could actually say something they might understand I Doug will get after me for this but I say send the internet send the Google servers because there's so much redundancy in there that they can figure it out it's like the hieroglyphics that's the analogies hieroglyphics are were decoded very quickly admittedly there was a rosetta stone but without the rosetta stone they would you know there was this clever frenchman who who did it jumping might think that cats are the dominant life-form they might be right I think their books about that but but but the point is that if you send a very carefully crafted message I think that's a that's a that's a non-starter just send a lot of material also the idea that they're going to send us something that relates to us I think is very very provincial right I mean if you could communicate with the Neanderthals would you try talking on their level I don't think so if you're sending message of Neanderthals are very close to us you talk to the trilobite what are you gonna say to the trilobite and I think that that's rather comparable to what we can expect if there's any information in the signal I agree with Doug they're not going to send an empty message into space an empty transmission it'll have some information on it but it might only be navigation information information for themselves who knows what but the idea that we could decode it at all I think is whistling in the dark Seth knows that I find his idea of everything on the Google servers the ugliest proposal I've heard but but but but it could it could work it could work but there are really two broad camps of what does it take to have a decodable message send enough the patterns are enough and the interpretations will arise from it I do tend to be more skeptical and think we need to send a primer of some sort now there's nothing incompatible with doing both send a primer to help them decode it I think the technical limitations if we're going to be transmitting that radio frequencies are though you're not going to be able to send everything the Google servers a speed that's going to be detectable I mean if you shift an optical you might have a better chance but you know my inclination you know when we when we think I think the great thing about your question is what do we want to say I think there's what's the intention of this is it so we can share what we want to say to get off our chest what we need to say what we want our legacy to be or should it be what is it that we can contribute to them so I would actually encourage us to think about that latter boy it comes back to cat pictures doesn't it look you know if you're getting 4k TV at home and I suspect none of you is but if you were to do that you're getting for getting like a hungry megabits per second actually more right you can send a lot of cat photos at 100 megabits per second if that's your want I let's take the next question thank you thank you as we know from the stargate sg1 documentary series another thing the real world to the government will want to at least control the information even if they can't keep it a secret Manhattan Project I think it's a very good example of that they threw tons of money Oh scientific problem for good purposes I think but even now they control the information on how you make a nuclear bomb for a good reason a lot of I think Republican yeah a lot of presidential types will look at this as an asset we want to keep so assuming that the day after you get a very valuable signal they come at you with a blank check and say hey making so many radio telescopes as you want but we have to keep control that information what would you do no no no no no it doesn't work that way if you get a signal the first thing you're gonna do is well not the first thing you verify it with the equipment you have but then you call up somebody in another Observatory you don't fall someplace you have them looking now suddenly there are various groups around the world that know about it this information it's not like how to build a bomb that's not information that's up in the sky and all you have to do is aim an antenna at it and you can get it this would be up in the sky there's no way to censor it there's no way doesn't the first 44 presidents weren't able to stop the earth from rotating now maybe that's the thing but previously everybody gets the same access to the sky but but and South has a nice anecdote of having been observing at Arecibo at a signal that looked really good for 12 hours you know you point the telescope toward the target the signal is strong you pointed away it disappears on or not or not it's looking very good and then eventually someone from the New York Times calls and says are you really on to it so I think the idea is that I agree with you why wouldn't the government want to have control over that the problem is by the time we have a confirmation it's going the news is going to leak out and it's going to be reported as there's a plausible signal and so there's no way to take back that location and so any government anybody loses control over that capture I agree it's not something you can keep a secret I'm just asking would you though want to compete it how quickly you can analyze the information some countries there will be in better position other countries I didn't even get the whole message if you can't see that part of the sky all day long so nobody gets to own the message we're explicitly designing this in laser City where when we find a signal that way that matches all of our criteria we're gonna send out what's called an astronomers telegram to say hey anyone with the telescope go look over here and tell us what you see because we think we see something interesting and and we want to know that we're not crazy that's that's science there's there's no you you can't sit in a box by yourself and decide that you discovered aliens that's that's insanity that's not science yeah I think there definitely be a lot of international collaboration if we we were to receive a signal that's my hope as well thank you so how would you know if the signal even reached outer space like do you have any way of telling if it's actually even getting out there or is it just stopping at the atmosphere well you can figure out how powerful the signals are and the signals get weaker the further they go out and you know Seth has done a nice calculation of how detectable even our own leakage radiation is so if there is a telescope at the nearest star right now they that's comparable to our best telescopes right now they wouldn't be able to pick it up but if you look at how radio telescopes have advanced since they were first invented if you keep that advancing going even two or three hundred years from now our leakage signals it's the TV and radio signals going off into earth not even the intentional ones could be detected out to about 500 light-years from here so that's a very far distance for my civilization just two or three hundred years more advanced than we are so we know how powerful the signals are as we send them and we know how much they diminish over time so the lad that let's just figure out how how far there what if we are the people who are two or three hundred years more in advance then we're never going to make contact because because we've had the ability to communicate for as you said less than a hundred years that we've had radio technology let's imagine that's the norm in the galaxy you have radio technology for a hundred years you destroy yourselves you decide so much with this exploration let's just turn inward meditate and so that's the cap hundred years if that's the case then given that the galaxy is thirteen billion years old what are the chances that there are two civilizations that last only a hundred years and they exist at exactly the same time it would be as unlikely as in the course of a whole Dark Knight to fire flies each flick on for a minute just a moment what's the chance it's exactly the same time so the only way we can make contact is if the aliens have been doing this a lot longer than we have either transmitting or listening for our signals it helps to be closer and that be bi-directional contact we might be able to pick if somebody a billion years ago lived for a hundred years but we happen to turn on the right receiver and point it in the right direction during that 100 year window when those signals wash over us we could have one directional contact question about what aliens might or might not know about physics so we know that there there's physics that we don't understand for example the correct theory of quantum gravity but as far as we know what we don't understand doesn't have much a direct impact on what we can really observe on a daily basis we understand how atoms work how nuclei work how Moloch Bill's work how planetary systems work how galaxies you know work how the universe is expanding or we think we go so the question is are we missing do you assume that we're missing some fundamental physics that aliens might possess for example do you think with it it's possible that we completely misunderstand the nature of space-time you know that's a good question because that addresses the possibility that you know we're we're too primitive to actually have a good strategy for detecting others but the problem with it is that it from a practical matter you can say that you know the aliens and I get emails about this essentially every day radio that's so old-school they'll be using subspace communication right or they'll be using quantum entanglement which is instantaneous but doesn't allow you to communicate instantaneously I mean yeah they're don't be using gravity ways so be using neutrinos they all these things and none of them I think Trump if I can use that verb none of them Trump radio or light that goes at the speed of light it's inexpensive requires small transmitters small receivers it's very practical but it could be that there's physics we don't know that allows a better form of communication but unfortunately if you go to the Stanford bookstore and look up subspace communication textbooks you'll find that it's a very restricted section there isn't much and if you don't know the the physics you can't build the equipment so you can sit around and say well I mean they're doing something we don't know about that's the end of that discussion there are certain epochs in the universe where different physics will be accessible you know a hundred billion years from now you won't see stars in the sky and so a lot of what we've learned about the universe and the the fundamental nature of gravity and all sorts of things won't be available to a civilization that hypothetically evolves 100 billion years from now somewhere and might might also be different 13 billion years ago when the universe was young and maybe there were some things that they maybe if life could evolve they wouldn't be able to discover have access to it there certainly do we live long enough to discover it all I think physics is my personal theory as physics is universal enough that we can have enough with the puzzle pieces that will overlap and we'll be able to figure stuff out physics is by definition what is universal for for everything and so it certainly may be quantum gravity is something people never discover maybe there's no limit to the maybe there is no finite set of physics we don't we don't know all these answers yet but we do have a pretty good idea of the way things do work on the large scale of the universe that I think gives us access to I good ideas to try there's there's good ideas to try there's bad ideas to try and there's ideas we don't know how to try yet and we just try to focus on the first class and society as a whole tends to move stuff from the third class into the first in the second class I actually think I think your question is fundamental in two ways first of all you ask about the nature of science and it might we expect that there to be other kinds of science well a metaphor I often think of science about it's almost like we're climbing the mountain and the apex is this is reality and understanding of reality is it really exists and so I would expect that aliens who have been at this much longer have climbed up the mountain further and so they know more maybe it's continuous with what we know and I think that's often been the view of how you communicate so we rely on the aliens they've been there they've done this before they know what will be meaningful they just turn back around and and send us a story that we will understand since we haven't gone up the mountain range but my concern though is what happens if the analogy is we've actually gone up a different side of the mountain we're still headed toward this understanding of reality but we we start with a different biology we start with different needs we start with a different history or what happens have given how and how different our own environment is it's almost like we're we're climbing up a mountain farther down the range so I think in all of these cases we can have a progressively more sophisticated science but they're different and I mean we see that here on earth just look at the history of mathematics geometry for 2,000 years it was taken as inviolable that two parallel lines will never meet but in the early 19th century there were three independent European geometers who who questioned that Euclid's fifth postulate and that became the foundation for non-euclidean geometries that give us a different understanding of space and time now both systems work well they independently work well but by tweaking one of the assumptions we get a radically new way of thinking about the universe so I would be shocked if our version and our way of representing understanding even something like chemistry and physics will be automatically intelligible I think it's the best starting place and so that you know when Franck you're asking what's the big path what why does this matter to me this is the biggest question is there really something Universal about our science or is this something that is a species specific way of understanding the universe around us that we might get a clue if we get a message from an extra trestle that shows that in some ways it maps on to us I'm just gonna add that our university has radiation at many different wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum so assuming any sort of alien civilization wants to know what's out there they will be observing and testing in the wavelengths that we that we perceive be my guess so this is the reason for which I work at the SETI Institute because we ask questions and you have those kind of answers which I think make me think will you make me think for the rest of the night thank you guys so we're gonna play a game where you can ask one questions short and you're gonna direct the question to one person and the person will response it will be very short this week and I try to get four four and question and answers thank you why I guess I'll go for set so I guess most people would think that if we identified a response from SETI that that might you know we might wish to evolve some kind of a strategy about what to do about the response and if you have more information about what you're dealing with then presumably monotonically you'll at least you won't damage the strategy you'll probably increase the value and the coherence of the strategy so why isn't the first move to obtain more information rather than to execute a purposeful communication without full information well I appreciate your appeal to reason and logic but you're dealing with Homo sapiens so I look it they'll just point out something that's actually obvious and that does bear on the what you're asking and that is who knows how many aliens are out there if you're optimistic you figure one in a million star systems might have a society that has this capability now if that's the case the average distance to the nearest million other star systems is about like 150 light-years something like that that means you pick up a message it's a hundred fifty years old that's okay you send something back takes another 150 years there's no way to stop that they're gonna people who who have you know antennas in their backyards they're gonna hook up a transmitter to it they're gonna do it for sure but it'll take 150 years and then another 150 years for you to get their response which I like to think would be please repeat whatever it is whatever it is I mean there's no hurry you have all the time you can spend on the problem and if you think you'll come up with a better answer you know in in 50 years and then wait 50 years I hope that geeky calculation has included our military radar which is by far the strongest signals we sent out and I seem I don't know but it seems to me it could rather inexpensively we could put a signal on military radar and start sending out on the military radar doing and then it also seems me whoever's out there they've they've got the same periodic table we have you started numbers that are element numbers and isotope numbers you quickly record guys that that's the periodic table being sent and then you identified elements you can quickly add elements together you know a CO was water I mean a whole lot of things with a little design goes because you they're going to pick up things with what through the static and so forth a weak signaling you talked about Google server but that's zillions of bits of information they could take a quick response yeah in spite of my scientific skepticism 2019 is the 150th anniversary of the periodic table so one of the messages we plan to send next year is in fact the periodic table so I like that thank you I just might add we are already communicating chemically with our the composition of our atmosphere and Terry I think that putting additional bits on to military radar certainly an interesting idea but I suggest you take it up with the Air Force or maybe the CA B or something because I mean it costs money and it might confuse the pilots okay let's take the next go ahead you can grab it and we don't like a rock star now you can stop singing a song in the distance we're talking should not we be dealing working with archaeologists and putting together a story of ourselves instead of worrying about what they can tell us that most of the time we'll probably be communicating with people who will be seeing us from a long time ago Ozymandias look upon us this is who we were uh as in Ozymandias but this is who we were because a thousand years from now when you will get this message we probably won't be here or will be entirely different from who we were when we sent this message but at the same so that's my one thought we considered do we have archaeologists I love it Steve dick was pointed out earlier former NASA chief historian one of the books that his series published when he was there was archaeology anthropology and interstellar communication because and Steve has long focused on the importance of analogies and so what better analogy than archeologists who try to reconstruct the past from this fragmentary information and deal with long timescales so it's a it's a great analogy check it out it's available free online archeology anthropology if I can break the rules there is one way around this long conversation thing which is sort of you force the archaeology ahead of time we send a space probe to another star system it takes decades centuries millennia to get there but once it's there it can have a nice low latency conversation figure out how to speak Klingon and then beam the results back and now we've turned it into our archaeology problem of how do we deal with this probe that was sent out ten thousand years ago and who still speaks HTML using floppy disks - okay go ahead so my question has to do with with the progression or evolution of ethics and if we're if you're spending any time maybe you're thinking about that because it would the answer the question about what the message should be it would seem that you'd have to better understand what that in that society is going to receive and is that an ethical thing for us to send out and also as an ethical thing for us to receive back in the millennia later that we're going to be receiving it so are you spending any time structuring the nature of how ethical may evolve you know if the singularity does happen then we're probably all gonna be robots and all that maybe aren't the concept of the value of individual lives will be a lot different so it would seem to be that that would be fundamental to being able to answer that question and is there any structure to that thought or is that too far beyond where we are there's certain you've been you you point out this this critical aspect of the conversation with the the conversation we hope for which are the long timescales and so a lot of our notions of ethics don't really hold because we think of ethics with those who we know face-to-face or we we have a clear idea who they are and there are short-term implications so as I think of an ethicist whose framework nicely translates to the medicine area with John Rawls who focuses on the implications of our actions for future generations and so the basic mindset is if you don't know which generation you're going to be born into what would you want people in 2018 to do to transmit or not transmit and so you think about it you try to make it as neutral as you can so that you don't have a privileged position and then act in the benefits of multiple generations so that's one way to bring in the this generational component I haven't heard of people trying to anticipate the nature of changes of ethics but you know maybe people like Seth always is emphasizing that the first aliens we contact may be artificial intelligence so people who focus on ethics of our engagement with AI could be people we could've gauge and I'll just add that are working with ethicists help helps us to have these conversations how do you even have the a debate about Medi if you're not using ethical arguments and bringing them into the conversation so it's happening yeah so I have to say that in the interest of maintaining our ethics and and moral upstanding nature we have to unfortunately end the program now in if you please save your question and and you can ask the speakers after if you want to ask but I mean literally we need to vacate the auditorium at 8:30 that's not our rule it's it's our host lease okay go ahead the Fermi paradox why is it considered a paradox it was in the 1950s Enrico Fermi he's working on a nuclear weapon and you know they're they're probably scared to death of us you know it's a look at what we've done to all the other species of life on this planet look at what we're wearing our clothes they're made of other other species with what note 60% of the species on this planet why is the Fermi paradox considered a paradox that's I think you're tube I think you're too down on humanity I made a calculation a couple of months ago about whether we could really wipe ourselves out with pandemics with climate change with nuclear weapons and I took all the nuclear weapons that all the world has instead launched them tomorrow launched them now right and just target the you know start with the biggest cities and just work your way down it turns out with the weapons we have you get all the way down to Racine Wisconsin so if you're a resident of Racine keep this in mind you're on the list okay still two-thirds of humanity is still there you can't get rid of everybody we're not a threat to anyone if there was a civilization on the moon we're no threat to them let alone a hundred light years away or 150 light years away the Fermi paradox of course is a really interesting topic you can read more about the Fermi paradox on our website www.visaplace.com is the night

Channel: SETI Institute

Views: 99,769

Rating: 4.5563979 out of 5

Keywords: SETI, METI, LaserSETI, Extraterrestrial intelligence, ET, messaging ET, douglas vakoch, protocols for detection, signal detection

Id: kVxJ1Ev2hmU

Length: 82min 54sec (4974 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2018

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[u/alllie]

For more than four decades, astronomers have been searching for technosignatures: signals coming from distant technological civilizations. The first SETI searches began in the 1960s by searching for extraterrestrial radio waves and have more recently expanded to include optical (visible) signals, such as powerful laser pulses. We know that, like technological progress, the search is also accelerating, evolving with the development of new antenna arrays and new networks of telescopes which will soon be capable listening to the entire sky, everywhere, and all the time. It is impossible to know when we will get our first contact and what this message will say, but we know that this discovery will have an ethical and political impact on our world. And then what will happen next? Will the detection of ET be dangerous or beneficial for humankind? Will it change everything, including our place in the universe or will we simply continue our life knowing that ‘We are not alone’?

To discuss these points, we invited four SETI researchers: Julia DeMarines, Astrobiologist and Science Communicator at the UC Berkeley SETI Research Center, Doug Vakoch, President of METI, Eliot Gillum, director of LASER SETI and Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute.