well welcome to the SETI talks and again we want to thank our sponsor Leonard Tramel who's here in the audience Thank You Leonard I'm Edna Devore I'm the director of education at the SETI Institute and I have the pleasure of introducing my boss bill diamond is a technology executive with long experience here in Silicon Valley he's got more than 20 years of experience in photonics and the optical communications industry and a decade in x-ray and semiconductor processing technologies his corporate background spans the spectrum from venture-backed startups to Fortune 100 internationals with responsibilities ranging from engineering and operations to sales marketing product management and CEO positions and today bill is the president and CEO of the SETI Institute his first nonprofit venture at least as bill likes to joke the first organization that's nonprofit on purpose true story true story true story before joining the Institute he was VP of Product Management and VP of Sales at Oak oh I'm not gonna do this Claro Oh claro incorporated an optical communications company and before that he was CEO of wave splitter technologies raising more than 75 million in investment capital for the companies development of optical waveguides in one of the world's first 8-inch silicon PLC wafer fab x' he's got his fingers in his background deeply enmeshed in what this valley does he had was also a CEO at dense light semiconductor in Singapore and x-ray dia incorporated it's now part of Zeiss in Germany and he led the team that developed the world's highest resolution x-ray microscopes as well as manufacturing the only commercially available zone plate lenses for focusing x-ray beams so quite a strong technological background earlier in his career he got to romp around Europe for six years is the optoelectronics business unit for AT&T micro electronics later Lucent and then returned to the US where he was the part of the executive team for a successful IPO of etek dynamics and its subsequent sale for fifteen billion dollars he's been the president of comet Technologies a US subsidiary of comet AG in Switzerland and I wonder if that's where you acquired your lovely Swiss wife could be could be and so I'd like to welcome bill his background educationally as a BA in physics from Holy Cross College and a master's in Business Administration from Georgetown and he's the president and CEO of the SETI Institute thank you thank you thanks very much Edna that was a longer than it needed to be but I in in what's definitely been an interesting career here in Silicon Valley I couldn't be more happy or indeed more honored than to be at the helm of the SETI Institute and for those of you familiar with our weekly colloquium series you know that typically we we take sort of a deep dive into a rather small Oh pops a small pond of information on any of a variety of topics having to do with space science astrobiology aeronautics astrophysics etc so today we're going to take a rather shallower dive into a vast ocean which is essentially the science of the SETI Institute before we dive into the talk however let me just introduce a group of people who are here with us today and you'll hear more about this in my talk but every year thanks to Edna whose leadership in the center for education for SETI Institute is key here we host a program called the REU program research experience for undergraduates so we host about a dozen summer interns with backgrounds and physics and astronomy and biology and chemistry and various things and and they team up with scientists at the SETI Institute and spend a summer of 10 10 weeks doing doing hard work and good science so I'd like to welcome the REU students and maybe ask if you would just stand and and be recognized but because we're so happy to have you here very good ok so here we're going to talk about today the science of the SETI Institute in the search for life beyond Earth so our journey begins by understanding where we come from where do we come from so if you go back far enough in time we can trace our roots and our origins to the sub-saharan African continent if you go back even further in time hundreds of millions or billions of years we can probably trace our origins back to the first creatures that grew feet from what had been fins and flippers and emerged from the oceans to walk on land but that's not really where we come from in fact those chapters are rather recent chapters in the evolution of life very recent chapters really where we come from is here it's the star stuff we are all brothers and sisters of the cosmos from the early universe and ultimately the in homogeneous collection of material and coalescence of matter into the formation of galaxies and the birth of stars and ultimately however I think we recognize that stars don't necessarily make a very hospitable place for us to reside there little hot little warm a little dangerous to to set foot on so we needs planets we need something solid to set foot on so planets ultimately became formed after as a byproduct of star formation in the early universe and of course still today as stars continue to be born so it's a process that takes millions and billions of years over time it's a process which it requires the the tug and forces of gravity to pull matter together to coalesce into rocky bodies or gas giants and while it's a very long and extended process of physics if you will and cosmology there's also stochastic events or random events that are associated with the formation of planets it's not always just this peaceful let's gather the matter together and form a planet sometimes there are stochastic events and impact events that actually have a relationship to the the evolution and development of life on Earth so it's a contact sport is there water around we think at least to understand life as we know it water is an essential ingredient where does water reside well we know that comets for example are icy snowballs that travel the cosmos some people believe that comets were responsible for delivering water on earth others believe that water was a natural byproduct of the Earth's early formation nevertheless one thing seems to be clear that water is also abundant in the universe in fact this is an imagery taken from Radio Astronomy work from scientists at the Max Planck Institute using their 100 meter dish in Germany and also the Very Large Array in New Mexico showing the presence of water in the very very early universe looking at very far distant galaxies so water appears also to be abundant so now we have kind of this this primordial soup we have a solid substance on which to form to to stand and for gravity to take hold we have liquid water we have thermal energy thanks to the tug-of-war of gravitational pulls between planetary bodies and stellar objects we have minerals we have the development of an act of an atmosphere indeed we have all the natural ingredients all the raw ingredients and then the question is but is life as abundant and as frequent as all of these raw ingredients which suggest could be the case so we've wondered about this we've been wondering about this really from the beginning of time we've wanted to know if we are a unique occurrence do there exist many worlds or is there about a single world this is one of the most noble and exalted questions in the study of nature now interestingly this is not a question that was asked by Carl Sagan or by Neil deGrasse Tyson or by Neil Armstrong or even by Seth Shostak this question was asked in the 13th century by the German Catholic bishop Albertus Magnus Albertus Magnus pondered this this question several hundred years ago he's one he was a philosopher an astronomer an educated educator and learned man and one of only 36 doctors of the church that have been so named since the beginnings of the Catholic Church so an interesting individual and like Albert we have all yearned to know the same thing and that is basically are we alone so enter the SETI Institute to answer that question the SETI Institute is a nonprofit research organization interested in the nature and existence of life beyond Earth we've got about 70 PhD scientists here and their research is world-class we also do a lot of education and outreach our interest range from nearby planets to the distant stars of all the places scientists look for extraterrestrial life the one that's garnered the most attention is Mars there's water on Mars and its surface is covered with channels that suggest that maybe once in the past there were rivers and lakes and even an ocean could there also have been life on Mars maybe one thing for sure we're looking we live on earth but earth lives in space and it's constantly being bombarded by these little rocks like this these rocks give us clues about our origins at the beginning of Earth the beginning of life I'm Molly Bentley welcome to big-picture science produced at the SETI Institute where researchers investigate the nature and origin of life the SETI Institute one our radio show big-picture science has more than 100,000 weekly listeners telling the public about our research and as part of the deal getting more people interested in science it took the New Horizons spacecraft about 10 years to cross the solar system and get to Pluto but nobody's been disappointed by what we found we see huge planes of ice we see mountains we see glaciers we see moons that are spinning backwards it's just a gift that never stops giving one of our experiments here at the SETI Institute is to look for evidence of intelligent life and to do that we use a set of 42 antennas up in the Cascade Mountains which is called the Allen telescope array we point these antennas in the directions of nearby stars hoping to eavesdrop on a radio signal that would tell us that somebody is out there there are a few science questions as compelling as Earth's place in the universe 10,000 generations of Homo safe have looked at the skies and wondered if there might be living things elsewhere but ours is the first generation with the ability to address that question the SETI Institute is leading the search for an answer in any case this is a video clip about the SETI Institute it's a really it's about a minute and a half clip and talks about the science we do at the SETI Institute and and the research we do and how we are unique as an institution and an organization and that the reason we exist is to answer that question of are we alone so let's take a closer look so who we are SETI Institute is the only research organization in the world that really combines all of the physical scientists many of the of other sciences including Computer Sciences we're branching into other new and interesting areas including including neural sciences but what we do is we combine the efforts of the full spectrum of scientific endeavor to answer this single question are we alone and I think this is what to me makes the Institute so fascinating and separates it from so many other research organizations where very often what you have is a singular problem with a singular science being applied to that problem here we apply the entire spectrum of the sciences to answer this question because you need them all they become whether it's chemistry or physics or astrophysics or astronomy or biology or zoology or microbiology they become the jigsaw puzzles that when combined form the picture of life in the universe what we do so we're an international center of excellence in education and research and outreach and we're focused on the exploration of planetary habitability the signatures of life and the evolution of intelligence what is our mission our mission is to explore and understand and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe and to apply the knowledge gained to inspire and guide present and future generations that's why we do what we do and who benefits from this everybody benefits from this we have a passion for exploration and discovery for sharing knowledge as scientific ambassadors to the public the press and the government that's an important part of what we do so the research is is the underpinning of the Institute in terms of executing the science we do to answer this question but if in the end of the day we're not sharing our work and in contributing that body of knowledge to the public at large we're missing a key part of our mission statement so that's who benefits so what we're trying to do essentially is we're trying to understand how did the universe evolved from its early beginnings from the Big Bang from cosmology and the the early expansion of the universe and the coalescence into galaxies and stars how do we go from cosmology to chemistry how do we go from chemistry to biology and how did we ultimately make this journey from biology to philosophy that's what we're trying to find out at the SETI Institute so what is SETI any of you flown on Virgin America Airlines so you've seen that part where they say in the safety video for the point zero zero one percent of you who've never used a seatbelt before here's how it works so for the point zero zero one percent of you before who here who have not don't know what SETI means so it is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that's where the acronym derives from and that has for most of its history involve the use of radio telescopes including the Institute's own Allen telescope array up in Hat Creek California and these are deployed in the search for signals which would suggest the presence of an extraterrestrial intelligence or indeed technology new techniques are also being used that include optical techniques where we're using sensitive optical systems attached to telescopes or wide field cameras to detect the presence of laser pulses which might also be indicative of some type of communication or indeed propulsion technology so Frank Drake who is one of the early founders of the SETI Institute still has his office at the SETI Institute and comes in once a once a week or so Frank is really one of the pioneers of Seti and he wrote what is considered by some to be one of the most famous equations in science of course there's equals mc-squared electrical engineers will say this V equals IR but this is right up there it has a few more variables but this is the Drake Equation and Frank put the Drake Equation together at the beginning or before participating in a conference that was being held at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at that time new Observatory in Green Bank West Virginia and this was in 1961 and he was really interested in this part of it which was which is an what's the number can I try to predict or can I try to come up with a formula which would allow me to predict or speculate on how many intelligent or technological civilizations might be out in our own galaxy that might also help us indicate whether there's some point and actually looking for them so his equation is what I call a reductionist model in that it's a little bit like a funnel each variable to the left is further filtered by the next variable to the right and ultimately it yields an answer or 10 yield an answer and you can find this on on lots of websites where for example you can plug in your own variables and see what comes out it's kind of fun to play with but we start with the variable R star which is the rate of star creation in our galaxy next we have the fraction of those stars that have planets F sub P and we'll talk more about that now this is one variable that thanks to the Kepler work and other work in looking at the discovery of exoplanets this is a variable that's increasing its value over time as we learn more average number of planets per star in the habitable zone so what fraction of the planets that are orbiting stars exist in that area that's the right distance from the star and the stars energy flux to maintain and sustain liquid water the so-called habitable zone what fraction of those that have the ability based on the distance from the Sun from their Sun and star to support life how many actually go on to develop life F sub I F sub L sorry and then the fraction of those that ultimately develop intelligent life F sub I and what fraction of those might ultimately result in a civilization that can develop technology that would be capable of revealing self through the transmission of signals into space F sub C and then there's my favorite variable of all which is the letter L that's the lifetime of civilizations capable of transmitting signals into space so once you get to a point where you have technology how long to technological civilizations last if I remember correctly I think Frank's number for this is 10,000 and the way I see things going today I think he was an optimist but that's for a different talk in any case that's the letter L so that's the Drake Equation and while he was using it essentially to try to make this predictive model of are there likely to be other civilizations out there that we might be able to detect what he unwittingly did was essentially write the roadmap for astrobiology or the roadmap for understanding this question are we alone in the early days of of SETI work the base of operations if you will was the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico so the search for life starts with this variable n sub e that is habitable planets that's where we can begin our search for are we alone or are there others out there it culminates with F sub C which is this existence of civilizations where a communicative technology may have evolved so we can use instruments like radio telescopes to do studies of SETI where we listen for signals and in the case of Arecibo it remains until next year when the Chinese dish is done the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope this is a picture of it in sitting on top of that mountain in Arecibo Puerto Rico and many of you are probably familiar with this you may have seen it in movies like James Bond or in contact or other places but it's it's quite a sight and it is quite large just to give you a sense of scale so you can see this receiving dome here suspended above and you can see on the side a stairway and right there on that stairway is a is a person so it's it's huge this is 300 meters across so 3 football pitch is wide and that's where the first work was was done and it was clear then as it is still clear now if we could detect a narrowband radio frequency signal and we could tell that this was coming from deep space and verify that it was coming from someplace other than Earth and something other than a satellite of our own making this would be a pretty definitive indication of intelligent technical life beyond our solar system we haven't had that wow moment yet we've had some close calls but we're still waiting waiting for that for that kind of signal so have we made contact not quite yet dr. Jill tarter who is also one of the founders of the SETI Institute is on our board of trustees and as an early pioneer in this in this field she likes to make this analogy that you know why haven't they called well we've only just begun to listen and in terms of the scale and scope of the universe and the fact that this is not just a spatial problem but it's also a temporal problem in terms of the overlapping of civilizations especially if you remember that ell variable which may be ten thousand years or less there's a spatial problem and a temporal problem so we've really just begun to listen and we've done the equivalent with the kind of detection work we've done since the beginning of that technology back in the 1960s we've done the equivalent of dipping a measuring cup into the ocean and if you took a measuring cup and dipped it in the ocean and you looked at it you didn't see any fish you didn't see any whales you'd be mistaken to assume or to draw a conclusion from that that there are not any but that's where we are we're still in the infant stages of this SETI endeavor some of you may have come across the SETI Institute in the movies in fact some people may be surprised to know there really is a SETI Institute because you've only seen it in the movies it was featured in Independence Day I think the opening sequence in Independence Day involves my my fictional predecessor doing some putting in his office and learning of a signal coming in that seems to be a valid and real signal contact made in 1997 and starring Jodie Foster Jody's character was really based largely around the work and the life Jill tarter although her experiences in the movie ended up being a little bit different than Jill's much to Jill's dismay I think if you asked her but but there's still time and then another earth in 2011 pondered a situation in which two identical earths come into contact with one another and the directors of the SETI Institute in fact I think the character in the movies woman probably based on Edna they talked to each other and there's two SETI Institute's in that movie because there's two earths but in fact these are fictional representations of the real Institute so what do we do at the City Institute we work to understand the miracle of life starting at its most basic level from the formation of molecules and the development of prebiotics to the evolution of advanced organisms sentient beings and intelligence so we want to know a few things we want to know how does this happen we want to know why does this happen and also we'd like to know where does this happen ultimately the question is has it only happened here most of us don't think so otherwise we probably wouldn't do this but this is the question we're trying to address we have three core centers of activity at the Institute and these are the Carl Sagan Center for Research which is really where all of our scientists are embodied under the under the Carl Sagan Center and that's where all of the work gets done where we publish in peer reviewed journals we work with colleagues at NASA Ames at other NASA sites at JPL other academic institutions and research institutions around the world so that's the core science of the Institute under the Carl Sagan Center we have the SETI Institute Center for Education you met the director Edna this Center is really focused on grant based educational programs and we'll learn a little bit more about those programs and some of what we do and the impact that these programs have which is surprisingly significant and then we have the Center for outreach which is really the vehicles that we use to communicate the work of the Institute and share it with all of you and we'll explore each of these three core activities in a little bit more detail the Carl Sagan Center for Research is headed by dr. Natalie Cabral who actually is also with us today in the audience as Natalie points out the Carl Sagan Center explores the evolution of habitability and life in our solar system and beyond through the multidisciplinary perspective of all the physical sciences and again as I said from the very beginning this to me is the most wonderful and amazing part of the SETI Institute this combination and this multidisciplinary approach to the singular question we have a series of different research thrusts or research groups within the the Institute within the Carl Sagan Center and these take us back to the Drake Equation which as I mentioned was really more than just a predictive model but actually this roadmap for astrobiology and the the different research divisions that we have within C within the Institute can be applied to different variables in the Drake Equation so we unravel and examine the Drake Equation in in close detail through the different research areas we have so what are they the first is astronomy and astrophysics the second is astrobiology the third is climate and Geoscience the fourth is exoplanets the fifth is ex planetary exploration and the sixth is SETI work so you can see again how these map on the Drake Equation and we have researchers who are parts of each of these a total of 75 odd scientists and some of them are wearing more than one hat but in each case we also have a head or a chair of these departments and they together with Natalie and other advisors within the Institute form the Science Council and the Science Council has the Charter of helping to guide the research we do to direct it to go after the the relevant kinds of funding resources that are out there and indeed as we're beginning to do now more than any time in our history derive and develop SETI Institute's own missions and our own science programs and our own science priorities that we will fund and and execute so we have what we like to call cycles of exploration and discovery which is really the interplay between these research areas and then again one of the most interesting things about forming the Science Council establishing these areas of research has been the ability to generate collaboration amongst and between the scientists in those various groups so each research division addresses key questions regarding the nature and origins of life how it came to be where we might find it and how natural and stochastic events might lead to the evolution of intelligence so what we'll do is look at each of these in a little bit more detail and the questions answered in each so the first is our astronomy and astrophysics research area that's really looking at the going you know back to the far left of the Drake Equation how two galaxies stars planets moons minor bodies form and evolve what is the path that leads from prebiotic organic compounds and ultimately to life so here we have actually a protoplanetary disc being shown on the left side and because it's difficult in fact to visually show some of the work that our astrophysicist do a lot of it is using computer modeling and and theoretical tools or data sets from from space probes and satellites but they're quite prolific in in their publications and their participation in various conferences these are examples of some of the recent papers that have been published by our scientists in the astronomy and astrophysics session and by the way one of the other things that you'll find on our website is we now share with everybody the proceedings if you will of the SETI Institute in terms of monthly reports so you can go onto the website and you'll see there a March and an April anime report which is essentially all of the published papers all of the invited talks technology development technology reports etc of the Institute so you know you can now go and peruse all the work that our researchers do and and dig further into areas of that might be of specific interest to you next we have the exoplanets the exoplanets are really looking at how abundant and diverse our planetary systems how many exoplanets have developed habitable environments and how many are common how common our earth-like planets there have been really free tools deployed for the detection and characterization of exoplanets the first being the radial astronomy method which used the relative wobbling of a star planet system when you have a large massive planet in close proximity to its star and it revolves around the star the center of mass between them is not at the center of the star so the star wobbles this was the first method by which exoplanets were detected the other tools that have been used are the G PI system the so-called Gemini planetary imager which is using a technology called adaptive optics and they've bolted this system on the back of what is now here in this picture on the left side the Gemini telescope down in Chile and that has been able to actually image exoplanets for the first time so to actually take a picture of a planet revolving around a star that is not the Sun very very dramatic and then we have the Kepler space telescope which has used the method of light curves or basically looking at what happens to the brightness of a star when a planet or other body transits in front of That star and the very very slight and it is very very slight dimming that results in staring at that star and then looking for that periodic dimming by staring at the star for a long time reveals the presence of exoplanets this has been I think one of the most exciting developments in astrobiology if you will or in the this question about are we alone is the fact that as far as planets are concerned we're anything but alone so GPI and Kepler the Gemini planetary imager again what you're seeing here are two different images taken at two different times in December of 2014 in September of 2015 showing this planet called 51 Arabi the star is about a hundred light-years from Earth so this is a planet imaging a star a hundred light-years from here and that's an actual image of it and again this is kind of a breathtaking WoW moment for mankind to actually be able to image a planet other than revolving around a Sun other than our the Kepler space telescope the father of whom is sitting in the audience with us bill Baruch II many of you know him from from NASA Ames the this has been again one of the most spectacular missions and from and most profound from my perspective in NASA's history as a result of the of the Kepler telescope we have identified 4,700 planet candidates 2327 seven confirmed planets the SETI Institute has researchers on the Kepler team they are in charge of a lot of the data analysis and data collection and dissemination from the Kepler space telescope and also our scientists are involved in the adaptive optics and the deployment of that technology on the G PI planetary imager together with colleagues at Stanford and elsewhere so this from my point of view has has really transformed our understanding of life in the universe or the potential for life in the universe and again it's drawn to the process to this conclusion that planets are everywhere so here's a chart that is actually already quite out of date it's as far back as 2013 but it shows how many planets candidate planets as of January 2014 were identified by Kepler you can see the size of the planet goes up on the y axis earth sized planets are down here neptune planets about four times Earth's size are in the middle here and large jupiter-like planets are up here and then orbital periods are along the x axis with an earth year of 365 days being about here so you can see a lot of the data is based on planets that are close in to their star and that's not necessarily because that's where we're there they all exist but it's certainly an artifact of the of the way that Kepler works which is to stare at a given star for an extended period of time so very very long orbital periods are going to be naturally a little more difficult to detect nevertheless a rather stunning discovery and and revelation this is actually looking at the star field of the original Kepler data set these are the CCD images or imagers of of the Kepler telescope and what they show you here is this uniform rather uniform distribution so no discernible patterns I mean what what is clear is that everywhere Kepler was looking it found planets so I think this is has given us I think the right to claim that if you gaze up at the night sky and look upon a star in the sky you can probably safely assume that there are likely to be planets around that star next we have planetary exploration what a solar system exploration teach us about the diversity of habitable environments their evolution through time and life and Mike human destiny includes solar system colonization so the researchers at the SETI Institute and elsewhere focused on planetary exploration are really all about looking at our own solar system as a laboratory for understanding life in the universe and indeed whether life in our own life may exist even in our own solar system let alone far beyond and there's lots of interesting candidates not the least of which includes Mars but may also include moons of other planets like Enceladus of Saturn or Europa of of Jupiter so SETI Institute has been involved in many NASA missions involved in the exploration of our own solar system that includes the Curiosity rover where a team of SETI researchers together with their colleagues at NASA Ames developed the x-ray diffraction system that's on the rover we were involved very heavily in the science team of the new horizons space probe that famously flew by Pluto last year in July one of our scientists mark Showalter was responsible for navigating the the craft by using Hubble data so on the approach to Pluto we could be fairly certain that it wouldn't run into anything which would be rather catastrophic and as a result of his work using Hubble to study and chart the path of the craft he discovered two of the newest moons of Pluto so we've had a lot of involvement on the science team of new horizons and also of the Cassini space probe which has been used to unravel Saturn's rings unlocking orbble the anomalies of the moon enceladus so a SETI researcher has used Cassini data to determine what the looking at the anomalies rather what strange wobbling of Enceladus as it orbits Saturn and finally was able to get a model that seems to map identically to the orbital characteristics of that moon and that model suggests a solid core a liquid water outer surface and an icy surface with no physical connection between the icy outer surface and the core as I told him what he had discovered was the M&M peanut of the solar system at the time but SETI scientists have also used Cassini data to determine that the rings of Saturn which have always been both a beauty object of beauty in the night sky but also a thing of mystery may be quite young they may only go back as far as the age of the dinosaurs so very interesting research coming out of Cassini so that's the kind of work that our researchers do in planetary exploration now we have climate and Geoscience what are the physical and chemical processes driving planetary climates how do life and the environment influence each other how my climate change impact human life so for this we like to go far afield in particular we like to go to the Antarctic so we our researcher Dale Anderson and his colleagues do work in this area called Lake Untersee Lake Untersee is a large freshwater lake at about 1,800 feet altitude in the Antarctic and it is a fascinating place for extreme biology studies and also studying the interplay between biology and environment this is a case where getting there is truly half the fun so it's quite a journey just to get from his base of operations on the East Coast down to the South Pole and once you get there by plane and get to your first base there's a minor six to eight hour journey on snowmobiles to get out to Lake Untersee from the base camp and then it's a rather trivial matter of drilling a hole through three-and-a-half meters of ice widening that hole with the heating out and then jumping in what could be easier so this is this is Dale suiting up and getting ready to take a dive into the lake and you definitely require some some warm gear if you're going to go swimming around under the ice but the rewards are are quite spectacular this is a picture of Dale under the ice and you can see it's it's really a lot like you know diving in the tropics it looks exactly like Hawaii and other places here but the rewards are indeed pretty spectacular this are these are mounds of of cyanobacteria that are basically calcium secreting organisms that thrive in this lake and other interesting species have been found in this lake where there's no natural photosynthesis taking place and extremely cold conditions right around the freezing point of water and yet life exists so this is another interesting place where in the study of life beyond Earth or are we alone we see information showing us that a variable of the Drake Equation is moving to the right extreme biology tells us that the conditions under which life can exist if you think about the envelope of conditions involving temperature acidity pressure water or the absence of water oxygen etc are much larger than we went than we originally thought then we was thought even twenty years ago so you combined that picture of an expanded presence of life that is extremely robust with the fact that planets are now known thanks to Kepler and GPI and others to be everywhere and it suggests that the probability is going up that we are certainly not alone next we have the astrobiology work our astrobiologists ask questions like how does life begin and evolve does life exist elsewhere in the universe what can terrestrial research teach us about bio signatures beyond Earth what technologies can we develop to detect them so here we make a different journey this is a research that is takes place more or less every year and is led by our own Carl Sagan center director Nathalie Cabral and her work takes her to the Atacama Desert into this region bordering Chile and Bolivia where there's high dry desert and volcanoes rising up over 20,000 feet and in some cases Lakes suspended in these volcanic Peaks far above normal lines of conventional life tree line etc and in places where there are extreme conditions of environment not the least of which is extremely high levels of UV radiation and yet here again we find that life is quite robust this is the the area in which you work so you can see very dry very arid very devoid of life work on the surface so it would seem but of course we know that that life is abundant there just like it is for example in our own deserts in North America but this is the base camp which they forgot to put a roof on but I think there's a reason for that and they climb the team climbs up these Peaks and investigates volcanoes at the top of these Peaks here's an example of one of these small lakes with a red algae bloom that has adapted to extremely high levels of UV radiation and maybe can teach us a lot of things not only about the robustness of life but the adaptability of life to extreme conditions and indeed may even teach us things indirectly that are of use to for example oncologists in the study of cancer how our organisms modifying their DNA and RNA to adapt to these kinds of environments and so quite spectacular in in this rather rugged beauty of the Atacama Desert there's some more scenes and you know not only are you rewarded with this beautiful scenery if you're doing research down there but you have these very comfortable flat plush campsites to to relax in in between your excursions but here again you're rewarded with some interesting finds here is an example of Salt Flats around these lakes and around the the Atacama region they look like they're devoid of life that looks like there's nothing there but you break open the surface and what you find is bacteriological life forms existing in abundance hidden underneath the salt and again what are the processes what are the life processes that are supporting this kind of life and living organism and here you have an orange algae bloom and you can see this particular algae has a flagella so this is a very interesting life form that has adapted to levels of UV radiation that in the presence of certain UV storms that have been detected by natalie and her colleagues are at radiation levels it would be fatal to to humans so adaptability of life is is one of the key areas of extreme biology and the work of our scientists in the astrobiology sector and then finally we have SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are we alone in the universe other advanced civilizations we can detect and what would be the social impact if we do how can we augment the odds of making contact of course one of the ways we augment the odds are by using now new techniques including optical techniques we're also working on and you'll be reading more about this in the coming weeks we're working on broadening our thought processes around what is really an anthropocentric view of looking for life in the universe because we are in many ways looking for ourselves we talk about the idea that we're sort of looking at a mirror when we're relying on on technologies of conventional SETI work to look for life beyond Earth there are very logical reasons for doing this but what if what we're looking for is not another version of ourselves but something entirely different so you'll be hearing more from the Institute about our expansion of thinking around the SETI question but we have the world's only devoted instrument to SETI purpose built for this purpose for the purpose of looking for radio signals it's located in Hat Creek just to the east of Redding California it sits between the last lesson volcano National Park to the south and Mount Shasta to the north it's about four thousand feet altitude it's in a radio quiet zone radio quiet by virtue of the fact that nobody lives there not necessarily by design but it's it's a stunning location it is open to the public it's kind of fun to to go and see and visit it so if you happen to have the opportunity and you're traveling in that part of the country you want to see the beautiful lassen volcano National Park stop and visit Hat Creek they there's a visitor center there's tours that you can do around the site and you can learn about the work that is done there but using feeds that are in the nose of the dishes that are sensitive to electromagnetic propagation and the one to ten one to 15 gigahertz range we scan across that frequency range and we listen for narrow band frequencies that would belie the presence of alien technology and we're listening 365 days a year other efforts which have to rent time on telescopes whether that be something like green bank or Arecibo or parks etc can only do so in chunks of time and since as I mentioned the problem we have is not just a spatial problem but a temporal problem the ability to actually listen every single day 365 days a year is very very important and and also to do so with an instrument that was purpose-built for this and among other things has the capability more than other instruments to differentiate between real signals and what might be false or human origin ated signals here are some specifications there won't be a quiz but you can learn more about the the telescope and and and again I encourage you to visit the site if you happen to be in that part of the of the world we have now a new website devoted specifically to the SETI work we do with the Allen telescope array it's at SETI quest info and if you go there you'll see you can see what we're observing you can look at data from when we've done different observing right now we're doing some interesting observations on red dwarfs and we most recently we looked at a tabby star and I think very recently we went back and visited revisited the so-called Wow signaled it happened in what was it ninety seventy-seven yeah back at Ohio State and so we're we're we've revisited that part of the sky to see if there's anything interesting to be found so the the nice thing about when you own your own telescope you can do whatever you want with it whenever you want with it so if you want to find out more about what we're doing what we're looking at what we've discovered there's also a star field map on that site where you can click and drag the star field and and look at data from different observations that we've had so very interesting and as I mentioned earlier we're also now developing an optical SETI program we have a proposal in for the deployment of a worldwide optical SETI system which would be based at six observatories three in the southern hemisphere three in the Northern Hemisphere and give us all sky all the time observation capabilities for looking for laser pulses so that's an overview of the Carl Sagan Center and now we'll take a visit to the Center for Education and the Devore is our director and as Edna says our education program share the excitement of exploration the joy of discovery and the wonders of the universe with children educators and adults and we indeed cover that full spectrum in the work we do we're strong supporters of STEM education where we leverage our broad science and engage our researchers with the public so there's some wonderful examples of the work that Edna and her colleagues do one of them that you've probably heard talks here about before includes the Sophia plane the Sophia plane is a modified 747 operated by NASA and the German space agency it incorporates a two and a half meter infrared telescope in the back end of the plane that floats in isolation to the planes vibrations what we do is we take teachers from all over the United States and give them an experience of not only going and viewing and looking at plane and learning about the work that I do they get to go on flights so the teachers in what we call the airborne astronomy ambassadors program really get the to experience science in the field in and working in observing scientists doing their work in this real live classroom and the whole point is they take the wonder of that experience and the passion of being able to experience that kind of research and bring that back to their classrooms and their school districts we've been running this program for many many years including on the predecessor airplane to the current 747 Sofia program and we hope to be continuing to do that and indeed we're looking at ways of expanding that program that would give us reach to even a larger number of teachers there's only so many people you can put on a plane for a given flight but there's lots of other ways to experience the Sofia science that is done a program program that is one of my favorites and for which Edna will forever be my hero is something called reaching for the stars this is a NASA science funded program for the Girl Scouts and it was conceived of by by Edna and her colleagues and this is a program of informal education and merit badge development for Girl Scouts this will be impacting girls from ages 5 to 18 it's conceived by the SETI Institute it was developed in conjunction with NASA and the Girl Scouts of America and the University of Arizona the Astronomical Society the Pacific and airy scientific and this kind of program over its five-year run will certainly impact hundreds of thousands of young girls and this is all about bringing stem and the excitement of science education to to young girls so we're we're very excited about a program where again derive from a relatively modest Institute of the size of the of the SETI Institute to develop a program that can set have such a huge huge impact we're very very proud about that NASA was also very very happy about it and many of Edna's colleagues in our science community complained because when you write a grant proposal to NASA they come back whether you were successful or not and they'll tell you what your strengths and weaknesses were and so forth and in edna's proposal there were no weaknesses and even our most success while scientists writing and submitting a proposal they'll get something back which says now this is a minor weakness here's the money anyway in Enders case there was not a single single flaw they could find so this is wonderful wonderful program we're very excited about we also have as I mentioned at the beginning of the talk our summer internship program this is funded by the National Science Foundation it's called the REU program research experience for undergraduates and in this case we're partnered with the National Science Foundation we bring about a dozen students in a very competitive process to the Institute they spend ten weeks with our scientists and in fact they are paired with an individual researcher on an individual project when they apply they're applying for a specific mentor so it's wonderful that we have in fact more mentors than we do students in terms of the budget of the program we have a lot of scientists very enthusiastic about their role in training and teaching the next generation of scientists they devote their time but the students work extremely hard they're doing weekly reporting and they culminate with an event which we will do right here at the colloquium where they will talk about the work that they did over the summer so this is a wonderful program that that again runs runs ten weeks and becomes really I think a game changer for the students who who get in and by the way I mentioned competitive nature so there were 250 applicants for about 11 positions this year so so we've got some very very bright capable young students participating the Center for outreach is where we this is the the this place where we have different vehicles to communicate the work we do with the public at large so we have our weekly public colloquium which you're sitting in which is always done here at Microsoft always on Tuesdays at noon and we have a content rich website we have a media presence on them on the social media we have a hour-long nationally broadcast radio program called big picture science and we bridge the arts with our science through a research sorry an artist-in-residence program at the Institute so dr. Seth Shostak our senior astronomer is in charge of our outreach activities and he notes outreach of the SETI Institute is more than just a nice thing to do it's an essential part of our mission not only does it make our research accessible and understandable it highlights the relevance of our work to the public and it promotes an interest in science among young people which is again from our perspective a very key part of our mission so the weekly radio broadcast again was called big-picture science and for those of you who are regular listeners your listeners you know this but big-picture sciences is more than just the science of the SETI Institute in big-picture science we really explore a wide range of scientific questions and and problems and interesting topics and what I like about big-picture science is you know they're never far away from what is the so what what is interesting what is impactful what is meaningful about the story we're talking about today again it's carried by over a hundred NPR stations nationwide and you can listen to it as a broadcast or a podcast or radio on demand you can get it from our website interestingly the may the city of New York the mayor's office of education operates a radio station of their own on the FM band and they recently just selected a big picture science to be included in that so we're very proud of this program and it's a huge role in the outreach of the Institute and if you haven't listened I urge you to listen it's really really brilliant the study talks as what we call the weekly colloquium what we're doing here and as talked about at the very beginning it's normally a very deep dive into the world of science that we do astrobiology aerospace Aeronautics SETI research we have probably by now over 360 lectures they're all recorded on and made available on our YouTube channel and they can also they're archived and accessible through our own website so there's several phd's worth of knowledge and education and information on this long history of the SETI talk series which again is a very important part of our mission and something we're proud of and something we're very thankful to Leonard for for supporting us for this year that some of their recent talks we've had include talks about sand seas and the solar system work on wind and wind wind erosion on Mars by Laurie from the Institute orbital dynamics suggesting a recent formation of Saturn's moons which Manya has done and I alluded to that work earlier when talking about Cassini SETI in the computational universe which was given by Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Research Institute so these talks as those of you who are familiar know involved researchers from academia and from other Institute's around the world as well as scientists from the SETI Institute our website of course is something that is again a constantly updated source of information about the science we do the education we do and the work we do so I encourage you to visit it often because there's always interesting stories some stories that we derive here are not stories that will end up necessarily in papers they tend to be fairly up-to-the-minute but we do also share news about peer-reviewed papers and publications and other events that were participating in so there's always something fun and new to learn by visiting the website and again this is where we we really the primary vehicle through which we share our work with the world our artisan Residence program is a program that that really is about the exchange of ideas between artists and scientists a mutual likes a motivation stimulation and inspiration that each other has and they the artists in our program spend time with our scientists understand their work and try to interpret this in ways that are meaningful to them and often what our scientists have find are gee what I'm seeing here in in the way you've interpreted my work gives me a new way to even think about it so the artist and Residence program is is a relatively new but emerging an important vehicle of sharing our our science with the world Charles Lindsay is the program director and it was really a chance meeting between Charlie and Jill tarter that established the artist-in-residence program in the first place so we're very excited about that program charlie notes there were now an international leader in this movement to integrate the arts and the sciences our artists bring fresh eyes to help navigate difficult concepts and act as a bridge to broaden the awareness of the science carried out at the SETI Institute there was I was recently with with Jill Charlie and others in Massachusetts at a wonderful Museum they're called the Museum of Contemporary Art it's out in the western part of the state and this is they're currently doing an exhibit called explode everyday an inquiry into the phenomena of wonder and it's a program of an exhibition of the art of over 23 artists from around the world four of whom are artisan residents at the SETI Institute so we're proud to have this representation at this wonderful Museum this is one of our artists work is a timeline of history of the universe from the Big Bang all the way around to the present and this timeline occupies three walls in a major gallery so it was a wonderful wonderful work the galleries themselves are big and airy it's the museum is a converted textile mill so a fascinating place in its own right and wonderfully huge exhibition space will also be at the Los Gatos new museum in November of this year they will be doing a dedicated display of the work of the artists from the SETI Institute so we're very happy to to have the artists as part of who we are part of what we give back at the SETI Institute so with that if you're interested and you don't want to follow us and want to keep track of what we do you know you can be a friend of ours on Facebook or follow us on Twitter or Google+ or link with us on LinkedIn lots of ways to stay up to date we do use these social media platforms press releases and other new and information news and information coming from the Institute is leveraged off of these platforms we're making several posts a day so you can stay up with the work we do through those platforms and with that and that story of the SETI Institute I thank you very much for your attention and I'm very happy to entertain any questions you might have okay one two one two we use the microphone because we record the questions does anybody have a question they'd like to ask I'll bring you the mic all right I can run up the center aisle I guess I'd like your opinion about an issue astrophysics has a lot of challenging questions that are pretty much answered now we know a lot about the origin of the universe we know it's a age to what 1% cosmological parameters are well understood gravitational waves and so on on the other hand in in biology I think the two fundamental problems how did life originate and is there life in two intelligent life elsewhere in the universe one could argue that work may be close to answering those or maybe we're not so close what is your opinion about that that kind of difference between the physical sciences and the biological sciences well I think one of the things that's interesting of course is the interrelationship between the physical sciences and the biological sciences I mean the impact of biology on environment the impact of environment on biology are interesting questions and when you talk about the impact of biology on environment you're talking about how does biology and influence for example the chemistry of the atmosphere and and vice versa I I think you know we speculated on this question of how close are we to finding life elsewhere we did a a panel session Natalie and Seth Fergal Mullaly and mark Showalter our new horizon scientists were all a part of that and we were asking that question are we close when do you know when do we think we will find evidence of life beyond Earth and my own take we had I think answers that range from sort of 10 years to 50 years and then mark Showalter wanting to be provocative said maybe never but my own feeling is you know within the next thirty years and maybe sooner we will find evidence of life beyond Earth I think in our solar system not technological life but biology that we can detect either directly or indirectly and definitively my feeling is that's not very far away hopefully even within my lifetime the question you know and I think it's it's it's fascinating and we don't know the answer we talked about this transition from how do we go from chemistry to biology we don't understand that transition yet although I think we're getting close and closer but but clearly that to me that bridge is where these two issues of the physical and the biological sciences come together and we don't know what that bridge looks like yet but I think we're not far from understanding that and and again within sort of this 20 year time frame we should be able to do it and this is what I think is so fascinating about the time we're in now because now more than any other time in our history we have the tools available and the resources available to answer a lot of these questions many of which I think will be you know answered in the coming decades hi Bill great talk thanks thanks so in the previous talk that you alluded to just now other than the notion that if we were to find et we you guys would get a lot more funding as the director what what would you say say you through the use of the Allen telescope array or through finding things you know swimming around in the oceans of Europa or whatever as time goes on solved the Drake Equation and actually got a number then what would you see other than you know trying to figure out how to spend your millions of influx of what would you see as the role of the SETI Institute changing from right now it's a it's a questing thing I mean calling it SETI quest for one of your website's really appropriate but but it's a fundamental shift if the quest is it's some way over right sure yeah yeah I mean I I think that that in terms of you know answering that question definitively is there life elsewhere you could say that that question as part of our quest would be answered but but then how did it happen and under what conditions did it happen and where might those conditions be replicated so that we could find it elsewhere I think that would be kind of the next role would be taking those additional steps of understanding so it would be a great moment to be at the helm here and say you know there's we've got definitive proof it wouldn't be as great as a signal that would really be this is definitely where I want to be when that happens but but seriously I think that you know the role would would transition to more of okay now we've we've found what we all believed I think most of us believed was there all along that's the evidence of life beyond Earth what does it mean and and and again what else do we have to learn from that I think the the learning if you will the the number of questions would probably grow exponentially with that discovery so rather than saying you know we've begun to now confine our mission into something narrower we'd probably be broadening that mission into something wider my take excellent talk thank you what can you comment on the possibility of detecting life outside the solar system that hasn't advanced to the point where it sends radio waves out into the other into space yeah that's a great question you know this is a a question that relates to a technology that is evolving and developing something we call bio signature detection do we have the ability to remotely detect the presence of biology far far away for example on exoplanets and there's lots of different efforts underway to define what those bio signatures might be you know - are there bio signatures that we could detect based on the chemistry of an atmosphere are there other signatures that could be detected through spectroscopic analysis etc one of the things we you know I mentioned that the SETI Institute is at a point now where we're trying to develop and derive and plan our own missions one of the missions that the Carl Sagan Center under Natalie's leadership is looking at is trying to develop CubeSat technology where for example we might launch a CubeSat point it to earth take the resolution way way down and begin to say okay what you know use the earth basically as a model and say can we develop bio signature definitive bio signature techniques using such a method that we could then deploy by turning an instrument around aiming it at exoplanets and seeing what we can what we can learn but I I believe as well that you know in the coming decades that capability of definitive bio signature detection of remote objects will will be possible my question is from the perspective of an educator movies have long been enamored of space and space exploration as their topic and I was wondering is there any theme or specific movie that you've seen that has furthered the mission of SETI and there's there anything that Hollywood has done that your reaction was gosh I wish they'd stop well I I mean to be honest I think most everybody you know takes Hollywood for what it is which is Hollywood in its entertainment so I don't know that I'd go so far as to say you know they've done things that I think are damaging potentially with the possible exception that that certainly Hollywood has had a lot of movies starting with War of the Worlds which is still a wonderful film an Independence Day about you know bad guys coming to you know do harm that may not be the best thing for for the work we do that has probably been among the things that have influenced those individuals who are against messaging the so-called Medi and you know I've asked the question internally to our scientists on a scientific basis on the scientific merits whether they think the concerns of people like Stephen Hawking who is against this whether they agree with that and in most cases our feeling is no that there's not really sound scientific basis for for that concern but so that might be one area that I think has created some perhaps unwelcome noise in what should be a more scientifically pursued question but we we have one of our researchers Pascal Lee has a documentary film called mission to Mars which which documents a two-year effort to a crawler like rover up to Devon Island and the hotend crater and the above the Arctic Circle and this is another Mars analog site where they develop even technologies of how you do Rover missions if we have for example scientists on Mars what are the logistics behind bringing them into a craft that then goes out and explorers and how much science do they do so they do all that kind of work there that film just premiered in Los Angeles a few weeks ago it's a documentary film that we hope and expect will be more widely distributed so that's kind of a serious science documentary and there are you know numerous people who have come to us at various times talking about you know possible television series or things like that to kind of do some what they call smart television and do some educational things exploring these these research areas of the Institute so we'd love to see you know programming like that come along but you know Hollywood if nothing else that means films like Star Wars and and TV series quite interesting and provocative like Star Trek have if nothing else helped capture the imagination and reminded us that you know there's more to life than just what goes on in the streets of Chicago or San Francisco and you know there's a lot of wonder out there and up there so I think in general it's it's it's positive any other questions excellent talk thank you my question is about the six observatories you plan to set up around the world look in optical wavelengths for laser pulses yes my understanding is we've barely started to resolve exoplanets around stars so how do you plan to resolve look at laser pulses that are only coming from a portion of the exoplanets sure well a bit like the Radio City one one thing that's important to note is that in Radio City or in an optical city as in Radio City we're not looking to derive an understanding of a message or to to decode it's really just to detect the present so in radio the radio SETI work we do it's really about if we see a narrowband what would amount to a carrier frequency coming from deep space and verified as not being local in it it's origins we could say okay there's somebody out there that's that's that's communicating we don't have necessarily the means to understand if there's a message in there what kind of protocols are in that method but you know what kind of modulation has been used to embed or decode or rather encode a message into a carrier so it's really not about trying to understand a message coming in it's just is there something there with the laser technology would be the same thing and and we have the technology with lasers right here on our own planet right now to beam a laser into space that would be shine several times several orders of magnitude brighter than our own Sun for brief periods of time we haven't coupled the mirror to the laser to do that but we think we theoretically can do that with laser technology we have right now so but this from our perspective this would really just be about oh there was a there was a flash this came from deep space or there's a pulse it's a narrowband we use a we use a grating to basically spectroscopically separate light signals and we can tell this a short pulse specific wavelength and it must be something interesting we don't know what let's think bill for a great talk today thank you to keep up a very long tradition here at these talks I'd like to present bill diamond our CEO with a SETI Institute Mugg thanks again this is the the only reason I gave the talk actually it was to get one of these mugs as I've said many times you know highly coveted yes you know it'll be on sale at eBay tomorrow for a hundred thousand bucks yeah there you go thank you very much for attention you
