When Will We Find Life Beyond Earth?

regular followers of the institute's work and NASA's work in particular with the Kepler space mission will know the name Bill baruchi who is widely regarded as the father of the Kepler Telescope it was his paper many many years ago that ultimately led to the launch in 2009 of the Kepler space telescope that has been one of the most profound and successful missions in NASA's History Bill has been widely recognized for the work that he has achieved with the Kepler Telescope but for those of you old enough like me and some of the panelists here to remember the Apollo Mission Bill's first work in the 1960s was involved in designing the heat shield for the Apollo missions so bill has a long and and storied career at Nasa just a short list of the accolades and recognitions that bill has received over the years I won't read the long one because we don't have time but in 2016 just recently in Philadelphia bill was awarded the Franklin Institute Bauer award and prize for achievement in science we personally know that the most coveted award he received was in 2015 from the city Institute that is the Frank Drake award for innovation in seti and life in the Universe research is also the recipient of the 2015 Shaw prize which is a very prestigious prize kind of the equivalent in Asia of the Nobel Prize other Awards and again I won't read them all but in 2015 the National Air and Space Museum trophy for current achievement in 2014 the National Space Club Robert H Goddard Memorial Trophy in 2013 the National Academy of Sciences Henry Draper medal also won by eight Nobel Prize winners so he's in Good Company in 2012 the American Institute of Aeronautics and astronautics Space Science award and in 2012 also The spie Goddard space science award and on it goes so um rather than take up the next hour with with the continuation of that we we wanted to recognize Bill with something special uh today which was a photograph taken by our very own senior astronomer Seth schostak sitting here to my left who's not only astronomer but a photographer of some note so we we had a very wonderful photograph of Bill taken by Seth that has been signed for by many of us at The Institute the science and executive staff of The Institute so this is a gift for Bill which he will pick up uh after the talk and and again we're just so grateful to have Bill and his contributions to the work of the city Institute to the broader understanding of life in the universe so I think all of us can be very appreciative of Bill's achievements and uh and in particular the Kepler Mission so here's to Bill baruchi okay so without further Ado I'd like to get the panel underway here's what we're going to do today for those of you again who are our regular followers of the talks we typically have a speaker very often from the city Institute often they are invited speakers from a wide range of topics from Aeronautics and Space to astrobiology astrophysics and Beyond um and this is the we record these they're done every Tuesday right here at Microsoft at 12 noon in this very Auditorium they're open to the public they're free of charge and we encourage you if you're interested in this area of science to come and join us for that regular series we also record them as YouTube videos we will record today's session today's session is also being live stream which is a first for the city talk Series so we're excited about that but if you're interested in in this series you'll find over 360 lectures of a wide range of topics on our YouTube site which we're very proud of it's it's part of our heritage and part of what we give back to the community in terms of sharing the work we do at The Institute so today's event however rather than the typical format of a single speaker is a panel session and the panel is going to be discussing a singular topic of when will we first find life beyond Earth now notice we didn't say intelligent or technological life we're still looking for that here but but we did say life so there may be some discussions about what do we mean exactly by life the only thing I'm wishing that we had done was you know put some dates up and we could have had like a you know some sort of a contest we just have to wait a few years probably to find out who won but but maybe not so long so let me introduce today's panel of speakers to you and their full biographies are all available on our website at seti.org but first to my left is Dr Seth schostak he's our City Senior astronomer um little quips and stories about each speaker if you think they're witty and funny you can credit them to me if you don't like them remember that I didn't write them so Seth claims to have developed an interest in extraterrestrial life at the tender age of 10 when he first picked up a book about the solar system the this innocent beginning eventually led to a degree in radio astronomy and now as senior astronomy Seth is an enthusiastic participant in the institute's seti observing programs is also the host of the seti institute's weekly science radio show Big Picture science and is responsible for the Outreach work that we do at The Institute to assess left is Dr fergal malali he's a member of the Kepler science team he's the city Kepler science officer Virgo malali is from noklion knock life not line not linear City in Ireland from knockline on the south side of Dublin and he holds a degree in physics from the University of College Dublin in Ireland and a PhD in astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin he currently works for the Kepler space mission based at NASA's AIM research center Center in at Ames right down the street from us here where he works on improving data analysis techniques for Kepler data he's also a member of the whole earth telescope headquartered at Mount Cuba astronomical observatory in Delaware to the left of fergal is our own Dr Natalie Cabral Dr Cabral is the director of the Carl Sagan Center for Science at the city Institute and a researcher in astrobiology in her own right Natalie has been a principal investigator at City since 1998. she leads projects in planetary science and astrobiology including science exploration strategies for Mars Titan and the outer Solar System's icy moons to help with these Endeavors Natalie explores high altitude lakes and the Andes where environmental conditions are analogous to early Mars with her team she documents life's adaptation to extreme environments and its relevance to Planetary Exploration and if I'm not mistaken that you also have the record for the for a woman for the highest altitude scuba dive is that correct yes now it's not a popular sport which may explain but nevertheless it takes a special kind of person to Lug all a diving gear up to 20 000 foot Peaks and go looking for life under the lakes of these volcanic leaks and that's what she's done to her left our very own Mark Showalter Dr Mark Showalter he's a seti Institute senior research scientist planetary astronomer Mark Showalter is rabid about Rings this is one of those lines where I said if you don't like it I didn't write it anyway he's rabid about Rings while everyone knows about Saturn's spectacular ring system it's often forgotten that Jupiter Uranus and Neptune are also encircled by fainter and narrower Rings recently he was granted three more years to study the system of rings and moons orbiting Uranus and the with the Hubble Space Telescope a mission he's been leading off and on since 2002 this work has already led to the discovery of two small moons and two faint rings you've probably heard us talk in the past about how Mark is credited with finding the two newest moons of Pluto curbos and sticks Mark says Rings and The Faint moons that interact with them serve as dynamical Laboratories where we can observe some of the same processes that operate in galaxies and during the formation of planetary systems so that is your panel today they will again be talking about the where or rather when we will first find life beyond Earth so what do we need for life it's widely believed that we need liquid water we need access to a range of Elements and Minerals for metabolic activity to take place we need energy heat that can be exploited to power the chemical reactions needed to power life so these are some of the basic ingredients that we think about when we talk about finding life beyond Earth and then the question is where will this be and when will it happen so with that I'm going to turn the podium over we're going to have each speaker have five minutes to opine on this subject we'll then have a little bit of discussion amongst the panel and myself and then at the end we're going to open this up to questions from the audience we hope to get some Lively activity we have a microphone set up here in front what we ask is that you come up and line up behind the microphone and also be respectful that there's likely to be people behind you so we won't be able to deal with extremely long questions but without further Ado let me turn it over to Dr Seth schostak okay well I want to thank a bill for that introduction and also thank Microsoft for the lunch he's already alluded to the fact that that may have dulled your brain actually somebody in the audience said to me you know Seth you're a perfect panelist for postprandial uh occasion like this because after I've had a big lunch all my blood goes to my stomach and you never say anything that requires it to get any higher I'm going to talk a little bit about the search for intelligent life my co-pantalists will talk about the other kind uh eight years ago at a conference in Germany I bet the audience a cup of Starbucks will find E.T in the next two dozen years now this caused a kind of a dyspeptic reaction from many of my colleagues I remember Jill tarter's eyeballs rolled up like Linda Blair's uh but on the other hand I have to say that about six months ago NASA's Chief scientist actually said we're going to find life within 20 years so I I guess she wants you know that cup of coffee too now was I merely being provocative was I simply whistling past the graveyard no if you ask when are we going to find anything well for example finding a needle in a haystack and this endeavor has been likened to that if you ask how long will it take you to find that needle Bob well it depends on only three things how big is the haystack how fast are you going through the need uh the hay and how many needles are in there anyway and for seti we know two of the three we know how big the haystack is we're looking in our galaxy mostly in our galaxy secondly we know how quick our experiments are and they keep getting faster this is something the public doesn't really understand thanks to developments in digital electronics our ability to sift through the sky looking for signals is doubling roughly every couple of years it's basically following Moore's Law and that will continue for a while now this is all contention upon funding which is a large part of the reason you're sitting here today right this is all privately funded funded the city work but assuming that this the funding can be found what this means is that in the next two dozen years we will go through a million star systems so that's like looking for that needle in the haystack and replacing a teaspoon with a skip loader right if you can go through the Hague more quickly you're going to find something sooner so it was on that basis that I made this bet that we'll find something within two dozen years or you get a cup of coffee from me my wife is buying Starbucks stock all right I I would say that the the chances here have probably been enhanced by the results that have been uh found by people like the Kepler team and so forth that give us some idea of how many habitable planets might be out there the current wisdom is that maybe one in five stars has a world that could be a Locale for life okay one in five now maybe it's one and two maybe it's one in twenty but all those numbers are the same number that means there are many many there are tens of billions of cousins of Earth out there now at the city Institute you see the Allen telescope array there behind me we're embarking on a program to look at twenty thousand red dwarf stars now you may wonder what is Red Dwarf is that a British TV show Red Dwarf is in fact a very small kind of star and it's the most common kind of star just like everywhere else in nature there are more small things than big things okay three quarters of All-Stars are red dwarfs so if you were to be plopped down into the middle of the savannas of Africa you can bet that the average distance to the nearest ground squirrel is going to be less than the average distance of the nearest megafauna you know I don't know an elephant in a line something like that so if we look at twenty thousand red dwarfs instead of 20 000 stars like this on on average they're going to be a factor too closer and that means a factor of four stronger signals they're also very they're dim bulbs they're like my brothers okay these these Stars Burn forever every red dwarf that's ever been born is still out there in its teenage years burning today that means on average these 20 000 stars on average are billions of years older than our sun and this is one example I can think of where older might be better because if you're older you've had more time to cook up something that might be interesting in any case 15 to 50 percent of red dwarfs are thought to have habitable planets there was an announcement of another red door system yesterday with three planets I think that they're a good place to look for et so we're going to be doing that let me sort of wind up here by saying well what would be the reaction because Mr and Mrs front porch to the extent that I ever go to a cocktail party will come up and say once they learn what what my job is they'll say so what happens if you find them would you even tell us right most people figure no no the government would swoop down and shut you all down because they couldn't handle the news what do you mean they couldn't handle the news one third of them believe the aliens are here right and and they're not terribly discomforted by that thought so I I don't think that that's it we have had a false alarm Jill can tell you all about it in 1990 1997 for most of the day we thought maybe we had found something and nobody was interested right the mayor of Mountain View didn't even show up right the only thing that happened was at nine in the morning when I was asleep at my desk uh one of the science reporters in the New York Times called up so that that was the interest so that's what will really happen it will be a tremendously big story but we won't have a message we won't know what they're saying that's an artifact of the technology used to search that would require building a much much bigger instrument but I think at that point money would not be an issue so bottom line if this idea of seti of looking for signals that might be being sent our way if that idea is correct if it has legs then this experiment it's not something for the ages this is not something that'll work three centuries from now if it's going to work at all it's going to work in your lifetime and I think that you should be prepared for that because what that means is that you know for 200 000 years the history of homo sapiens we've liked to think that we are perhaps astronomically or biologically or maybe intellectually special and we will learn in an instant that none of that is true all right so uh thank you for that perspective now again this is Seth was sharing his views on when we might find a signal which is a particular kind of life and a more advanced kind of life I did get an email from Donald Trump this morning assuring me that if we do find a signal he will build a dome so rest assured we have nothing to fear Donald is here so yeah there's a good introduction for you a good segue for you for a girl maybe get it a little more no idea who's gonna have to follow us that showstock up here this is the energy is going to go down just a little bit I work on the Kepler Mission um I'm going to take and approach this question of radio signals are all very well and go to be great if we contacted something tried to contact us that want to communicate with us but even among even among humans there are far more people than there are people who are emitting radio waves and there's far more different kinds of life on the earth than are technologically capable so a better approach to this in my opinion is to start by Looking For Life of any form at all and the way I think we should do this the way I'm going to focus on anyways I'm going to talk about life on planets around other stars life which is outside the solar system I'm so much biased on this I work for the calculator Mission it is our job to find planets around solar systems we're trying to drum up some business for us the two big results from Kepler if you haven't heard them that I want to share with you is number one is that in our galaxy there are now we now know that there are more planets than stars out there now when I was growing up and I was reading those astronomy books from the library we didn't know about any planets out there there were people who were arguing very logically that planets were very rare we now know that they are extremely common more has been worked on by a colleague of mine Chris Burke who has established that if you just look at the sun-like stars stars that are like our sun and you look for planets which are about the same size as the Earth but the same orbital appear at the Earth take the same amount of time to go around their star somewhere between 2 and 25 percent of those sun-like Stars has an Earth-like planet by that definition that's a pretty broad range I think between 2 and 25 25 if you heard that there was a horse that was 25 chance of winning a race you might put a bet on it if you woke up the next morning discovered there's only a two percent chance you might be pretty unhappy but to go from a range of where we had no clue what the number was at all to get to it in a factor of 10 as I said a factor of 10 for an astronomer is basically the same number we've done and I tell my referees that all the time so let me go back to that definition a little bit I said planets which are about the same size that they are about the same orbital period that's something of an unusual definition of an Earth-like planet you might talk about trees and Waters and mountains and people and stuff I use that definition because with the Kepner Space Telescope those are the only two properties of the planet we can actually measure so all those pretty pictures that you see of capital planets that show up in the media that show up in your Facebook feed they owe more to the imagination of artists than they do to any constraints we can place in the planets themselves um there are things other than the size of the planet and its orbital period which are important size is important if the planet is too big it's probably a gas giant like like Neptune or Jupiter and there's no Rocky surface to walk on if there's life there it's not life like us it's not life like we recognize and we we could observe those planets and not understand what we are seeing the other important thing I talk about orbital period if a planet is too close into its parent star it's going to be too hot and any water on the surface will boil off if it's too far away all the order will freeze into ice it won't be available for life one of the few things I know about biology and I stopped taking biology when I was 14 but every biochemical process we know about and takes place within water we can't imagine any form of life that doesn't involve water at least I haven't heard about it feel free to contradict me in a minute so we talk about these things maybe two percent maybe 20 maybe one in fifty maybe one in four the planets uh of the stars out there that are like the sun host a planet like the Earth by that definition there's also important things like atmosphere what's in the atmosphere is it full of poisonous gas is it full of full of nitrogen like our own atmosphere is there water there is there any evidence of the sort of gases that life produces that we could detect and the way to the way to answer this question the way to move forward from Kepler is to take what's called a spectrum of the light from a planet as we're showing in the diagram up there if you take the light from the earth and you pass it through a prism um you can see that the the the the the light from the planet is brighter and fainter at different colors that's all that a spectrum is in the picture that I show up above I'm showing a spectrum of the earth starting from from Green wavelengths all the way out to red and then pushing further on into light which is too long of a wavelength for human eyes to see this is what we call infrared light this is how this is the light that your remote control and your television uses to work um if you look at this spectrum you can see a number of lines and bumps and wiggles and and glitches in that Spectrum these are caused primarily by these are caused by molecules in the Earth's atmosphere which are very interesting to us from the point of view establishing if there's life on that planet you can see some of them I've marked off with H2O that's water knowing if there's water on the surface of the planet would be very important for this question and that big spike down there just slightly to the right of the middle that's oxygen now oxygen is a very reactive chemical there's not something producing oxygen that oxygen is going to react with stuff it's going to disappear on time scales which are short for on from the point of view in astronomer the oxygen on the earth is being created by life and so if you take the spectrum of a planet and you see water and you see oxygen that's very strong evidence that there is life on that cloud so I see this is the way forward into doing this the problem with this now before I go on I should say there's some astronomers who disagree with this they say there's possibly other mechanisms of coming up with oxygen this is not subtle science but I think it's the way for us certainly certainly the best approach we have at the moment the problem is is that these planets are very small and faint they're very far away and they're very close to a big bright star in order to take a spectrum like this of a plant that is not the Earth you will need to suppress the light from the Star by a factor of about 10 billion that's a lot people are working on this they haven't figured out how to do it yet looking at those technical challenges I estimate it's going to take them maybe 20 30 years to solve that problem and then maybe another 10 years to get the mission designed funded built and launched so that's my prediction okay so uh I have a special respect for fergal um as an astronomer because I think where he grew up you know so he grew up in Ireland he had to take everything on faith even Stars so imagine his surprise when he moved to California he says my God they were right there are stars out there all this all the studying hasn't been invade okay so your what's your prediction in terms of when what's that says the when so uh I asked my friends if other people to work in the Kepler Mission and I heard everywhere from never okay so I'm gonna like I'm gonna spit the difference here I'm gonna my guess is gonna take about maybe 30 40 years maybe a little bit longer to get all the technology developed funded built and launched so that's going to be my prediction okay okay thank you Natalie yeah no I I will have to go referable in terms of you know how we need to look at life in the universe we need to collapse the walls of just looking for something that looks like us or things like us Etc which means that that opens New Horizon literally and that opens a New Horizon both for the study aspect of it or the what we call more of the astrobiology the little guy the microbe you know the what set doesn't think is an intelligent uh part of life but we actually after four billion years led to somebody like you Seth so uh you know you do have you do have uh to think about life as they continue and you know microbial life is going to tell you about intelligent life but to go to the point of today's discussion about when I guess that there are two two aspects of it there is the uh Planetary Exploration in the past 40 years that has been building on a program uh a Continuum that shows you you know what the geological history of a planet is what the past climate of uh of a planet can be like you see Mars behind me we have learned from Mars that we we have a planet that looks a lot like the Earth just look like the Earth it's not the Earth but we know that conditions were habitable in the past on Mars we know that climate was favorable and things changed so uh Mars is for me I don't know if it will be the first place where we find life but this is the first place we have started to look at habitability and we are going to start to look for life soon actually there is a exomars mission uh on its way now that is going to start to look at Spectrum things that uh you you would like to see looking for methane the thing for oxygen science that life could have been on on Mars uh in the past and now we we know now that we have a method that is seeping out of Mars methane can be created in a number of way but the interesting thing on Mars for instance is that this is a variable signal and uh what that means is that it can be a event somewhere maybe it can be a geological activity but it can be also related to biological activities so this hypothesis uh is very much possible so definitely in my mind uh Mars would be you know uh possibly the first place where we are going to find something because we have a integrated program that has been helping us understand what its ability was in the past so Mars had lots of water he had what beer was discussing about energy lots of volcanoes uh nutrients in the minerals but also shelter and shelters is is very important for life so in the past you had an atmosphere it's now gone but that was the the primary shelter for uh potential Life on Mars so that would be one place where I would be looking for uh having results sooner rather than later and then there is obviously you know Cassini and we might talk more about that with with Mark uh um and and all the moons that we're discovering uh in in the solar system and and all of a sudden we discovered that there are oceans we have a heat that is generated by gravitational Tides from these giant planets and the shelter is there and the nutrients is there is being provided uh to uh potential life in the subsurface of these uh moons and and planets uh through the exchange with the surface so all of a sudden in the past 40 years we came from you know just having a glimpse of little dots through telescope to having full-blown words that we can understand and what we also understand is that you don't need to be a planet necessarily to be habitable the notion of habitability has completely changed in the past 40 years we came from understanding habitability as a distance from a parent star anywhere either inside it or you wear outside it and today this is not the case anymore a number of words in our own solar system are outside the habitable zone yet they have available environment and very promising one oceans maybe hydroformal system inside the moons of enceladis in Europa so the planetary the soil system is really the place where I think just because we have lots of mission going at them we'll have sooner rather than later a response to are we alone but to Seth's point we know that there is no intelligent life or technologically intelligent and advanced life in the solar system but still we can learn a lot and you know we can learn a lot about how to go and find ET and find E.T Faster by understanding how life evolves with its environment and this is one of the great lessons of astrobiology in the past few decades is as we realized that life doesn't just show up like that and but when when you have transitioned from Prebiotic chemistry to to life all of a sudden something very strange happens life transform its environment a planetary environment is going to give you the condition for uh the uh the physical chemical condition for life to happen it will tell you what type of Life Is Possible or not possible but once life is here it's going to modify its environment and so to go back to fergal's discussion and to says discussion we have to think in terms of looking for intelligent life and advanced life in terms of co-evolution of life and environment which means that every single planet that we are looking for is going to be a unique experiment so looking for et you are going to look at something that is different every time you look at a planet you are going to look at a different experiment is it looking like us who cares you know there is probably a lot of intelligent life out there but it's going to be very different are we searching the right way I don't know but what I'm saying is that probably the solar system is going to give us the answer first but by learning what we are learning right now we will be finding ET sooner because the answer is also contained in the way we are looking at the solar system all right thank you Nat this is what's fascinating about working at a place like the city Institute you can tell perspectives tend to be colored a little bit by the kind of work that's being done so here's Seth who won't be happy really until he finds a signal from something that Donald will protect us from and then we have fergal who really won't be happy until we're looking at life on exoplanets quite a challenging technical feat and Nat is focused on microbiological life probably I would agree uh the the the first places we're likely to find the presence of life beyond Earth as right here in our own solar system and yet of a very basic life form and with that Mark we'd love to uh get your perspectives okay um well I am a physicist and mathematician so I'm going to take a kind of a mathematical approach to the problem and I'm going to go I'm going to go For Broke with Seth I want there to be intelligent life in the universe and so I did is take God this image of the tree of life I came straight out of Wikipedia so it has to be true but I am I turned it into a kind of a board game and the idea is that you are a fledgling young planet and you were sitting there at the base of the tree of life and uh the goal of this game is to get to the Winner's Circle which is an upper right where there are big brains intelligence uh a creature that can actually look down on that tree of life and say wow look at that that's really cool uh there are a couple of checkpoints along the way and uh the game is to basically roll the dice and see uh if we can get past each of those checkpoints um uh there's something very peculiar though I gave you I sort of gave away the ending when Earth played this game we got all the way to the winner circle right uh we are here and uh what that means is that we have a very uh particular perspective where we can look down on that tree of life we can look down on that game we passed all four of those checkpoints we could say wow life is easy I bet life is plentiful on the universe because look at us we came along um there is a mathematical flaw in that reasoning and that is that we have what would be called a biased statistical sample we are looking at ourselves and uh you could just imagine sort of taking it to an extreme suppose every planet in the universe played this game and only once did any other planet get into the Winter Circle and have that intelligent species that intelligent species would look at its tree of life and it would say wow this game was easy I bet life is plentiful but they would be wrong and for us to make that same argument it is flawed we could be wrong about that so uh so let's just start at the base and play the game um the first uh question mark that you can see that's biogenesis the beginnings of Life some form of life we know that that happened rather quickly on Earth and so some people have argued if it happened quickly it's probably rather likely uh I would say that might be right but on the other hand we've got to remember that we are in a biased position if life didn't occur quickly on Earth then we wouldn't be here to look at it and therefore it's a slightly flawed argument to say life is easy just because it appeared quickly uh it could be that it does appear and it become it is a very likely outcome it could be it is a fantastically improbable outcome we don't know uh the next uh the next checkpoint the next question mark is uh is the is a very interesting one the origin of eukaryotes which are these more complicated cells not just the incredibly simple ones that we started with but uh the eukaryotes have a nucleus and the story as we understand it is that one day this this big archaean was sitting around antibacterium came along and sort of found a hole through the membrane and uh and entered into the archaean and that bacterium took up residence there it became a mitochondria the nucleus formed and that archaean became a eukaryote the first eukaryote and we are all descendants of that one event took about two billion years so half of the history of the Earth was spent waiting to get from biogenesis to the first eukaryote uh and you know most of the time when a parasite enters a critter neither of them turns out to like it very much so it could be that that that turn of events was in fact incredibly improbable but complex cells are one of the requirements to get up to the uh up to the Winner's Circle uh The Next Step the next question mark there is basically where we were sexual reproduction appeared that means you have two parents instead of one that means every individual is a unique genome and uh once you get to sexual reproduction uh Evolution explodes and that's why the yellow piece of that tree is uh has so much variety on it it has slime molds and it has us and everything in between and uh but that's because of sexual reproduction it did not have to happen there are mathematical reasons why asexual reproduction seems to be preferred in a lot of numerical experiments that have been done so it may be that sex was inevitable but it may also be that it was fantastically improbable finally you get to life now we could imagine a planet where all Evolution ended with elephants and lions and bears uh and uh nobody rebuilding radio telescopes uh what is it that made that transition so the genus homo became as intelligent as we are that's a really tough question because the thing is big brains are not The Natural end state of evolution big brains are big drains on nutrition on on metabolism uh there's got to be a good reason for the brain to get that big and we don't really know why that happened it could be that intelligence could have been a fairly likely outcome but on the other hand intelligence does not seem to be foreordained it could be fantastically improbable so so you put that all together and my bottom line is that I don't know when we're going to get to any of these points how often they occur but but mathematically what I worry about are the biases when we ask these questions my colleagues are very optimistic and I hope they are right but that's my bias uh consider that we see life everywhere on Earth everywhere we look it is built into our brains so not only are we biased by living on a statistically unusual sample Earth we are biased because we see life everywhere and if we see life everywhere on Earth then we're a lot more inclined to see life off the Earth and we're not a lot more inclined to wants to see life off the Earth so that's a bias that we have to look at very very closely so uh my concern is that if we play this game even if one or two of those steps in the process one of those Gates that we had to cross turns out to be fantastically improbable then there is a lot less life in this universe than we want there to be and looking at the solar system and looking for et uh might just take a long time not because our technology isn't capable not because we're going to interesting places but because it's just not there yet or not there currently so if I had to predict I would say there's a 50 50 chance that my colleagues are right and that we'll see Life in The Next Century and there's a 50 50 chance that we'll see life never and uh the reason we have to study this problem is because we could be alone in the universe and the stakes are so high that we really have to answer that question and that's what the city Institute is all about in a nutshell so um actually very interesting as you now you know we're all related so we're all family here we all are descended from the eukaryotes and we have cousins who are slime mold so this is uh this is a good example of why you know the family photo album isn't always that attractive so I'd like to start off with with a question to the panel it seems clear to me that finding life of any type at its most basic level would be a transformative moment in human history do you believe it would be equally transformative if we were to find evidence of past life not necessarily current living life for example on Mars that if we could find uh the clear solid evidence that life had been there but it is not there now I don't know why you're looking at me like that so uh this is a very important Point bill um I guess that Mars is definitely the the closest planet to to ours uh very different but similar enough that we can think that life you know as we know it could have evolved on it and there are a number of possibilities on Mars in in terms of uh past life the the first one is that life evolved on Mars and it was all different the environment was similar but it evolved something and and so uh it is there it means that there is a second Genesis on the second planet of a system of eight and that start telling you a little bit more about your game uh Mark about about the statistics of Life uh at least in your solar system can we expand further that's another question but at least that gives us uh some something to start on the second one is that of course nothing happened on Mars and this is another you know another conclusion can we expand that to the universe I I don't know Finding microbial Life on Mars that relates to us to me is probably as close as exciting as finding a second Genesis and here's the reason why Mars and the Earth have exchanged a lot of material when they were forming just because of you know orbital mechanics it's easy for rocks for Mars to go to the Earth and it's a somewhat less easy but feasible for pieces of earth to to go to Mars and so as they were forming the two planets exchange a lot of material so let's imagine that they were seated by exactly the same material and that you know life started on Mars and and life started on Earth maybe we are margin maybe there are earthlings uh we don't know but we are cousins and this becomes really important for us because uh we don't know what life is and we don't know how it started on Earth and we will never know we will never know for the same reason as we're here today our planet is a very Dynamic planet and plate tectonics and geology have erased the record of all the ancient rocks that were at the beginning of the history of Mars of the earth and so the oldest one we found so far are 4.1 billion year old and already we have potential traces that life was was there as Mark said life started very early on but the time when Prebiotic chemistry transitioned to life this record is gone from our planet and if we are sharing some seeding material with Mars Mars doesn't have plate tectonics the geological activity was much less which means that somewhere in an outcrop sitting on Mars you might have the record of how Prebiotic chemistry came to be life and that would help us understand how we came to be so this would be profound in a number of levels you hear this actually you asked for the reaction bill but I think that that experiment has been run for those of you who can remember the biggest science news story of 1996 and that's all of you right that was the claim that they had found fossilized Martian microbes in a rock that was picked up in Antarctica and what was the reaction to that four days straight big headlines in the New York Times in font that hasn't been used since that you could read from low-flying aircraft right the public was extraordinarily interested and this was life that had presumably been dead for four billion years so I think that the reaction would be substantial and knowledge would be profound for us because once again you know the record is gone here it's like being an orphan and looking at photo pictures and finding a net or some relative somewhere and you know learning who you are that way when we talk about uh candidates for life not only do we have of course Mars and particularly those uh regions just below the poles of Mars where there still appears to be liquid water evident um other candidates that come to mind are Europa which is getting a lot of attention there are NASA missions planned to explore Europa but also Enceladus the the moon of Saturn would the anybody in the panel care to comment on what they believe might be found when we get a closer look at those moons well I can uh I can speak to Enceladus in particular I know that uh at least there are very very preliminary plans to actually send a mission out to Enceladus and some of this by the way small about 300 kilometer Moon of Saturn which has geysers it has essentially cracks in the southern hemisphere where sprays of of salty water are salty ice in fact are coming out and they've been detected directly by the Cassini spacecraft which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. uh they're a very preliminary uh technological thoughts about how to actually take a spacecraft send it to Enceladus and then drop a probe essentially a submersible probe into the interior ocean of Enceladus through one of those cracks which are not very deep as we learn and it would be the easiest and shortest way to actually take a look inside one of these oceans inside many of the satellites and planets in the distant dwarf planets have a have an interior salty ocean that could be the right kind of place for life to form so imagine maybe in a few decades Beyond other people's Horizons we're actually looking at the undersea environment in uh in Enceladus and seeing Little Critters swimming around and that would be one of those great moments of proof that there's actually uh frequent biogenesis in the universe Alan Alistair asked before New Horizons got to Pluto what is he going to find there and he said we will find something wonderful and I think if we send a probe to Europa or Enceladus and we get under that ice crust whatever we find will be wonderful if we find life that answers this question if we don't find life we've got the conditions that are perfect for for life and we can start Wondering Why didn't it form and that'll give us start to give us some sort of insight into how common it is that biogenesis happens in other places around the Galaxy so I think that would be one of the really cool things for NASA to do forgot I will go with what you are saying by adding that we need to look at our solar system as a natural lab to understand who we are where where are we coming from but also what life could be outside the solar system although I think that there might be more biochemistry than you know what's feasible in our solar system but definitely we need to use what we have this is a Rosetta Stone this is where we are this is who we are and so we need to use it to understand what's beyond us Saturn is a lot lot closer than the nearest star that's right that's the good news so uh we've had some interesting perspectives here I hope you've enjoyed this we we want to get maybe some discussion going before we do that it's it's worth observing that you know as you would expect it's very difficult to pin down a scientist in the absence of data very data driven and so you know we've had kind of wide ranging guesses you notice that there's nobody who's actually gone on record and say Here's when so you know in the parlance of the game show host I would say thank you for playing [Laughter] I'll go ahead and share a perspective that I think that within 30 years from now we will find evidence of life within our own solar system I'm not sure whether that's on Mars the polar regions are going to be explored we hope by a mission yet to be funded but in the works called Icebreaker which is a probe that they hope to launch and land on Mars launch in 2024 their missions planned for Europa um not sure if there's Missions at this point planned for Enceladus but they're in the work they're in the worst yeah so I I'm of the opinion that within 30 years we're going to find evidence that to the point made earlier by the panel that life formed early on Earth it seems that the ingredients were there early on for at least basic life to evolve I think Mark raises some interesting points about the ultimate evolution of life into the species who can ask this question but but basic life I'd like to believe is is more prevalent relevant than we can imagine so uh another thing before we open it up to questions um not only is this a competitive sport but we're involved in a competitive sport in terms of our fundraising efforts today so I noticed that we've dropped to fourth place on the leaderboard here which is a result of the fact that you guys are all in here and just enthralled by what you're hearing and nobody's out there so we hope that to be changing what's particularly depressing is that the number one is the multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies oh they should come here come on I don't know what that says about Silicon Valley but maybe it sums it all up in one nice thing so anyway uh please remember us on Silicon Valley give stay and see if we can we can move up the leaderboard what I'd like to do now is uh open up the floor to questions we have a microphone up if up in the front if you have questions for our panelists please make your way to the microphone if you can if that's too difficult we can probably get a microphone maybe Lee if we could we arrange to get a microphone for people who seem to be trapped in in the middle first from David Morrison for searching for life in the solar system whether Mars or elsewhere I have not seen any evidence that anyone has figured out how to build a life detection instrument what would it be what would it do if we can't bring the stuff back what could you analyze that would tell you whether something either was alive or had once been alive that's uh that's a very good point and that goes back to the question David that we don't know what life is we know when we see it and uh we are searching for something we don't know and uh basically what we are trying to do right now is to go to places and one way of doing this is going to places we believe are good analog to those planetary environments that we we want to visit and we are developing instruments that are trying to figure out you know what would be left in an environment that is high radiation uh what would be left in the US Etc so right now we are putting instrument together unless you have a rabbit that is going to jump in front of your Rover on mars or something that is going to fly in front of your camera as you are crossing the geysers of Enceladus it is going to be down to biochemistry and so it is extremely difficult to get a instrument package that is small enough that is going to give you uh the information you need but this is what we need to do now and that also tells us that we need to bring back those samples we need to have the capability we need to have the resources to bring the stuff back on Earth because it's always going to be better than what we can put on a spacecraft so right now you have all sorts of instruments you have Raman spectrometer looking for Organics to have something else looking for pigments that go with the ramen you have bio signatures that are morphological that are chemical that are physical that you know name it but you cannot have any one thing taken along that is going to tell you this is alive okay um I have a question for Seth I think our other panel members May contribute to but I'm working with some of the ATA data and my bias has been that when we find the signal it won't take very long to figure out what it means but I'm reading a um a science fiction story by Gregory Benford where the in the somewhat in the future of the Earth and the moon are Awash with ET signals and nobody's figured out any of them so my question for you is when when will the signal be decoded once it's been detected yeah all right Jeff asks you know when will we decode the signal I I appreciate your optimism Jeff in assuming that we will find the signal for those of you who are technically inclined and I suppose that's a large fraction of you the reason that you don't get the message right away you don't get the bits is because of course we average the incoming Cosmic static over seconds or minutes or whatever the integration period is in order to find weaker stuff it's like making a Time exposure at night with your camera you lose all the temporal information so the bits which are presumably coming in at billion or Millions at least millions of times a second like a TV signal those are they all go away but if you find if you announce tomorrow hey we picked up a signal coming from 847 light years away from that star system over there I think money will no longer be a problem okay and this should worry our fundraiser perhaps but money will not no longer be a problem because you will get the money to build a very much bigger instrument that can have the sensitivity to find those bits now how long after that do you finally figure out what they mean because they're not gonna they're not going to send an empty signal into space unless it's a very short signal saying we're here let us know you're there otherwise they're going to send info they're very far away they're not going to wait for you to get back to them they're going to send everything they're going to send a lot of stuff and I think that what you would do at that point is you would take all these bits and you would put them on the internet and it would be like decoding the hieroglyphics that was done very quickly because there was a lot of material and if it would presumably be a lot of material and you have the whole world working on it and could they ever figure it out I don't know personally I'm somewhat skeptical that they'll ever figure it out we'll ever figure it out because to me it's like giving neanderthals right A Digital television signal neanderthals were not that stupid but they would never figure it out but that's okay even if you don't figure it out at least you know you have company well maybe you'd finally be able to beat the multi-disciplinary association maybe well they will they will decode it for us so my question is at the other end of the Spectrum which is back to uh exchanging rocks with possible evidence of the transition to biochemistry is it possible to look on the moon because that's even closer than Mars I mean presumably we exchange doesn't have the gravity but we we exchange rocks with the Moon Yeah would it be likely that if we looked on say the near surface of the Moon when we might find some yeah um exchange of material actually it is much easier to get material from Mars to the Earth than it is to get material from the moon to the earth because anything that is on on the moon on Mars is basically orbiting the Sun and it just goes off in some pathway it gets banged off Mars and then the Earth gets in the way and it lands uh if something comes off the moon it's still orbiting the Earth and you have to get rid of all that spiraling energy until you get it down to the Earth so when we find uh extraterrestrial meteorites that come from the solar system they are much more often from Mars than they are from the moon but that being said uh we actually have pieces of the Moon already uh we can go there and get them or we can wait for them to fall they do fall occasionally uh I'm sure they have been analyzed in the same way that that uh that chunk of Mars was analyzed that apparently thought was thought to contain fossils but did not um and uh and that was a certainly a worthwhile Avenue yeah but but what about Earth rocks maybe landing on the moon well it's actually once this is this is a Dynamics problem so this is where I I know this stuff getting stuff off the Earth is much harder than either the Mars or the moon because we've got a bigger gravity so it's much more likely for example for life to form on Mars and then accidentally see the Earth than for life to form on Earth and then accidentally seed Mars uh because getting Material off of Earth is much more difficult thank you I will add something that goes back to David's uh uh question as well is that the reason why uh we we would prefer to search on Mars is because Mars is going to give you context and uh it is really difficult to understand what's alive and what's not or what was alive and and it's not anymore uh you need context for that and finding a rock that has been dumped by an impact and an ejector somewhere randomly at the surface of a planet is not going to help with trying to reconstruct the conditions and the environment this rock and this record was formed in okay so sacrilegious question and it actually turns out it follows the previous questioner have we ever considered seeding one of these planets with some life form to verify that we are right and it can in fact support life Mark is that allowed laughs can somebody get the mic yeah she has the answer to this question my name is Margaret race and I work on planetary protection which is the biology of this is the planetary police my boss is the planetary police but anyway so United Nations outer space treaty is something that we've all been using to set policy for how we go into space and there's article 9 of the treaty says no harmful cross-contamination and harmful is in terms of what you're doing to the science that you're going to do as well so if you would seed something on purpose that could then perhaps spread there that's not a good thing so we are very careful in what we do to spacecraft before they go to a place like Mars and so while it has been proposed that you do experiments inside a dome or something like that right now you wouldn't do that although when they're talking about sending humans to Mars that issue is coming up what do we do about humans who go along with all of their microbes so stay tuned yeah there's a shortcut to that you can do lab experiment in Mars Chambers and the other thing if we find life up there I don't know what that says does that mean that Mars belongs to martians and what do we and if if Mars is different than that chart of Life as we know it does that make it a second Genesis so then you go into ethical questions and Theological questions so it's science technology and lots of other things that come up thanks very much Marge so you'll you'll be you can rest assured that not only do we have scientists working on these questions but we also have the planetary police making sure that we do so carefully yeah I have a question for Fred Mullally um you said it would take about 40 years to be able to block the light of a central Star by a factor of 10 billion to Sea of planets um I've seen a a proposal that looks like a um for a a star blocker that would be about 50 miles from the telescope and block the light it looks like a big circle with a lot of pointy it's like a sunflower with a lot of pointy petals around a big circle and this is the design and I presume that's well thought out and isn't this really a budget issue rather than a design issue to see planets around Stars yeah so the idea you're you're talking about is uh on a culture and it is basically the idea it's very simple as you have a big telescope in space and then you put a a big shade further open the space blocking the light of the star and because of the unusual properties of light when you treat it as a wave if you shape that sun shade just the right shape light from this very Central Star will get blocked but light from a very small ring around it will will still survive um so the history of this just to go back a bit originally people said we're going to use the properties of light and build something called an interferometers we've got multiple telescopes in space and we'll combine the like just right block out the light from the Star it's going to be easy so NASA said all right here's a bunch of money go go do that they came back a few years later ah that's a bit harder than what we thought but look we've got this great idea we built something called a Corona graph we put this little little thing to block the light deep inside the spacecraft I said all right here's some money go figure out how that works and they came back and said Well turns out that's a little bit harder than we thought as well but we could build in a culture and that stays through the enthusiasm from NASA for funding the money to establish the feasibility of that that sort of died off a little bit and and so this does seem to be our best approach at the moment towards solving this problem but uh to say that it's technologically solved yet is a bit premature people still have to work and still have to make sure that it does work yeah but it's more than but Terry it's more than just budget because it isn't 50 miles the distance between the telescope and the occulters thousands of miles somebody have a better number it's a very very big distance and that means now you have to coordinate these two things when you want to point this instrument so that's a problem too so if you do build one of these you'll spend most of your time not finding planets with this spacecraft because you're waiting to get that a culture into just the right place some people see that as an advantage one good one cosmologist says and then while you're moving their culture into place you can do some real science that's when I lost all interested in this project so before we we jump to the next question I I I know it's a little after one we may lose some of our uh friends from Microsoft I do want to thank any of you who have to leave uh at this point very much for attending and joining us I do hope that those of you at Microsoft will remember that if you are interested in supporting the work of the city Institute your donation today goes a lot further because your employer is going to match and we're so grateful for Microsoft support and for your attendance so thank you for that we we have been uh as well by by courtesy of Microsoft been granted a little extra time here so we're going to go about another five six minutes of of q a until about 1 15 and with that you have the microphone yeah so my question was earlier you were talking about looking at red dwarf stars maybe my question is more inspired by science fiction than science but I read that there the planets are usually tightly locked and you know one side is always always day and the other side is always the night so how do you have life in such a place yes the question is a good one and that is if you have a planet around a red dwarf star that red dwarf star is really pretty dim the planet has to be very close in in order to be habitable in order to be able to have liquid oceans but if it's that close in it's going to get tidally locked just like the moon one side of that planet's always facing the star the other side is always facing away from the Star so The Far Side will be very cold the atmosphere will freeze out in useless heaps of snow and ice on the ground and that's it it's dead Jim well that was the view 15 years ago but since then people have done studies and these people can probably talk about that in which they show look if you really have a plant like that the winds will carry some of the heat from the hot side to the back side if you have oceans the ocean currents will carry some of the heat from the hot side to the back so the atmosphere won't freeze out and sure it's too hot on the near side and too cold on the far side but in between it's like Northern California mm-hmm it's going to be a very it could be a very narrow habitable zone just around the night side housing housing will be deer like California a a planet a rocky planet in the habitable zone of an M Star is a very different environment from the earth the stars are much more active they're spewing out these flares as explosions on the surface there's a high energy radiation it would be a very different environment from the Earth but that goes back to what Mark was saying just because it's different environment it might be life which is different to us in many ways but there could still be life there so to me it's a big open question what we would find if we actually got to land a probe on a habitable zone planet around the damn star you can make the argument if you have a habitable stripe on a habitable zone Planet you're actually much more interested in finding more room so you may just be saying is anybody out there with more space than we have here question I would like to ask to what extent are you using these uh origin of life on Earth to inform your search for life elsewhere in particular I'm referring to some recent progress they've made with white smokers under the ocean there's one group that seems to think that they have managed to duplicate the Krebs cycle you know the energy production within a cell using just white smokers thank you yeah well um once again I'm not a biologist but where I can respond to your question is that definitely what we are learning for from Earth it really help us design and and conceive the type of search we we want to do on other planets and and when you have an environment like Mars that tells you you know there was water then then there was this and there was that there was energy uh we had volcanoes we have hydrothermal Springs we are finding the evidence of that then you go you can go back to the type of life you know on Earth but it's never a problem to find uh environments that you you can relate to I think that what is harder for us is to conceive something we don't know but in fact what's going to happen is that 99 of the universe and probably the solar system is something we don't know and so that you know goes back to the whole discussion here yes you let's use our solar system as a natural lab as a way to conceive ways to search for Life as We Know It understanding that Life as we know it is only probably a very small fraction of what's out there Mike Fisher what do we know about the origins of the tardigrade Tree of Life Prebiotic chemistry to life the origin of the telegrade what I know about the target grade and once again I am not a biologist but what I know about them is that you can fry them you can freeze them you can expose them to uh the vacuum of space and it seems that they are absolutely Immortal they are indestructible so there is definitely something we need we need to look into uh uh their uh their biology and how they can adapt and survive because we might have a number of Clues here not only on how could we ourselves survive you know these conditions or or even as they go dormant for a a long time possibly travel into space or or surviving in different planetary environment so I I don't know about the origin of the third degree I know that you know well I've learned somewhere that people said that they are aliens actually because we don't understand them so to me that's the easy the answer we don't understand they are alien you know like we don't understand the Pyramid of Giza though so they were built by aliens um yeah we haven't met yet but they are responsible for a number of things already but um 30 grades are an extreme version of adaptability on our planet and they are telling us something about you know uh how we came to be but also where how we could spread and survive extreme condition uh in space and outer I'd like to invite you to comment on what seems to me to be the tragedy of city that is the universe or at least the Galaxy is so large that the likelihood that somebody is out there who will be detectable in the signal is pretty good but if and when that's detected we shall have to realize that we have no hope whatever of interacting with it if I can interact with you uh well I I I'm not quite as pessimistic right within a thousand light years there are millions of star systems so there might be somebody within a thousand light years and if they you know they'll know that our planet has life thanks to the kind of experiments that have been discussed here they can see the out the uh oxygen in our atmosphere and stuff like that and they may say you know it's worth occasionally sending them a transmission with some information because they're far away hundreds maybe a thousand light years away I think they would send a lot of information because you're not going to get into an easy conversation with anybody that far away is that interaction I mean I you know I studied Latin in high school it took 2 000 years for Cicero's words to get to me but it's still interesting and I can you know where I can't talk back to Cicero I can but my psychiatrist says I shouldn't but but I consider that interaction you're not going to meet them yes I agree with that but you might learn something I I have by the way when the doors closed and sets off as I've heard Latin being uttered so I think he's trying I have not told his psychiatrist however all right well with that I I think we've we've come up to the end of our time I'd like to thank our panelists and have you join me in thanking them for this Lively discussion foreign I'd like to thank all of you for joining us I hope we've made some new friends and found some new supporters today don't forget the Mercury not Venus Transit on Monday join us for coffee and donuts if you'd like to take a look through a telescope and see that firsthand thanks again everybody [Music]

Channel: SETI Institute

Views: 116,712

Keywords: Silicon Valley Gives Day, SVGives, Search for life, ET, SETI

Id: Yaa5ExQTk6Y

Length: 66min 50sec (4010 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2016