Why we should search for alien artifacts | Beatriz Villarroel | TEDxZurich

[Music] thank you [Music] how many of you believe there's intelligent life on a different planet how many of you believe that Ichi ever visited our solar system and how many of you believe that the pyramids were built by aliens and that your office Mates is actually a space lizard in disguise my name is Beatrice Villarreal and I'm a very curious person I love exploring the topics to say I should never touch I'm also astronomer with a PhD in the last five years I've been wondering can I still vanish Is there alien life out there and how can we search for it we've all seen movies about E.T in Starship Troopers giant bugs come to the Earth and attack the humans it's a splatter movie I always enjoyed alien with Sigourney Weaver with a smart woman who nobody listens to and stopped the only Survivor just remember to be aware of the cat when it comes to movies representing the actual searches for et I believe contact is the most profound where Dr Ellie arroway searches for et in the radio bands She searches and she searches and finally she makes contact represents the first generation searches for extraterrestrial intelligence Minister must believe that we'll find alien life by looking for signs of intelligence in the radio bands since 60 years astronomers use the world's largest radio telescopes since seven years they have conducted the most impressive effort ever in the radio look at the size of these Majestic telescopes they have surveyed thousands of stars and galaxies no they have solved as many as 300 000 objects but nothing nothing has been found Dr Ellie Attaway is still waiting for her signal then the other bio signature scientists these guys and girls are much more modest why should we be looking for an intelligent civilization capable of writing Books and Music when it is much more likely that a planet has primitive life the bio signature scientist to want to find primitive life on a distant planet amoeba and once the little miserable organism jumps on the planet's surface and blows out some gases my astronomer colleagues expect to find a bump or a signature in the Spectrum I don't need a planet in our solar system I'm in a planet that looks like the Earth is another star that is where the expectancy something in the Spectrum but we don't have one image of an earth-sized planet around another star not even a dots now if I tell you I want to look for et visiting our backyard you will directly think that I want to look for flying sources flying sauces like a Mass Attack Independence Day or X-Files where they land in front of the White House in all movies all UFOs always land in America many of Myers [Applause] many of my astronomy colleagues they don't really like UFOs and they just reject the idea and can you really blame them we have today billions of mobile phones capable of doing any kind of picture and there's still not a single high quality believable image of a UFO and after several Pentagon hearings last year they presented us with more images of bloody dots astronomers were not impressed but when it comes to getting the spectrum of an earth-sized planet around another star there is not even a bloody dot for an image and now we want to look for alien live there what if what if we instead where to look for artifacts and objects that an advanced civilization has sent to our solar system it only requires technology we already have and it is possible to do researchers from the ground using technology of the cheapest kind so why should we even try to look for this life about 20 percent of every Star similar to our son has a planet similar in size to the Earth orbiting the star within the habitable zone with liquid water can exist there are 40 billion earth-sized planners just inside our own Milky Way galaxy scientists have found 80 different types of amino acids on asteroids they have found even the basic building blocks for the DNA molecules with the basic building blocks of fly being everywhere there are all reasons to believe that our galaxy is full of life no humans can send a spaceship on an Interstellar travel and we can send exploratory spacecraft so-called probes the probe can carry a message it can carry cameras communication systems lasers everything needed to communicate back to its creator Voyager 1 was a NASA space probe launch in 1977. it's carried a golden record and indecent pictures of humans it's a surprise that the Voyager Mission has not been canceled so far it has already flown by Jupiter Saturn in fact it entered Interstellar space in 2012. at its current speed it could reach the distance of the closest star Alpha Centauri in 77 000 years but in the future we might be smaller and faster probes traveling maybe at a fraction of the speed of light for example breakthrough star shot aims to reach Alpha Centauri our closest star in 20 years now if we can send a probe to another system also cannot Advance civilization Center probe to our solar system our galaxy might be full of billions of probes on adventure so now one part of the story is a center probe another part of the story is to detect one but we can do that too we detect probes every day we call them satellites we can also see space coverage there are one million pieces of space garbage in orbit around the Earth and they are easy to see when the sunlight is the surface of a satellite or a piece of Base debris sometimes a short flash of light can be seen as an object rotor is even small artificial objects can be tracked by a telescope on the earth either by astronomers or the military this gives us our direct method to search for EET probes we just need to look for fast flashes of light for example we can use photographic plate images from 70 years ago these images were taken when the sky was entirely devoid of any human objects in garbage and in these images we can search for fast flashes of light flashes of light following a straight line such short flashes are similar to those produced by an artificial objects when it's reflecting sunlight this makes searches for et Pro so easy because we know you must have nothing up there and we already have all the data I got the idea when my team made an unusual discovery we saw nine flashes of light that appeared and vanished in a small patch of the sky within half an hour we did not know what it could be there were two possible explanations one is that we see false stars on the plates created by nuclear fallout from unreported Secret nuclear bomb tests in the early 1950s in United States but I'm no conspiracy theorists the second option is that they see fast flashes from lasers or something reflecting the sunlight outside the Earth it could be 80 space probes or it could be spaceships or it could even be just small artificial objects that have been orbiting for millions of years now my team the Vasco team wants to search for fast flashes from Alien probes and we want to use both old images as well as survey the sky with an entirely new instrumentation that we have designed we don't need one billion dollar missions or telescopes we don't need to create difficult challenging projects with thousands of people and we certainly do not need for Pentagon to release any of their secret reports they can keep the classified data all we need is to look up the sky as such for things that flash we can do today we're going to do tomorrow or in the coming years Dr Ellie arroway is still waiting for her signal but what if she's just has been searching for the wrong thing instead of looking for radio signals or primitive life let us finally ask did ET send a probe or visit our solar system many of you know astronomical Sagan Sagan estimated that the Earth might have been visited Ten Thousand Times by E.T traveling close to the speed of light there's no more time to neglect the question let us stop pushing away the uncomfortable we all need to look at the sky we all need to search this guy for glinting on human objects and knowledge through science through verifiable reproducible and transparent studies we can get a definite answer and only through curiosity we can all finally move forward next time you're told the Curiosity to kill the cat remember any cat has nine lives thank you [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 43,948

Keywords: Astronomy, Big problems, English, Life, Research, Science, Space, TEDxTalks, [TEDxEID:50430]

Id: N9p-r2OiHVg

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023