Instant Genius - Mike Garrett: Is there anybody out there?

Episode Date: July 11, 2018

There are 100 billion stars in our Galaxy – surely we can’t be the only intelligent lifeform out there? In this week’s Science Focus Podcast we speak to Mike Garrett, the Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, about the search for extraterrestrial life, what we’ll do if we find them, and what it means for us as humans. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio. If you do make that discovery, then I think it's one of the biggest things that we as a species would ever have achieved. And I think it would change a lot of things about how we think about ourselves and our place in the galaxy and in the universe. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team.

We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Helen Glennie, editorial assistant at BBC Focus magazine. When you look up into the night sky, do you ever wonder if we're alone on Earth? Could it be that we're the only intelligent life forms orbiting one of the hundred billion stars, in our Milky Way. With numbers so vast,

it seems impossible to believe that there are no other beings, little in green or not, going through the same experiences as we are on Earth. But as of yet, we know nothing. This week we talk to Mike Garrett, the director of the Georgia Bank Center

of Astrophysics, about the different methods of searching for extraterrestrial life, why we've yet to find anything, and what it means if we discover we're not the only ones sending messages to the stars. Here's ScienceFocus.com,

editor Al McNamara talking to Mike Garrett. So your specialise, your specialist is the search for alien intelligence. How are you searching for aliens now that's different to how we've ever done it in the past? Well, I think we're looking at the potential effects of aliens in a wide range of different sort of astronomical data sets. traditionally, of course, people have been looking in the radio to see if they can see sort of the signatures of radio signals that were generated artificially and so by some other technical civilization. I think that's still a very sort of valid way of looking for potentially extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe. but there's all sorts of effects that aliens could have on astronomical data.

For example, if you have a very advanced civilization and they use a lot of energy, then you would expect to see that as an enhancement in the infrared emission that they produce, for example, in the mid-infrared or maybe even in the far infrared. And so there's actually, there's also, for example, the exoplanet research, which of course has been very successful in detecting planets around other stars. But of course you can use the same technique to look for megastructures, structures that have been built by advanced civilizations around their star to potentially, for example, collect energy or maybe for manufacturing. or maybe for computing. So you would also see that in the light curves of stars, you would see these kind of effects.

So I think it's sort of, I think it's important to think about how extraterrestrial civilization potentially can affect the data that astronomers use to do astronomy and to do astrophysics. We shouldn't sort of forget that there might be some non-natural, effects in the data. So what you're saying is that if we are to use astronomical data to find extraterrestrial intelligence, they're doing something that's markedly different to what we're capable of doing, as you say, with using manufacturing around a sun?

Yeah, I mean, I think the more advanced the civilization is, you're kind of making an assumption that the more difficult it is for them to hide. So, I mean, as you suggest, we are probably not terribly visible in the universe, although the radio waves that we've been generating for the last 50, 60 years. Potentially, you know, they're strong enough to be detected at fairly large distances, but they haven't gone very far yet. You know, they're only sort of 60 light years beyond the earth at the moment. so they haven't really travelled so very far. But even we're not an advanced civilization by any means. But at some level, we are also producing some effects

that might be detectable by a really advanced civilization that might have very sensitive instruments, very sensitive radio telescopes, for example. So you'd assume that an alien civilization that's capable of detecting the signals that we've got is going to be more advanced and how long will it be before realistically they are the ones

that are looking at us as opposed to us looking for them? Well, as I said we've only been sending out artificial signals like radio signals really strong ones for the last 60, 70 years so

I guess we are detectable within that sphere of 70 light years but you know I think at least my own feeling is that intelligent life is probably quite rare in the Milky Way, our own galaxy, probably quite rare, you know, full stop. So that, you know, there probably aren't very many sort of technically advanced civilizations within the radio bubble that we have created so far.

So I suspect the chances of us being detected at the moment are probably limited. I'm picturing the beginning. I think the film is Contact, where it's got the radio waves at the beginning, and the further out it gets, the further back in time you're getting of that signal. Yeah. So realistically, aliens are long way away

are going to get like the earliest signals for us, essentially. They probably could be very far away. So, you know, we're maybe talking about, you know, 10,000 light years from here, which means they'll see us, as we were 10,000 years ago and well, the way things are going at the moment, you would be surprised if we are still around 10,000 years from now.

So it could be that we've already become extinct at some level, at least as a sort of advanced technical, well, not in advance, but as a technical civilization, we might have already sort of been and come and gone. So could that be the same other way? if we spot something using astronomical data, that could actually be of a civilization that's actually not existed for a long time.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it might not be there. So it's a bit disappointing, but the scale of space, the scale of our own galaxy is so huge and probably intelligent life is so rare. So we mean there could be hundreds of intelligent technical civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy,

but they're still separated by thousands of light years. And that makes it difficult to detect them because they're rare. So the signals are not all over the sky. They're only coming from particular sort of small locations on the sky. And of course, having a conversation, if you're separated by 10,000 light years, then that becomes pretty impossible

to have a conversation. You could pick up perhaps if they're broadcasting, you know, their encyclopedias. You could record those, but you couldn't actually have a conversation with the people that had, or the beings that had created those encyclopedias. That would be difficult. So the messages, are we

ourselves sending out messages and have we designed something, like I know on Voyager's the Golden Record, which was, you know, practically anyone who gets that's going to be as confused as anything, but are we sending out some sort of message which is going to sort of give any form of alien or extraterrestrial intelligence a chance

to understand us a bit better? No, we have in the past sent out messages and some of those messages have been designed so that they should be, you know, interpretable by other sort of civilizations if they were to come across them. So I think Frank Drake, for example, in the 1970s, sent a message with the Arrocebo telescope, and it was a message really designed to try and describe who we are and what we're like and what we do.

Using quite a lot of maths and science as a sort of basic building blocks towards more complicated ideas. So that has happened, but really very very very. rarely has it happened, have we actually deliberately sent out messages with content. But of course, we're sending out messages, you know, every day with our own radio waves. When we transmit to the spacecraft in the solar system, we're sending out pretty powerful radio signals that would be sort of easily identified as being artificial in nature, so not something that's been generated by stars or galaxies, but something that clearly has intelligence behind them

because they have a very narrow band sort of signature, very narrow frequency channels. So we're doing that all the time when we talk to the Voyager spacecraft and New Horizons and all these other spacecraft that have really small antennas, so they need to receive powerful signals. receive powerful signals at the edge of the solar system. So those signals go beyond those spacecraft, they go out into the

edges of the solar system and beyond and in principle would be detectable, but wouldn't have much content in them. Mostly designed for Voyager and New Horizons to listen to. Yeah. So when you say a moment ago you were talking about the conversations essentially that would have, we would actually, what we would be doing is we would be listening to what they're saying and they would be listening to. to what we would be saying with not really much chance of a conversation happening there?

I think so. I mean, if intelligent life, and I might be wrong, I mean, the good thing about this business is that I think everyone has, you know, entitled to an opinion on it because we have no idea whether intelligent life or technical civilizations are widespread in the galaxy or whether they're actually quite rare. So, you know, but if they are out there, I have a feeling that they're rare, and that's partly because we haven't detected anything so far. And if they're rare, then, you know,

the Milky Way is just so big. You know, it's 100,000 light years across. And the speed of light is so slow, you know, we always think of the speed of light as being, you know, incredibly fast. For us, it's almost instant. You know, you see someone move and that's instantaneous because light travels fast for us. But when you're trying to communicate on scales, not across a room or, you know, across the Earth's surface,

but when you start communicating across the galaxy, then things become difficult. You even see it with a mobile phone. You know, if a mobile phone has a large delay and you're trying to speak to someone in Australia, even a few seconds delay makes conversation quite difficult. So you can imagine if you had 10,000 years. years of a delay between conversations, it becomes impossible. So what are the chances then of actually, even if it's not conversational, even it's just us, two civilizations, ourselves and another one, what are the chances that actually

happening at the same time? Well, for it to happen at the same time, and if I'm right, that these civilizations are quite real, then it means they've had to have been existing for a long time. you know, they've had to have been sending out radio waves for a long time. They have to have been doing that and we have to have been doing that. So you're probably, you're probably talking about, if this occurs, you're probably talking about two fairly advanced civilizations sort of in this, in this scenario, rather than, you know, a fledgling technical civilization like ourselves where, you know,

there just hasn't been enough time for our signals to reach any other civil. if those civilizations are rare. And listening as well. Yeah, and listening and pointing in the right direction. And this is what makes it, I mean, SETI is a very, very difficult thing. And to detect signals, you know, the telescopes that we have, even in the radio, they only see a tiny fraction of the sky. And so there's a lot of things we miss,

even in astronomy, we miss 99.99% of all transients in the sky in the radio just because our telescopes don't cover enough of the sky. They cover a tiny amount of the sky. And if you multiply that fraction by the potential possibility that intelligent life is rare anyway, then the detection of those signals becomes very difficult with current technology. And it may change, you know, if we have, we are moving towards, you know, radio telescopes with much wider fields of view, being able to see a much larger area of the sky. I suspect we won't make any detections until we have a kind of all-sky radio telescope that sees all of the sky instantaneously.

And that's, that's quite a way, that's quite a way off. What would we need to be able to have an all-sky telescope? A huge computer. and an enormous budget for electricity. So talking about huge budgets, there's just been, is it $100 million or that's been invested into SETI-through Breakthrough Listen? Yeah.

What's that money going to be used for? Presumably that's not going to be enough to build the big Sky Telescope. That's not going to be enough to do what I would like to do. But I think it's an important first step because up until now SETI has been very kind of ad hoc. People get excited about building equipment to do SETI because it's quite an interesting pursuit in terms of the engineering challenges.

Some astronomers, not all, but some astronomers get excited by the idea of getting that hardware and then going and doing surveys. fewer people actually get excited about analyzing the huge amounts of data that these kind of surveys generate. And so there's all the data out there that probably has never been actually looked at at some level. And it's all just been a bit of ad hoc, you know, some pockets of private funding in the US, for example, coming and then disappearing and going through good times and bad times. And I think what Breakthrough Listen does is that it provides a nice base level of funding that really allows very systematic surveys to be done.

Now, using the best telescopes on the planet. And I think that's a major step forward. and to publish the results as well in refereed scientific journals. That's another big step forward. So you see a lot of publications coming out by the breakthrough list and the group in Berkeley. So these are very positive things. We need to take this and we need to build upon it. I don't think it's going to detect a sety signal.

I might be wrong. But at least it's the first sort of real systematic attempt of you. using the best technologies and the best survey techniques to do the best possible job. So I'm very positive about the project. So you can have the best equipment and investment in it. But then, as you say, it's very rare the chance of actually happening. So really, why are we doing it? Why are we investing so much money in it?

And why are we actually, in the grand scheme of things, looking for extraterrestrial communications? Well, of course, the breakthrough lesson is basically Yuri Milner's baby, and he's decided to fund it, and he's a billionaire. So it's up to him what he does with his money. I think it's a good idea. You know, perhaps a pessimist, well, I'm not a pessimist, but maybe I think the chances of success are limited. but at the same time, I don't know everything and no one, as I said before, everyone has a valid opinion on this topic

and there are many people who probably think the chances are much higher than I personally think. And coupled with the fact that, you know, if you do make that discovery, then I think it's one of the biggest things, you know, that we as a species would ever have achieved. and I think it would change a lot of things about how we think about ourselves and our place in the galaxy and in the universe.

It would raise a lot of interesting questions and at some level for me if we made a detection, that would be pretty mind-blowing, I think. It would change the way I personally look at the universe. At the moment, you know, as an astronomer, I see a universe. in which the data are completely described by sort of natural phenomena and the application of astrophysics. It's amazing how well physics in the laboratory applies to physics in the universe. It's sort of like the Fermi paradox in a sense. Should it really be like that?

It seems very unusual to me that the universe doesn't have some artifacts out there that are associated with other advanced civilizations. We don't see that at all in any of the data at the moment, but maybe we haven't gone deep enough. Maybe as our instruments get better, the possibilities of making those detections increase. Would you be able to just describe what the Fermi paradox is in this situation? So I think that, well, everyone has a different idea of what the Fermi paradox is,

but for me, I think it says that, you know, we have a set of, laws of physics. And if there are civilizations out there, and if they live long enough, so much longer than our civilization, technical civilization has lived, which is only a few hundred years old. But if, you know, they have technical civilizations that maybe lasts for 10,000 years, for example, or 50,000 years, and they continue to understand physics better and to be able to build technology. There's no reason

why those civilizations can't go from one star to the next star. And they don't have to do it sort of incredibly fast. You know, if they populate one star and then go out to a few others and it's a sort of avalanche effect if

these different civilizations colonize more and more stars. And if that happens, if there are advanced civilizations and they're capable of interstellar, or travel, then in the order of a galactic rotation, you know, which is something like 10 to the 5, 10, I'm sorry, 100,000, a few hundred thousand years, you can populate large areas of the Milky Way.

And the question is if such civilizations are out there, you know, why don't we see them? Why haven't we seen them here? Why haven't they visited the solar system? If you look at the solar system, the solar system I find incredibly disappointing. You go to Mars, for example, and it's absolutely pristine. It's clear the only rubbish that's left around there are all the spacecraft that we've sent there and their parachutes and their re-entry shields, etc, etc. Apart from that, the place is pristine.

And in the same goes for all the planets. and the moons that we've visited in the solar system. Again, they're all well described by just natural phenomena. There's no evidence that our solar system was ever visited by an advanced civilization. We don't see any evidence for things that we're left behind. Our own moon, for example, we have high-resolution images of the moon down to, you know, I guess about 10 centimeters. We can see the footprints almost of the astronauts that walked on.

moon. We can see the descent stage of the lunar module and the lunar rovers, etc. But everything that we see, and we've got good resolution, everything we see comes from us. There's no evidence that anyone else has visited us or the solar system. And if advanced civilizations are out there and if they've mastered interstellar space travel, which they should, because there's nothing in physics that says that that's not possible, then that raises a question where are they? Why aren't they here? Is it

because, as you say, our solar system and probably us as a species being not as technologically advanced, we're just not interesting enough? Could be. Could be. I don't know. I mean, if we look at the exoplanetary systems that we are, I mean, the exoplanetary surveys that are being done at the moment, they're a bit

biased, so they're biased towards finding sort of big planets in general and planets. that are close to the whole star because we use the eclipsing technique to detect them. But it looks as though our own solar system, although as I say, there's lots of biases.

It looks as though our own solar system is actually quite interesting. You know, you have these rocky, these small rocky planets and the central part of the solar system and these big gas giants on the outer side, the outer part of the solar system.

So at some level, we might actually be quite, unusual. So we might actually be quite interesting, I think, at least to an astronomer. So obviously that sort of takes away the logic behind things like UFO sightings and all that. That's not really, that's sort of not really there, is it? Well, I mean, I haven't investigated these things myself, but I know people who have and people who have spent a lot of time actually, you know, looking into this, because I think, you know,

you shouldn't just accept things for, you know, what you've read in the book or, you know, what your professor tells you or whatever. Sometimes you have to go out and do things yourself, but it takes a lot of time. And certainly, I know, respected scientists that have had a look into, you know, the UFO conspiracy and UFOs. And I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that there are, unidentified flying objects around the earth. And the fact that, you know, we've all got these fantastic mobile devices. I don't know about you, but I've never seen anything that suggested any good photographs of these objects.

It's still all word of mouth, etc. So you'd think nowadays we'd have great movies and films and pictures of these phenomena, but we don't. We'll just have to rely on sci-fi for that. Yeah. So sort of verging in. on the reverting in on the realms of sci-fi when we do

or if or let's just say when for the sake of argument when we do detect a signal from an alien civilization what happens what's the protocol then so there's

so actually one of the things that I do is I serve as one of the co-chair people of what's called the SETI permanent committee It sort of sits under the international astronautics association. And we have drawn up what we think are sort of a set of protocols that people are advised to use if they're involved in SETI science or SETI research.

So, you know, if you're to discover a signal, then, you know, I think the first thing that you, you would do is you would absolutely have to convince yourself that this was an artificial signal, that there was no possible or obvious natural explanation to it, that it could only really be fit by some artificial sort of explanation. And once you were absolutely sure that this was a sort of bona fide potential detection of a seti signal, um, The next step in the protocols is that you should give the coordinates to another independent observatory and ask them to check up on your observation.

Do they see the same thing, for example? And of course, these observations have to be independent, so it would be quite nice. For example, if you're using a radio telescope to make your discovery here in the UK that you might use a telescope to follow that up in the United States or in Australia well separated in geography. And then if they came back and say, yep, we've seen the same signal and we come to the same conclusions,

then I think the next step is that you should inform, I think someone in the United Nations, who's the top guy in the United Nations? The President of the United Nations, whatever that might be of your discovery. General, is it the Secretary, I think. Secretary General, that's it, the Secretary General of the United Nations. And then from that point onwards, I think you know, you would be, I'm sure people would be, you know, writing papers to nature, for example, and I guess they would be submitting them

to nature at that point after informing the United Nations. Now that's a whole kind of set of protocols. There's also protocols about how you bring, you know, what would be the way you bring this message over to the public in terms of press releases, etc. But I suspect that's not how it's going to work out. You know, if we ever really have a SETI signal, then it'll be some Pulsar astronomer

that has never thought about SETI before, you know, or some other kind of astronomer and the X-rays or gamma rays or whatever who doesn't know anything about the SETI protocols and makes the discovery and sends out on Twitter or Facebook or something like that. So I'm not sure the protocols actually have,

well, I probably shouldn't say that they don't have any value, but I think the way this will, a discovery will be made will be so different. from what we expect, that they may not be fully relevant. So it's discovered, essentially, the message is found. What sort of thing will it be? Will it be a communication to us, or will it just be, you know, noise that's come from their activities?

Yeah, who knows? I mean, if it's a radio signal, then the nice thing about the radio signals is that, at least the way we communicate, the radio is that we usually have what's called a kind of carrier wave which is a very sort of narrow band spike it has

power in a few frequency channels so very narrow frequency range so that's pretty easy to pick up so that's what Voyager sends to us and we send back to Voyager and then all the data comes in a much broader sort of band of

frequencies much lower power but the carrier signal is a you lock on to. And it's very easy to distinguish the carrier signal compared to just the sort of galactic background of noise, etc. So I think you'd be looking for something that was that kind of obvious, you know, some narrow bands of radio frequency signal in the radio. And in the other areas, you know, like the exoplanets, then, you know, if you discovered

a megastructure, then you'd be looking for signs that whatever was passing, in front of the star was not sort of spherically symmetric the way planets are. And that would also be a very obvious signal, you know, if it was some huge space station when passing in front of a star,

you'd probably be able to tell that quite easily because it's unlikely to be symmetric, for example. What about something like a Dyson sphere, which is sort of covering the star, as it were, to harness the energy from it? Would that sort of

signal, what sort of signal would that send out would suggest there's life there? Yeah, so there you would be looking in the infrared part of the spectrum, probably the mid-infrared or the far infrared. So, you know, 20 microns, 10 microns, 5-microns, something micrometers, something at those kind of wavelengths.

So, I mean, the thing that, one of the reasons that I think advanced, at least advanced civilizations, when I'm saying things, you know, intelligent life is really, I'm typically talking about advanced civilizations being rare. And one of the reasons that I think that is that Dyson spheres are something like a Dyson sphere. They make quite a lot of sense.

You know, they're very efficient. You know, the stars are very efficient at producing energy. And it's just a matter of having some kind of bucket to pick up, you know, the energy from the star. But if you have that bucket, if you have a lot of those buckets around stars, then they begin to heat up. up. And when they heat up, they produce this sort of emission in the infrared. And when we've looked, you know, we've looked through, you know, different infrared satellite surveys, we don't see any evidence for those kind of advanced civilizations, not in our own galaxy and also not in the sort of the local part of the universe here,

where there are many galaxies. We don't see sort of Kardashov type 2 civilizations. evidence for that or Cardyshroft type 3 civilizations. No evidence for that. That's one of the things that makes me think that, you know, at least these advanced civilizations must be incredibly rare. Or they just don't do things that we want to do. You know, they just don't have, you know, very high energy needs. You know, maybe they just sit at home having great thoughts.

Sitting on Twitter and Facebook is... Well, if they have Twitter on Facebook, that would suggest that they probably like energy. So maybe they're just meditating. What would they be meditating on, for example, if we did decide to communicate, we decided to send them a message? What sort of things would that be? What they would meditate on if we sent a message?

I have no idea. I suppose, you know, as we said before, they're probably advanced civilizations, so they've probably had their own history. perhaps they grew up or evolved on a planet much like this planet. So they've probably gone through all the challenges that we seem to be going through at the moment. You know, you called me today. I think it was, you know, yesterday was one of the warmest days in many cities in the UK. Yesterday, the warmest days in June or even in the summer.

You know, so they have their own challenges. They probably went through global warming, you know, using carbon. based fuels at some point and then if they advanced beyond that, they probably moved on to something else. So I guess if there was any information content on the signal that we were sending like a TV signal, it would be very interesting for them to see how we were evolving. In fact, they might already know whether we're on the slippery road to disaster or whether we can go beyond some of the challenges that we have at the moment, population growth, global

warming, rising of sea levels, the fact that we are producing sort of artificial intelligent machines and sort of letting them loose amongst the populace. That's probably going to happen the next 10, 15 years that we don't have many safeguards built in for all sorts of things like, you know, modification of DNA and designer babies. And, you know, we have a few sort of interesting politicians here and elsewhere where I think are making life very difficult. All those things. So they might already know,

just by looking at it, having this snapshot of us in the year 2018, whether it's a thumbs up or whether it's a thumbs down. Is it sort of like the great filter, as it were? Well, yeah, I mean,

and I think there are such, I think they probably are such things. It's amazing that we haven't blown ourselves up, you know, with nuclear war, or at least set ourselves back, you know, maybe 100 years. So we know that, that there are such filters there.

What we don't know is whether we can pass through them or not. With everything that we're doing with SETI, was everything that we're searching for aliens and we're looking out for the threshold communication and we just don't find it and we can't find it. What can we learn from all of this searching and what do we get out of it even if ultimately we don't find anyone out there?

So I think if we don't find anyone out there, I think, first of all, if that was really true, if there's no other intelligent life forms, even in our own galaxy, I think that would be pretty startling. That would say that there's something very rare about us, something even very special perhaps about us, which goes against all kind of scientific thinking, which usually sort of invokes the sort of Copernican principle. or the so-called principle of mediocrity, that one part of the galaxy is just as good as any other part, and there's nothing special about us. I think if we knew for sure that there were no other intelligent life forms even just in our own galaxy,

I think that would suggest that that principle of mediocrity didn't actually apply, at least in this particular case of intelligent life. And I think that would be surprising at some level. And I think it would be telling us that, you know, maybe there is something special about us and maybe we need to realize that we need to kind of work hard in trying to, you know, keep going to keep this civilisation sustainable, that we need to stop trying to somehow exponentially expand in all different directions. We have to become more sustainable.

we have to forget about borders between countries. We have to look after each other, not just people that are in our family, but people that we meet in the streets and people that we talk to in other countries that need our help. That if we don't do those kind of things, then maybe we will disappear very quickly as well.

And there will be absolutely no intelligent life in the galaxy or in the universe. I think that would be quite sad. The search for an extraterrestrial life is sort of philosophical about our own humanity, as it were. I think so. And if you see the kind of people that are involved in SETI and that are interested in SETI, you probably come across, you know, people that maybe the most visible are those that are actually searching for signals, you know, radio astronomers typically or astronomers in general.

But you see that there's a huge interest in SETI that brings people from all sorts of different backgrounds to think about some of the aspects that the question raises. You know, the, you know, theology, for example, you know, we have lots of religions here on Earth and they have some pretty solid ideas about our place in the universe and maybe even some ideas about, you know, intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. So if you made a detection, you know, it might, might change things in all sorts of different topics. And there's also culture, you know, the different cultures and how different cultures think

about the universe and what's out there. There's artists who are very sort of challenged by some of these thoughts. Even lawyers who think about, you know, how do you engage with other civilization, linguists that think about, you know, how do you communicate from species that are maybe intelligent but have had a completely different evolutionary path and maybe even think in completely different ways. So SETI just ticks a lot of boxes for a lot of really interesting topics. So it goes beyond just the detection of a signal.

It's really all-encompassing and addressing all sorts of fascinating topics and questions, I think. That was the director of Dodgerald Bank Center for Astrophysics, Mike Garrett, speaking about the search for extraterrestrial communication. you can hear him talk at this year's Dot Talks at Blue Dot Festival, which starts on the 19th of July. You can find out more at Discover thebluedot.com. Did you enjoy this podcast? If you like what you heard, then why not subscribe and leave us a review?

You can find us on iTunes, ACAST, Stitcher, and many of your favourite podcast apps. This podcast is made by the team behind BBC Focus magazine. In our summer issue, which is on sale now, we dive deep into the podcast. the science of laziness. We also talk to some experts about the threat of space war, and we meet two men trying to create an ice age Jurassic Park in the middle of Siberia, and of course, much, much more. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at

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