Will We Discover Alien Life? | Is Anybody Out There? | Absolute Science

on August 15 1977 a strange signal from the constellation Sagittarius was received by the Big Ear radio telescope the signal known as the law signal reached an intensity up to 30 times higher than the usual signals and had a duration of 72 seconds it's name comes from the note written at that moment by the person who discovered it Jerry our new collaborator and SETI project a project for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence founded by NASA in 1960 the WHA signal is among all the strange signals received up to now the one that has the greatest likelihood of having been emitted by intelligent extraterrestrial beings despite its origins still being uncertainty to this day in a vast universe 40 billion years old and containing 500 billion galaxies science is convinced that there must exist or must have existed extraterrestrial intelligence in this vastness it would seem that there should be fullness of life out there with this conviction human beings have searched for and still search for it incessantly state-of-the-art radio telescopes attract the sky day and night year after year in search of any sign of extraterrestrial intelligent life [Music] nevertheless in 2009 everything changed that year NASA launched the Kepler satellite into space and thanks to it we have found thousands of earth-like planets where conditions for life might be possible this is meant undoubtedly the total revolution in the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life [Music] given the important advances in astrophysics some scientists believe that there is a chance of finding extraterrestrial intelligence in the next decades seth shostack astronomer and director of SETI search for extraterrestrial intelligence declared before the House Science Committee of the American Congress that in a couple of decades we will have found evidence of its existence finally yet I think they're good and if that happens it will happen in the next 20 years depending on the financing a first contact could be close the question is do we really want them to find us what will these forms of life be like what will their aims be is anybody out there [Music] given the millions of billions of earth-like planets life elsewhere in the universe without a doubt does exist in the vastness of the universe we are not alone Albert Einstein 4.5 billion years ago in the baskets of the universe the earth our home was formed from the birth of the universe it took 14 billion years for human beings to arise just six million years ago to give us an idea of the time which has passed until our first steps Carl Sagan made a time comparison in which if the age of the universe was a year the Big Bang would have occurred on January 1st on September 8th the Sun would have formed on September 11th the earth would have formed and we would have been born the last day of the year December 31st at 11:39 how many things must have happened in other places during the same time today when we take a look at what we know about the universe and what we know about the origins of life on this planet it leads us to think that the same things that happened here might well have happened elsewhere and so life beyond this planet is quite plausible in terms of a science that we know today we see the organic building blocks that are essential to life on Earth and so the raw stuff that's necessary for life is out there the places that life could live is out there the big question is do they come together and form a second Genesis we take up a tiny place in the immensity of the universe the Milky Way the galaxy we live in might have around 100 billion stars among them our Sun in total it measures around 100,000 light-years in diameter maybe there are a million maybe there are a billion maybe there are a hundred billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy that could support life the kind of planets that earthly life could survive on how many of them have cooked up their own life here from one end of the Milky Way we an intelligent civilization wonder if it's possible that we are alone in all of this vastness there's just a lot of real estate a lot of room for life in space we've now learned that planets are as common as cheap hotels they're all over the place there are a trillion that's a million million planets just in our own galaxy if there is no life on any of them then earth is a miracle a miracle and I'll tell you this for scientists believing in miracles is usually not a good strategy when we think about how vast the universe is it would be incredible if there's no other life out there there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone and there are billions of galaxies in the universe if life appears on only a miniscule fraction of those planets then life is prevalent throughout the universe that's why human beings and their enthusiasm for knowledge and exploration have started the search for intelligent life with the hope of sooner or later finding it being found by it [Music] Alton is Podesta hi Rita Aaron echoes Prospero's Eloisa manfully posse felicidade todos the hey a tener el esta carcinogen yeah right oh yes - Amon Polo Ronald Horvath Naveen evasion accommodation Aaron aunty fortunate receiver was na AKO karate ramana a neo Kozma was Narayana Harvick of Ananda awesome mission way where a person they show more closer this search can be done in two ways tracking signals that may come from any extraterrestrial civilization or sending our own messages into space which may be received by one of those civilizations someday active SETI also sometimes called Betty messaging extraterrestrial intelligence reverses the roles instead of passively listening for a signal from another civilization we send intentional powerful signals to nearby stars in the hope of getting a reply back [Music] with this goal in 1977 the most elaborate and comprehensive message to date the sounds of the earth was launched into space a moving introductory message including everything that human beings consider that our and extraterrestrial civilization should know about our species it was included on a golden record on each of the Voyager interstellar space probes launched that same year from Cape Canaveral as a golden record on one side that were encoded music from around the world greetings and 55 languages a 12-minute Sal montage of the evolution of life on Earth and on the other side there were pictures over a hundred pictures describing some basic mathematical principles in the diversity of life and culture on earth the content of the recording was carefully chosen by NASA and a committee chaired by astronomer and author Carl Sagan the audio section has a salutation in English from the UN general secretary and short messages in 55 languages welcoming and wishing peace to all forms of life we thank you he thought is actually active really thought that one was not the only message sent there have been a few symbolic transmissions to Otherworld the most famous transmission to another civilization happened in 1974 from the world's most powerful radio telescope in Arecibo Puerto Rico it was a very simple message it took three minutes to sand and it provides a mathematical and scientific overview of life on Earth nevertheless the search for extraterrestrial life is not founded just on the sending of messages in the hope of a response someday but on the development of a search for signals that may indicate the existence of that intelligent life SETI as a scientific exploration actually got its start within NASA in the life sciences portion of NASA people were interested in the question of life beyond the earth and this program developed within NASA it launched actually in 1992 it was called the high resolution microwave survey in 1993 senator bryan from nevada terminated nasa's funding for SETI and he terminated with a vengeance so that NASA was unable to recover and come back the next year with another City program so at that point because we had already formed a non-profit Institute called the SETI Institute to help NASA stretch its funds as it did this SETI work in 1993 we said okay we've got a non-profit we're just gonna go out and raise money to do this privately the SETI Institute is nowadays the main world institution devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence it's a project called SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence this search is based on the use of radio telescopes radio telescopes receive radio waves as we can't go to space aboard spacecrafts to find that intelligent life what we look for our radio signals what we're looking for is a signal that's at one spot on the radio dial just like when you're listening to the the radio in your car you know you tune across the dial you hear static everywhere and then at one spot you're near and there's a station okay that's the signal that's produced by a transmitter somewhere it's not natural static it's not like a quasar a pulsar galaxies or hot gas coal gas all those things in space make radio noise but it's all over the dial so we look for signals that are at one spot on the dial and of course the source of the signal has to be up in the sky those are the kinds of criteria we use to know that even if we don't know what it means we at least know they're there they're there on the air one of the biggest SETI projects started in 2007 is the Fallon telescope array which seeks to install 350 antennas to receive possible messages from outer space we designed this we went to Paul Allen and asked him to fund it and he was generous to fund the first phase of construction of what we now call the Allen telescope array it's in Northern California near Mount lassen the Allen telescope array has 42 telescopes someday we hope to grow it to 350 the Allen project will become the most powerful instrument in the search for signals from other civilizations in our galaxy since it was launched after just a few months in operation it has been able to analyze the same amount of area of the universe as in the last 45 years of SETI's existence another of SETI's most famous innovative projects is SETI at home it was started in 1999 by astronomers at the University of California in Berkeley and it uses an army of millions of amateur Internet users from home anyone can be part of this enthralling pursuit the screensaver analyzes some of the data that comes from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico up to now more than five million people from all over the world have participated and are processing all of the info captured by the Arecibo radio telescope the SETI at home project has grown so quickly that it is the biggest ever of its kind both projects Allen telescope array and SETI at home have been a huge advance in the search for intelligent life giving hope for discoveries in the near future but undoubtedly what has radically revolutionized and pushed the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life is the Kepler mission which is focus on the search for potentially inhabitable planets it was launched by NASA on March 6th 2009 and orbited the Sun looking for extrasolar earth-like planets where life may be possible Kepler which is a space-based telescope that was launched about five years ago is on the hunt for planets Kepler has found literally thousands of planets or planetary candidates it's it's a planet finding machine the Kepler spacecraft has been a game-changer in the search for other intelligence Kepler now can tell us which stars have planets around them and which of those stars are earth-like that means we now know where we can point our telescopes to look for a twin of Earth in 2011 for the first time ever Kepler provided scientists with a census of the Milky Way for the first time ever we can calculate how many stars in the Milky Way could have a planet like ours around a billion so one of the big triumphs of astronomy in the last two decades is to show the majority of stars have planets planets all over the place there are more planets than stars according to the data in the near future millions of inhabitable planets may be found just in our galaxy what Kepler is shown is that maybe one in five stars has a planet which could have liquid oceans a bit of an atmosphere in other words the kind of place where you might want to build you know build yourself a house right so one in five means that just in our galaxy there are tens of thousands of millions of cousins of the earth that's a lot of real estate this data is crucial to answering the question of whether we are alone in the universe and helping us to resolve some unknowns of one of the most famous equations in astrophysics the Drake Equation which is now of major interest the Drake Equation is a way to grapple with all of the issues most central to determining how many civilizations are there out there in our galaxy trying to make contact the Drake Equation looks at seven independent factors and tries to put a number on each of them so you multiply all those up and you come up with a number that we call in the number of potentially communicative civilizations in the Milky Way our star is the rate at which stars have been born in the Milky Way galaxy over the last few billion years so it's a number that is stars per year our galaxy is ten billion years old and early in its history stars formed at a different rate all of the F factors are fractions each one must be less than or equal to one F sub P is the fraction of stars that have planets n sub E is the average number of habitable planets in any planetary system f sub-l is the fraction of planets on which life actually begins and f sub I is the fraction of all those life-forms that develop intelligence F sub C is the fraction of intelligent life that develops a civilization that decides to use some sort of transmitting technology and finally L the longevity factor on average how many years do those transmitters continue to operate that is perhaps the most elusive term of the Drake Equation as we look into our own future we wonder will we survive as a technologically adolescent civilization will we last long enough to make contact that is the big unknown the Drake Equation includes a series of terms whose value we can't know exactly it's just a fantastic framework with which we can organize our ignorant because you can't solve the equation there are no right answers to that equation not yet as we shift into the more biological and cultural terms of the Drake Equation we move into areas where we're uncertain but during the last few years we've seen how exoplanets have arisen in front of our eyes thanks mainly to the Kepler space satellite when Frank Drake first wrote down the Drake Equation back in 1961 he put his own personal estimates into each of those factors and came up with a number his estimate which was ten thousand so within the Milky Way galaxy of a hundred billion stars he thought ten thousand of those stars might host technological civilizations what do we know now that we didn't know in 1961 well we know one or two of those terms a little bit better and they kind of agree with the optimistic estimates that were made 5060 years ago there are other estimates that are extremely pessimistic there's only one and it's us Carl Sagan had a number that was more optimistic he said probably a million was his guess we think we know that our star and NCB are both numbers that are closer to 10 then say to one and all the F factors are less than one some of them may be much less than one but of all these unknowns the biggest unknown is Kell so perhaps the most useful version of the Drake Equation is simply to say that n is approximately equal to L the information in this equation is very clear unless L is large n will be small and these are estimates just for our galaxy but we don't have estimates just for our galaxy but for the visible universe this fact multiplies the chances for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence the Hubble Space Telescope has given us an approximate calculation of the total number of galaxies in the viable universe 100 billion so we can calculate the number of earth-like planets in the visible universe a trillion earth-like planets the universe is 14 billion years old so there has been time enough for intelligent empires to arise and possibly fall it would be miraculous if no other advanced civilization anywhere had ever existed it's just a matter of time until we find them radio telescope technology is becoming more and more advanced and some scientists believe that the first evidence will be found in the next decades so far we've looked at a little over ten thousand stars very carefully with the Allen telescope array in the next couple of decades that'll be a million stars and by the time you've looked at a million stars that's a reasonable number to find intelligent life if it's really out there in fact people like craig Venter and Daniel Cohen have said 20th century was the century of physics 21st century is going to be the century of biology but my colleagues and astrobiologists and young scientists are saying yes the century of biology on earth and beyond this coming century this 21st century could well provide us with evidence of life beyond Earth and a biochemistry that's different from the only one we know the chance of an imminent discovery brings with it a controversial question what will the first contact be like what could human beings say to another intelligence species what introductory message can we compose about human beings that species that it habits one of the edges of the universe and who have developed enough to wonder if there is anyone else out there or to try to find them there should be a deliberative process to think about how we want to present ourselves to other worlds and that is a dynamic conversation that we're having now in the south and in the science community should we transmit if we do who should speak for Earth what should they say in what language how it's not a simple task to ponder a first introduction to an extraterrestrial intelligence and the even more complicated question of how to compose that message to make it understood how we would say something meaningful to another civilization it is going to be one of the most tremendous intellectual challenges humankind has ever faced composing a message that can be understood by aliens will be extremely difficult and conversation may be impossible in order to make contact with another civilization and truly understand them we have to find a language that any scientist who is engaged in SETI anywhere in the galaxy will understand this is what's called active SETI or Metis messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence if you can build a radio transmitter anywhere in the galaxy you have to know that two plus two equals four and so it's basic mathematical principles like that that we use as the foundation for a language to communicate with extraterrestrials in terms of the message content how it should be sent and what it should say what would we say about ourselves and what are efficient encoding schemes and how do we provide a tutorial so that they can figure out what the scheme is my suggestion is to send the internet right send so much information that they can look through it and find pictures videos sounds text of course and they'll be able to understand it so like the hieroglyphics several messages have already been sent to space and we hope to receive an answer someday the first sent message was attached to the Pioneer 10 space probe launched by NASA from Cape Canaveral on March 2nd 1972 a golden anodized aluminum plate designed by astronomers Carl Sagan and Francis Drake was affixed to the probe it was a kind of an interstellar message in a bottle on it drawings of two human figures appear one feminine and one masculine with the image of the spacecraft behind them to show the proportion of the human silhouettes our address in the universe was also included as well as the scheme of our solar system another similar plate was affixed to the Pioneer eleven [Music] the next message sent in 1974 was designed by the dr. Frank Drake and transmitted by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico this message is generally known as the Arecibo message it was a very simple message it took three minutes to send and it provides a mathematical and scientific overview of life on Earth it starts with a description of our numbering system in a binary code numbers from 1 to 10 and then using those numbers a description of chemical elements that are essential to life on earth and once we can talk about those chemicals we can talk about the way they combine into molecules including DNA the core of our genetic material here on earth the arecibo message also gave a description of our solar system the population of our earth even a diagram of the telescope that was used to transmit the message 1977 saw the launch of the sounds of the earth the most elaborate and comprehensive message to date recorded on golden records they were affixed to each other on the Voyager spacecrafts besides salutations in 55 languages they included an audio section devoted to the sounds of the earth volcanoes lightning wind laughter and the message in Latin per aspera ad astra through hardship to the stars in Morse code also included were eclectic selections of music from different cultures the Brandenburg Concerto number 2 by Bach the Magic Flute by Mozart the melancholy blues by Louis Armstrong Beethoven's fifth symphony [Music] as well as traditional music from different cultures in addition to the audio 116 photographs were sent showing different forms of life on the earth and human society mathematics definitions the structure of DNA a diagram of the fertilization and birth a violin with musical notes and so on well anyone receive these messages will we have an answer but above all what will those who receive this message be like I think that one of the best things about finding life a second Genesis life that isn't related to us somehow somewhere else will be will be to begin to understand how biology can be different I mean we don't even know if they'd have the similar biochemistry but on the other hand you know we're carbon-based life-forms and carbon which is all over the universe of course is great at hooking up with other atoms to make complex chemistry and since that's what we are you know they might be carbon-based that's not crazy we're having a hard time figuring out what other ways there might be we're working on it from the bottom up with synthetic biology trying to build life in other ways but I think life elsewhere will have evolved to be perfectly suited to its environment if the environments are similar to ours then there could in fact be a lot of similarities if the environments are extremely different from those that we enjoy here on this planet then I think it's unimaginable I'd love to find out what we can't imagine in fact as we imagine the kind of beings we make contact with they may not be biological beings at all on earth we are anticipating computers becoming advanced enough that they may even deserve the term intelligence in the next century or so so if we make contact with a civilization that's thousands or millions of years more advanced than we are the intelligence on the other end of the line may be an artificial intelligence these hypothetical forms of life may have abandoned their biological bodies a long time ago to create a computer body they may have the ability to build a quantum computer with an extraordinary computing power a super intelligent device with the same capacity as a conventional computer that occupies a whole planet then they may have lost their consciousness of the self to be absorbed by a global digital network of minds a great collective consciousness but in terms of what they'd be like what they'd look like nobody can release say except this probably within a hundred years we're going to develop Thinking Machines here on earth so I think it's very likely that if you actually pick up a signal coming from elsewhere it's not coming from some sort of biological beam it's coming from a machine the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is not really different from the search for our own future the absolute ignorance about the possible aims of an extraterrestrial intelligence is what has led some scientists to voice their misgivings about announcing our existence to extraterrestrials at least until we know their intentions toward us active SETI is a controversial topic no less than the cosmologists Stephen Hawking warned do not transmit to et you know when he said that in 2010 his concern was that aliens may invade earth to strip-mine our planet taking our rare resources well Hawking is a genius but he can't predict the future and so there's no way he could have told that earth-like planets are distributed everywhere but even if there is a danger even if another civilization can come to earth it's too late to conceal our existence any civilization with the ability to travel between the stars can already pick up our radio and TV signals that are leaking off into space there is no added danger of transmitting signals through active SETI in any case considering the data we now know a first contact may be possible in a short time it's also possible that some civilization has already listened to our messages nevertheless how is it possible that if there are other civilizations we haven't yet received any evidence of their existence this is what is known as the Fermi paradox the physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked where are they the idea was if in fact the universe is populated with life why haven't they come here the formulation of that paradox arose when the physicist Enrico Fermi was working on the Manhattan Project whose aim was the development of the u.s. atomic bomb Fermi's answer to his paradox was that every advanced civilization develops along with its technology the potential to exterminate itself as was thought to be happen at that time the fact that other extraterrestrial civilizations had not been found implied for him a tragic end for Humanity however there are several possible solutions to the Fermi paradox they do exist but they are not communicating with us they do exist and communicate but we can't hear them they do exist and have been here but we weren't they do exist but most people don't know it yet they have disappeared maybe these civilizations have already destroyed themselves as a consequence of a nuclear war or some other cause but we find even more solutions to the paradox well there are a lot of answers to the Fermi paradox you know one is that it's actually very difficult to travel between the stars you know even over the course of long periods of time it takes a lot of energy it takes a lot of commitment and anything that you can gain in terms of information you could get a lot cheaper simply by sending radio signals another possible solution is that we aren't interesting to them if some civilization were able to come to the earth from the stars it would have to be thousands or millions times more advanced than ours and we may not have anything interesting to offer them such a civilization might consider us as primitive as we consider a simple beehive would it make any sense for us to interact with bees and try to make them understand our advances in spacecraft missions nuclear energy or quantum mechanics or maybe there is colonization and we just don't happen to see it because it's not nearby or it isn't very obvious paradoxically the galaxy could be filled with intelligent forms of life but we are so primitive that we have not even realized it another explanation for the Fermi paradox is that we may have already received those signals but we haven't realised it we haven't perceived the signals or we haven't been able to understand or decode them in this case some strange signals from outer space have been received their origins are now being investigated and they have posed serious questions for scientists the most famous signal that's been detected came in 1977 it was at Ohio State University's big ear radio telescope and in the course of listening for signals from another civilization there was this message that was strong that was spread out over frequency it looked exactly like the kind of signal we would want to get from et during his work on the night shift on July 15 1977 Jerry R Eamonn professor of the State University of Ohio and SETI project volunteer observed the weird transcription of the radio signal made by a computer in a section of paper feed to confirm later that it was the most intense anomalous signal detected up to that point by a radio telescope the signal of unknown origin had a duration of 72 seconds and reached an intensity 30 times higher than conventional signals and had come from the constellation of Sagittarius in fact it was so astounding that when the technician was looking at the printout the next morning he wrote Wow in the margin and that's become known as the WoW signal the computer processed the signals received into a series of alphanumeric characters it wrote the sequence 6eq uj5 which has kept the international scientific community on edge until today Eamonn and his team studied the signal in detail in the end they were able to rule out that it had been part of any interference coming from the earth so during the following month the operators of the radio telescope tried to reposition the signal but they didn't succeed well many times in the decades since then astronomers have looked at the same part of the sky to see whether they can find the WoW signal again but we've never been able to replicate it so the key to progress in SETI is to be able to find a signal that looks as good as the vowel signal but now to be able to find it not just once but over and over and over again today the origin of that signal is still under investigation another signal which provoked important debates was the radio source sh g b 0 2 + 1 4 8 discovered in march 2003 by SETI at home and announced a new scientists on September 1st 2004 since said he at home started more than 5 billion signals have been detected that because of their mathematical profile or their lack of repetition in time have been ruled out among all of them the candidate sh gb 0 2 + 1 for a was one of the very few that was confirmed again and the only one to maintain a high statistical chance of being intelligent and of extraterrestrial origin another relevant signal was the one observed by the Australian astronomer reg Burt bottle a SETI collaborator who found a strange signal close to what years later would be confirmed by NASA as the first habitable planet the glycin 581 just 20 light-years away on the NASA website in the section astrology picture of the day we found an explanation for the signal no one knows for sure what caused this signal there is a slight possibility that it just might originate from an extraterrestrial intelligence many unusual signals from space remain unidentified the study of signals possibly emitted by an extraterrestrial intelligence as a delicate matter that requires a great deal of confirmation first if you think you have a signal from an extraterrestrial make sure check check with colleagues double-check your data and then secondly if you're really pretty sure you found it tell the whole world despite countless conjectures about a possible contact or some evidence that is being hidden SETI states that we haven't yet received a confirmed signal and makes it clear that as far as SETI was concerned it wouldn't be a piece of information to hide a lot of people in this country figured that the federal government would cover it all up because the public couldn't handle the news well we know that isn't true because we had false alarms and what actually happens is the media are very interested the newspapers the radio shows TV shows they call you up right away if you get any kind of interesting signal so according to the SETI protocol the day they confirm the first signal indicative of extraterrestrial intelligence they will make the news known worldwide a fact that considering technological advances may occur in a short time seth shostack declared before the House Science Committee of the American Congress that in a couple of decades we will have found evidence of its existence the chances of finding it I think are good and if that happens it will happen in the next 20 years depending on the financing there are sort of guesses as to how many societies might be out there broadcasting and those guesses run from maybe 10,000 to a million well if then the correct number is any where in that range then we should find something within a few decades so you know this is not like building cathedrals in the Middle Ages this is something that's going to work within one generation if it's going to work at all if I had to bet when we will find intelligence beyond earth I'd say in the next 20 years and it's simply because technology is advancing all the time SETI success depends on computing power what will happen from then on what will occur when we receive a signal and it is confirmed as extraterrestrial how would that affect our lives our priorities our conception of the world and our own identity as humankind prepared so what happens if we find a signal if we find evidence that they're out there you know people will still go to work the next day or they're in school they'll still go to school they won't divorce their spouses there won't be civil unrest they won't be rioting in the streets it's just that we will know something really important that as wonderful as Earth is as wonderful as our species is we're not the only kids on the block and I think it's good to know that if it's true in January 2010 the Royal Society held a conference entitled the detection of extraterrestrial life and the consequences for science and society the introduction of the conference was as follows astronomers are able now to detect planets where life may exist and the living generation could see the signature of extraterrestrial life being detected should it turn out that we are not alone in the universe people fundamentally affect how humanity understands itself and we need to be prepared for the consequences [Music] over the long term if you actually did get a message and could understand it of course that could be very transformative imagine you know giving I don't know Neanderthals to keep the keys to your local library say hey you might want to read some of this stuff I mean that would change everything for them so there is that potential although I think it's a fairly far-fetched idea concern that a discovery could be closed humankind has slowly started to prepare itself to establish a protocol procedure neither a country nor a collective of people would be represented but all of humankind there's a protocol called the declaration of principles concerning activities following the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence and this provides guidelines about what do we do next the most fundamental issue raised in this protocol is before there is a reply there should be broad-based global discussion that if we are to speak to another civilization if we are to send a response it should be a response that has gathered global input this wasn't transmitted to the SETI Institute or to any other organization the message was transmitted to earth it belongs to the whole earth it should be shared wide most scientists agree that a finding like this would alter and transform the status quo in many ways what would be its effect on our society our science our technology or our religion so for me detecting another civilization is a way of coming to a better understanding of who we are as human beings it would mean a chance to see whether the ways of knowing that we've developed here on earth our math our science our ways of expressing ourselves our music our art are they somehow tapping into something that goes beyond earth or are they uniquely ours the discovery would be on the same level as those of Copernicus and Darwin and as of the transforming events in human history however it will be decades before people get used to the idea that we are not alone in the universe and it's real meaning becomes deeply ingrained has occurred with the hello centric cosmology and biological evolution it's likely that our first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization will happen when the Allen telescope array detects a message that confirms at last the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life or when one of the people connected to the SETI at home project announces that his computer has decoded some of the signals of the Arecibo telescope then our first contact will be a uni-directional conversation we might capture some intelligent message by chance but it could take decades or centuries before our answer gets to them given the huge distances of the universe let me tell you what my my hope for the impact of the detection of a distant technology would be what I hope is that we can make it understood to the people on this planet that the only way that contact happened was because on average technological civilizations have a long lifetime we're sitting here is a very young technology and we literally do not know whether it's possible to grow old to be able to be wise enough to manage our population to Shepherd our planet to go forward into a long future long in cosmic times but if we find someone else we know the answer to that question we get a proof of existence it's possible to grow somebody else figured out how to do it and I would hope that that would motivate us to find solutions to the problems that we face today we know that somebody else made it through this bottleneck this technological adolescence I'd hope it would motivate us to find answers for ourselves today we know that the first contact may occur in not too a long time it's not easy to figure out what will happen in this first communication if it will be something positive or harmful to human beings what is clear is that it will be a turning point in the life of the human species [Music] [Music]

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Id: ND4Kn1wtrVg

Length: 50min 55sec (3055 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2019