When Will We Find the Extraterrestrials?

thank you very much Lisa I'm always astounded by these introductions because I keep asking myself who is that guy you know kind of thing I'm also very grateful in fact at the Linda Hall library for bringing me to Kansas City as is my mother uh 96 years old a couple of weeks ago because she grew up in Kansas City so she uh she insisted that I come to Kansas City in fact I used to come here a lot when I was much younger anyhow we're going to talk a little bit about why we think they're out there and uh how are looking for them and what it would mean to you the car buyer if we were to find the aliens I always ask and I will ask tonight how many of you think that there are aliens to be found okay I won't count those but how many of you think probably not all right well you're the ones I really want to talk to later you know oh it's I was sort of wondering why why you know you'd even listen well let me hmm yeah okay there we go all right let me just say uh give you a few suggestions as to why if you were to grab the next 10 astronomers off the streets of Kansas City and that's not a good idea but if you were to do that and ask them do you think that the aliens are out there probably nine out of the ten would say yes part of the reason is evidence like this this is a picture I made in Northwest Australia the pilbara hills a number of years ago now there's a business card there so you get some idea of the scale this rock is the oldest well-preserved sedimentary rock in in the world actually and we know how old the rock is from radioactive dating it's about three and a half billion years old okay there's very little you know uncertainty about that you know five percent or three percent or something but you might be able to see and see if I get the right yeah you see these sort of round structures here that look like cauliflowers in the rock those are the remains of bacteria that live three and a half billion years ago they're what are called stromatolites they're just colonies that the bacteria made and still do mate today actually it was controversial for a while but the point is that the Earth is four and a half billion years old that's that's a number that's worth remembering by the way you can use it at your next cocktail party and you may impress somebody but by three and a half billion years ago there was already life all over the place okay we don't know when the first life appeared a lot of people work on that it may have been as early as four billion years ago conceivably even earlier than that the point here being that it's almost as soon as the earth was formed life developed and that suggests doesn't prove but it does suggest that life wasn't terribly improbable it didn't take a long time to get this project going okay so that's one thing you can say well okay now the other big argument for why the aliens may be out there is that the universe is big really big okay now there's a picture of these aren't Stars these little dots are this is part of the survey that's made of galaxies each one of those dots is a Galaxy now if you don't recall it a galaxy is a galaxy is just a big neighborhood of stars a typical Galaxy like our own Milky Way has a few hundred billion stars in it so each one of those dots is a few hundred billion stars okay and you can see there are a lot of them and in fact the number of galaxies we can see with our telescopes is on the order of 100 billion so I'm sure you've probably multiplied those two numbers together on the back of the shirt of the guy in front of you that's uh unless you're in the front row it and that that turns out to be ten thousand billion billion stars within our purview or undoubtedly is a lot more to the universe maybe an infinite more a degree of more stuff but there's at least that much that's a one followed by 22 zeros that's the number of stars that we can see okay that's big number that's uh like the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of of America okay uh never mind that that's there you go and that's the number of galaxies 10 to 22 stars now the point is that life won't cook up on a star obviously it's a little bit too toasty it'll have to cook up on a planet and up until 1995 the only planets we knew about were the ones you see depicted in the exhibits here in the library the nine now eight that orbit the sun okay now when I was a kid which was sometime before the Crimean War and I would go to the Hayden planetarium in New York and they would tell you things like well you know the way the planets were formed here was because another star got close to our sun and ripped some gas out of it and that made the planets that turns out not to be right but had it been right this would be the only solar system in the whole galaxy right now not too many astronomers bought that because there's something called the principle of mediocrity in astronomy and I always thought it referred to the astronomers themselves in fact it does but but what it really is saying is that if you think that you're very special you're probably wrong right okay so beginning in 1995 we began to find planets around other stars for real other ordinary Stars not by actually seeing them but by doing this little trick here there there's a there's a little cartoon showing a planet going around a star seeing the planet is very hard typically finding these planets and you probably heard Sarah Seeker talk about this it's difficult because they you know a planet like the Earth only shines with about 110 billionth of the brightness of the Sun so you know the the difficulty is not that you can't uh build a telescope that's powerful enough to pick up that light but it's right next to a very bright light namely a star you that you can't see but what you can see is maybe the dance that you induce in the star when a planet orbits it because the planet does I'm sorry the star doesn't just sit there it dances a little bit depending on the mass and the distance of the planet going around it so you get data like these in which you see a star in this case 51 pegasy but you can see it comes out you at about the speed at which you drive your bicycle down Ward Parkway then it goes away from you and then it comes toward you and so forth and that dance is the indication of planets around other stars now we found about 400 in some of these planets around other stars so every comes those of you who read the newspaper so remember when a newspaper is well occasionally you see these stories about planets having been found around other stars the number 450 is a large number compared to the eight in our solar system but that's actually not the interesting thing the interesting thing you want to know is but what fraction of stars have planets okay and uh I was going to tell you about him but we don't know well no I will tell you about that we don't know that but this guy in the upper left corner guy by the name of Jeff Marcy is the foremost Hunter of planets these days he lives in the Bay area near San Francisco he's at UC Berkeley and he's been looking for these wobbles and stars for a long time now and I asked him just a couple of months ago I said Jeff we found 450 planets but if you had perfect telescopes what fraction of stars do you think would show these wobbles right and it just said oh well on the basis of the statistics we have so far I would say maybe a half or three quarters now to an astronomer a half is the same as all right and we don't astronomy you don't usually worry about factors of two so that's what gives what gives you this number down at the bottom in our own Galaxy about a trillion planets orbit stars on the order of a trillion now that's a that's a pretty big number by the way the number of planets that are not orbiting stars that have gotten kicked out of their solar systems and are just wandering around like you know like pariahs or whatever between the stars is probably three or four times that number but never mind that those guys may not be where you want to live so that that's a big number and again if you don't like our own Galaxy if for some reason our own Galaxy doesn't appeal to you you can always move to one of the 100 billion other ones we can see so these numbers are so big that you know it's kind of encouraging this is an experiment going on now this is the Kepler Telescope launched by NASA a little over a year ago and Kepler's mission is to find out what fraction of stars had planets that are cousins of the Earth in other words you know the right size the right distance from their sons to have maybe liquid oceans thick atmospheres and maybe you know something alive okay it's going to answer that question in the next thousand days right it's going to happen the thing works so it will happen right and maybe maybe it'll turn out that Earth are very rare nobody figures that they figure that maybe maybe one percent of All Stars will will have Earth maybe two percent maybe half a percent we don't know but this experiment is going to answer that question and this is actually a very interesting thing because uh no previous generation could do this experiment and no subsequent generation has to do it this is a one-off deal it's it's very much like what happened at the beginning of the 16th century right at the time of Columbus if you had made a globe of the Earth right most people realize the Earth was a globe and you know try to fill it out I mean you'd have Europe and you'd have most of Africa and you'd have some of Asia and that would be it most of the globe would be blank in one generation we were able to map the globe right almost all of it I mean we're missing things like Antarctica and some islands here and there but basically the globe was mapped by one generation no previous generation could do that and no subsequent generation had bother right it was just done forever and of course we continue to make maps and they're better Maps but you know the fundamental work was done by one generation and that's what this this instrument here is going to do it's going to answer this question what fraction of stars have planets where you might consider building condos if you will okay that's the estimated result but this is a guess on the basis of the people that have been doing this experiment okay now let me talk a little bit about intelligent life and start with intelligent life that might be nearby because that's what we always hoped this is Percival Lowell here came from a Boston Brahman family this photo is more than 100 years old now Lowell grew up in well in Massachusetts right uh he was a fairly he was a fairly wealthy family he grew up in and he went to Harvard studied mathematics he was apparently one of the best students at Harvard ever had one of one of his uh of course that's only Harvard but one of his one of his brothers actually was the president of Harvard for a long time and you know he uh he was really interested in astronomy he could have taken the job at a third rate you know University somewhere and hope for tenure but you know he had money so he didn't have to do that he just built his own observatory in fact he sent out a bunch of uh astronomers he said find me the best place to build an observatory where the you know the atmosphere is stable and all that and they came back I think the answer was Argentina or something like that and he said think again so they they thought again and they came up with Flagstaff Arizona and so he built an observatory there in Flagstaff he modestly named it the Lowell Observatory he did a lot of good work the Lowell Observatory is still in Biz by the way uh just continues to do excellent research but one of the things that Lowell got involved in was the were these claims that there were canals on Mars these have been seen by Italians beginning in the 1860s and the 1870s of course the Italians were very cagey about it all they called them Canali which of course was probably appropriate since they were in Italy but it was unclear whether they meant real canals dug by you know martians looking for shovel ready projects or whether these were just some sort of you know natural channels caused by who knows what anyhow so they you know they one day they'd say one thing the next day they'd say something else but Lowell looked at these things and he was convinced that the canals existed and were for real this is some of his handiwork you can see some of the 400 and some canals that he no I guess it was more like 200 and some close to 300. uh canals that he he mapped and gave nice Latin names in case the uh you know the Martians hadn't bothered and uh in fact he wrote several books around 1900 in which he described all this work and also he explained why the Martians were engaged in all this civil engineering all this trench work the answer was of course that Mars was a dying drying Planet which happens to be true and they were compelled to dig these canals to bring water from the polar regions down to the equatorial territories where they would grow their brussels sprouts or whatever it was that the Martians were chowing down on now among his many talents Lowell was a very good writer and so the public believed this the astronomical Community was very doubtful and in particular where I live in the Bay Area there was a bigger telescope than Lowell had it on Mount Hamilton the lake Observatory and these guys would look at Mars and they we don't see any canals and he said your problem is you're not in Flagstaff right well that may have been their problem let me just show you here's a modern view of mars or the same area that you see on the left there and you can see the dark areas so Lowell got that right what he didn't apparently get right where the canals in fact this is an illustration from a contemporary textbook of astronomy and showing you what it would look like on Mars okay and which kind of looks like Santa Monica or maybe Venice I don't know and here's this is from 1908 this is the the Martians themselves you can tell the females because they you know wear bows in their hair and have long eyelashes I guess it's a martian cocktail party I'm not quite sure uh you you see a trend here that you know goes back obviously quite a ways and that is that the aliens tend to be anthropomorphic they tend to look like your neighbors I mean if these guys moved in next door you know you'd probably get around inviting into dinner eventually right not all that different uh now actually what was causing the canals it's kind of a diversion but it's sort of interesting Lowell died in 1916 and he was still convinced that the canals were real but by then very few scientists were okay and I think that the real answer to what was causing the canals was uh determined by this guy Edward wander who was a uh a researcher actually in the United Kingdom and he made pictures like the the big one there just a bunch of patterns a few Dots here and there he just made those by hand he kind of made them up and he would put them at the front of a classroom some some school in London filled with 11 year old boys and they were at different distances from the screen just as you are and he gave them all sheets of paper and a pencil and he just said you know draw what you see and at a certain distance from the screen almost all the boys would connect the dots they were drawing lines so this says something about our retina and our visual system you like to connect the dots that probably helps you to catch dinner or did a hundred thousand years ago right so modern published these results now Lowell of course was unconvinced but most of the rest of the world was that's probably what caused the canals in 19 in the mid 1970s of course we got for a close-up views of Mars including this one remember the Viking Landers that plopped down onto the rusty Dusty surface our little Ruddy buddy there making these kinds of pictures and it doesn't look anything like that textbook illustration you don't see too many canals and in fact somewhat to the dismay of the people who are running this experiment NASA they didn't see any live in fact remember this was an exciting time it was 1976 I believe and the shutter is open for the first time on a camera that's sitting on Mars and nobody knew what they were going to see it might be a little green guys waving you know maybe some liking maybe some plants something and what it saw was this and the picture never changed day after day for months they took pictures the picture never changed sort of like a joke you know if you're not the lead dog The View never changes well that view never changed on Mars you have to think about that the view never changed on Mars we tried doing this in your backyard right take pictures every day of your backyard The View will change the grass will grow dogs will walk by there'll be an insect here I don't know but something will happen not on Mars it looked like Mars it was dead Jim it was dead okay now mind you there was a guy at the Caltech uh Norm Horowitz who said at the time he said well it could be that there's Life on Mars that looks like rocks but as we now know these are rocks okay so look bad it looked bad but I I do want to point out I don't want to spend too much time describing stupid life because that's what this is all about but uh we shouldn't give up on Mars that was a very discouraging thing for a long time the whole idea of life in space kind of went into remission for a while or at least it was at the subdued level is what I mean to say because you know here Mars our best hope for company here nearby look dead but it may not be the the picture on the left here was taken by an Orbiter in 1999 around Mars it just shows the side of a crater and on the right hand side you see the same crater six years later you see that white streak down there okay well we don't know what it is could be talcum powder could be a whole bunch of things but most likely it's caused by water that leeches out of the side of the crater and ran down before it sublimated you know went up into the air so it looks like what you really want to do in order to find Life on Mars is send Bruce Willis to the red planet with a you know a bunch of drilling guys maybe they can get labor cheap from BP now and just drill down a couple of hundred feet and because there seemed to be aquifers down there and just pull up that muck and look at it under a microscope and see if you see microbes because there's plenty of biota there are plenty of living organisms underneath the ground here I don't mean a foot underneath the ground I mean a mile under the ground even two miles under Kansas City there's a lot of life right obviously it doesn't work with photosynthesis but there's a lot of life down there okay and you just drill a one mile deep hole and pull up the the stuff you'll find these microbes okay so maybe on Mars this is another place we might look for life this is a looks like a giant tennis ball which it isn't this is the moon of Saturn called Titan but it has smog it's a lot of hydrocarbons this is a picture of the same place seen with Radars you begin to see something there and this is also a radar photo of Titan this is a fairly recent one showing these Lakes they're Lakes on this Moon around Saturn it's really cold out around Saturn you know on a warm day here it'll be minus 200 or so okay it's very cold so these are not Lakes these are liquid Lakes we know they're liquid now these are not Lakes of water obviously they're Lakes of liquid natural gas ethane and methane right kind of stuff you use you know to cook dinner and in fact there's a proposal out now one guy at the Washington State University in Pullman he's proposing to NASA that they send a mission to Titan and they drop a boat in fact you know maybe this size onto one of these lakes with cameras and other devices to try and find life on Titan because even though it's very cold it is liquid and it's you know Carbon chemistry there may be something there the only you know the only thing you can think of that's kind of bad is that it's very cold so the chemistry goes slowly but still so we may find life nearby there are at least seven other worlds in our own solar system that are thought to have either liquid water or in this case liquid of some sort seven other worlds in a in a solar system with only eight planets about 160 moons a lot of those are moons but still and you may remember in 1996 the biggest science news story of 1996 you remember that Martian meteorite it was on the front page in the New York Times with font that you could read from low-flying aircraft I mean that was a big big story for three or four days and I remember my neighbor saying yeah well these guys are claiming they found dead ponds come on Mars I got live ponds come in my bathtub why why are my tax dollars paying for this you know that kind of attitude like I didn't get it but my neighbors never do the point was if you were to find Life on Mars dead or alive right that would tell you right away that life's not a miracle right just a cosmic infection if you will right if the next planet out also had left unless that planted infected ours which is possible but anyhow all right what about intelligent life what about intelligent life um the public believes and and I know that they're representatives of mufon here in the audience tonight the public believes that there's not only intelligent life out there but it's here right occasionally buzzing the countryside or abducting you for experiments that may not be appropriate on a first date now you may gauge you may engage a lot of things but if you you may engage in that comment that I'm I'm not one of those who think they're here that would be great for me it's not that I'm against the idea because after all it would be job security for me if the aliens were you know walking the streets of Overland Park okay I don't think that the evidence is convincing I mean it doesn't violate physics for them to come here it's not that it's impossible it's hard it's really hard but I think that if they were here personally I think if they were here the evidence would be good I don't think it's very good so these people say forget the search direction to terrestrial intelligence forget trying to do experiments to find them out there they're here okay now this is not a fringe belief of course this is a you know a fairly widespread I just show you this this is my favorite UFO photo I have to say but I made this photo in my garage this is this is a lampshade I found in an abandoned shopping cart okay over here the results of a poll a CNN times poll from I believe 2002. do you think a UFO crashland in Roswell New Mexico in 1947. 65 percent of Americans say yes like the aliens I mean mostly UFO crowd actually doesn't believe this but anyhow the aliens come who knows how many hundreds of light years to visit New Mexico because I know Tex-Mex Cuisine not sure but they come all that distance and then in the last 50 feet they make a navigation here and crash into the dirt okay so could happen but is the U.S government hiding the fact that it knows of the existence of aliens eighty percent of the public says yes right 80 okay mind you this is the same how long did they keep Anita Hill quiet was that two weeks this has been going on for more than 60 years is the same government that runs the IRS but somehow they're they've kept this quiet now you may believe that I mean Americans love to think that their government is keeping secrets from them and for its part the government makes sure that it keeps some Secrets just to keep you interested right but even if you want to believe that our government has this vast conspiracy to keep the most interesting science story of all time secret from you for some reason right presumably because you'd riot 80 believe it's true they're not writing about that seven percent of Americans think they've been abducted right that's perfectly okay that's okay dear I noticed that you disappear from the bedroom for a couple of hours every every week or so but it's all right it's you know even if you believe all that that our government is complicit in this it's hard for me to believe that the belgians and the botswana's and the bulgarians and the Brazilians and you know that they they're all keeping it quiet too because you have to assume that that's the case otherwise you have to make the argument that the aliens only visit American uh here's one argument against this just this is a very simple argument going into space going to from one start to the next is very difficult right this isn't a problem of engineering our Rockets go at seven miles a second okay now seven miles a second is great if you're going to Topeka it's unclear why you'd want to but seven miles a second is great if you're going to the Moon if you're going to Mars you can get all there you know get to the moon in a couple days get to Mars in a couple of months uh even if you wanted to go to Jupiter Saturn you get there in a few years seven miles a second that's okay but if you go to the nearest other star where presumably the moon Pandora is right if you go there at that speed it takes you well this calculation is slightly wrong it should be actually a hundred and ten thousand years not 75 000 years to the nearest other star but what the heck 75 000 years 110 000 years that's a long time to be sitting there with your tray table and seat back in their fully upright position eating pretzels off your lap so now you might say okay well great I understand that this is Trivial because obviously they've got better Rockets well of course and we'll have better Rockets too but there is a physics problem the physics problem is the there are two several of them one is the amount of energy required to go fast if you want to get to the nearest star in 10 years you need us obviously you need a rocket that can go about half the speed of light all right the energy required to to to send something the size of the upper floors of this library to the nearest star at half the speed of light is more energy than the entire U.S burns up in a century it's a lot of energy that's a lot of coal oh whatever okay and the other problem is when you're going at those great great speeds of course all the interstellar particles are hitting the front of your ship and making you know high-speed deadly radiation it'll rip right through the ship and give everybody instant cancer so there's a lot of problems a lot of problems but I mean as I say doesn't violate physics it's just hard okay now here's too bad about different version of uh PowerPoint nevermind here's another thing I often ask why is it that the aliens are here now just in time to maybe improve your social life by abducting you for the salacious experiments right because after all the Earth has been here for four and a half billion years and uh you know there's been life on it for four billion years I mean they could have visited the trilobites right or the bivalves or the dinosaurs or something but they've come just in time for you right 10 000 generations of homo sapiens and dog on it you luck out because here they are now you could have said well they've always been here in which case they've been pretty unremarkable I mean it's hard to find much archaeological evidence of that but okay the other thing is that people will say Well they're here now because they're disgusted with our Behavior right right they don't like what we're doing in the environment and they're like in fact we got nuclear weapons or they have some other interest in us now personally I find that kind of a stretch I mean I you know I I don't go in the backyard and separate the ants you guys have been having Wars all this time I've had enough of it you know I mean I just not something I spent a lot of time with the other thing is they don't know about any of that stuff now here you see I Love Lucy right and the first um episode of I Love Lucy I believe was 1953 but you know within a few years that's right in any case 1953 so that's what 57 years ago so the uh you know those signals I Love Lucy the First episodes of I Love Lucy are washing over a new star system at the rate of about one a day you think that the sponsors would be happy about that but I don't know okay our most powerful thing the signals that we've been broadcasting into space we've been doing this for a while go back a little earlier than I Love Lucy say 60 years 70 years so evidence of our presence is 60 light years out in this space that's the only way the aliens really could find us if they're that far away right they couldn't find the Romans and they couldn't even find the victorians they could only find us if they're within 60 light years because they could pick up some of these broadcasts right Radars are actually the strong signal but never mind well that means they can't be more than 30 light years away to have picked up the signals decided they don't like Fred mertz's jokes hop into a spacecraft that goes 99.99 the speed of light and then come down here to haul you out of your bedroom okay now how many stars are within 30 light years well only a couple of thousand that's not many right in fact that's a pretty small number so I think it's safe to say this I will make this as a categorical statement in a talk which is singularly free of categorical statements but that I I don't think that any other species knows about the existence of homo sapiens except other species here on Earth right they don't know we're here you know we're here so it is rather remarkable they've come now okay they simply don't know what they will know is that Earth has life because we've had oxygen in our atmosphere for a long time and oxygen is caused by photosynthesis the oxygen in our atmosphere now we also have methane and so forth you know which is caused by what are politely called bovine flatulence or porcine flatulence so they would know their Pigs in Space you know pigs on Earth and so forth but they wouldn't know about you because that signal hasn't gotten to them yet okay uh the other thing that I find interesting about the the whole phenomenon of are they here or not is that it's highly emotional highly emotional and this is perplexing to me I get phone calls and emails every day from people who uh have something to show me that proves that the aliens are here every day and I usually direct them to mufon by the way so but um you know but it's very emotional it's very emotional I don't know why actually anybody who buys my book will find there's actually a whole section there and why it might be emotional all right let me skip from that to the the question of how we're looking for et one of the big controversial contentious even uh aspects of this problem is look maybe life is very common making bacteria might be something that a lot of planets have managed to do but what about intelligent life if I give you a million worlds it has a life and you let it cook for a few billion years will it ever produce something like you right functionally equivalent to you now the first thing you have to ask is well what do you mean by intelligence anyhow I mean is there intelligence inside the Beltway or whatever right now what we mean by intelligence is really simple it's an operational definition if you can build a radio transmitter you're intelligent right so ask the person sitting next to you hey can you build a radio transmitter and you know how to treat them as you're walking out the door um okay here's a guy see there's a guy who 30 000 years after this photo was made we'll be building a radio transmitter so he can you can tell he's intelligent he's adding some Ram to his computer there okay now is intelligence that joke usually turns audiences against me but I figure it's too late okay um no where the intelligence is commonplace or not Stephen J Gould for example was very uh skeptical about this he said look rewind the tapes of Earth and play Everything different play the play them again with slightly different you know thunderstorms here and there and you wouldn't have humans here or a very obvious example 65 million years ago right this big rock slams into the Yucatan down in Mexico and wipes out you know two-thirds three quarters of all species now if that rock had arrived you know 20 hours earlier it would have missed the Earth and you wouldn't be sitting through this there would be dinosaurs in Kansas City okay right so there is the question yeah but maybe something else would have evolved to be intelligent and that's the question so there are a whole bunch of people who study this not a whole bunch total number is fewer than in half of any Row in here but anyhow that's a whole bunch in this field uh studying the question of what caused our ancestors to get smart Okay uh here's for example something a bit of evidence in that line this is from Laurie Marino who's a biologist down at Emory in Atlanta and what she's done is she's looked at the IQs of uh cetaceans you know Dolphins tooth whales things like that and she estimates their Intelligence on the basis she she couldn't get their SAT scores but she she does is she just looks at the volume of their their cranial cavity Compares it to their body size and so forth that turns out to be it seems a good measure of IQ so here's every time you show graph here you lose 10 percent of the audience I got 12 of these Okay so so here's here's the IQ of the citations on the left Dom on the right smart 50 million years ago today so 50 million years ago there were a bunch of these things ancestors of modern day dolphins and they were pretty stupid but then they developed echolocation so they could find fish and they got smarter at least their brains got bigger and now then you know that some of them got smarter yet and some of them got Dumber a million years ago the smartest thing on this planet was a white flanked dolphin today of course it's homo sapiens but while this is the show you know we're not the only species that has increased its average intelligence with time right I mean obviously Dolphins no also other simeons of course but you know some birds are fairly clever octopuses are reputed to be clever I've never you know you go to the local library you know you probably won't find much octopus literature here but still the fact that various species found a niche for intelligence that helped them survive suggest that it might happen uh frequently there's also this kind of work this is a Jeff Miller down at the University of New Mexico I'll just tell you this story very briefly what Miller says is that look a lot of higher animals reproduce by signaling for Fitness now what do I mean by that their strategy for reproduction or at least mate choice is that the males display and the females decide okay I mean you know the guys all know this that you know men are merely a genetic experiment being run by women true now the canonical example here is um the peacocks right so the male peacocks have these big blue feathers and they trip across a female and you know they show these blue feathers and the female little pea hands with their little p brains looking around well I don't know this guy's blue feather is pretty good but you know that guy's blue feathers are better so she takes him home to Mom now you gotta ask what's in it for to choose a guy with a big blue feathers because they don't really have much survival value in fact you could argue they have anti-survival value because they just attract Predators right so that may be a point I mean he's still walking around he must be good right this is sort of like Clint Eastwood I was sort of one of those Clint Eastwood cowboy films remember he would ride into some God forsaken western town probably had had a shower in three months and the women all turn out and always went why whether they want to have anything to do with this guy and the biologists say look if he made it this far he's good okay so same thing happened with Captain Cook in this episode I mean all right anyhow but the point is that those blue feathers are hard to grow metabolically hard to grow and if there are any are there lots of mutations in the guy's genome then he can't grow the blue feathers so what the P hen gets out of this is healthy chicks okay so what Miller says is look hominids we got the same deal right except we don't have the blue feathers but our brains our brains are very tightly wired into our genome and your genome uh half about half of your genome has some effect on the way your brain is wired up so what the males ought to do is when you go to a party you know you just take off your skull and you pass your brain around all the women you know so check it out right now that's considered a social blunder so that so we don't do that but if the guy can you know sing or tell jokes or I don't know something you know the women are listening with their ears well Bob here is kind of interesting but Melvin over here you know he's more interesting so she goes home with Melvin now it isn't because she's interested in and thereby of course raises the average IQ of the males it isn't because the women are interested in smart men don't flatter yourself that's not it it just had fewer genetic you know mutations that's all that it's about so you know a guy like this is um popular of course now Miller usually gets a comment so why do women get smart and he said look the females are under tremendous evolutionary pressure to be charismatic and so forth so that the you know males don't wander off and you know bring all the meat back for some other woman's kids you know that kind of um now not everybody buys this but but Miller will tell you says look if you doubt this just pay attention the next time you're in a restaurant look at the couples if they're just getting together the guy's doing all the talking to impress the female if they've been together for a long time the woman's doing all the talking to keep the guy from wandering off at least before he pays the bill I don't know okay it's a little digression although it might make an amusing story for you to consider later the point of all this is that this is is a very simple mechanism that could be expected to obtain on any world really I mean you know or something like it it's nothing miraculous in this it's just a darwinian selection mechanism that ratcheted up intelligence nonetheless despite all the arguments that I've made in the past 25 minutes this was mentioned by Lisa at the beginning we have not found any compelling evidence of life beyond Earth and I might say that's to quote the last president dead or alive we haven't the only life we know about is right here on Earth okay now I think that's going to change I think in the next 20 years we're going to find some we'll we'll see if that's true I think it's actually possible that in the next couple of Dozen Years we're going to find the intelligent variety of Life the Lee T what would be the clues well maybe see intelligence is probably a lot less common than say microbial life probably many many many more worlds with stupid life if you will than intelligence because and NASA is looking for unintelligent life right microbes on Mars and so on that's where all the big money goes the the government money is all looking for essentially life that probably requires a microscope to see okay on the assumption that uh you know microbial life stupid life if you it's much more commonplace than intelligent life and certainly when I walk my neighborhood in California it seems to be the case now but on the other hand intelligent life to begin with might be more interesting right you might find a peer but beyond that it might be doing something that makes it easier to find for example you could look for artifacts it's one of the photos in the Apollo mission that NASA never released on on the Assumption you wouldn't find it interesting now look you know obviously this is some work I do with Photoshop but if you actually did find something like this you can say well I don't know Ralph but it doesn't look natural to me and it doesn't all right so so this would be a legitimate thing I mean maybe our solar system was visited you know uh 300 million years ago and they said well you know they've got a fair amount of floor and fauna here who knows why don't we just spend the extra ten dollars and leave this time capsule in case right so that they if they ever find it they'll know how to join our book club or whatever okay and you you could leave that time capsule on the Earth but you know the Earth is cursed with with weather and plate tectonics and other things that kind of chew up the landscape all the time so it'd be better to leave it on the moon so you could consider digging up the moon we don't have the money to do that but this is a legitimate approach you could look for Astro engineering keep in mind the universe is three times as old as the Earth right most of the Stars two-thirds of the Stars you see out there two-thirds of them are older than the Sun so there's been plenty of time for other societies to get not just millions of years ahead of us but even billions that can live that long right so you know maybe some of them are doing stuff that's so spectacular that we might just find it in the course of normal astronomical observation like a ring World here like Larry Larry niven's idea that may be possible or a Dyson swarm Freeman Dyson uh suggested that what you really want to do is instead of burning oil and and gas and coal and stuff like that is you just want to build a whole swarm of solar cell satellites and you know encircle your own star with them have them beam all the other and she down back to you and that way you get uh it's 10 trillion times as much energy as we're using now right so you know that would be enough to power your iPod and everything else 10 trillion times so he said why not look for these sorts of things out in space and there have been some efforts that's again legitimate it sounds far out but literally but it but it's actually a good approach and then of course there's the approach that Jody Foster pursued in the movie contact how many of you saw this movie okay well yeah there's Jody down at the very large array in New Mexico which by the way has never been used for this but and she's wearing a pair of earphones I was one of the consultants for the film I said and I told Warner Brothers I mean I told a lot of stuff and they ignored it all but what I said you know this is wrong because at that time we were we were monitoring 56 million channels I said you've gotta you've got to put 28 million pairs of earphones on Jody and they demired they said we're not going to do it it's going to crowd this shot you know yeah but actually this film was fairly accurate in general in terms of portraying what we do my day job listening for et on the radio not going there that's hard not waiting for them to come here that's chancy but simply finding them in situ find them at home by picking up signals they may be broadcasting into space now that idea goes back 50 years this month the last month really when Frank Drake did the first experiment in West Virginia and we still haven't found a signal and I'll get back to that now I show this picture this is just a contrast with Jody there this is the real deal here this is down in Puerto Rico at the Arecibo antenna this photo is about 10 years old now but and we were observing using that antenna and as you can see they're computers here the computers are doing the listening I don't have any earphones on right we as I said we had 56 million channels the computers don't need a coffee break they don't mind monitoring 56 million channels obviously it's all done by computers and in fact that carbon-based life form over here he wouldn't act would actually be necessary to have them there if the equipment were a little bit more reliable which it is now and but even then it was reliable enough that most of the time I would just sit there making self-portraits for my mom like this one okay so that's what it actually looks like now people will ask what uh what kind of signal are you looking for right you know people is either looking for the value of pi or maybe the Fibonacci series prime numbers perhaps well all that works in the movies but you know you don't need any of that and in fact you don't even want any of that because if you have the technology that can pick up alien signals you probably know the value of pi it'd be kind of disappointing yeah we finally heard from the aliens and they told them told me something I learned in seventh grade well um we don't actually care what the message is we're not looking for it in fact our equipment can't even find it in general okay we're looking for what are called narrow band signals now this is a little bit of signal from down in Puerto Rico actually uh 20 megahertz and so forth but you see these narrow band signals the ones that are at one spot on the radio dial those are the kinds of signals that transmitters make radio television they all have narrow band signal components and those are the kinds of things that are not made by quasars or pulsars or you know galaxies Hot Gas cold gas they make signals that are all over the dial it's it's think of it nature it's not very good at engineering radio transmitters right you're driving around you could have been driving around today listen to your car radio and maybe you're listening to your favorite country in western station or whatever right that's at one spot on the dial but when a lightning bolt went off and there were plenty of them near my hotel this this afternoon you would hear crackling you know you hear a crack in your radio right and it doesn't matter where you're tuned you could hear it anywhere in the dial so that's the difference between natural static and something from a transmitter and so we look for these narrow band signals okay I also want to point out we've only occasionally listened this is a picture of the Arecibo telescope thing made at night there but in any case people think you've been doing this for 50 years and you haven't found anything right shouldn't you be at least discouraged or maybe ashamed or my mom will call up and say you know when are you going to get a real job you know kind of thing um but there's no reason for being discouraged because we've only barely scratched the service because we've always had to use somebody else's antenna this is a privately funded thing right this is there's no government money funding this it's been private since 1993. we would borrow this antenna this is the one down in Puerto Rico against thousand feet across if you haven't seen this you ought to go down there and and and look at it because there's some threat to it to funding for this the government may actually start funding this and in which case they may just unbolt it and cart it away it'll hold four billion scoops of Baskin-Robbins ice cream although not a good idea in the tropics it's very sensitive because it's very big but in all the time we've been doing this the number of star systems we've looked at carefully over a wide range of frequencies is fewer than a thousand it's fewer than a thousand in a galaxy of two three four hundred billion stars we've looked at fewer than a thousand so you know there are some people make a big deal about this they say there's an eerie silence and so forth there's no Airy silence we just haven't it's like going to Africa in search of uh megafauna right looking you know landing on the the west coast of Africa looking at one city block worth of real estate and say well no Pachyderm is here I guess it's Mega fauna free the entire continent right that's that's completely analogous to what we've done so uh you know might say well it took you 50 years to look at 750 star systems isn't this going to take a long time and that's a question we get all the time how long is it going to be before we find E.T and that's the title of this talk now I showed this picture this is Frank Drake and he's the guy who did the first seti experiment uh 50 years ago this month in fact he's still working he'll be 80 this month actually Frank but he still looks like this he looked like this when he was 10. I have photos he always looks like this Frank I don't know what he eats but he never he doesn't age anyhow he comes in every day he writes this equation down on the board we don't know what it means but there it is and and Frank it's his question you know when are we going to find E.T and Jill Charter heads up our City Works she gets a question when are we going to find ET I get the question and that almost exhausts the number of scientism but we get this question we'll get a couple more and I noticed that they they only everybody gives an answer but the answer is always the same number of years they expect until they retire right so that's telling you something about their psychology but maybe nothing about this work all right here's a better answer this is an antenna system that we're building in Northern California called the Allen telescope array that's Paul Allen co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation along with Bill Gates and he paid enough money to get this thing started so they're 42 of these antennas and they're they're about you know 20 foot in diameter they cover a very wide range of frequencies for those who care about that sort of thing but this the real point of this array you can actually see me in the photo flashing my flash down here and accidentally got in the picture there's Jupiter um these the the advantage of this thing is it's faster than previous experiments much faster that's the point of it this is what it looks like a you know from 50 feet up 42 antennas we have 42. the idea is to build 350. actually now you know that could be done in the next two years but it's a money problem let me just show you this this is just a little animation that shows you what it'll be like if you get all 350 built this is a project together with the University of California at Berkeley by the way so they're using it for conventional astronomy at the same time that we use it for seti presumably if we get all these things built we'll only have enough money for one employee there he is okay okay and yeah so that you know at 350 this becomes an incredibly powerful instrument incredibly powerful both for astronomy conventional astronomy and for City all right so to the point here about how long it's going to take us to find out this this Quest has been likened to the matter of finding a needle in a haystack I don't know how many people do that but you know and somebody will ask oh when are you going to find a needle Bob I mean you've been looking at this it depends on three things how big is the haystack in the case of this search we know how big the haystack is it's our galaxy a couple hundred billion stars two how many needles are in there in the case of our search we don't know how many societies are out there broadcasting we don't know the number of needles and the third thing you need to know is how fast are you going through the hey are you going through it with a teaspoon skip loader what right now that we do know in the case of this exercise because this plot these black dots show some metrics some indication of the speed of our search and you can see it's going up all right and for those of you who are still you know conscious there you may notice that this is a semi-log plot in other words it's going up exponentially kind of an overworked word the media like to use exponential everything's growing exponentially but it actually has a real meaning uh and this actually is going up exponentially in fact it's following Moore's Law which is that line there now Moore's Law Gordon Moore is one of the co-founders of Intel Corporation he noticed 50 years ago almost now that the number of transistors you can fit on a chip right and produce at a given price was doubling every 18 months what that really means is that the power of your personal computers is doubling every 18 months if you replace them right now that's an economic law actually that's not so much a technical thing it's because the people who make the computers want you to replace them on the same sort of time scale that you replace your car right you place your car I don't know how often you replace your car depends on how much salt the state of Missouri throws on the roads but every three four five years you might replace your car but your computer you know it's not suffering all that salt damage you know five after five years your computer looks just the same as the day you bought it and so they're figuring how can we get them to buy a new computer that one looks perfectly good right and the way they can get you to buy a new computer is to make the new one so much more powerful that after three four five years you don't get any respect at parties anymore because you've got an old computer his works it works so they double every 18 months on average it doubles and you'll notice that the speed of our search doubles every 18 months too which means whatever we do in the next two years kind of equals all the previous years put together and it's because a lot of what we do is just still hear me probably don't want to uh is it it's because a lot of what we do is digital signal processing so of course it doubles every 18 months all right so the bottom line is this this line tells you how far out into space we can see with an instrument like this new Alan telescope array as a function of time right so after by the year 2012 2014 we'll have looked out to 100 light years and then you know by 2015 200 light years and so forth the numbers down here are the important things those numbers give estimates and that's a euphemism for guesses as to how many needles how many societies are out there broadcasting signals that are wafting through your body as you sit through this operific presentation okay now we don't know Carl Sagan figured a million and then not billions and billions but me if he's right then we should find ET by 2015. Isaac Asimov figured 670 000. somehow he could do this to two decimal places all right so if he's right takes till 2022 or something Frank Jack himself figures he's very conservative he figures they're only ten thousand in in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars and only ten thousand out there that are broadcasting but if he's right then it takes till 2027 or 2028. the bottom line is if the assumptions that go into this experiment are right and we're going to find DT in the next two dozen years this is not an experiment that's you know like building cathedrals in the Middle Ages where one generation starts it and then you know four generations later maybe you you know you get it up above 20 feet or something right if it's going to work at all if the premise that this is a good way to find out whether we're alone or not is correct if that has value then this experiment is going to succeed within your lifetime and I feel strongly enough about that that I bet all audiences I'll bet you a cup of Starbucks that we'll find ET within two dozen years so there you go either within two dozen years you open up the Kansas City Star well all right you open up your browser and you read scientists find signal come in from 800 light years away or you get a cup of coffee can't lose no I mean they're always you know caveats maybe we're missing important things in a lot of ways this could go wrong that's why I only bet you a cup of coffee but I will bet you that much that'll work all right let me just say a few things about what he uses speculative things and what E.T might be like for example people always ask about that we always assume it's carbon based your carbon-based life forms captain and this is the periodic table you may remember it from bad experience in eighth grade um you see carbon up there there it is up close carbon uh is a very friendly atom as these four covalent bonds it likes to hook up with other atoms either other carbon atoms right and makes a very uh um sort of durable molecules actually and of course life is just chemistry right and they used to say that on TV life is just chemistry and so carbon is actually the best basis for making complex chemistry at least under the sorts of circumstances we have here on Earth people often say yeah yeah but underneath carbon in the periodic table we got silicon and it also has four covalent bonds maybe a silicon based life the trouble is the Silicon doesn't work nearly as well as carbon it's because the atom is bigger don't worry the bonds aren't as strong and you know think about it you take carbon you hook it up with some oxygen you get CO2 right which despite the problems we're having with CO2 in the atmosphere now CO2 is a great gas for biology all the plants love it you take silicon and you hook it up with a couple of oxygen atoms and you get s-i silicon dioxide sio2 and that's better known as quartz which you'll find that your plant does not want to breathe okay so you know silicon maybe under some circumstances but it's not saying underneath that is germanium in germanium-based life in tin Base Life maybe in The Wizard of Oz lead right so we we just assume you know ET is probably carbon based uh Homer Crowley went by there on a plant with plate tectonics so that they can get some metals and have some technology big moon a good big Moon's kind of good and stabilizing the the spin of your planet having Jupiter around is you may figure Jupiter is not big in my life but it but it's big and it's big in your life because it's sort of cleaned out the inner solar system of all these big rocks I was otherwise would land in Missouri and ruin your whole day these are all things that we assume about life yeah they have to have you see dolphins they may be smart but they're never going to build radio transmitters because they can't hold a pair of pliers right and also they live underwater where it's hard to do metal or Gene so for stereo Vision these are all things but what do they actually look like well we don't know Hollywood does he's District nine these guys I mean they have more or less the same gestures as us but they don't look all that appealing they're only you know most Hollywood aliens are bad aliens so they look like things you don't like like insects and arthropods and things like that you know they're vectors for disease they're annoying they eat your crops and all that you don't like them and if you were to scale them up you probably like them even less so Hollywood does that mind you you know you take an insect and you scale them up by a factor of ten and now the cross-section of its muscles are 10 by 10 100 times bigger so they're 100 times stronger but unfortunately their volume has gone up by 10 by 10 by 10 by a thousand times so their power to weight ratio has gone down by Factor 10. if you actually if you don't follow that doesn't matter but the point is the point is if you actually made a bug this big it would immediately collapse into a very unappetizing Heap but it doesn't matter to Hollywood um well then they're the lazy God aliens I love these kind these are mostly on television where budgets are smaller you know I mean these are really anthropomorphic guy I mean you could this guy look like somebody you might want your daughter to date if they would only send them to a plastic surgeon right they're not all that different from us you know God was too lazy to come up with new designs so it's called lazy God aliens uh there's no reason the alien should look like us I don't think so there's some people who do but I don't think so I just you know take a map of the Kansas City Zoo you know put it on the wall throw a dart at it and then go visit whatever it is you hit unless you hit the primate house it will not look like you they look like a fish or a snake or a giraffe or something right and those are all things that share a lot of your DNA right everything at the zoo probably shares at least 85 percent of its DNA with you identical to you even a pumpkin pumpkin seventy percent of the DNA in a pumpkin is identical to human DNA I assume your lifestyle is different than that of a pumpkin but these guys right do these look like any I mean really look they just look like us here's your standard alien um it's it's been pointed out by a biologist that this is just a projection of what we think we are going to become right another million years will all look like this because we're losing our hair these guys are going all the way we're losing our olfactory sense our dentition small nose of small mouths small bodies because they don't load trucks or living and in fact judging by the eyes they design websites that's our future could be I doubt it so we just assume that the aliens are on worlds that are sort of like ours they are okay that's the usual assumption and that's reflected in our experiments and what I'm really actually trying to say here is that this may be a little bit too provincial maybe a little bit too conservative okay uh we're still picturing the aliens as being something like the Martians of yore something like us okay now let's look at that sort of more fundamentally all we require are the aliens is that they be smart so they have to have intelligence your intelligence consists of a three pound brain once described as a slow speed computer operating in salt water that's your brain okay now your brain runs at 25 watts more or less which is the same power as a fridge light I point this out to my brother I always said you're a dim bulb but actually of Interest here is that uh your entire body runs at like 75 or 100 Watts right so I don't know how many people are in the room but each one of you is putting out heat equivalent to about a 75 watt light bulb which may account for the temperature in here in fact that's that's a lot but so you run at maybe 75 Watts but 25 watts is going to the two percent of your body that's in your skull it's very expensive metabolically you have a hamburger right and one third of the calories are going just to keep your brain warm no matter what you're thinking if anything at all okay so most men they're usually in idle mode okay so you know all right that's that's us um but that three pound brain I'm trying to tell you it's expensive but on the other hand it's an improvement over what we had this is a another plot showing the history of brain size for our uh our the hominids that became us so three million years ago your brain weighed one pound two million years or sorry one million years ago your brain weighed two pounds and now as I've pointed out your brain weighs three pounds now that last step from two pounds to three brains was important because with a two pound brain you're a forest ape and with a three pound brain you get 10 your next door so you might think all right so what's the point well the point is that maybe this curve just keeps going up maybe our descendants will have five pound brains or ten pound brains I doubt it because women are already having trouble giving birth to babies with heads as big as they are and they might just go on strike if you would say it's going to have a 10 pound brain eventually you know and also their mechanical problems with a 10 pound brain you know you're driving around in your car and somebody's trying to pass you and you turn to see it and you twist your head off which you know discombobulating everybody else in the car I mean a lot of problems but this is what we usually assume the ET will be these big brain guys they're just us further down the road but maybe not because there's this problem it's not maybe it's an opportunity this is a plot by Hans Maravich at the Carnegie Mellon he's a roboticist up in Pittsburgh and what he's plotted here is just the compute power per thousand dollars since 1900. see it's going up and the data run out here in 1997. so in 1997 they compute power for a thousand dollars you buy is equivalent to the compute power of a spider right today 2010 you get the compute power of a lizard for a thousand dollars which is good if you're trying to sell car insurance or something I don't know the point of this plot though is that by 2020 your desktop computer your laptop will have the same compute power as a human brain okay there's no doubt about this this is you know you can take any curve you want here but that's going to happen by 2020 your home computer will have the compute power of a human brain now people say well what happens then and I don't know I'm just going to turn my keyboard around you type I mean I don't know I don't know because this doesn't mean that it's thinking right to think you actually have to have the right software you have to figure out how to emulate thinking in software and that might take longer but it but what's unclear is that it will take infinitely longer right artificial intelligence as you know is a big research area and the people who do it have been predicting they're going to make a thinking machine within 10 years they've been saying that for many decades now uh but may you know they will also say don't confuse lack of success with lack of progress we will do it and when they do it you know once they do that then within 20 years you know one computer will have the same compute power as all humans put together now you might think we'll just keep up by putting chips in our brains I'm sure we'll do all of that but it won't allow you to keep up now let me just emphasize this by this little graphic I made this is the evolution of a horse right so 60 million years ago a horse was about the size of a collie dog today a horse is about the size of a horse Okay so that's 60 million years over here personal computers I had a personal computer in 1977. uh my computer at home today is I reckon it's 8 000 times faster than what I had in 1977. so in other words in 35 years or so computers have gotten 10 000 times faster okay in 60 million years darwinian evolution took a horse from this to that so it took 60 million years so you get the point if you can produce artificial intelligence and you may say well you never do it you may I think delude yourself into saying that but if you can do it it then in fact it very quickly outpaces Darwin I mean you know that's the end of the race it's not that we disappear right it's just that the machines go do their thing or who knows but in any case it doesn't mean we necessarily disappear all right so here's the time scale you invent radio we did 100 years ago you go on the air now we can find you and that your phones have stay on and then within 100 200 300 years you invent your successors because that's what we're doing so I think if you really want to know what ET is like you can forget these carbon-based guys like this fellow here the arrival okay he looks kind of like us must have the same plastic surgeon as Michael Jackson um you forget these guys because we're going to invent our successors and they've already done that right then what do they do well Ray Kurzweil figures they might be Nanobots you know they just spread out and chew up the cosmos not much evidence of that happening but you know possibly and I think it's this stuff makes sense to me because now you've spread out the intelligence over a great deal of of space and that's not a good thing to do if you really want to be smart because you want to minimize the time it takes from one idea to get back and forth but in any case I think it's much more only you can prevent gray goo I think that the more likely thing is that these intelligences will be very concentrated made out of whatever the optimal Computing material is called computronium this is only this that that gray guys or biological entities maybe on a planet and they're you know billions of them and whatever they're just sort of like us but in fact at the point where they could actually make their presence known they're almost at the point where they can produce something that's clever than themselves and has more capability and so the odds are that if we find something that's what we find where would they be who knows I don't know I just suggest this as one place the the center of the galaxy has a lot more energy and matter than we have around here maybe they're there maybe we should just point our antennas there all the time we don't do that but that would be a good strategy all right let me just finish up because it's getting late let me just finish up by showing this slide this is the front of speech from a book about Australia the history of Australia called the Fatal Shore by uh Robert Hughes I think it was an art critic for the New York Times but maybe I got that wrong any case he wrote This Book and this is just the front of this piece but you see here this is April 1770 and you see Captain James Cook there right Landing in botany bay which is you know what 20 30 miles south of modern day Sydney and the locals of course are happy to see the English now what Hughes wrote was that for 40 000 years there had been a watch glass of isolation sitting over the continent of Australia right and in that afternoon in April of 1770 Captain Cook sails into Botany Bay and that watch glass cracks and there's no ever putting it together and what I'm suggesting to you tonight is that in the next two dozen years we're going to see the watch class of isolation that has sat over our planet for four and a half billion years crack and I think that'll be very interesting okay thank you very much [Applause] we have time for a couple of questions we have a microphone up front one in the back if you could raise your hand okay um yes I did see you on Larry King live uh well the um question by Stephen Hawkins about the possibly being dangerous for us to contact alien life how do you feel about that yeah well let me say I mean I have a lot well let me not say all that stuff background I don't worry about it I don't worry about it you could say look Advanced aliens won't be hostile but that falls under the category of alien sociology in the facts are the data set for alien sociology is pretty slim so you can't say categorically they wouldn't be aggressive maybe they would be I mean I think if they came here I agree with Hawking on that if they came here I would you know grab my wife on a bunch of frozen pizza and head for the hills but the fact that we're listening there's no danger in that right when you tune in kcur here you don't have to worry that the DJ is going to jump in the car next to you and start giving you a hard time they don't know that you've tuned them in so that's a passive experiment is it dangerous to broadcast you could make that argument if you wanted to but and this was the point I was trying to make on that show never got around to making the point because he couldn't but that is if you really are paranoid about this if you're worried about this it's too late it's too late because we've been broadcasting for 60 years and while those signals are quite weak any society that has the capability to come here and ruin your whole day right has more than enough capability not only to pick up our TV and our Radars but to pick up in FM radio but to pick up the lights from our cities in fact that horse has left the barn so if you want to worry about it it's okay but it's too late so I recommend you prepare accordingly um the the question part is uh how narrow is the narrow band that you look for and the comment that comes that I'm thinking about it comes from what you you know the the the expansion rate of intelligence and uh the the technology is changing to broadband for communication and so you know we might in 100 years no longer produce signals that would look like the nerve it yeah that's a very good a very good question it's a somewhat technical question he's suggesting that we're looking for the wrong kinds of signal because we don't use narrow bands so very much anymore I mean high definition television still has a carrier in fact but it's much weaker than the analog TV signal and so maybe we're you know we're becoming invisible and they've long ago become invisible because they operate the way your cell phone works spread spectrum and stuff like that I don't worry too much about that to begin with I think it's very difficult to hypothesize what somebody a hundred thousand years ahead of us might be doing in terms of radio technology if 100 years ago you'd ask Marconi what do you think this invention will be useful for in the year 2010 I'm sure you would have had a lot of ideas but most of them would have been wrong so there's that but the other point is if they're deliberately trying to get in touch I agree they will be efficient it'll be very hard to find leakage from their Planet but if they're deliberately trying to get in touch or if there's a you know galaxy-wide weather report or news reporters then they will include narrowband components because those are they Remain the easiest thing to find so they they want you to hear them they will do that and that's that's about all I can say the difference between a star and a planet yeah well difference we need to start a planet the Stars you know makes its own light if you will a star has an energy source and produces a lot of light and heat the surface of the Sun is about nine or ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit surface of the Earth is somewhat lower than that yeah yeah planets tend to be cold compared to stars stars shine that's it that's the answer thank you thank you for attending tonight's lecture our final lecture in the are we alone series is next Wednesday May 19th 7 P.M thank you and good night

Channel: Linda Hall Library

Views: 70,617

Keywords: Extraterrestrials, ET, SETI, UFO, UAP, aliens, astronomy, STEM, STEAM

Id: 8PF3gINC17Y

Length: 69min 8sec (4148 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023