Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

For thousands of years, humans have looked up at the night sky and wondered, “are we alone?” For the longest time, it remained nothing more than a philosophical question, but in the 20th century, some researchers thought it was time to finally start looking.  One of the big questions was how do you look for something that you don’t know exists, and if it does, you don’t know where it is? Learn more about SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast. Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For thousands of years, humans looked up at the night sky and wondered, are we alone? For the longest time, it remained nothing more than a philosophical question, but in the 20th century, some researchers thought it was time to finally start looking. One of the big questions was, how do you look for something that you don't know exist, and if it does, you don't know where it is? Learn more about SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The idea that there might be other intelligent life forms in the universe is actually a pretty old one. We have writings from philosophers going back at least 2,000 years who have pondered the idea. The Greek thinker Democritus in the late 5th century BC pondered the idea of a plurality of worlds. St. Augustine referenced Epicurius in his idea that there may be many worlds, quote, throughout the boundless immensity of space.

The Islamic scholar Muhammad al-Bakir wrote in the early 8th century, quote, Maybe you see that God created only this single world and that God did not create humans beside you. Well, I swear by God that God created thousands and thousands of worlds, and thousands and thousands. of humankind." When the telescope was invented, it allowed astronomers to see some of the worlds beyond our own, and it only added credibility to the idea that there might be someone else out there. Many noted intellectuals of the time considered, if not advocated, the idea of worlds

beyond our own, including Johannes Kepler, Benjamin Franklin, Jean Locke, and William Herschel. In the 19th century, the French astronomer Camille Flamarian wrote a popular book titled The Plurality of Habitable Worlds. And it was an extremely popular book that went through 33 editions in just 20 years. Flamarian was probably the first person to propose that aliens would be very different from life forms found on Earth. All of these ideas were just that, however. Ideas.

They really couldn't be proven or disproven. It started like pondering if we're living in a simulation or someone else's dream. Things began to change at the very end of the 19th century in the beginning of the 20th century. The discovery which changed people's thinking was radio waves. Nikolai Tesla proposed that his wireless electrical transmission system could be used to communicate with people on Mars. Tesla got something right and something wrong. It was possible to communicate with Mars using electromagnetic waves. However, there were no Martians.

Tesla was far from alone in thinking that there might be life on Mars. Around the same time, the astronomer Percival Lovel announced that he had discovered canals on the surface of Mars. Lowell spent a great deal of time observing Mars and created sketches based on his observations, which showed lines on the surface. He interpreted these lines to be a vast system of canals on the planet that were created by an intelligent civilization. He wrote several popular books on the subject and was largely responsible for the idea that there were intelligent Martians. However, as telescopes improved, no one else could find his canals. His ideas were never really taken seriously in scientific circles, even if they did circulate for years in the popular culture.

They were taken seriously enough that in August of 1924, when Mars passed closer to Earth than it would for another 80 years, the United States conducted a national radio silence day, where radios would be quiet for five minutes every hour. Several groups, including the U.S. Naval Observatory, turned their antennas towards Mars to try to hear a signal. Needless to say, they heard nothing. Throughout the 20th century, our understanding of the cosmos improved, and we learn more about the size of our universe and the composition of our own solar system. telescopes improved dramatically, and we began sending probes to other planets. But the first real attempt to think seriously about the issue of extraterrestrial intelligence came from the astronomer

Frank Drake at Cornell University in 1961. Drake came up with what is known as the Drake equation. I've previously done an entire episode on the Drake equation, but just to summarize, it's an equation that lists all of the variables necessary to determine the odds of intelligent life in our galaxy. These include the rate of star formation, the percentage of stars with planets, the percentage of planets that can support life, the percentage of planets which actually develop life, the percentage which develop intelligent life, the percentage which broadcast their existence to the universe, and the length of time that a civilization exists. Most of these variables were mysteries when the equation was proposed, all they had were

estimates, which were really just best guesses. Other than the percentage of stars with planets, which appears to be close to 100%, we haven't really improved our estimates of most of the other variables. Drake also took the first step beyond just philosophizing about life and other worlds. He conducted the first actual search for intelligent life. In 1960, he pointed the 26-meter radio telescope at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia at the stars Tau Setti and Epsilon Iridani. In particular, he looked in the 1.42 gigahertz part of the spectrum, which is called the waterhole, because it's near the hydrogen spectrum lines, and is unusually quiet. Hydrogen, being the most common element in the universe,

would be a natural place where other civilizations might broadcast if they're looking for attention. He too found nothing. This was only a start. The galaxy is extremely big, and this was only a brief peak through one pinhole. What was needed was a long-term continuous observation of the sky if there was to be any chance of finding someone. Ohio State University conducted the first real attempt at a long-term observation of extraterrestrial radio signals. In 1963, the university opened a radio observatory called The Big Ear. And from 1973 to 1995, the telescope was dedicated to listening for radio signals from

outside our solar system. In 1977, the Big Ear received a signal, which became one of the most famous setty signals ever recorded. It was dubbed the Wow Signal. due to the comment written on the printout of the signal by one of the researchers. It was a 72-second-long burst emanating from somewhere in the constellation Sagittarius. It was 30 standard deviations more powerful than the average signals recorded, and to date, it remains one of the best candidates for an artificial signal ever found.

However, no one has ever seen the signal since. In 1971, NASA funded a SETI study called Project Cyclops. It was to be a massive radio telescope array covering the Earth with 1,500 dishes. It was never built, but it became the basis for future SETI projects. By the 1980s, more ambitious ideas were hatched. The SETI Institute was founded in 1984, which would serve as a hub for various SETI projects. One of the problems which was tackled in the 80s was the issue of spectrum analysis. Searching for intelligence isn't just a matter of the number of radio telescopes or the size of the radio telescopes, even though that is a fact.

You also had to scan an enormous number of frequencies, literally millions of frequencies. In 1985, Project Meta was launched, which stood for a megachannel extraterrestrial assay. It could analyze via computer 8.4 million frequencies, down to 5-100s of a hertz. This was replaced in 1995 with Project Beta, which could analyze 250 million channels. In 1999, SETI at Home was launched, which used the power of distributed computing. Participants could install software on their home computers that would check radio signals during its downtime. The program had hundreds of thousands of participants over the 20 years it was in operation. The project was put on hiatus in 2020.

Steady projects are usually low on the totem pole regarding priority for radio telescopes. They might get some time, but it's usually left over time. There was a need to have a permanent array of radio telescopes working full-time on steady observations. The Allen Telescope Array, named after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, was supposed to be a ray of 350 rather small 6.1 meter dishes, which would act like a single 100 meter dish. Unfortunately, only 42 dishes were ever constructed, and it has limited operation due to funding shortfalls. Here, I really want to stress the difficulty of the entire SETI initiative. You're looking for something that you don't know if it even exists. And if it does exist, you don't know where it is.

know what technology they might be using to communicate, and even if you knew that, you wouldn't know how they're trying to communicate. And then there's a slight problem of physics. The inverse square law says that a signal's power is only as fourth is strong when you double the distance from something, or a ninth is strong when there's three times a distance. Over the vast distances of intergalactic space, radio waves become really, really weak. Oh, and then there's also the small problem of the speed of light. If there was some distant civilization listening for our signals with super sensitive technology, only civilizations about 100 light years away could hear, because that's how long we've been broadcasting radio waves. Assuming they heard our broadcasts and were

100 light years away, it would take another 100 years for their signal to reach us. And that's just from our end of things. If some advanced extraterrestrial civilization wanted to send a signal out to some other civilization, it would require a tremendous amount of energy. You could somewhat overcome the Inverse Square law by broadcasting a highly focused beam of energy like a laser, but if you do that, you need to know exactly where to point it. Even then, energy will still dissipate over extremely long distances. Some estimates suggest that if we wanted to communicate with another civilization tens of light years away, we would need to broadcast with a radio signal that uses all of the energy produced on Earth. It also might be that we're completely barking up

the wrong tree. It could be that there's some advanced technology like Star Trek subspace communication that all the cool civilizations are using, and we just haven't discovered it yet. Advances in astronomy might make it easier to narrow down where in the sky we should look. Telescopes like the James Webb might be able to discover planets with high probability of life. If we can find such planets, we could focus our efforts there. It would certainly be easy, easier than trying to observe everything everywhere all at once. Currently, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is mostly a side project in the world of astronomy. There is currently no government funding for any SETI projects, and there is unlikely to be any in the near future.

All current efforts are privately funded, or rely on spare time on telescopes. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is one of the greatest unknowns that there can be. The search is who, what, where, and how are all mysteries. SETI is kind of like the scientific equivalent of playing the lottery. The odds aren't very good, but if you should hit the jackpot, it will change everything. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett.

I just wanted to extend a big thank you to everyone who is supporting the show over at patreon.com. I have show merchandise available there, including hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers. Plus, it really just helps me get this show out every single day. including, of course, weekends and holidays. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you too can have it read on the show.