[MUSIC PLAYING] - As I mentioned, this
is the concluding section of our Undiscovered annual
Radcliffe's science symposium. And there is a
reception afterwards. But we have just
a single speaker for this session, who needs
almost no introduction. But I'll give her a
tiny introduction. And then you can read her
incredibly impressive bio, or you can read Carl
Sagan's book about her, but only the first part of the
book has actually happened. So for those of you who
have read the book, Contact, you know that there is the
success of Jill Tarter's character in the book, Contact,
where contact with aliens is actually made. And that could happen. But it hasn't happened yet. OK, so Jill is
well-known for her work in essentially creating the
SETI Institute, from which she is now the chair emeritus
of SETI research at the SETI Institute. SETI, by the way, stands for
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But I think Jill
will have something to say about what she
means by "intelligence." And her whole life, her
whole professional life, essentially has been
defined by this one question of, are we alone. And you just heard a wonderful
session about the possibilities for establishing an
environment for life. But again, as you
probably know, Jill is trying to go much
farther and actually find evidence and
communication from life. And I'll just tell you that
Jill and I were reminiscing a little bit yesterday. And she reminded me
that she started-- I knew she started
in radio astronomy. And I knew that her
work had something to do with star formation,
which my own work does too. But she started out looking
for brown dwarfs, which are the kind of stars now
that are a dime a dozen. But they were another
one of these things that people thought,
well, that should exist, but I'm not really sure,
and nobody's ever found one. And now that's
just, like, old hat. And when I stand here, and we're
talking about 4,000 exoplanets, not only when I was born, but
when I was in graduate school, there were no planets beyond
those in the solar system. And then you look at Nate's
thing about the difference between a telephone in 2007--
sorry, in 2017, or now-- it's astonishing how well
people can accept change. And so as Jill talks,
I want you to all think about how we would
accept it if the search for extraterrestrials is
successful in our lifetimes. And we'll come back
to that at the end. And I just want to thank
Jill very, very much for making the trip here. And I'm very excited
to hear what she has to say about the undiscovered. So thank you, Jill. [APPLAUSE] - Thank you. So thank you very much, Alyssa,
for inviting me to participate in this symposium. And I do need to start
with a disclaimer. I work on SETI, the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence. However, I can't
define "intelligence." I don't know how to
find it remotely. What we have done
historically is use technology as a proxy for intelligence. And if we find evidence of
someone else's technology out there, we will infer some
intelligent technologist, at least at some point. And so that's what I'm talking
about, "The Undiscovered," looking for technosignatures. All right? You've heard about biosignatures
in the last session. But technosignatures also
fit under that umbrella of astrobiology. And it's really finding
habitable worlds through the deliberate
actions of the inhabitants. And we had a question
about big numbers, and how do astronomers
deal with them. And I'm going to talk to you
now about the necessity of all of us dealing with them. Because we are intimately
related with far away events and long ago times. So we really have to think about
what we mean when we say here and now. And I am on a mission to
change your perspective. I hope by the end
of the afternoon, maybe I'll have
done some of that. All right? So here-- obviously, we're here. Right? At the Radcliffe Institute
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Right? And from the altitude of the
low Earth orbiting satellites, we would see ourselves here. And since 1968, when Bill
Anders, on Christmas Eve, took this Earthrise
image as he was coming around the limb
of the moon on Apollo 8, we've been able to
visualize ourselves here, as a body in space. This is a really
potent image and one that we do need to internalize
and change our thinking. We're also here. Right? There is, somewhere up
there, a little white dot. So this picture was taken
a few years ago by Cassini. And we sent out an email,
and I hope that you all went out on the lawn and
waved to Cassini when we were taking this selfie. [LAUGHTER] And before that, you've
seen this Pale Blue Dot from the Voyager spacecraft,
as it was heading out of the solar system,
past Neptune, and turned around and
looked home and caught us in a mote of light and dust. And our Sun is here, right
at the edge of this Milky Way galaxy. Now, that's not a picture
of the Milky Way galaxy because nobody's gotten
outside to look back and take that picture. But it is a galaxy
very much what we think the Milky
Way would look like if we could get outside. So our Sun is one of 400
billion stars in this galaxy. And our galaxy, which is here-- again, that's not us. We're not outside. But this is representative. This is the Hubble Deep
Field, a thumbnail of dark sky that we didn't think
contained anything until we spent hundreds of hours
staring at it with a fantastic space telescope. And now, we see all
of these hundreds of billions of galaxies within
the observable universe. And we note that some
of those galaxies are smaller and fainter. And that's because they're
farther away, which reminds us, as we look out in space,
we look back in time. So we now need to
think about our now in the context of
13.8 billion years of the evolution of the cosmos. And that's a big long timespan. But really, humans can
trace their lineage back a lot farther than you might
think in this long history. So humans trace their
lineage not just back through the centuries
of our families, and not just back through the
millennia of our architecture, and art, and many experiments
with different forms of governance, we
trace our lineage not just back the millions of
years since we branched off from the great apes, not just
back to the 2.4 billion years ago when cyanobacteria
oxygenated the Earth's atmosphere, and not just
back 4.6 billion years to the formation of
the solar system, but back a few hundred million
years earlier than that, where a giant molecular cloud
was polluted with the winds of [INAUDIBLE] stars and the
detritus of stellar explosions, such as this beautiful
modern supernova explosion. Because the atoms, the iron
in the hemoglobin molecules of your blood, the
calcium in your bones, they were, in fact, cooked up
in the center of massive stars that exploded and polluted this
cloud, this molecular cloud, which eventually collapsed
into our solar system and our planets, just as this
supernova may be providing raw material for future
generations of stars and planets. And the message here is that
you really are intimately connected all the way back. It takes a cosmos
to make a human. We've been on this journey of
exploration and understanding for millennia as we've
pieced together this story. And the journey still has lots
of potential in the future as we try and understand
the undiscovered. And we're asking
questions about who we are, why we are, where
we are, when we are, and, of course, is there
anybody else out there. That's yet to be discovered. But in my career, a long one
and a very enjoyable one, there have been two
real game changers. And you've heard
about those earlier-- extremophiles and exoplanets. Right? Extremophiles are life
as we didn't even know it until a few decades ago. They're thriving in places
that we once thought completely hostile to life. But of course, that
was our mindset about thinking about we as life. Right? These organisms are
beautifully adapted and can live in the
most amazing conditions. We can find them almost
every place on the planet. Perhaps there are regions
of the Atacama Desert that are too dry to
support this sort of life. Or perhaps our instruments are
not yet sensitive enough to it. Or perhaps those regions
are populated by weird life as we haven't yet discovered it. So we are now considering a lot
more environmental conditions as being conducive to life. And we now know that
there are more planets than stars in the Milky Way. We've heard that today. And that means
that there is more potentially habitable real
estate than we ever imagined. And I agree with Lisa that
this is such an exciting time because we are on the
threshold of deciding whether any of those
potentially habitable worlds are actually inhabited. And so you heard the
story about looking for biosignatures in the
atmospheres of exoplanets around other stars. We are also conducting a
very significant program of searching through
our own solar system to find biomarkers that we can
actually observe and study up close and personal. But microbes are wonderful. We're beginning to understand
how bacteria dominates the life on this planet,
rewriting the tree of life, where the two branches
become minuscule compared to the branch that is bacteria. But some of us are interested
in not only the microbes, but the potential for the
mathematicians out there. And that's what we're doing
when we think about plans to try and detect technosignatures. So these
technosignature searches will have exactly the
same kind of problems that biosignature searches have. We're going to have to
deal with false positives, with false negatives. Often, it's going to
be absolutely essential that we understand the
context in time and space for what we are observing. And the progress forward
in this field has been-- it's been very much of a roller
coaster in terms of funding because where microbes
don't necessarily pose any ethical or
religious questions, technosignatures, technologists
out there, certainly do. But it is true
that the technology that we have in the 21st
century is, in fact, detectable over interstellar distances. And so it's a perfectly
reasonable question to ask of the universe-- is there anybody
else's technology that we could detect
with sufficiently systematic and
sensitive explorations? So this work began in the
modern era, with a paper by Phil Morrison and
Giuseppe Cacconi in 1959. And although there
are many things that you could consider
to be technosignatures, the first ones that we started
looking for were signals, were electromagnetic radiation. So we started our search a
little more than 50 years ago with radio telescopes. At the beginning
of this century, when technologies allowed,
we took that into the optical as well. And now, the frontier for
these searches for signals are in the near infrared. So what are we looking for in
these different wavelengths regimes? We're looking for patterns,
patterns in frequency and time, patterns that nature cannot
produce, but engineering can. And if we were to
find these patterns-- and oh, my goodness-- actually,
nature did produce that, well, that's new physics. That's not such a
bad booby prize. Right? [LAUGHTER] So for example, this
is a waterfall plot. Frequency is along
the horizontal axis, and time is on
the vertical axis. And each dot gives an indication
of the intensity of the signal at that frequency time unit. Lots of snow. Lots of noise. But your eye sees
patterns there. And those patterns
are not natural. This is, in fact,
the way the planet Mars often looks to
our radio telescopes when both Mars Express and the
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are on our side of the
planet and their carrier waves are being beamed back
to the Deep Space Network. So this is what we're
looking, for patterns in frequency and time
that indicate engineering versus astrophysics. And in the radio, we use
frequency compression. We look for signals that
occupy only one channel on a 9-billion-channel radio. And in the optical, we
look for time compression, pulses of light that last
a nanosecond or less. Both of these kinds of signals
we have reasons to believe that nature cannot produce. So we need to build our own
equipment because astronomers are studying the
natural universe, and they're not interested in
building the kinds of detectors that would find engineering
as opposed to astrophysics. So whether or not
SETI succeeds will depend upon whether there
are any other technological civilizations out there and what
the distance between them is. And that's not just
distance across space, but it's distance across
time, because longevity of the technological
civilization, or at least the technology, is
required if we're ever going to be successful. We may be looking for
exactly the right thing. And there may be another
technology close enough in space for us to detect,
but at the wrong time. They have to be coeval,
co-temporal with us in this 10-billion-year history
of the Milky Way galaxy for us to successfully detect a signal. So longevity is key to success. Now, turn that around, as
Philip Morrison has done, and he has called SETI the
archeology of our future. It's archeology because of
the finite speed of light. So should we ever
detect a signal, and should it have any
information content, as one of the students was
questioning earlier, it will be telling us
about their past, because it took the light
a long time to get here. But if we detect a signal,
if we have a success, then we know that, on average,
technological civilizations are long-lived. It couldn't work any other
way for us to be successful. And therefore, we know
that it's possible for us to have a long future. So you talked about these great
filters, the great barriers. Are they in our
future or in our past? Well, I think SETI is
one of the only ways that we might get to know
that, in fact, technology is stabilizing and it is
possible to have a long future. That's one of the
reasons that I get out of bed every morning to
work on this project. I think it's
incredibly impactful. So I've said we've been
doing this since 1960. And if you take the
nine dimensional space that an electromagnetic
signal, the nine properties that the signal might have to
be detectable, and you say, I'm going to set that
volume, that search volume-- I'm gonna set it equal to
the volume of all the Earth's oceans, and how much have we
searched in 50-plus years? Well, when I did
that calculation on SETI's 50th birthday,
I said, you know, we've searched one glass out
of the ocean in 50 years. Last month, Jason Wright at
Penn State and his students published a reexamination
of the calculation. And it turns out, by now, it's
more like a small swimming pool. [LAUGHTER] But the thing is that
we are on the cusp of an exponential improvement
in our capabilities, and the tools we can build,
and the computing that we can use to search this
multi-dimensional space. And so it's a
very, very exciting to see how rapidly our
abilities are progressing. So we have often used the
tools of the astronomer. But at the turn
of the century, we decided we needed our own
telescope to be on the air all the time,
looking for signals. And so at the Hat
Creek Observatory in Northern California, in
partnership with UC Berkeley, we built the Allen
Telescope Array. We'd wanted to build
350 telescopes. But, you know, the technology
development took longer. It was more costly. The telescopes are inexpensive
but not as inexpensive as we would have liked. So if you've got to stop
between somewhere short of 350, it seems like 42
is a good number. [LAUGHTER] Life, the universe,
and everything. And this is the
first time that we have built a large
equivalent telescope out of a large number
of small dishes. And that means, for us,
that silicon and computing is as absolutely
important as aluminum and steel in these fixtures. And we hope that
eventually we will be able to expand this
fantastic instrument. And starting in 2011, when
the Kepler spacecraft began releasing data on exoplanets,
we combined the data on they're known exoplanets with the
radial velocity exoplanets. And we used those
as our targets. And we did that up until
about a year and a half ago, when it became
obvious that every star has a planet, at least one. And so then we switched over
to another mode of observing, which is, our targets are
now the 20,000 nearest red dwarf small stars. Because if we look nearer, we
can detect fainter signals. And as you heard
earlier, there is really a question about whether
planets around a red dwarf can maintain an atmosphere,
whether the flares from the first billion years
of these active small stars are inimical to life. But we haven't looked at
this class of stars before. And so that's what we're doing
with the Allen Telescope Array right now. And you can see an
indication of our technology. You can see this blank strip. This is right ascension
and declination. So that's an astronomer's
map of the sky. You can see this
strip right here. There are no observations. That's because that's the
geosynchronous belt, where all of our satellites are orbiting. And those signals are so much
stronger than the faint signals that we're trying
to detect that when we point our telescopes
in that direction, the receivers clamp down. It's just too loud. And so an analogy
that I like to say is if you took one of our
cellphones, 1 watt transmitter, and put it on the moon, it would
be the second loudest radio signal in the sky. So we're looking for
very faint signals. And if you want to
follow this search, there's a website
called setiquest.info that will show you
the stars that we are observing currently. We observe three at a time. It helps to distinguish between
terrestrial interference and a distant possible signal. And we do our signal
processing in real time so you can see what happens
to signals that are found and how we follow up on them. So the other large SETI
program that is now in action is the breakthrough-- I'm now having a hard time. All right, we can
do this this way. All right. The Breakthrough
Listen initiative, which started in 2015 with a
pledge from Yuri Milner of $100 million over 10 years. And their intention is to look
at all the stars within five parsecs, 1,000 stars
of all spectral types, out to about 50 parsecs-- that's a 150 light years-- look at a million nearby stars,
look at the center regions of at least 100 nearby galaxies,
and throw in exotic objects as they come along, like
the 'Oumuamua object from a distant solar system that
came through our solar system a few months ago. So what are they doing? They are not building
their own telescopes. They are renting time on
existing large telescopes. And they are building
spectacular back end digital signal
processing systems to work with those telescopes. So this is the Green Bank
telescope in West Virginia, at the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory. They are also using the Parkes
Telescope in New South Wales, in Australia. They are using the Automated
Planet Finder Telescope at Lick Observatory in San Jose,
California to do optical SETI. And they have recently signed
a memorandum of agreement with the FAST, the very,
very large telescope that's just coming online in China,
with the MeerKAT Array of 64 dishes in South Africa,
with the Jodrell Bank telescope in the UK. And we can look forward
to observational programs on these telescopes
with new back end equipment in the near future. So that's the big city projects. But there is more SETI on the
telescopes around the world today than those. How many of you have ever had
SETI at home on your computers? Yeah? OK. Well, it's still running. It's 12 years on. And it was developed
by UC Berkeley. And I think this is what
put distributed computing and citizen science on the map. So you can use a
screensaver to look through data recorded
Arecibo, or at Green Bank in the same way that we do
at the Allen Telescope Array. In real time, you can
work on recorded data to try and help process these
data for finding SETI signals. There's a new array spreading
over Northern Europe and the UK called LOFAR. And they are beginning to look
for transient low frequency radio signals. There's a small
group in Italy that used the Medicina, a
32-meter telescope, and now, are switching to trying to do
SETI on a new radio telescope at 64 meters. And there is a sky
survey being done by students at the Goldstone
Apple Valley Radio Telescope down near the Deep Space
Network in Southern California. And this is a sky survey that
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was proposing to do
when we were a NASA project, before the funds
were terminated in 1993. NASA was able to move-- I don't know. I think they moved the
fence, not the telescope. But now the telescope
is outside the fence. And it's been incorporated
into this research, student educational facility. And the students are conducting
that sky survey today. This is the Mileura
Wide Field Array, a lot of very interesting
dipoles in the deserts of Western Australia. And they've begun to look
for transient SETI signals. In the optical part
of the spectrum, Harvard has been leading
the way for a long time. The students built their
own optical SETI telescope. And it takes about-- let me see. They can look at
about 80% of the sky. And I think it takes
about 280 clear nights to scan the entire sky, looking
for these bright optical flashes. And they re-observe the
sky a number of times. The data from the
Keck Observatory, from the high-res
spectrometer, which is used to find exoplanets with
the radial velocity technique, those data have been
reanalyzed, looking for lasers, looking for, actually,
continuous lasers or bright flashes of lasers. There's an amateur
optical SETI observatory at Boquete in Panama. And they are looking at
some interesting new signal processing techniques. And as I said before, the
near infrared and optical part of the spectrum is being
explored at Lick Observatory in San Jose. And we've begun doing
some serious data mining. This is a project that Jason
Wright and his students at Penn State have undertaken. The WISE spacecraft
explored the entire sky at infrared wavelengths. And they're now going
through that data to look for very advanced
kinds of technology-- a Dyson sphere,
something that captures all the energy of
its star and would have an infrared excess
radiation from the back side of the panels of
the Dyson sphere, or even more extraordinary,
a civilization of Kardashev 3 type that could control
all of the energy from all of the
stars in its galaxy. And we are, right now, beginning
to prototype and deploy some different optical
SETI detectors. So on the left is one
of the four VERITAS detectors, which are actually
looking for high energy cosmic rays, gamma rays. And they are being
retrofitted, or the software is being retrofitted, to find
those events which are not long trails on the sky, but our
individual pixels that turn out to be the same pixel on the
sky from all four telescopes. And we'll see if we
can use these Cherenkov detectors in a new way. And then a project
called PANO-SETI being developed by a
collaboration between Harvard, and UC San Diego, and Berkeley,
and the SETI Institute. If you come from Berkeley,
you gotta Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes. Well, imagine a geodesic
dome with 126 sections, each one of which is filled
with a Fresnel lens that's a half a meter across. And that can capture light from
a very large area on the sky and focus it onto very fast
optical arrays of detectors. And a couple of those
will also focus the light onto much more
expensive and much newer technology that works
in the infrared. And this way, you
can build something that looks at 10,000 square
degrees on the sky at one time. And then as the
sky turns overhead, you get to look at the
whole sky eventually. And because you're
looking for transience and you want
confidence, of course, you'll build two of these-- one in Northern California,
one in Southern California. They overlap where they're
looking on the sky. And when you get
coincidence detection, you have a very
strong indication that that was a real
transient signal. And then at the SETI Institute,
10,000 square degrees wasn't enough. We wanted to be able
to look at all the sky all the time for bright flashes. And so we're
building something we call Laser SETI, built on
very good quality astronomical cameras with high resolution
gradings and fast readout. And so if we can manage to
put eight cameras at each of 12 sites around the
globe, then we really will be looking at all
the sky all the time. So the first prototype of this
goes up at the ATA next month, we hope. But in terms of the
astronomical future, we need to think about how to
use the tools of the astronomer again. And we have these great pieces
of telescope coming on air. So the JWST, which you heard
about, WFIRST, which we hope will be the next one that
flies with a star shade to block out the bright
star, and finally, something that we're beginning to
think about and design, two options, one called
HabEx, one called LUVOIR, the large ultraviolet,
infrared telescope. And we need to figure
out how we can get access to the data or instrumentation
on these telescopes to look for optical SETI. And it's not only from space. But here's a weird
telescope that's been proposed to look at
only one star system-- and that's the Alpha
Centauri star system-- and perhaps be able to make
an opacity map of Proxima B, the planet around the
very nearest star to us. The devil is in the details. We'll see if this
gets supported. We know that these telescopes
are coming on the ground-- the 30-meter telescope, the
Giant Magellan Telescope, the extremely large
telescope at 40 meters, downsized from the
overwhelmingly large telescope of 100 meters. We couldn't do that one
with this current generation of technology. And finally, the LSST, Large
Synoptic Survey Telescope, which, every few
days, will give us a new picture of the heavens. And for SETI, FAST
will come on the air. Hopefully, the
MeerKAT Array will grow into the Square Kilometer
Array in South Africa. And we might even
get an equivalent in the US of the
next generation VLA. We want to be doing SETI
on all these instruments. And for me, whether
or not SETI succeeds, I think it has a really,
really important message. And that's what I'm
trying to do today, to change your perspective. Because if you sit
and listen to me talk, or anyone talk,
or think about SETI, you've got to realize that
it's putting a mirror up to everybody on the planet. And the message is,
you, you're all the same when compared to
something else out there. And I think that this
is the perspective, the cosmic perspective, that
we need globally in order to attack the challenges
that we heard about earlier with respect to
energy, and water security, and food security. We need to think and
act as one species. We are Earthlings. And I'll leave the last
word to Caleb Scharf, who's the chairman of the
astrobiology department in Columbia. And he says, "On
a finite world"-- that's us-- "a cosmic
perspective isn't a luxury, it's a necessity." And so you all have a
homework assignment. When you get back to your social
media, go in to your profiles and change the first thing
that you say about yourself to the fact that you
are an earthling, and then act like it. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] [INAUDIBLE] OK. - So we are honored that Jill
will answer some questions now. And so we'll use
the same procedure. If you could come to the
microphone at the center. And again, try to keep your
question as a question. And we have time for about
maybe 10 minutes of this. I'll come get you. Thanks. - Yes. - Thank you. Really enjoyed the talk. I had a question. You said that detecting
a signal would suggest longevity of the civilization. And I'm confused by that. Isn't the fact that you
have such a large sample and that they span so
much distance and time that statistically you
could get a signal-- you have a whole range of worlds
from which that could emerge, even if they've had a
very short lifespan. - Well, if they had a short
lifespan, we would have to be-- let's make it ridiculous. Let's say that somehow
the technology arose, and 10 years later, it did
itself in, it blew itself up, destroyed its world, whatever. We would have to
choose and be very lucky to be looking at
that particular world during those 10 years. - So just the fact
that we're looking at a very small sample-- - No, we're going to
look at a large sample, but the fact that you
would have to hit them in just the right 10
years, it makes it much-- statistically, what
you're going to detect is the long-lived civilizations. - Hi. My name's Siobhan. I went to Barnstable
High School 10 years ago. - Oh, OK. Did you have the same
fantastic teacher? - I did. And Caylee's my sister too. So I have to brag about that. But my question is
maybe a little silly. But in media, in
certain television series like The X-Files,
in movies, a lot of them perpetuate this idea that if
contact had been made already, our government would
hide it from us. And I was just curious
about hearing from you, one of the people that
would be the first to know-- [LAUGHTER] Do you think that
if contact was made, you guys would be allowed to
tell the public right away? Because people would panic. Surely some people would
panic and get upset. Do you trust the general
public with this information? - Yeah, actually, let's
start with that piece of it. And the social
scientists have done a number of research protocols. And they've asked the question. And they find that already,
an overwhelming percentage of the people on the planet
feel that it's quite likely that there's life out there. Some of them feel it's visited
us already, some of them. But it's not new news. It's really not the
kind of news for which you would panic at this point. This idea has seeped
out into the culture enough so that we don't
really think that there's an opportunity for panic. As to whether the government
would try and shut it down, it's really going to be a hell
of a difficult secret to keep. We are privately-- - Blink once for yes. - Hmm? - Blink once for yes. - Yeah, right. Exactly. [LAUGHTER] It's not quite that. But there is a-- we do have a false
faith that when we observe that,
yes, we don't expect that that will be an issue. Certainly, the government,
almost any government, but current example,
probably, is not good at doing these
sort of things. So we intend to tell the world. And we'll tell you what we know. And it may be something
that completely comes back with a lot of
baggage of caveats. We think this, but
we can't prove it. It's possibly this,
but it might be that. But we will share
the information for whatever we discover. And as we begin to go beyond
these kinds of signals that we've been looking
for and consider other technological
modifications such as-- we heard about the
TRAPPIST-1 system. That's seven planets
orbiting a small dwarf star, all within the distance
of the orbit of Mercury. Those planets are different
distances from the star. But what if, when we
get these great tools, and we actually make an
image of those seven planets, we find out that they all
look exactly the same? Now, they shouldn't. Naturally, they should reflect
their distance from the star. But maybe somebody out there
needed more real estate and they started transforming
some of these planets because they had enough
energy to be able to do that. That kind of far-out thinking
is what's going on with respect to technosignatures these days. And that one's going
to be really loaded. I mean, if we ever discover
something like that, we'll tell you, but
it's going to have an awful lot of caveats. Yeah. - Jill, thanks for a great talk. I was really struck
by your metaphor of searching for
just the one-- we've searched one glass of water
out of an entire ocean. And sometimes, in
my own work, I feel like the challenges
are insurmountable, whether it is just coping with
the distances, the tiny sizes of the signals that
we're searching for, or whether it's my
proposal got rejected, or funding for science is
going down, or whatever. And I was curious, over the arc
of your career, what you draw on for inspiration on bad days. - Ah, yeah, those bad days. It's the fact that
we can do today what we couldn't
conceive of a year ago. And next year, we'll be
doing so much better. So you get out of
bed, or at least I get out of bed in
the morning not thinking, today's the day
I'm going to get a signal, because that's bound
to have a bad result. But you get out of bed thinking,
I gonna make the search better. We'll be able to do this. We'll be able to do that. And maybe, eventually,
we're going to be doing the right thing
to find whatever is out there. So it's simply to look at
14 or 15 orders of magnitude improvement over Frank
Drake's first search in 1960 and understand that with
exponentials, the best stuff happens in
the last folding, right, the last factor of 2. So yes, it's the
opportunity to do something better than we did in the past. - Thank you. Your career is an
inspiration to us all. - Oh, Thank you, Laurie. [APPLAUSE] - In respect to the
star shade, what exactly would that item give you,
give your space telescopes, for recognizing any
sort of alien signal? - Well, so there a lot of
bright lights up there. And I can put my thumb
over one of them. And then I can see if
there were anything on the ceiling that were
small and faint around that. That would help. But my thumb isn't good enough. As we heard earlier, the
Earth, in optical wavelengths, is 10 billion times fainter
than the star, the Sun, if you were looking
at it from a distance. So what you have to try and do
is block out that bright star. You can do it with an instrument
inside the telescope called a coronagraph, which
actually takes that starlight and scatters it far away. But it's hard to get a factor
of 10 billion that way. But the star shade is just that. It flies in front
of the telescope, and it serves the same purpose-- blocking out the star light so
that you have an opportunity, perhaps, to be able to
image the faint planets very close to, around
that bright star. - Is there a distance
to where it's no longer efficient to use it? - We actually have
not flown one yet. We hope that WFIRST will fly one
as a technology demonstrator. And it is flying-- oh, I can't remember
the distance. Can anybody remember? I think it's a few hundred
kilometers out in front of the telescope to
cast this big shadow. - Do you give any credence to
the TV show Ancient Aliens or-- [LAUGHTER] - I think science fiction
is a marvelous way to help us think about things
that we can't conceive of. That wouldn't be
one of my choices. [LAUGHTER] But I think science fiction
is actually fantastic. It gives us examples of
stories, where life was detected and we didn't realize
that it was alive. It was a life that
we didn't yet know, and we didn't realize
that it was alive. And we can explore
those kinds of ideas and think about how
we use them to keep our minds open to
future discoveries of the undiscovered. - You've been doing this
for a number of years. And I'm just curious about-- there were a couple
of times when you thought you got
a signal, and what that experience was like. And if it turned out it
wasn't, what kind of things would cause you to
get that-- yeah. - That adrenaline
rush is unbelievable. And you get so excited,
you do stupid things. And so every time we have one
of these, our list of checklists and what you do next
gets longer because we learn from our mistakes. Yes, the one-- the one
that was most spectacular for me personally
was, we observed with two widely separated
telescopes in this project that we call Phoenix. We were using the National
Radio Astronomy Observatory telescope. And we had a second
telescope in Georgia. And the telescope in
Georgia got hit by lightning and it fried a disk drive. So it took FedEx a few days to
get in there with a new disk drive. But we still have this
telescope in West Virginia. Right? So what can we do? We don't have the
differential Doppler signature from the two telescopes to help
us distinguish interference from the real thing. So you look at the star
that we were pointing at. You see a signal. It's a picket fence in
the frequency time plane. That's not natural. And you look away. The signal goes away. You come back on the star. The signal's there. Look off in a different
direction, signal goes away. Come back on the star-- hours of this. And early in the process,
I thought, well, you know, that picket fence has a very
regular spacing in frequency. Why don't I query
our database and see if we've ever seen that
frequency spacing before from another part of the sky. And I did that. I wrote the program. It compiled. But I was in a hurry, and I
didn't do very good formatting. It was kind of a mess
when I read it out. And indeed, it was the
right question to ask. And indeed, we had seen it
from other parts on the sky. But the columns
were mixed up, and I didn't see that we
actually knew that it wasn't coming from that star. So we spent the day. The star set. And the nature of the signal
was changing over time, changing in a way
that we knew that it was rising above
us to the zenith rather than setting in the west. So we went off, and
had some dinner, and did some internet
research, and figured out it was the SOHO spacecraft
orbiting the sun, getting in a tiny little
side lobe of the telescope. And that was really
disappointing. But you know what? Our colleagues
back in California were all excited because
we'd shared this with them. So they stayed up through the
night waiting for the star to rise again because I forgot
to call them and tell them it wasn't. [LAUGHTER] And I have paid-- I have bought so many drinks
in bars over the years to apologize for
that bad behavior. - Thank you for
that great story. - OK. - Hi. Can you describe
what our planet looks like to the observers that
are on another planet, looking for us? - It does. The strongest radio
signals that we actually have are associated with the
radars that are looking-- over the horizon radars. And the most
numerous transmitters we have are still the
ground-based broadcast television and radio stations. And so if you looked
at our planet, and you were looking at
the right frequencies, you would see it sparkle
as those transmitters came over the limb as
the planet rotates. And you would see various
frequencies light up from these signals. And indeed, there's
a great study by Woody Sullivan a long time
ago that we need to redo. But you could actually--
back in the day, when it was all broadcast
television, you could figure out
the different parts of the globe assigned different
television stations, slightly different frequencies. So you might be able to conclude
that geopolitical structure on the planet was not
global, had some differences. But-- how we doing? [APPLAUSE] - Thank you very much. - You're very welcome. - Well, that was certainly
worth waiting for. Thank you, again, Jill. Thank you. And it falls to me to try
to say a few things that connect what we heard today. And before I do that, I
just would like to point out something that's kind of
a preamble to what I'll say in a minute, which
is, this is the list of countries where people are
now listening and watching what's happening here-- the United States, Canada,
Belgium, Argentina, India, the Netherlands, Turkey, Chile,
the United Kingdom, Israel, Sweden, and Taiwan,
as far as we know. So there are
hundreds or thousands of people watching this live. And that's been
possible for the last-- I don't know--
decade or something. It's become much
more popular now. And you know, even
in places as far away as Taiwan, people are clearly
up in the night watching this. So thank you very much, Taiwan. And what this is allowing here
is an example of Radcliffe. My friend Immaculata here, my
colleague, Immaculata de Vivo, the other director for
science, said, you know, Radcliffe is being
discovered and used to be part of the undiscovered. And technology is allowing
us to talk to more people. And what we're doing is we're
transmitting information. And I think the
theme that you heard today is that we've gotten
to the point where there is so much information
and our ability to gather this information,
and to put it together, and to process it using
ever faster computers is necessarily changing how
we emit the truth about how we do science. So in other words,
you used to have to share data with
close colleagues and not share beyond
there, because there wasn't so much to go around. But now, in almost
every field, there's too much information for
people to process on their own. So you heard about teams. You heard about people
using new algorithms and finding cures for
diseases or finding out that Alzheimer's
might have something to do with viruses,
when that was clearly not something anybody
was looking for. And so stepping
back and saying-- I think Nate's word that he used
several times was "reframing." We have to reframe
the kinds of questions we can ask in the presence
of so much information. And you heard a lot of people
use the phrase "big data." I don't particularly
like that phrase because what's important-- and
I do do data science sometimes in my day job. And I know what's
important there is what you heard some of here
today, which is combining. You just heard Jill
tell you about so many different telescopes
being used in the search to answer one question. So you have a lot
of cases where you have a lot of different
kinds of information being brought to bear on a question. And we like to call
that "wide data." You can think of it
as data diversity. OK? So there's this plethora
of information that's just getting larger and larger. And we're inviting more
people into the conversation. You heard about Citizen Science. Sometimes you hear this phrase,
"democratization of data." Most importantly, you heard
the unbelievable questions from the Barnstable
High School students. Thank you again. And you heard about transitions. When we were talking, for
example, about climate, you heard that there
are some transitions, in some cases, that we just
want, like the transition that we were talking about today
about how we teach education, and some that we need, like the
way that we handle the climate. And so we're at
this point where we have to have a conversation with
the public about science, which I was trying to think about it. And it's a little bit
about how you're a parent. And so I'm lucky enough that
my parents are here today. My daughter happens
to be in Morocco. She's not on the list
of people watching this. But-- [LAUGHTER] But thinking about being a
parent and being a child, there's this need to respect
your parents that you're taught when you're very young. And there's a need to
respect scientists. And there's a need to
respect what's in the book and what you have to learn
from what's in the book and all that stuff that Stuart told
us this morning about what you have to know. But then at some point, many
points in your life as a child, you have to learn
when to ask questions, and when to stop
just completely-- I'm sorry to my parents-- respecting authority, and
just go a little bit outside. I think earlier I called it
something like out-of-the-book thinking. OK? So going beyond what
your parents tell you. But the thing is,
the danger here is that we need to
admit uncertainty. We need to admit ignorance. We need to admit the mist
that Stuart was talking about, this fog that we look
at science through. And if people haven't
had the experience and they haven't been
taught in the right way, they are going to
come to the conclusion that that means we don't
know what we're doing. And if you have
good parents, you don't ever come to that
conclusion about them. Right? You still respect them. But you can question them. And that's how scientists have
to behave with their colleagues as well. And you heard these
stories about people having data in a
drawer that they didn't want to put out there
because it was going to violate conventional wisdom, and it
was going to question authority in a way that they
thought they might not get tenure or something like that. And I think that when we
have much information, and a lot of it-- you heard people talking about
open data and open software. We have this need and this
desire now for transparency. And yeah, we'll get to the point
of more reproducible research. But really, it's not about
reproducing research. It's about opening
new avenues and about this idea of the undiscovered. And I think that there are
so many questions to be asked in this vast realm of
ignorance-- thank you, Stuart-- that I would just
like to close-- I want to thank a few people. And then, what I would
like is to capture that spirit of the
undiscovered one more time by asking Caylee to have
her poem read for her by us one more time. But I guess my
closing thought is that in this era of
so much information that you heard about
across all of these fields and this so much more
inviting, instead of capable-- or capabilities that
we have in terms of ways of dealing with
it, and the more people who are involved, we
can't hide any more. We have to be open
about our ignorance. And we have to somehow do
it in a way where we still respect our parents or
the people who gave us this education that we
had that led us to ask these intelligent questions. And so with that,
I would really like to thank all of the
speakers for bringing us this wonderful set of talks. So let's have round of
applause for the speakers. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] And then you see so many
people scurrying around, making this all look effortless. But there really was about
a year of preparation for this event. And I can't name them
all one at a time because there are just
so many people helping. But I would just like
to thank the staff who participated in making this
such a fantastic event. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. And I'll remind you that,
after Caylee reads her poem, we can move to the
place where there are copies of her poem,
the poster session. We'll continue next
door with, this time, a reception instead of lunch. And I would just
like to say thank you all for coming and for making
this such a fantastic day. And let me turn
it over to Caylee. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] - You all ready for round two? [LAUGHS] So I hope
that, because of all of these amazing speakers
we've had here today, that you can recontextualize
this poem I've written and have a much
deeper understanding of the meaning behind it. So in case you missed
it the first time, the poem's title is
"Method Versus Muse." "People have drawn a thick
line between art and science. But what is science
without the arts? The questions that
need to be asked can't come from a formula,
when, for centuries, they've been deeply rooted in the
hearts of geniuses and prophets with brains full of thought. It seems that,
over time, humanity forgot how to think critically
and to question with care. And in an age of
internet access, the answers are
always right there. And schools are so
focused on students having all the right
answers that they forget that we're poets,
and designers, and dancers. They draw facts on young minds
like piles of heavy bricks and expect us to
absorb information stacked miles thick. They teach us so much. But now, we need
to build from it. They marched with
us to base camp. But our goals are at the summit. Applying what we know to
explore the unforeseen and the undiscovered
is easier said than done when curiosities
lie dormant and smothered. Every day I see young minds
afraid to ask questions. It cripples the scientific
world at its very foundation. Research never comes without
curiosity, without a spark. And my spark would
have died too, but I found my
light in the dark. My creativity led me to
ask all the right things. And now I stand here before
you to ask, when will you change the tune that you sing? What will it take for
schools to open their eyes to a world of
unmatched opportunity that very clearly lies in
the minds of young people who still have their fire? When will you take
their thoughts and lift them up higher? Maybe you will be
the one to inspire someone's great questions
or someone's desire. Teach young minds to fall
in love with the unknown. For every question we ask,
there are many more to go. Nurture the creativity we
all harbor in our hearts. And maybe we will give way for
a new way of thinking to start." Thank you. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC PLAYING] - Thank you. Thank you so much.
