Science Friday - How Close Are We To Answers About Aliens?

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

The idea of creatures from another planet is part of our culture, from the warnings of the alien in “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” to the plaintive desire to return home in “E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” to the hulking creature of “Nope.” Aliens appear in movies, books, comics, you name it. But are they more than science fiction? And if they were, how would scientists prove it?The government has investigated reports of alien sightings, including in Project Blue Book, which ran from 1947 to 1969. And last summer, congressional hearings into Navy pilots’ sightings of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) brought the search for intelligent life back into the public eye. But there’s more to the search for alien life than people spotting lights in the sky. Projects such as Breakthrough Listen are surveying the stars for signals. Advanced telescopes such as JWST are enabling us to collect data on the atmospheres of exoplanets, a first step in detecting biosignatures on distant worlds. And astrobiology projects such as the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission are looking for signs of ancient life elsewhere in our own solar system.Dr. Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and author of The Little Book of Aliens, joins hosts Ira Flatow and Kathleen Davis to talk about the evidence for life elsewhere in the universe, and how scientists might go about trying to answer the question of whether we’re alone.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Is there alien life out there? And how would we prove it? It's Monday, January 15th, but even in a galaxy far, far away, it's Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Charles Burgquist. It's a question that's come to anyone who's gazed into an endless night sky full of stars. Are we alone? Some people believe there's life elsewhere in the universe. Some people say it's already visited Earth. But how would you go about proving it one way or another? Without an alien landing on the universe? in the White House lawn. Dr. Adam Frank, author of The Little Book of Aliens, joins Ira Flato and Kathleen Davis to talk about the scientific search for extraterrestrial life.

And now it's time to talk aliens. Ah, creatures from another planet are so part of our culture. I love that theremin music from the day the Earth stood still. It's a great movie. And, you know, they appear everywhere, aliens, movies, books, comics, you name it. And actually, words like UFOs or the most. modern government phrasing UAPs, unexplained aerial phenomena. I'm still not used to that phraseology.

They're both science and science fiction, aren't they, Kathleen? Yeah, and we have been fascinated with the question of alien life being somewhere out in the stars for decades, I mean, even centuries. And so now with congressional hearings into Navy pilots' sightings of strange things, the search for intelligent life is getting a more serious treatment. And so how do we as a culture think about alien life with an open mind? Yes. And joining us to talk about the search for intelligent life and how we might find signs of it is Dr. Adam Frank,

professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, author of The Little Book of Aliens. He joins us from WXXI in Rochester, New York. Welcome to Science Friday. Oh, thank you, Ira. Thank you for having me on. Nice to have you. And let's get right to this flurry of attention that we. mentioned to this topic in recent years with the release of those famous videos from the Pentagon.

What is your take on those? Yeah. Well, you know, what's interesting about that part of the story is how it also rides on what's happening in astrophysics. And I think they're actually related because what we're getting so close to actually getting data about from astronomy about life in the universe that I think the UFO and UAP stuff is sort of picking up on that. You know, in the book, I try, I know people are interested in this.

So about a third of the book is about UFOs and UAPs. And what happened in 2017 was the New York Times published an article, front page article, about this Pentagon program that was looking at UFOs or what they were calling unidentified aerial phenomena. And it was accompanied by these three videos, which have been replayed endlessly, taken by Navy pilots. And that was the beginning of sort of this flurry of new activity. where people were recognizing that the government had an interest in this. The government was admitting that there was unidentified stuff that they were seeing.

And, of course, if you were into UFOs, you're like, my God, this is it, finally. And if you're skeptical like I am, you're still like, okay, this is interesting. We should study it. But there's still no data even close to associating any of this with, you know, anything non-human. So what would it take to actually be proof aside from an alien, you know, appearing in telling us to, you know, take them to our leader. Right. And that's, you know, after 30 years of doing all different kinds of astronomy, you know, everything from star formation to how stars like the sun die.

One of the reasons I did this book is because I myself have started doing astrobiology, you know, over the last 10, 15 years. And we are now at the point when it comes to getting proof that it's going to be our telescopes. It's going to be things like the James Webb Space Telescope. And in particular the telescopes which are going to come after it, the ones we're designing now, where we are going to have data, I can't tell you what it's going to say, but actual data, rather than just yelling at each other about our opinions, relevant to this question of, is there life, alien life, where we should find it on alien planets?

And that's the game changer. That's why I wrote the book. I wanted people to understand how after literally millennia of human beings arguing about this, we're finally in the position to get real hard data about whether or not we're the only life. in the entire universe. So one thing that I love in your book is that you say that there's one big flaw in this argument of UFOs, you know, those traditional flying saucers, being alien visitors. And you say, you know, if aliens were here and they wanted to hide, that would be a pretty

bad way to do it, right? Yeah, yeah. I call this the high beam argument, you know, which people are always saying, oh, I saw these lights in the sky and they were moving in an incredible ways. And, of course, these aliens never just land on the White House lawn and say, yeah, we're here, what's up? So, you know, they're trying to not be seen, and they're terrible at it, which for supposedly advanced technological creatures, you know, are they sending us their teenagers who are like can't find the cloaking device button?

Let's go to Chicago and Kevin. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hello, how are you? Hi there. Go ahead. Well, you know what? I was just, first of all, this has always intrigued me the subject. I just feel that we can't be the only so-called intelligent race in the universe. There has got to be something, somebody else out there, all those billions and trillions, I mean, out there in the universe. Yeah. You know.

Yeah. And in the event that I'm wrong, would it be a good idea for us to try to, you know, find ET, whoever ET might be. Good question. Depending on their mindset, I mean, how would they view us? And, you know what? A reason they probably don't land on the White House lawn is because they see how we are with each other.

Okay, let me get an answer. That's a good point. How do you answer that, Adam? Well, there's a couple parts here raised really good questions. The first one is whether, what are the odds that we are the only time in the history of the universe that I did tell, or any kind of life, but, certainly intelligent life formed. And Woody Sullivan and I did a paper on this in 2016. And what we just did is we used the data that existed about exoplanets because we have found now that the universe

is teeming with planets. We didn't know that when I was a graduate student. And so what we figured out that was there are 10 billion trillion planets in the right place for life to form, what are called habitable zone planets. So in order for us to be the only time that life has ever formed, then, you know, it must have mean that all of the experiments that nature was running with those habitable zone planets failed, if you think of them as being experiments. And, yeah, I think I agree that it's up to the pessimists to tell me why it would happen here and it didn't and why the experiment succeeded here and failed in those other 10 billion trillion planets. That's not a proof by any stretch of the imagination. But it does sort of, I think, shift the who has to do the argument about life being common. or uncommon. So that's the first part.

The second? Go ahead. I'm sorry. Well, are you talking about the Drake equation here? Well, that's what we did. We modified the Drake equation to take into account. Like when Drake wrote his equation in 1961, nobody knew whether there were any planets other than the eight in our solar system that existed. It was possible that planets were really rare. And I try to cover this, unpack this in the book so people can see how the evolution of our thinking was. So when I was a question. graduate student in 1986, it was entirely possible that planets were just very, very, very rare,

which meant life was very, very rare. And then in 1995, we discovered our first exoplanet. And now we know that every star in the sky, every star you see in the sky pretty much, has a family of worlds. And if you count up five of those stars, one of them is going to have a planet in the habitable zone, the Goldilocks zone, where liquid water can exist. And we think that's what's important for life. So so much change in just the... last 20 or 30 years. The game has changed, and that's why I want people to understand. That's one of the reasons why we're so close to getting real data about the possibility of life in the universe. So in your book, you called the Drake equation, and I'll quote it, an epoch making

milestone, it will be remembered as the moment when it all began. Is it that important? Yes, it is. Because what happened was, is that for central, like I said, you can see the ancient Greeks yelling at each other about whether life existed. And we just didn't have a good way of thinking even scientifically about the problem? And it was really this amazing decade of, you know, 1950 to 1960 that all the seminal work happens. The Fermi paradox is sort of first formulated. Drake carries out his first experiment.

He, you know, he does Project Asma and looks for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence, which was really the first ever astrobiology experiment at all. First time anybody looked for any kind of life in the universe. And then what that equation did when he wrote that equation, which was really the agenda for the first SETI meeting ever held, he took this problem that people couldn't even really figure out how to think about and he parsed it into seven sub-problems. Right. The main problem is how many intelligent civilizations are there in the galaxy that we could talk to? And he broke that problem up into seven sub-problems, each of which could be studied independently and made progress on it. Let's go to the phones, to Alex in Martha's Vineyard. Hi, Alex.

Yeah, I was calling in to mention I'm an anthropologist to study the UFO topic and aliens and such for maybe three decades now. It's always a little disconcerting to me to hear the topic of UFOs and aliens get conflated together. And, of course, I do know why. It is the most popular layman's explanation for the UFO phenomenon, but I tend to think that it might actually throw us off the scent scientifically when we do that, when we say these interesting phenomena we see in our terrestrial skies, and we jump to the conclusion of aliens when there's absolutely no proof of that. Yeah, I agree. I agree completely that they are separate things, and it's, you know, but of course the interest, you know, often. Often when I'm asked to do something on CNN or MSNBC about this topic, it's because people are making that conflation. Oh, you know, the latest UFO video.

And then it's like, what does this have to do with aliens? And I always have to explain that there's just no solid data. There's no data of the kind I would be required to provide if I said I found alien life on an alien planet that links UFOs to anything non-human. So have you seen any compelling evidence in your opinion that makes you think? that maybe we have encountered some sort of alien technology that we've maybe been visited in our solar system. This makes me think of a mua, which I know some astronomers have strong feelings about. Yeah, yeah. So the answer is no. There's just nothing. Because, I mean, I wish that would be the most exciting thing ever. You know, I'm not against it. And in the book, I argue that, look, let's do a transparent, open scientific investigation of UFOs and UAPs and see where it leads.

As of right now, there is just nothing to indicate that we've been visited by anything, by anybody. And so a muamu, you bring up a muamu, which was exciting on its own because it was the first interstellar comet or interstellar interloper. The first time we saw something, you know, entering the solar system from outside. And of course, Avi Loeb argued that it might be a solar sail, a piece of technology. but I don't think anybody else really believes that. And I'm one of those. I think, you know, I understand why he proposed it, but then I think he was just hanging on too hard to the conclusion

when other people came up with more reasonable explanations. All right. Let's go to Kyla in Portland, Oregon. Hi. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi there. Hi. So I guess the last question just kind of sheds a lot on this.

I know you're talking about UAPs and UFOs, but my question was more, I guess, about our depiction of alien life forms. in sort of our popular culture and just why we always have this notion that they are, they're humanoid at all, why they resemble humans, why they have two arms, two legs, the torso ahead, why they look like us and why not something completely out there, like why a UAP couldn't be an alien life form or something. Like a note, like in the movie, No. Yeah.

Exactly. That's what I brought up in my original call was, that was like one of the most like original depictions of an alien that I had seen recently and it just got me thinking like that they could be any size, anything. So small, huge. Yeah. So anyway, that just was a thought that it has been occurring to me lately. Yeah, good question.

Thanks for that call. And in fact, when people talk about alien life, the phrase that almost always comes up is flying saucer. But you tell a great story in your book about how that term came to be. It was a misnomer, right? It was the greatest misquote in journalistic history. Yeah, so it was Kenneth Arnold was the first guy who, you know, first the story, his story was the first big UFO story. And he was flying his plane, his private plane in Washington State. It was 1947.

And he sees nine objects moving the way he described it as being like the tail of a Chinese kite. And he landed and he told people about it. And then some reporters came and talked to him. And what happens he, what he said he saw were things that looked like sort of crescent shamed. kind of like the batwing ninja star things that, you know, Batman throws around. They were crescents. But the reporter got it wrong and said he saw a flying saucer, a supersonic flying saucer. And within six months, there were 800 sightings of flying saucers, even though he never saw a flying saucer.

So that really shows you sort of the power of narrative and story associated. One of the aspects, I think, of understanding UFOs is a phenomena. Mm-hmm. But, I mean, to the caller's question, when we... you know, this pervasive idea of what an alien looks like that we have in our culture, you know, standing on two legs has arms, has legs. I mean, do you think that's just persisted because we know what we know and we're not using our imaginations? I think it's because of low budgets on science fiction films. It's a lot easier to slap some antenna on some guy's head and call it an

alien. You know, one of the most fun parts of the book was when I sort of went, did a deep dive into evolutionary theory and asked, like, well, what might, what do we know about Darwinian evolution? That'll tell us how life can evolve. And it turns out that, yeah, some things, there's what's called convergence in evolution, that evolution will use the same tricks to solve similar problems of, like, you know, how to walk around on an air solid interface. So you might expect legs and you might expect heads, but you're never going to get the same combination that you got here. There's also evolution is about accidents just as importantly, contingency. So we should expect with aliens, we should expect to be surprised and probably grossed out a little bit.

It's not going to look anything. We're probably the only humanoids in the galaxy, if not the universe. Maybe a shifter thinking more to the blob than the grays. Yes, blobs are good. Yes. Gu. I'm into goo. Into goo.

Primordial goo or just goo in general? All kinds of goo. I think, you know, I mean, general, like you look at. life on Earth. If water is really important for life or any kind of solvent, then you should sort of expect things to be amorphous. And, you know, the idea of blobs

or goo, that could be something that's used quite a bit, you know, as life's architecture. Yeah, well, they talk about having to have a precision grip to make tools and things. The goo would have to find a way to do that. And we're going to talk more, but we have to take a break. We're going to talk with Adam Frank more about

his book, The Little Book of Aliens. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. And I'm Kathleen Davis. We're talking this hour about alien life, what it might be, where it might be, and how it's entered our culture with our guest, Dr. Adam Frank, author of The Little Book of Aliens. So let's talk about exoplanets, because your idea is that, you know, better than looking for alien life on our planet, we should start looking for it on other planets. And a good candidate for that could be exoplanets, right? Yes, yes. I talk about in the book about these three revolutions that have happened in astrobiology that now make it a really going concern that NASA is all in on. And the first of that was the discovery of exoplanets, that the universe is teeming with worlds.

And what would we look for? What would be the signs we would look for? You talk about some Dysonian things like circulating giants satellites around planets, right? Or. or electrical solar panels or even just the biology of what's going on in the atmosphere. Yeah, that's really the exciting thing. So what was not possible beforehand and is now finally possible, is that when we detect exoplanets, one of the main ways we do it is when the planet passes in front of the star. We call that a transit. It's like a little eclipse. And if the planet has an atmosphere, then some of the starlight passes through the atmosphere leaves a, gets a chemical fingerprint of what is in the atmosphere.

So we can, you know, even if it's 40 light years away, we can tell what's in the atmosphere. And so that means we can tell whether there are chemicals in the atmosphere that only life would put there. So, for example, oxygen, you know, take a deep breath. The oxygen in Earth's atmosphere is only there because of life. If life went away within, you know, not too long a time, all that oxygen would react with the rocks and disappear. So oxygen and particularly methane, if you found them both, that would be a strong indicator of an alien biosphere. So the oxygen is a biosignature. Likewise, there are techno signatures, signatures of technology, things like chloro-fluorocarbons.

Our group, I'm the principal investigator of NASA's first grant to study these techno-signatures in planetary exoplanet atmospheres. And we showed that chloroflorocarbons are something that, that even the JWST could find. So that's an example of a techno-signature. City lights. We would be able to detect city lights, artificial illumination on a distant planet, or solar panels, if there was a large-scale use of solar panels. So all the science is just happening right now.

But it shows you that finally we're ready now to start getting data that will show whether there's life or even intelligent life on other worlds. We have a question from Steve on Twitter, on X, I should say. And Steve says, isn't it possible that there are other life forms in the universe that aren't carbon-based like us humans? Therefore, they wouldn't necessarily need to live on a planet located within the Goldilocks zone. What do you think of that? Yeah, we've had a few of those questions coming in. Lots of people asking that same question.

Well, that's a great question. And it really shows you how mature this field has gotten. Because, again, when I was a graduate student, nobody really was studying life in the universe. There was no way to do it. It was still kind of, there was what we called the giggle factor associated with. it. But now NASA's been funding this for over 30 years or at least 20 years. And so the whole field has had a chance to mature so that now we are agnostic. We're learning how to do agnostic astrobiology where we're not saying, oh, it's carbon-based or its molecular chemistry,

biochemistry looks anything like ours. And we're looking for much more general ways of thinking about what life is and what life does. So, for example, we don't really need it to be carbon-based. We could be silicon-based, and we can figure out what the properties, say, with the atmospheres. I was talking about atmospheric biosignatures. You don't have to necessarily look for something associated with carbon. You could just look at the chemical reaction network, which if that network, which is basically which chemicals react with other chemicals, life makes very different chemical reaction networks than non-life. And you should be able to tell that, whether it's carbon-based or silicon-based or whatever. So,

the idea of agnosticism is really the frontiers of astrobiology right now, and we're really making progress with that. Let's go to the phone. So we've lit up the phone. Let's go to Kimman. Is it Telahatchee, California? Or give that to me correctly? Well, my name is Ken.

Say get the whole thing wrong. And the town is much harder to pronounce than that. It's a hatcherpe. Thank you. Thank you, Ken and the hatcherpe. Sorry, go ahead. Well, I just thought you might be interested to know that I'm so old that when I did my master's thesis, it was about 50 years ago, and my field was not in science. My field is international relations, political science.

So I had a bit of a hard time talking to my professors into addressing this issue because they were kind of, they were absolutely immersed in the game. as you call it, the giggle factor. But I was able to finally persuade them. And so I wrote the paper on the international, as of 1970, the international implications of contact with ex-presidentalism. And did you have a conclusion in your paper? I did. I did.

What was it? And, of course, I had to really get into all the science because the perceived contact might be a perceived malevolent, might be perceived benevolent, might be perceived benevolent. or perceived we don't have a clue. And it might be just, you know, contact with a little blob of bacteria. So my professor just wanted, I think they wanted the interesting factor. So they wanted to have a perceived probably malevolent and contact on our planet. All right.

And I'm going to stop you there because thanks for that call because we have other callers with a similar vein, somebody saying that Stephen Hawking said if we hear a signal from E.T. out there, we shouldn't answer it because it could be waiting, you know, to serve man, as the old Twilight Zone said. I love that. Best episode ever. So what is your answer to that? What do you think the ramifications of not just finding intelligent life, but any kind of life? I think it'll be the, and this is the sort of the, I kind of wrap the book up because I really wanted to, people to understand. I don't think it matters whether it's intelligence or not. You don't. Finding any kind of life would be the most significant scientific discovery in the history of humanity. And the reason for that is life is weird, right? We know a lot about, you know, what physics does. It makes black holes and it makes comets and it makes planets. But life is unlike any other system because it creates. It evolves. It innovates. And as of right now, it's possible that this incredible innovative capacity was a one-off.

Like we're the only time in the entire history of the cosmos that had happened. If we find it. if we find just one other example, then really there's more examples, then probably life is common. And that means all bets are off because life can innovate because it can go past itself. Like what life can do and we're part of it becomes almost sort of entirely infinitely open-ended. And it would show that we are part of a cosmic community of life. And I think it would really force us to reevaluate how we see ourselves and how we see our place in the universe. And just to make the point about why it's important, think about the Copernican Revolution, which was just a scientific discovery that, oh, hey, the Earth goes around the sun, not the other way around. That was implicated in the Renaissance, in the Enlightenment, in the Protestant Reformation.

It was just an astronomical idea, but it actually helped reshape world politics. Do you still find that there are barriers for astrobiology to be taken seriously within the greater scientific community, you know, despite the fact that it would be. just incredible if we did find evidence of life elsewhere. When it comes to what I call dumb life, and I mean no disrespect, but when it comes to biospheres and microbial life, no. I mean, you know, NASA's next giant telescope, the thing that's going to replace the JWST, its name is the habitable world's observatory, right? So that shows you that we are all in, the entire astronomical community is saying this is

the number one problem for astrophysics. When it comes to intelligent life, I still find, my colleagues and I on this NASA grant still find that we have to, especially sometimes for older scientists, there's still that bias. There's still that giggle factor. But it's slowly dying away. The fact that we got this grant, which really NASA got so burned by Congress for doing any kind of setty work back in the 80s that they were kind of like, we're not going to do this. The fact that we even got this grant shows that the tide is turning. Okay. Let's go to see how many calls I can get in.

Colleen in Pensacola. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. I have a question based on the conversation. I have totally enjoyed this program. I understand proof, but what do you say to the people who say they have been abducted and have drawn pictures of the people of the beings that have taken them? I mean, are they delusional? Or how does the author feel about this? Good question. Well, you know, I would never tell somebody that they didn't see something they said they saw because I wasn't there, right?

But science is about public knowledge, not private experience, right? And so if we want to have public knowledge, something that we can all agree on, then we need the same kind of standards of evidence that we use. to say make our cell phones, right? The reasons these cell phones work and are not just like a brick that we hold in our hand is because of these incredibly rigorous standards of evidence that scientists have. Scientists are so mean to each other about their evidence. But that's what's required for us to be able to say that as a community that we know something. And so, you know, for the people who have those experiences, there's nothing I can say, but I can't do any science with it. And that's really the question. One of the famous lines

from the X-Files TV show was, I want to believe. Do you think we as a culture want to believe that we're not alone? I do. I do because we are the cosmic lonely hearts. It is very strange to be a human being and have this capacity to know what the stars are, to know how large the universe is, and then have no one to talk to about it, right? I mean, human beings, first of all, we're terrible to each other, right? And we have this thing like, does anybody do better? And so there's just, we have all of these deep questions about ourselves and we don't have

anyone to talk to. So I think naturally we look to the stars. And now that we know the stars are just like the sun and that there's planets all over the place, we want to know what other stories the universe has written with creatures like us. Knowing who to talk to, that's the subject of Alex in New York. Welcome to Science Friday. Yeah, hi there. So my question is basically we live in an, you know, alternate facts world where not very, it's hard for anyone to agree on anything from elections to climate change.

So it's not clear to me that if extra stress the life was found, everybody would agree that it was. Great question. Of the aliens, from this perspective of the aliens, who do you pick as your human spokesperson to convince the most people? You know, that's like, you know. Oprah? Is it Lennel Messi? Dwayne the Rock Johnson. I've always wanted to say this, so I'll take my answer up the air. You've got the ability to say that now.

That's what happened in science fiction movies. They go, take me to your leader, right? Right. So is there any one person would be good? That's a fun question. Yeah, Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Because? That's who I vote for.

He'd be great. I mean, you know, he's a nice guy. He's huge. You know, I mean, I think that would be the right representative. All right. Let me ask you this question. I'm going to give you the blank checkbook question. and I give a lot of my experts who come on, and that is you're talking about investigating looking for signs of life, let's say, in the exoplanets.

You talked about new methodologies that are coming on, a new telescope. What tool besides that telescope could you love to have if you had an unbelievable amount of money to spend on it? Well, more than one telescope in more than one wavelength. I probably want, you know, a bunch of those telescopes that are configured in different ways to, you know, because this is the problem. With building a telescope like this, you have to sort of, you know, you have to look at all the possibilities and then somehow, you know, roll the dice on the best bet. So if I had lots more money, I'd be able to sort of put my cards down on a lot of different bets. I would also want probes in the solar system. I mean, there's a lot of really interesting places in the solar system.

The ocean moons of the giant planets. You know, like, for example, Titan is a really interesting place. I'd love to have boots on Mars looking for either existing. resistant microbial life or fossil microbial life. So there is just so much that we could be doing. And we're just, you know, we're getting, even though it's, you know, a test space telescope's a lot of money, it's still a little dribble compared to what we could be doing. But how do you cope with just how vast space is? I mean, even if we did find a spot that had some sort of techno signature from another place, I mean, it would basically be impossible for the technology that we know about to get in contact with them.

I mean, let alone visit, right? Well, I think, you know, imagine that we do, let's say we find a techno signature on a star, a planet orbiting a star 10 light years away. I think what would happen is we'd then build the next biggest telescope to get even a better view and et cetera, and we keep doing that. And at some point, we'd send probes. And the probe might, if we could get something up to half the speed of light, it would take 20 years to get there and 20 years to beam back. But it shows you that we've got to be in this for the long game. I think this would just be the beginning. It wouldn't be the end of the story.

it would be the beginning of a long, long story. Are we in it for the long game? Is there enough money, interest to be in it for the long game? Have things changed now? I think so. I mean, the fact that the next JWST is the Habitable World Observatory shows that we're willing to put enormous resources into it. And if we find something, then I think really then all bets are off. You're going to see an enormous amount of funding poured into that if we get our first good bio or techno signature.

You like to quote Carl Sagan in your book a lot. and especially about evidence, right? That extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary, or extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence, absolutely. Still true. Absolutely. And what kind of evidence would that be extraordinary? I don't get about a minute left, but what kind of evidence would you need?

We would need, for example, if we found chloro-fluorocarbons in an alien atmosphere, that would be it. You can't make chloro-fluorcarbons unless you have industry. So that right there would tell you that planet has an indebted. industrial, you know, intelligent civilization. That's terrific. It's a terrific book. My guest is Dr. Adam Frank. He's the Gowan professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, author of The Little Book of Aliens. It's a great book, Dr. Frank.

It's just like, well, well, well written. I recommend it to everybody. Thank you for joining us today. Oh, thank you. This was so much fun. And we have an excerpt of the book on our website at sciencefrily.com slash aliens. And that's it for today. Next time, a tale of heroic survival, Sir Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition, and The Endurance. Thanks for listening. I'm Charles Burgquist.

We'll see you soon.