The Search For Life Beyond Earth

they maybe loveth intelligent civilizations capable of communicating us in impact on ourselves of contact with another intelligent civilization is now being discussed by serious thinkers the world over but seemed to me just perfectly natural that we would not be the only manifestation of of life in the cosmos we now know without a doubt that the possibilities for life are literally innumerable and we haven't begun to look we have way more places still to go so we take very large telescopes and we point them at nearby stars or nearby galaxies and look for that special kind of radio signal that we think is only produced by technology it's time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond Earth we are live we are intelligent we must know [Music] we are literally doing an experiment to find out what the answer is rather than doing what we've done for millennia which is to ask the priests and the philosophers what we should believe about life beyond Earth dr. Jill tarter is part of a movement known as SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence she's dedicated her life to it she's also the inspiration behind Jodie Foster's character in the sci-fi movie contact [Music] seems like an awful waste of space today SETI is a mission involving scientists from around the world so what SETI searches look for is electromagnetic radiation like radio light that is different than the radio signals that we get from natural objects like stars and galaxies and quasars and consistent with the kind of light or electromagnetic radiation that's produced by technology Andrew Simeon heads up a team at the University where up to 8.8 petabytes a great Bank right for ten years they will be scanning the cosmos as part of a hundred million dollar privately funded initiative technological sources have a very interesting property which is that they can compress electromagnetic energy in time or in frequency so you can have a lot of energy a lot of radio energy at just one place on the radio dial and that's something that Nature doesn't tend to do the team's work is the most comprehensive search ever undertaken in nearly six decades of SETI efforts and technological advances mean that the search is finally building momentum what we've done for a number of years is to go to a large radio telescope presumably a national facility and rent time or figure out a way to piggyback on other people's observations and so we wanted to get to a situation where we were doing SETI 24/7 290 miles northeast of San Francisco is the Allen telescope a cluster of small dishes dedicated in large part to SETI research the Allen telescope array is the first time we've ever built a large radio telescope out of a lot of small dishes the joy of having small dishes is that they look at a large area on the sky all at once ultimately we'd like to have 350 of these six meter dishes here right now we have 42 alongside more telescopes more powerful computers offer a chance to expand the search the quantity of data produced is staggering with our next generation of radio telescopes we'll be ingesting as much data from just one telescope as is coursing through the entire Internet at any given second so we collect a massive amount of data from the telescopes that we observe with and some snippets of that data are actually brought back to our lab here at Berkeley there's this like gradual roll we actually have to look for the sorts of signals that we're trying to find and to do that we develop powerful algorithms including algorithms that use things like machine learning and artificial intelligence scientists now know that most stars have planets Jill tarter believes this radically increases the chances life is out there [Music] when I was a graduate student we knew about nine planets those in our solar system but we didn't know about planets around other stars not at all today we know that there are more planets out there than stars every star has on average at least one planet and usually more so that is a huge game-changer the universe seems a lot more potentially bio-friendly and now lots of people are interested in the question of life beyond Earth there are more stars and grains of sand on all the beaches in the world if you look at one of these grains of sand and say that's the Sun and the third planet around its habitable and you look at the beach I mean how could it happen in one grain of sand and not in others so we're very optimistic about SETI it's probably just a matter of us being able to recognize what a very advanced civilization would look like Lawrence Doyle was part of the NASA team used the Kepler space telescope to hunt for planets outside our solar system but now he's bringing the search back down to earth there are various kinds of intelligence but the one that SETI is going to detect is going to be communication intelligence everything communicates all animals and even plants communicate it's just a matter of how complex is that communication I thought well why aren't we studying non-human communication on earth so as a proxy for an extraterrestrial signal we proposed starting with bottlenose dolphins and humpback whales and squirrel monkeys to kind of design an intelligence filter for SETI so that we can recognize the general rules of intelligence so we've devised various ways of looking at a signal a message and analyzing how complex what the relationships are between signals in human linguistics the relationships are called syntax if you're missing a word you can recover it if you're missing two words in a row you can still recover three you can see it gets harder if you go up to nine there's still a possibility you could fill in those words but there's very low connection you for missing ten words you might as well just guess a word from the dictionary so we go up to ninth order entropy that is there are still connections nine words away of grammar and syntax all animals all people all extraterrestrials they have to follow these rules if they're transmitting knowledge to each other and if and when we get a message we can recognize the complexity of that communication system we can say okay we go up to 9th order entropy word entropy squirrel monkeys probably go up to 2nd order i'll humpback whales we don't know yet we haven't got enough data extraterrestrial signal comes in and they go up to not 20th order entropy and we are gonna know that their communication system is to ours as ours as the squirrel monkeys we are connected to this huge cosmos and we want to know what else might have evolved out there were we to know for sure that the universe actually many many times has given rise to some sort of organism like us that thinks and ask questions about the universe itself I think it could very much change our our perspective on science and our perspective as humans and I think the ultimate outcome of that change in in perspective could be truly truly amazing indeed [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Bloomberg Originals

Views: 233,413

Keywords: News, bloomberg, SETI, Aliens, Alien Life, UFO, Area 51, science, technology, deep space, star trek, astronomy, Moon Shot

Id: Q7iJ_u9IV1M

Length: 9min 49sec (589 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019