Science Friday - Beach Health, Extraterrestrial Communication, Maggots. April 13, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: April 13, 2018

Some private citizens, scientists, and entrepreneurs are sending some focused messages through the cosmos, which could theoretically be intercepted by any technologically advanced civilizations among the stars, essentially advertising the existence and location of Earth. Is it ethical to do that—or could it needlessly put humanity at risk? Beach nourishment, the process of dredging up sand from the seafloor to replenish eroding beaches and protect coastal ecosystems, has a history that goes back to the 1920s expansion and widening of the beach at Coney Island. But does it work as intended? And where does all that sand go once it’s placed? These days, people are thinking about how to put maggots to good use before we die. That means we have to get over the ick factor and actually study these creatures. What do they eat, when do they eat, how much do they eat, and at what rate? Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira of Plato. A bit later in the hour, we'll be talking aliens and whether we should be trying to talk to them. Hmm. Is there a risk there? But first, NASA's Kepler planet hunting space telescope is failing, but fear not. A new planet finder called Tess is on the way. And here to talk about that and other selected short subjects in science is Ryan Mandelbaum, Simon's writer at Gizmodo in our New York studios. Welcome back on this Friday to 13th. There, come in. That's right. I actually have a selection of, I think, maybe some Friday the 13th spooky unlucky team stories.

Hit us with number one. Sure. So, yeah, Monday NASA is going to be launching the transiting exoplanet survey satellite or tests, which should be surveying as many as or perhaps as little as 200,000 stars within the closest 300 light years around Earth. And they're hoping to find some exoplanets, maybe some Earth 2.0 candidates. And who's launching this? Is this one of those SpaceX? Yeah, it's going to be on any SpaceX.

Sex Falcon 9. Wow, so there's a lot literally writing on that. Yeah, well, literally, yeah. Literally. So, so how is this different from Kepler? Sure. So this, what's really important about tests is that it's looking at the closest stars around us, and these are going to be potential, you know, they're going to survey it first, and then these will be potential targets for the James Webb Space Telescope or some successor to the Hubble to really understand what's going on to the, you know, around these planets and perhaps having an Earth 2.0 somewhere. So, you know, some of the telescopes

they have a very narrow focus on, which part of the universe. This is going to be a wide ranging search? It's a survey. It's a survey. It's a survey. Get as much as they can to, you know, understand what's there and then dig into what looks most promising. Okay, let's talk about other mysteries of the universe. You have a story about a new

dark matter experiment. I do. You like this. I love dark matter. I love dark matter. I feel like the perfect thing to talk about today. But I think dark matter fans will remember the Wimp particle as the biggest candidate. But some scientists are getting excited about another potential dark matter candidate called the Axion, which is much lighter than the Wimp, and they've got an experiment to the University of Washington that's hunting for it.

Wimp is weekly interacting massive particle, yeah. And what does Axion stand for? Axiom seemed after laundry detergent. I know that. It was like a little – it's like a tablet used to put it way before you. Sorry, I'm not old enough. Well, so how are these different again? How would axions be different than WIMS?

Sure. So axions would be lighter, and their motivations come from different places in physics. Axion specifically solve a problem called the strong CP problem, which we won't get into. Good, good. There is motivation in particle physics, and ultimately they're looking to find it with, it would have like a radio signature. they might be able to see with a radio antenna, actually. They have to just tune it up. So why haven't we seen these in these particles smashers?

Why doesn't it show up? They're just way too light, and they interact really weakly with the atoms and with the particles. So they're too small. They pass those. Too little. Too little. And if you find them, so what would that tell us about all the theory is going on? I mean, the thing about dark matter is that it's something like, you know, matter makes up 4% of the mass energy of the universe,

and dark matter makes up, you know, a quarter of the mass energy. mass energy of the universe. So there's all this stuff in the universe and we don't know what it is. Not to mention the dark energy, right? Don't even get me started on the dark energy era. So, say, that doesn't mind-boggling that we don't know what 96% of our universe is made out of? Makes my brain leak out of my ears every day. That's more than making a hair hurt, I think. All right, let's move on to this. There's a new Ictheosaur. What is an ectheosaur? So it's a really big underwater creature.

This one, scientists, well, a fossil hunter in the UK found this enormous jawbone fossil. And this fossil is, if they extrapolate its size, then they've essentially got this maybe 85 foot long giant underwater lizard. And this would be certainly one of the largest ichthyosaurs and only a little bit short of the blue whale, which could be about 100 feet. So we don't know much about this because we just have the one fossil. You know, that's one thing that people do think a lot with these discoveries is, okay, all you've got is a jawbone. Now what, if it's a different species, how do we know that it scales like this? But it's sort of a simple basic scaling function that would get you this big lizard. We know just how big it is, but nothing else about it.

Right. And you have a story also about something random, more random than your usual stories, which are quite random. Definitely more random. This is another one of those big physics experiments, but, you know, cryptography needs random numbers. order to encode things and secure your data. But there's a lot of concern about the ways they generate randomness aren't really randomness. And that random? Not random enough. You know, you might be able to figure out. Random but there really isn't random. Random is not really randomness. Real randomness. So one way that you can create randomness is by observing a particle using quantum

mechanics. If you put it in a system where it has one of two possible states, then potentially you can continue to measure that state over and over again to get basically a random coin flip. But there's a problem with that, and this is going to be a little mind-boggling, but if you could travel faster than the speed of light, then you'd potentially be able to predict what that particle is going to do. So what they do is they send two particles connected through entanglement, you know, spooky action at a distance. That's my favorite subject. And then they confirm that the number is actually random based on whether or not the particles were entangled. Yeah, my head did that too. Same.

Wow. Do they actually have a device that generates these? Oh, yeah. What does it look like? It's huge. You have two, almost 200 meter long arms of this giant L-shaped thing, and each of them has their own lab, and they send a pair of, you know, two beams of light particles split by crystals down either tunnel. And then they measure them and make sure that things are random. Wow.

But it's not, they've, they've, it takes 55 million photons to end up with 10 minutes worth of randomness, which is 1,024 bits of randomness. I'll stick with my dice. Right. Finally, there's another reason why you might not want it to eat the world's hottest pepper, right? Oh, yeah. This is perhaps the unluckiest of them all. A man was in a hot pepper eating contest. He tried to eat a Carolina Reaper pepper.

And what followed was thunderclap headaches that got so bad he had to go to the emergency room. Oh, don't you hate it when that happened? All the time. I mean, so he just wanted to eat this pepper? Or, you know, was it a dare? It's a contest. Oh, is a chili pepper eating contest, yeah. And so they think that there's a chemical in the hot pepper called a Capsayacin,

which is known to interact with other blood vessels. Shout out to my dad who actually worked with Capsidicin back in the, I think, 70s or 80s. But anyway, this could constrict or dilate the blood vessels and potentially cause these headaches. Wow, wow. So let that be a lesson to everybody. Don't eat too many hot peppers, especially not these. Yes, and bring it on the thursday. Friday the 13. Thank you, Ron. Thanks, Ira. Ryan Mandelbaum's Science Writer at Gizmodo. Now, it's time to play.

Good thing, bad thing. Because every story has a flip side. Now, beach sand. You go to the beach, you know, it comes and it goes. It's literally washed away by tides and wind, sometimes faster than the waves can pile it back up. So it is common for coastal engineers to try to replace the lost sand with sand scraped from offshore or elsewhere, where the sand gets deposited. It's a process called nourishers. but does it work? A study appearing in the journal Coastal Engineering asked this very question looking at four beaches in California. And while the researchers found that beach nourishment has helped keep some California beaches sand-filled in the face of some challenging tides, there are some downsides too. Boniludka is a postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute at UC San Diego.

Welcome to Science Friday. Hi. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. So what are we learning for sure about the benefits of adding sand to beaches? Yeah, well, the story just changes depending on what nourishment you're looking at. But the few that we studied here in Southern California, there were some that were built with larger than native sand grains. And those maintained relatively wide beaches for many years, even during a big wave El Nino winter. So they helped protect the back beach from erosion and flooding from wave over topping and promoted tourism.

So it really depends. The size of the sand grain was crucial. Yes. We compared that behavior to a nourishment that was built with sand with native grain sizes, which washed offshore in one moderate storm months after it was placed. Wow. That said that sand was stored in a large offshore bar, and some of it returned to the upper beach the following summer. But if you're trying to make the beach wider, then the coarser grains were more successful in some sense. When we talk about nourishing, I love that phrase, nourishing the beach. Yeah, I'd never heard of it. Back in the days we used to just call it erosion and filling it back up. Right.

But we didn't have hydrating back then either. How much sand does it take to fill a beach up? Well, that's one of the big questions is we want to know if we want to keep these beaches wide. How much sand do we need to add? How often? And if we do that, where does the sand go? Okay, so the good news is that if you choose your sand right, you can get the sand back on the beach. So what's the bad news about this?

Right. Well, some of those coarse grain nourishments that we observed also caused some controversy. At one site, groundwater flooding occurred at low-lying homes that were adjacent to one of the coarse-grained beach nourishments. And at the same site, nourishment sand migrated kilometers along shore and contributed to clogging a river mouth, causing hypoxia in the estuary. Wow, that's not good. Yeah, hypoxia is a loss of oxygen in the water that can cause diacetate fish and other aquatic species, and in this case there was a bunch of dead leopard sharks, so it caused some controversy there. And other studies have shown nourishments might have a negative impact on intertattle invertebrates

that serve as prey for shorebirds and fish. So oftentimes nourishments constructed with sand that's similar to the native sand are preferred to help mitigate damages to the natural ecosystem. Now, I've seen headlines before that we're basically losing our beaches to climate change. Is this what's happening? Are we going to need to nourish beaches more in the future? That's possible. As seas rise, beaches will have to move landward with the waterline.

However, we aren't sure which beaches will be inherently capable of that migration. And furthermore, existing infrastructure could block the migration of the beach, depending on how coastlines are managed. So nourishments are one way of attempting to maintain beaches in the face of sea will rise. So tell us what you need to study or what we better need to understand. stand about this whole practice? Yeah, nourishments are still really understudied in terms of the sand evolution, their ability to mitigate flooding and erosion under varying wave conditions, and their influence on water

tables and ecosystems. So we believe that as these projects are implemented, it only makes sense to monitor them and to try and learn as we go with the hope that we can provide information to help coastal communities better prepare for their future. Well, Dr. Olatka, thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much for having me. Bonilatka Post-Docrylifelo at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute at that's at UC San Diego. After the break, how to construct a message to intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe if they exist?

And whether sending focused advertisements of our location is even a good idea. Do we want them to know what we're here, you know, what could happen? Well, we're afraid. Is it an ethical considering the risks? We'll talk about it after the break, talking to E.T. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato.

Voyager's Golden Record contains a multitude of messages to spacefaring aliens that find it. Recordings of the natural world, photos and diagrams of DNA and human anatomy, classical and rock music. And of course, greetings in dozens of the world's languages. Namaste. Hello from the children of planet Earth. But those messages contain a lot of assumptions, human assumptions, about what might make sense to alien intelligence.

What if, for example, they took that collection of different voices as a sign of people in conflict, some sort of argument among a group, should we perhaps try for a simpler message? Or maybe no message at all, because what if our communications invite danger or hungry aliens? You've probably heard of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but there's also a group called Medi, messaging extraterrestrial intelligence, and some of my next guests are advisors to that group working to determine the future of our communications with the cosmos. Many of them are gathering this week in Reno, Nevada, for a social and conceptual issues in astrobiology or SOHA conference, and we have two of them on the line now. Kelly Smith is acting president of SOHA, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University in South Carolina. Welcome.

Thank you. Nice to be here, Aura. Nice to have you. Sherry Wells Jenton is a linguist and associate professor of English at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you. It's a delight. So you're there in Nevada doing all of this interesting talk.

Kelly, you helped convene this conference. Set the scene for us. What's the goal of that gathering? and you have astrobiologists and philosophers and all kinds of different people. Yeah, if we discover evidence of life beyond Earth anytime soon, and a lot of people think that's likely, the implications for humanity will be massive. And so I and some like-minded people feel like this is something we should be dedicating a bit more effort to. And so we're trying to organize an academic community that provides the infrastructure necessary for that.

So, you know, regular meetings, eventually we'll have our own journal. and then just, you know, the ability to talk to colleagues in different disciplines who are interested, not just in the science, but in the broader questions about what the impacts of the scientific discoveries are on society. Yeah, and one of the big questions is, should we actively engage in sending messages into the cosmos, correct? That's one of the big hot topics, I think maybe a quarter of the papers at this conference are going to be on METI in some way or another. Sherry, you've said the Voyager golden record was packed with too much information, which leaves it open to misinterpretation. Give us an idea of what you mean by that. Well, it really depends on what your goals are.

If your goal is to say, hey, we exist, we're intelligent, we're here, we're like you, maybe we're at least thinking, then almost anything you send can accomplish that. But if your goal is to actually contribute a piece of information so that they can actually understand anything about who the heck you are and what you're all about, then what we generally do is overwhelm when we send a lot of information. So maybe we want to keep it just simple and just for the initial contact, say, we exist. Isn't it cool? We exist too.

Yay. Well, you know, there's a danger in that, and a lot of people think about that, and it's been the subject of science fiction writers. There's a classic Twilight Zone episode about a communication breakdown between human kind in aliens. If you're a Twilight's own aficionado, you know what I'm talking about. It's called to serve man. And the aliens have a book called

to serve man, which we interpret as a noble thing, right? That they wanted to help us. And then the final twist comes, as you hear in this clip. Mr. Chambers, don't get on that ship. To serve man... You all know that one,

right? Oh, yes. Spoiler alert 50 years later. But by People should rightfully be fearful of that, that if we do let aliens know we're here, they may want to, you know, take over our planet? Well, I think it's certainly a possibility. I think a lot of the many proponents point out rightfully that people worry about this in weird ways that are influenced by Hollywood, et cetera.

But the bottom line is we don't really know that much about aliens, and we don't know that much about what might motivate them. And so reaching out to aliens and advertising not just our existence, but our location, does pose some kind of risk. The tricky bit is trying to figure out how much risk it poses and then what kinds of restrictions would be required given that level of risk. Right now, there are none. Anybody can do anything they want to pretty much. Sherry, you know, even humans here on Earth, we have trouble communicating with each other. We do.

We do. We do. We do. to the aliens. We do. We have issues. We certainly have issues. I mean, just look around you any day.

You'll see people, even people who love each other, having trouble communicate. But in some ways, sort of that horse has already run out of the barn. And we are monitoring. We are changing our atmosphere. We have been broadcasting, like Kelly said, people have been sending all kinds of random stuff and some not-so-random stuff. So anyone who wants to know we're here could, and maybe already does. And if you'd like to talk about it.

with us. Our number is 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFry, 844-724-8255. I'd like to bring on another guest who wasn't able to make the conference this weekend, but he has done some thinking about this. Jacob Huckmusra is a research scientist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, based in Clayton, Delaware. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks a lot for having me. You study exoplanets and which ones might be. good targets to send a message to our, are there a few hotspots that we should be pointing at in the universe? Well, there are a few hotspots, but, you know, I'm really glad that the segment started with a discussion about Tess, because I'm really excited about Tess, and I think Tess is going to find the best hotspots. You know, right now we know about some planets, this Trapist 1, a seven planet system around a low-mass red dwarf star, very exciting, possibly one of them in the habitable zone,

a couple of it might be interesting. Proxima B, the nearest star to our sun, has a planet. These are exciting, but I think Tess is going to find literally thousands of planets that are really close to our sun. I think these are going to be the best targets for many. Also for SETI, though, I think that's an important point. These are also going to be important targets to search as well as thinking about messaging. Could intelligent life have been sending us messages all along some time in our millions of years of evolution, and we just weren't listening or not capable of it? Maybe they gave up.

Absolutely. Absolutely. That is totally a possibility, and we have only searched a drop in the bucket of the possible signals. One analogy I'll bring up real quickly, Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute. She likes to point out that the existing SETI searches are like taking a glass of water, being in the boat in the middle of the ocean, you dunk the glass into the ocean, and you ask, are there any fish in the ocean? And you look at your glass and it's empty water.

There's no fish in there. So does that mean there's no fish in the ocean? Well, no. It just means you've only searched a very small portion of the total sample space. And we've searched a very small portion of the sky and a very very small portion of the sky, small portion of the frequencies. So it's quite possible we haven't been looking long enough. She has a way with words.

Now, let's think about, I'm thinking now that I'm a very advanced civilization, or why would I expect that, you know, that these advanced civilizations are still communicating in the ancient field of radio waves, you know?

I mean, we're not using tin cans and strings anymore. If they're so advanced, maybe they've learned how to do gravity waves or some other kind of thing. and they're not even listening in radio waves. No, I think that's a really important point, actually, and maybe Kelly and Cherry have something to say. But I think that's exactly right,

and it's quite possible, maybe even very likely. Any extraterrestrials we meet, contact would be far more advanced than us. But, you know, so if you think about sailboats as an analogy, sailboats at one time used to be the pinnacle of technology. All our militaries are outfitted with boats with sails. Today, we still have sailboats, but they do not reflect the pinnacle of technology of our militaries.

And so in the same way, radio might still exist, on another planet, you know, might have ham radio operators that do this for fun, even if they're not using radio as a primary means of communication. So that might be a strong reason for us to actually transmit. We may have the onus as the younger, less advanced civilization. We have the onus of transmitting with radio waves, whereas they're probably not going to. That's one argument. Kelly, have any... Go ahead.

Yeah, I think, for all you know, we may be bathed in tachyon transmissions right now or some new technology that we don't know how to interpret. And maybe it's even sort of a test. It's like, well, once you can answer, then you've definitely reached that level of technology. On the other hand, I think when you're doing any kind of meddy work, you have to assume that there's a partner on the other end of the message who's making some efforts to interpret it. And so it seems a good bet that even a super advanced civilization would realize that radio communications is likely to be one of the first ways civilization starts and then maybe laser communications. And so if they want to find a signal, they will probably be looking for these more primitive ways of communicating. Are there people actively messaging the stars today? And who might they be, Kevin?

There are definitely people who are messaging the stars. I mean, there have been a couple of dozen attempts that we know of in the past since, let's see, 72, I think was the first major one. In fact, I just got an announcement the other day about a new predicted attempt that's going to be performed in May from an array in Sweden. So this stuff does go on. And, of course, we've been leaking electromagnetic radiation into space since Marconi. So in some sense, the signals are out there. But the difference, I mean, at least some of the more problematic attempts, I would say,

the difference is that they're much, much more energetic. So it's one thing to leak, you know, a very weak radio signal into space and then the power of that signal drops off with a square of the distance so that, you know, if you wanted to watch I Love Lucy 50 light years away, you'd need an antenna the size of the solar system. It's possible, but it requires some real effort. But with METI, you're talking about aiming a laser at a likely planet and pumping an enormous amount of energy into it.

Well, so actually I would take issue with that. They're not doing laser METI for very much. It's mostly radio METI. Well, either way. But that is important because laser is much more directed and, spreads a little less than radio, and so it is relevant. But I think it's also important to say that there have been these handful of messages that have gone out. Some of them maybe are louder than the background radiation, but in order to be detectable, you need to get your message off

more than once. So I would argue that essentially none of these past messages that have gone out are going to be detected. It would be like our wow signal where you see it once, and you have no way of verifying it. So I still think the most detectable signal that we have coming out from Earth are television carrier waves, which go, and radio carrier waves, go in all directions at all times, and then military and astronomical radar, like pins on a pincush. They're not going in all directions at all time, but they are by far the most detectable signal emanating from Earth. Orders of magnitude louder than any many signal. Sherry, if you think that the kinds of messages we've been sending out, like on the Voyager Golden Record, have too much information, how would you design

a signal that's unambiguously, a signal made by life rather than a radio wave or an x-ray, raised released by stars or something? What would your signal be? You know, we have a conference here, and if you'd like the answer to that question, I think there's maybe 150 people in attendance. You probably could get about 400 answers to that question. Give me your answer. But I mean, the goal is to be, I think for me, the goal is to be as simple and sensible as possible. We've got a whole lot of stuff. I mean, for heaven's sake, there was even a Doritos commercial that was broadcast with powers to the stars. So I think one of the things that we are, it would behoove us to do is get on the line and start making some sense so that

they're receiving all this muddled stuff from Earth and maybe just a nice, clear, you could go back to a nice clear string of prime numbers. You could go back to just talking about the fact that you have an artificial signal. And maybe that's all we're ever going to get. Maybe just the binary, yes, we exist is all we can hope for. So Sherry, I've got a question. Let me just, I just need to interrupt and pay the bills here. I'm Ira Plato, and this is a Science Friday, from WNYC Studios. Okay, go ahead. So, Sherry, I really like that. I had a question for you based on a project I was involved in with Michael Bush, who's at the SETI Institute, but this ties in with historical Mediwork, where Michael devised a code that was not just prime numbers, to one step further, where he defined basic arithmetic, zero equals zero, one equals one, one plus zero is one, and so on, and you can use that to define arithmetic and the periodic table of elements. and I think we got as far as you could describe the structure of the solar system and even our transmitter.

And so you couldn't say hello. You couldn't say we come in peace. That's too human. But there was actually quite a bit of math and science we could talk about. Do you think that's reasonable? I think, well, you know, okay, so anything I think is reasonable is reasonable for a human being, which means I have no idea. I mean, you can take any group of sort of people who like puzzles,

and you can put together like the Frudenthal system where you teach them equals plus minus, not true. And you can tell them. You can make things. You can say, this is a circle. You can make a word for a circle. And it's fun. It's fun to play with. Whether that's at all intelligible to people who aren't humans, there are 150 people at this conference, right?

I don't know. There's by 400 opinions. Okay. Let's go to the phones. Let's go out to New Haven, Connecticut. Hi, Colin. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for your program.

I had just a quick question is, what's the next step? Suppose we do get an indication that someone's heard our message. What do we do with that? What do we, how do we further the communication, the conversation? Yeah, what does that mean for a lot? You know, how do we, how does our culture accept it here on Earth? And there is no one culture. Well, I'll say one thing first, and then I'm sure Kelly and then Sherry have something to say.

I think for me, the neatest thing about that is the intergenerational aspect. If we send a message and we get a reply, that means we've successfully managed a project probably over 70 years or longer, because it takes however many light years away the star is for the signal to get there. If someone listens to it and they reply, it means that it's taken that long to get back. So we're not very good at long-term projects right now on Earth. I could cite many examples. I'm sure all of you listening could as well. So if we got that, I think to me that would be even more exciting, equally as exciting as whatever the message says. Probably that's exciting too.

But the fact that we are really seriously talking about doing an intergenerational project would be historically significant. Yes. It's an activity in radical hope and radical faith in our descendants and in our circumstances. ourselves, can we manage this thing? I mean, after we're done jumping up and down and getting all excited. But we are finding exoplanets that are close, like 40 light years away, things like that, but you could take one generation to get a signal back and forth? That's true. I still think, though, and again, I don't want to be a fearmonger here, but we don't really know exactly what we're dealing with. And there are a lot of very intelligent

people like Stephen Hawking and David Bren, who have talked about how responding to this kind of signal is not a good idea. The guidelines for SETI require international consultation before a message is sent back. And if you'd like an interesting scenario, I don't want to give away anything, but the three-body problem is a recent science fiction trilogy that talks about what can happen when you answer a message from an advanced civilization, and it's not good. Wow. You know, one thing I wonder about...

One thing, Kelly, that I'd like to wonder what you think. think about this is could, could listening be just as dangerous as receiving a message, or as sending a message? Because if we're worried about, you know, the Stephen Hawking, Jared Diamond, cultural collapse phenomenon where, you know, we make contact with a more advanced society and it causes collapse on ours, simply the act of searching and receiving a message passively and interpreting that information could be very damaging to our civilization also. All right, I'm going to ask you, Kelly, to hold on to that because we have to take a break and interrupt this. Very interesting discussion about extraterrestrials with Jacob Husmissera, Sherry Wells Jensen, Kelly Smith,

our number 844-8255. Stay with us. We'll be right back with lots more on your questions and your tweets. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about how to communicate with intelligent life if it exists elsewhere in the universe. And whether or not that's even a good idea. Topics of discussion at the social and conceptual issues in astrobiology. Conference in Reno, Nevada this weekend. And my guests are Kelly Smith, Associate Professor Philosophy at Clemson, Sherry Wells Jensen, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Jacob Huckmusra at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science.

And our number 844-724-8255. Lots of people are very interested in this. Let me see if I can go to a tweet or two here. How do we know that Extra Life is on the same size scale, same size scale, same size? size scale as us. Maybe we're so small that other light forms don't pay any attention to us. Maybe they're too, or they're too small for us to pay attention too.

That's a great question. It makes me think of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where we somehow perturb an distant civilization and they come and they invade us, and it turns out that they're smaller than fleas, and so it has no impact on us when they launch their intergalactic warfare. So, yes,

to the question, absolutely. There's maybe some physical constraint based on what we know about how Adams formed together and stuff, but, yeah, we don't know. We don't know at all. Yeah, I think the answer to all those questions is, oh, could be. Wouldn't that be cool? All right.

Let's go out to Allentown, Pennsylvania. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Yeah, this is David. Hi, Dave. Yeah, this is David in Allentown. Go for it. This might be a slightly off topic. I'm not sure, but I'm not so much concerned about encountering super,

human civilizations are super smart that might come over here, be predatory, and take all of our things. I'm much more concerned about sending out probes to find this life, and they contact microbes or microorganisms for which we have no defense, and when bringing these things back, they overwhelm our ecosystem. So that's the War of the World scenario in the opposite direction. Yeah. There are folks at NASA. Yeah, go ahead.

There are definitely our folks at NASA who worry about what they call planetary protection. So their slogan is all the planets all the time. And they worry about both how we might contaminate alien life on Mars or Europa or something like that. But then they also worry about bringing samples back to analyze on Earth. And so that's definitely a real concern. I would say this, though, that the more different alien life is from us, the less likely their microbes would be able to infect us. That requires probably a certain level of similarity

between the biochemical systems. And so anything's possible, but it's a decent bet that we wouldn't have to worry too much about a completely different kind of life. Is it possible that we could detect life as we don't know it? That's a really interesting question. I went to a National Academy of Sciences meeting about a year and a half ago,

and I was on the panel that was assigned to remote detection of life as we don't know it. So trying to figure out using telescopes and things like that, whether there's life as we don't know it on another planet. And we talked for about 10 minutes and quickly decided that there was really nothing that we could say about this. Because if it's life as we don't know it, we don't know what to look for. Now, if you assume that life is roughly similar to ours, it has biochemistry-based and stuff like that, then there are things you can start to look for. but it's unclear how how defensible an assumption that really is, right?

Whether, you know, life like us is common or not. Sherry, I'm still trying to figure out what kind of simple signal we would send. That would be unambiguous, and, you know, we've had Carl Sagan on a show many years ago talking about things like this and Frank Drake, people like that. You know, and they would talk about hydrogen atoms and all kinds of stuff, something that's universal mathematics. Is that something that is that simple?

Maybe send out a rectangle or whatever? I'm sort of a radical reductionist, right? Don't send that. That's too much. Whatever you're thinking of sending, walk it back a step. Like what? Pick it, for example. So maybe we just want a blank carrier wave, just so that it is clearly artificial.

Or we could go back to the old string of prime numbers. But even that, when we're thinking about, all we know about those other folks is that they received our signal, that they have constructed some kind of technology that allowed them to send or answer this signal. That's all we know. We don't know how they built that radio telescope. We don't know what their culture in society.

We don't know what their sensory apparatus is like. We don't know what their bodies are like. We don't know if they still believe in magic, if that's their underlying cultural conception of science, but it was working at least up into the point that they could build a thing. We don't know. Well, I'll just add to that

that this is actually one of the points that people in this area argue about is the extent to which we can extrapolate from humanity to aliens. And I think, you know, there's a good argument. You know, certainly what Sherry says is right. You don't know all these details. But on the other hand, if you ask something like, well, would an advanced civilization capable of building radio telescopes understand mathematics?

It seems to me, and a lot of other people, that the answer to that has got to be yes. Their symbology may be different. They may think about it in different kinds of ways. but it's hard to imagine a civilization that could build a radio telescope that would not recognize prime numbers is very special. Could just... I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, I completely agree with that. The ability to build a radio transmitter is really what we're after here. And I think just for listeners, in case you're confused, the way that you do SETI searching and METI, you know, transmitting,

this is not a way to find all possible life forms that might exist in the universe. It's really a way to find life forms that have the ability to build a radio. transmitter. That's all we are able to say with this. What about if we receive information? We're just receiving a message from ET that could be damaging to our society. What if they share information we don't want to hear?

I think that's right here. Yes, as Jacob points out there, some people who are very worried about that. I personally am not that concerned about that. I think one man's cultural collapse is another man's progress, right? But I do think that it's kind of funny sometimes to listen to scientists who really want to make contact with

aliens because I always point out, you know that's going to put you out of a job if they're nice, right? If they send us technology primer 1A, you're just going to be, you know, a remedial educator for the rest of your career. I think we, I would happily take that job to make contact with you. I'm right, let's go. And at some point, you just have to decide, well, who are you? Are you a person that, what kind of, what is it that you do as a species? Are you a reacher outer?

Are you a hider? What do you do? Let's say we find evidence that, well, you know, what? life might exist under the ice, let's say an Enceladus, you know, one of our, the moon's out there. And it's not, maybe it's not intelligent, but do we have an ethical obligation to that life, not to contaminate it, not to disturb it? What is the ethics of this? Do you think about that?

That's a really complicated question. And I'm sure I could start any number of fights back at the conference by saying, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say it. You know, my personal view is that while it's certainly defensible to say that microbes have some kind of moral rights, I think what oftentimes people forget is that so do humans. Humans clearly have moral status. And in fact, I think most philosophers would agree that humans have superior moral status. And so it's one thing to ask, you know, should we do something to a microbe in isolation? The answer is probably no. But that's not the way real decisions work.

Real decisions are, there's something valuable that we want as humans. And in order to get that, we have to take some risk of harming microbes. In the case of microbes living, even more complicated animals, living underneath an ice sheet, you're not going to be able to penetrate that ice sheet and explore that ecosystem without taking a risk of contaminating it because it's very difficult to completely sterilize a probe. And then you're going to have to decide, well, do we want to explore the most important scientific discovery ever made? Or do we want to leave it alone and just let it do its thing? My last question to all of you.

Do you wake up every morning and say, Hey, today's the day we're going to have. Well, I do have SETI at home on my laptop, but I'm hoping that that's my ticket to Stockholm one day. And I enjoy the radical back and forth. I am so hopeful, it's going to be today. It's never going to happen. It's going to be today.

It's never going to happen. I like that whiplash, that emotional whiplash, that's a power source for me. But you're all very serious that it might exist out there. I mean, you take it all very seriously. Even if you make joke about it, you take it seriously. And my excitement, you know, I don't expect that we find SETI succeeding every morning I wake up, but I do get excited about the new planets we find literally every week now, and that's really exciting, and that is narrowing the scope on where we're going to look for intelligent life.

All right, I want to thank all of you for taking time to be with us today. Very, very interesting. Jacob Hux Mishra, a research scientist at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. It's based in Clayton, Delaware. Sherry Wells Jensen, linguist, an associate professor of English, Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Kelly Smith, acting president of the Society of the Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology Group. He's also Associate Professor at Clemson University in South Carolina.

Thank you all for joining you too. It was fun. Thanks a lot. Sergeant Hartman, your senior drill instructor, from now on you will speak only one spoken to. And the first and last words out of your filthy sewers will be, sir. Do you maggots understand that? Sure, yes, sir. Remember that scene from Full Metal Jacket where the drill sergeant can find no more insulting form of life to call them than a maggot?

But we're here to tell you that the lowly maggot has gotten a bad rap. Sure, we think of maggots as insects that consume dead flesh, but maggots will eat just about anything from poop to pizza. And now some forward-looking people are thinking about how to put these voracious eaters to good use. And that means we have to get over the ick factor and actually study these crue. creatures. What do they eat? When do they eat? How much and at what rate do they eat? Luckily, there's at least one intrepid researcher willing to do this work. Dr. David Hu and his maggot research is the subject of our latest macroscope video. Joining me to talk about it is Luke Gorsk in our Science Friday video editor. Hi, Luke. Hi, Ira. So why do we want to know so much

about how maggots eat? Yeah, it's the burning question on all of our minds, right? So, consider this. We waste a lot of food. I mean a lot of food and, you know, where does that food go? It ends up in a landfall. And what happens to that food in a landfall? Well, it's a lot more disgusting than a swarm of maggots. It becomes this

black, slimy, polluting stuff that ends up in our waterways. Well, we've got to get that stuff out of the landfill. We shouldn't put it in there in the first place. We should probably feed it to something. How about some maggots? Because they eat really, really fast. And what can you do with those maggots when you're done?

you can turn them into chicken feed or you can feed them to fish on farms. I mean, right now we feed fish on farms ground up byproduct of fish that's caught in the wild. That seems pretty wasteful. So, you know, you can become a lot more sustainable with food waste if you take advantage of these maggots. And that's what a lot of companies down in the South are actually doing. In Georgia and Texas, they actually have these black soldier fly farms. And they have a lot of questions about, you know, how quickly can they grow? and all that.

And Dr. David Who at Georgia Tech wants to answer some of those questions. And, you know, he starts by looking at the biology of them. And there's some very interesting aspects about them. The black soldier fly larva can eat twice their body mass in a day. So in growing these larva, one of the big questions is how quickly can they eat? Because the whole idea is to allow them to eat as much food as possible. And so if you have more and more larva, is food just consumed just as quickly? That's a good question.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking with Luke Raskin. So he's actually playing around with all these maggots? Yep, he's got swarms and swarms of maggots. But on the other hand, I know from watching this video, it starts out with puppies. What are puppies? I can't imagine what puppies and maggots have to do with each other. Ira, have you heard of the puppy bowl problem? No, it's not the thing on an animal planet where they have a dog.

during the Super Bowl. No, no, no, no. I never heard of it. Okay, so imagine some cute puppies, 10 really, really cute puppies. See, that's a nice refreshing break from the maggots, right? So the 10 cute puppies are given a very, very small bowl of food. And then they have to decide who gets to eat first and when they eat and how much they get to eat. And it's a small bowl, so they're piling up all over each other.

They're swarming around trying to get at the food. And this is known in some circles as the dog bowl problem or the puppy dog problem. problem. And it applies to all sorts of things, you know, from economics to parking spots around a building. And maggots? And maggots. So when you have a large swarm of maggots and you just plop an orange down in the middle of them, how do you, how quickly does that orange get eaten? How do they, you know, you can only spit a certain amount of maggots eating in a given time. And then compounding the problem is that the maggots don't eat as quickly as you would think. They actually spend three-fourths of an hour not eating. So how do the maggots actually solve this?

Well, David Hugh actually did a whole bunch of tests, and this is what he discovered. Individual larva can be activated by the motion of their neighbors. If a single larva takes a bite of food, it is super activated, and it continues to swarm around and look for food. And they actively move out these blockades, these larva that are sitting around and not eating. And that helps other larvae get to the food. It's kind of like a buffet line. People are sort of pushing them out of the way, just so each of them grabs one bite. You can imagine the buffet line would be eaten much faster.

And looking at the macroscope, all these larvae swimming around there, if you're watching a while long enough, you get over the ick factor. I mean, I did. Well, I started viewing them more as insect puppies. And when I started thinking of them that way, yeah, I got over it. But then again, I've been watching hours and hours of swarming maggots. They may have gotten into my brain, and that might have explained why I view them. now as insect puppies. But you're not having nightmares about them.

You're having nightmares? Oh, no, totally. You do? Yeah, absolutely. But at the end of the day, I mean, I have to remind myself that, you know, this is a very good solution to a very, very bad problem. And if we can feed these maggots, these, this food waste, and then turn them into food for chickens, that's great.

They normally eat maggots chicken. Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's what they like to eat. Yeah, I mean, they're really high protein in the maggots. I think there's somewhere near 40% protein and a lot of fat. That's really good for chickens. That's really good for fish. That's way more sustainable than feeding them feed, you know, processed feed from other sources.

So this is a viable project. Absolutely. This is absolutely viable project. And there's lots of companies that are starting it up, and they want to scale up. So there's a lot of questions about how to do that. Well, and you can get a good start by checking out the latest macroscope video. And you should. You can find it on our website.

at ScienceFriday.com slash maggots. Thank you, Luke. Great video. One last thing for all you science trivia geeks out there, and you know whom you are, Science Friday trivia is back. Join us on Wednesday, May 9th at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York, for a ruckus and ruckus-rocus time. We have really a lot of fun.

I mean, it's a laugh-filled of geeky teams. We have teams come in there. They buy for a prize. There'll be drinks and prizes. And more than a few bad science puns by. Yours truly. I'll be there. I hope to see all of you. So reserve a spot for your team early. Here's how you do it. You go to ScienceFriiday.com slash trivia for tickets and info. ScienceFriiday.com slash trivia. That's out there Wednesday, May 9th at the Bell House in Brooklyn.

Charles Berkowitz is our director, senior producer, Christopher Taliatta. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Heiler. We had technical engineering help from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Jack Harowitz. Coming to you via WNYC Studios. shout out to Indiana Public Radio. Welcome back to the family. I know you're having a little listening fest out there. And of course, we're all active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. And if you have a smart speaker, ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want.

Every day. Every day now is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato in New York.