Somewhere in the Skies - The Little Book of Aliens (w/ Adam Frank)

Episode Date: October 22, 2023

On episode 340, we are joined by astrophysicist and astronomer, Adam Frank. Frank is a leading expert on the final stages of evolution for stars and his computational research group at the University of Rochester has developed advanced supercomputer tools for studying how stars form and die. Today, Frank discusses his latest book, The Little Book of Aliens, which poses and attempts to answer many questions on the possibilities of alien life, how and where it may exist, how it can search for us and how we can search for it. And perhaps most excitedly: how close are we to finally making contact? Or have we already? Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2023 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Your agent handles it all. In fact, we're so confident restoration is guaranteed or your money back. Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply. Today on Somewhere in the Skies, we are joined by astrophysicist, Adam Frank, to discuss The Little Book of Aliens. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague.

Adam, welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. It's my pleasure to be here. Pleasure is all mine, man. I had the amazing opportunity to read a advanced copy of your new book, the little book of aliens, and I knew I had to talk to you, man, because not only do you cover one of our obvious favorite topics here at somewhere in the skies, but you cover it in a very hopeful, optimistic, but most importantly, scientific way. So that's really what I want to break down with you tonight is what are aliens? What could aliens be if we do eventually somehow make contact? You know, there's many people on this planet who believe we have already.

That's not really what this conversation is about today. I really want to dig into a lot of what you believe, as an astrophysicist, I might add, what these alien intelligences could be how they could possibly get here, how we can search for them. All of that. But obvious question, before we even get to all of that, origin story time, how did you get interested in astrophysics? And yeah, if you don't mind, give us a little bit of, I guess, your resume, if that's cool. Right. So I got started in astrophysics as a five-year-old. I found my dad's, I have this really clear memory of this. I had found my dad's, or wandered into my dad's library and he was a big science fiction fan. He was a writer and he had those pulp 1960s

science fiction magazines like Isaac Asmanoff's you know amazing stories and um I remember looking at the covers of those things you know like and they had pictures of like guys bouncing around on alien planets and Michelin tireman spacesuits and rocket ships you know with flame blasting out the back and bug-eyed monsters. Uh and that was that was it. I was done like that was I've never wanted to do anything other in my life than be an astrophysicist and study the stars. So that was the beginning. And then my dad also started putting science fiction in my hands early on. I remember him giving me like when I was 10 or 11, the big book of the golden age of

science fiction, which was Asimov and Heinlein and those people. And then Dune, he gave me Dune. So I grew up with science fiction ideas. I still am. I, you know, as a kid, I watched every science fiction show there was. And back in those days, there wasn't much. So as you can see here, you know, Star Trek, back in the mid-70s when I was coming up, the Star Trek, the reruns would be on at 4 o'clock and 7 o'clock.

So I watched every episode of those first three seasons of Star Trek, like 30 times. Wow. So, yeah, so I grew up with this, you know, real passion for space. And then I learned that, you know, I had some facility with mathematics, you know, in physics. I really fell in love with mathematics and physics. So I went to school to study physics. I became a physics major, then went to graduate school, also in physics, because it was really

theoretical physics that really, that was the way, that was the approach I wanted to take. I knew I was bad with machinery, right? So you never wanted to put me in front of a telescope. And I always had a strong interest in life in the universe, in astro, what we now call astrobiology. But back in the day, there wasn't much going on there. There was just SETI, essentially. And SETI was still kind of marginal. So I pursued, I became a computational fluid dynamist. I studied things like how it starts form out of clouds of gas, how they get torn apart. And all through, you know, so that was most of my career.

I ended up at the University of Rochester where I ran a research group that does this. I'm a professor there. But I always had that interest in life in the universe. And then, you know, starting in the 1990s, astrobiology, as for reasons we'll talk about, starts to grow again. And I jumped on board. By the mid-2000s, I started doing, I turned my research group to studying exoplanets, the atmospheres of exoplanets, and then dove all the way in, started to really get involved in astrobiology. And now, again, something we can talk about, but in 2019, a group of us applied for a grant to NASA to study what are called techno-signatures.

And we got the first grant. NASA, again, we'll talk about this. NASA really was not giving any grants. lots of money to study dumb life, you know, microbes or what we call biosignatures on alien planets, but not much money to study intelligent life. And our grant was really one of the first ones ever, or at least in a very long time, that NASA gave to study the possibility of finding technological life, technological civilizations. And so since then, our group has done really, I think, really amazing, interesting work, pushing the boundaries on that problem.

That's amazing. And yes, I do want to touch on techno signatures a little later because I think that is really, you know, the advent of a new way of searching for this intelligent life out there, which I think is very exciting. You've got a lot of different groups trying to tackle that approach right now. So first of all, congratulations. That's amazing that your group was one of the first. And the fact that NASA is finally getting so much more proactive with this topic of searching for life.

They're also apparently searching for UFOs. So that's kind of what I want to touch out first here with you, Adam. You do start the book, actually, with some chapters that do concern the topic of UFOs or UAP is there now sort of calling them. So that's my first question for you in terms of the book. What made you want to start the book talking about UFOs? And what are some of your thoughts on the topic of UFOs, especially in the last few years when it's really become more mainstream than ever.

Yeah, what do you make of all that? And what made you want to decide to start the book with that? Well, you know, the book is about, about, you know, it's the little book of aliens, right? So it's all about aliens. It's about our conception of aliens. It's about the history of our searching for aliens. And, you know, the main reason I want to have that pull back and have that background

is because from the scientific point of view, we are at the cusp of finding alien life, whether it's intelligent life or microbial life. the profound explosions in the science of astrobiology mean that you really need to look at the big picture. And, you know, UFOs have been a big part of the popular conception of a life in the universe. And so I wanted to run through that history. I also wanted to explain to people why, as a scientist, like how scientists view the subject. And the history has a lot to do with it. So, you know, I am very skeptical that UFOs have anything to do with alien life, you know,

in the universe, and we can talk more about this. But certainly, when you look at the history, you can see how much of our popular conceptions were driven by the presence, you know, by what goes on in the UFO community. I talk about the government reports. And, you know, certainly because the government, though, you know, that long history of government reports, which has a lot to do, I think, with shaping where we are now, you can see because it was the Cold War, the government was certainly less than transparent about what was doing with UFOs. The government was very happy to use UFOs as part of its Cold War subterfuge.

You know, this was this was a battle to the death with the USSR with the Soviet Union. And so, you know, the government was certainly willing to, you know, to use misinformation when it came to UFOs. So I wanted to cover that stuff as well. I wanted to give people the history of those reports, but also understand, yes, sort of what was going on with them. And then finally, we get to the modern era with UAPs. and I really wanted to track through what was going on with the UAP. So people had a firm understanding of where we are now,

especially when it comes to, you know, things like the NASA panel, which I'm all for. Again, I'm skeptical of the fact that I don't think UFOs and UFPs have anything to do with the alien life. But, you know, I'm a scientist. And if we can collect the kind of data, that scientists require in order to judge. So, you know, the thing about this is scientists have,

we're brutal with each other. We're really mean to each other about when it comes to the link between data, some data, and a conclusion, you know, a claim, right? We are very, very mean to each other. And, you know, if you've ever stood in front of the hardest thing as a scientist is to have to stand in front of like, you know, a bunch of people who are much smarter than you and argue that you have a piece of data that is linked to a conclusion.

as they shred every possible, you know, nook and cranny and nuance in that link. So the good thing about, I think, with the NASA panel, which is, you know, the NASA panel and the Galileo project and such, is that now, you know, we can begin the process of collecting the data that we need to try and link to me, just figure out at all what these things are about. So, you know, I think it's good that the pilots now feel free. You know, there's not the stigma to talk about it.

because that way, you know, that's the first step to collecting data. But as I say, you know, one of the things I wanted to cover in the book is how science goes about its business. So people can understand how science will link a piece of data to, you know, or a collection of data to a conclusion. Because, listen, if somebody comes and tells me a story that they saw something in this guy, I'm not going to tell them they didn't. I wasn't there, right? But science is about public knowledge, right? It's about knowledge, you know, 400 or so years ago, we came up, human beings came up with this amazing way of interrogating nature, of getting into a dialogue with nature, whereby we can pull out

conclusions that we can all go, oh yeah, yeah, that's right. Gravity, you know, the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 meters per second square. Anybody can test that, right? And so that is what we're looking for. If we want to understand what, you know, UFOs or UIPs are, we need to build that same. kind of process, which will require probably building new instruments and having a rational search strategy and having a rational well-crafted way of sorting through the enormous amounts of data you're going to get from that. So that's why I wanted people to understand. I wanted people

to sort of see the history. See it as scientists see it and see, you know, from the scientific perspective, what would you actually need to have data to go one way or the other? Like as a scientist, if the data is good enough, I'll go in whichever direction the data is going to go, right? And I would hope that would be the true for UFO. People are really excited about UFOs as well. If the data really doesn't point to, you know, if you can show that things aren't moving at Mach 5th, Mach 500 and making right-hand turns, if the data doesn't support that, then, okay, you know, it's something else.

And no matter what, what I really want people in the UFO community to understand, though, is that, you know, the stuff on the science end, the stuff I'm going to talk about with techno signatures and biotechnology is super exciting. Like, you know, we're a poised to be able to find the possibility of alien life, whether it's intelligent civilizations or microbial life. To me, it's the same. They're both equally mind-blowing. That we're on the edge of doing that.

Like, if you're, you know, if you're alive today, there's a good shot that there's going to be data relevant to that question coming down the pike in your lifetime. As the Krispy Chicken Sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful.

I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet. No. Krisby, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711.

Valley through 62326, participating stores only while supplies lastly out for full terms. That's amazing. That gives me so much hope that we might live to see that day where many people, in the past haven't. And what I think is really cool, too, Adam, is not only do you cover the history of the UFO topic, but you also cover the history of those who did ask that big question, are we alone? You know, you bring up such things as the Fermi paradox. You bring up the Drake equation. These are big buzzwords that us in the UFO field either love or hate,

depending on where you lay in the grand scheme of belief, I guess. But yeah, Did you maybe run us through a little bit of that, the history of our search for alien life throughout the years? And how that can kind of, I guess, propel us forward as we continue to look for new ways. Yeah. What's really amazing is this question is ancient, right? As I talk about in the book, you know, you can see the Greeks, the ancient Greeks, like Aristotle and Democritus, you know, in a steel cage death match, you know, arguing over whether or not, you know, the Earth is special or whether, you know, there's planets with life throughout the, universe. And so this question, people have been arguing about for 2,500 years, but it was only the 1950s, really, that there was this amazing decade, 1950 to 1960, when so much of the foundational

science, the foundational questions were asked. So like the Fermi paradox was this idea that Enrico Fermi, you know, the paradox itself is just from, you know, a lunch conversation that he was having with colleagues at Los Alamos. But the basic question that Fermi recognized early on was, well, you know, why isn't the universe full of detectable aliens? Why aren't they here? Or why haven't we found signals of, you know, of intelligent civilization? Because what Fermi realized, like, in a split second, was that if there even one star-faring civilization, even if it was, you know, even if the speed of light really is a speed limit, then even, you know,

if they're moving at a tenth of the speed of light, in a time scale very short compared to the history of the galaxy, they could reach every star system in the galaxy. So, you know, his question was, why aren't they here? And another, you know, so that's what I call the direct Fermi paradox. The indirect Fermi paradox is something that's also called the Great Silence, which is, well, we've looked, but why haven't we found any? So, of course, if you're a UFO fan, you're going to argue that they are already here. If you're an astronomer like myself, you're going to focus on the the indirect Fermi paradoxes, which is why haven't we heard anything. But of course, the answer to that one, that one's got a real clear answer, which is we haven't looked.

People have this idea that like, oh, every night astronomers, you know, take their radio telescopes, you know, like Jody Foster in contact and listen for, you know, signals of alien civilizations. And nothing could be further from the truth. There's never been any money in SETI. And part of that is because SETI got pinged with some of the more wackiness that happens in the UFO community. and they, you know, NASA wouldn't fund SETI because Congress kept burning them for it. So there's never been a whole lot of SETI done. In fact, actually, if you look at all the SETI searches that have ever been done, you know,

and compare it to like the ocean. Like if the ocean is all of the stars we need to search for alien life, so far we've looked at a hot tub worth of water, right? And if you looked at a hot tub worth of water and didn't find any fish in it, would you then go, well, there's no fish in the ocean? So the Fermi paradox is one of these foundational ideas, which, still today we deal with. And then there's the Drake equation, right?

So Frank Drake, so the 1950s begin with Fermi, and they end with Frank Drake doing his the first, really astrobiology search of any kind, the first astrobiology experiment ever taken, which was Project Osma, where he convinced his colleagues at the radio observatory to let him use this new instrument and look for, he looked at two stars looking for signals of alien life. He didn't find any. but that launched the, that launched SETI, that launched the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

It was the first time anybody at any, anywhere, had ever done a search for life elsewhere other than the Earth. And then in 61, you can have this very important conference on intercellar communications. It's actually, it's a workshop. There's seven guys at it, but including a young Carl Sagan. And that's where the Drake equation comes up. Drake was trying to formulate an agenda for this meeting, the first ever meeting on, you know, communications with extraterrestrial civilizations or finding extraterrestrial civilizations. And he needed an agenda and he broke the problem up into like these seven different pieces.

And he wrote them down as an equation whose solution would be the total number of intelligent, technological civilizations in the universe. And the way he broke that problem up first asked how many stars are there. and then how many stars have planets, and then how many planets are in the right place for life to form, how many planets where life can form, does it actually form, Bing, Bing, Bing, all the way down.

He broke the problem up into these seven pieces, which still today are foundational. We still use that background in how we organize the astronaut, a lot of astrobiological sort of thinking. So that first decade is important for everybody, for people who are into UFOs, for people who are into just asteroids, the scientists are into astrobiology, that's when a lot of the core ideas were laid down

that we're still working with today. Because in science, science is very conservative. I just wanted to put this in, you never give up on a good idea, right? So that's why those ideas are still around today. Interesting. Well, on the spot, I want to ask you, Adam, within sort of those time periods, you also had this thing called the wow signal. What do you make of that personally, as an astrophysicist, as an astronomer. That was one of the one moments where I think a lot of those people who really want to believe that we got a signal, that we got a signal, supposedly. What do you make of the wow signal?

I'm not wild about the West. I'm not wow about the wild. Because it was one-off. Like, you know, it happened once. I mean, the exciting thing about it was it looked exactly like what you'd expect it to look like if it was a signal. But, you know, a one-off, you can't do anything with a one-off, like in science, right? So, you know, and the people have gone back and they've looked at that source and, you know, that location on the sky again and again and again and again and they've never found anything else.

And so you just, you can't do anything with that. Whereas the new stuff that we're developing now, the techno signatures, which is based on entirely different approaches to the problem, that won't be a problem. If we find a techno signature in the way that we think we're going to, you know, the way what we're planning, you'll be able to go back and look again and again and again. It should always be there, right? because we're not looking for sort of like radio beacons that somebody's like pointing at us to say, hey, we're here. We're going to be looking for the indirect signatures of biological or technological activity. So, you know, just like, you know, civilizations or biospheres going about their business.

So that's why the wow signal, you know, if it's only a one off, I can't do anything with it. I can be like, whoa, that's really cool. But then I'm stuck, you know, with arguing over whether that one thing that happened was, you know, the cool thing about science is that every somebody said this to me one time in science a good theory or a good result is like putting a quarter in and getting a dollar back

out right it takes you it leads to the next question that you can try and answer the wow signal you put a quarter in and you got nothing back right because it was just nowhere to go okay we went back and looked and we didn't see anything so you know it was exciting but it just

it was a dead end I hate when that happens I hate when you don't Get your money back. Such a good point. Where's my candy bar? Yep, yep. That's when you tip it over. That's when you tip it over.

Well, you also cover Adam sort of these hypotheticals about how life, if it is out there, how it could possibly get to, let's say, our solar system. And these are big questions. And these are big questions that a lot of skeptics often will put in front of UFO people and say, there's no way. There's no way that they would be able to travel these vast distances. So you do tackle this issue in the book of how could an advanced civilization possibly get here? Is that something you can briefly touch on for us?

Yeah, yeah, because what I wanted people to see is like, you know, of course when we talk about, you know, alien civilizations or civilizations have been around a lot more, we don't know what science they have, right? And so, but you also can't to sort of wave your hand and use that as an excuse to say anything's possible. Because the thing is, we do know a lot of physics, right? And any physics that the aliens have has to sit on top of the physics that we do know, right? So for example, the second law of thermodynamics, right, which says that if you use energy, you're always going to generate some heat or generate some waste. That law, I mean, we have not seen anything that would ever tell us that that law is going to be overcome, right? So anything that the aliens do is going to have to sit on top of the second law.

That means you've got to do some work. If you want to extrapolate the, you know, the science that we have now, you got to do some work to connect it to the science that we do have because we've got some pretty amazing science. Like we've done for a bunch of hairless monkeys, we've done pretty well, you know. So, okay, so that when we run down the list of ways in which you could cross the mind melting distances between the stars, I think, Rick, really everybody should spend a little bit of time working out with those numbers, like how far away the star. are, I mean, it's really, it's hard to sort of get in your gut just how distant the stars are. So, you know, the first, so we can start with stuff that we totally know and work upward. So one way is, is hibernation, right? You know, if this speed, so we believe every, there's nothing that tells us that you can get around the fact that the speed of light is a constant and nothing can go faster than it, right?

That, for the physics we understand, that's the way it is. So if you're going to go slower than the speed of light or as close to the speed. speed of light as you can, then the stars are pretty far away. If a star is 100 light years away, it's 100 years to get there. Right. So, but you know, you could do maybe hibernate. If your biology doesn't allow, you know, if you only have a 70 year, 80 year lifespan, then you can hibernate if that's possible. You could also do century ships where like, you know, you have ships where like one human generation after the other is born and lived and die. And it's the great, great grandparent, great, great grandkids that arrive there. You know, those are pretty, you know, those are pretty,

expensive and hard to do, you know? I mean, and also, if you're going to do that, you're, you know, it's slow, right? So one of the weird things about having the speed of light be a limit means that interstellar civilizations may not be possible, right? If it takes 200 years, 200 year, light years is the next door for us, right? That is 200 light years away is still the block, you know, on the block. And if it takes 200 years to get somewhere, you know, and your typical lifespan is 80 or 90 years, then like, how do you have diplomacy? How do you have, you don't really, it'd be hard to have a coherent, stellar civilization, right? Okay, so you go past that.

Then you start to get into things like, well, okay, what about a warp drive, right? Because Einstein's theory of relativity does allow for this idea of bending space time. So that, you know, if you don't want to actually go from point A to point B, can you bring point A and be together and kind of hop through space, you know, hop through curb space via like a wormhole or a warp drive. And I cover these possibilities. And like with warp drives, there is a solution to the general relativistic equations, the accubre drive, as they call it, that actually does, you know, because here's the interesting thing. Nothing can travel through space faster than the speed of light, but space itself or space time itself can move it at whatever speed it wants. So the accubre drive is this idea that

you could create a warp bubble that sort of bends itself through space that sort of propels. It's a, you know, a bubble of space time that is moving through space time at whatever speed you want. So, you know, the ideas of general relativity give you some ways of maybe thinking about how you could have it. But here's the problem. The only way any of this works is you have to have what's called exotic matter to be able to bend space and time this way. And it doesn't exist, right? Exotic matters basically, you take the, you know, it's something, you got these, equations, you say like, oh, if I just had a term that, you know, had a minus sign right here,

and I could make all this work. And that's literally what we do when we play with those equations. But there's there's no evidence for exotic matter. It's literally just something we dreamed up, you know, and put into the equations. So, you know, that's the problem with exotic matter. Now, you know, maybe some super advanced civilization has come across that. I don't know. But that's, you know, that's the problem with exotic matter. And then you get to quantum mechanics, right? And quantum mechanics is just so weird that who knows what's hiding in it. But that's really, then we're pulling stuff kind of out of our butt. So those are kind of, you know, the possibilities.

Now, I know that there are some people, UFO people who really are into extra dimensions. And I have a whole chapter on extra dimensions, on what extra dimensions mean scientifically. Because it's one of the most beautiful and coolest ideas in mathematical physics. The idea of being able to like, you know, do the mathematics. for objects that have more than three dimensions, more than three spatial dimensions. And it's just, I love it. I love talking about it.

I love thinking about it. But the problem is there is zero evidence, zero. I mean, really zero, because people have looked, that there's any more than three dimensions of space. You know, you can go forward and back. You can go right and left, and you can go up and down. And that's pretty much it.

So, you know, from that scientific point of view, there's just, you know, because people, there was ideas like string theory, which was playing with the idea of extra dimensions, but those ideas just didn't work out. They have not played out. I mean, to me, string theory is really kind of a dead end.

So, you know, so I examine all those possibilities. Well, you know, who knows, you know, again, where we'll go. But if you're, you know, if you're trying to take a ladder, you know, and begin with the physics we know, and I think that's really important because if not, you're just making up science fiction stories. That's what you've got to work with.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah. It's always that frustrating, I guess conundrum of like our own limitations as human beings, our own physics, our own logic in terms of all this. But hey, like we, like you said, we work with what we have to try to ask those bigger questions. And then you just hope that they converge. Well, okay, so we cover how they could possibly get here, Adam. But in terms of us going out and looking for it, You do cover that as well, the different ways throughout history and now how we are searching for that.

And we've been saying it throughout this whole conversation, techno signatures. It's kind of the big buzzword nowadays with a lot of search for alien life. So let's go there, man. Would you mind kind of breaking down what techno signatures truly represent? Because I don't think a lot of people really understand what that term means as opposed to biosignatures. And then on top of all of that, second. prong question. Exoplanets, a place where we could search for techno signatures. So yeah, would you mind maybe break in all that down for us a little bit? Cool. It would be my pleasure. I love talking

about this stuff. The Summer in the Sky's podcast is free to listen to every week. But if you would like to help support the show, we have a very active Patreon page where you give what you think the show is worth. In return, you'll get early access to the main show, bonus episodes, and priority to ask our guests your listener questions. Your support truly makes the show continue and grow. So to learn more and to join, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. You know, what's amazing is like, so when I was in graduate school in the late 80s and early 90s, like, you know, astrobiology just wasn't a subject.

Like SETI was kind of marginalized, you know, the Viking Landers and 76 had landed on Mars. There was a little biology of the experiment that hadn't really gone anywhere. So, you know, it was kind of like there was nowhere to go. And then two amazing things happened. One was we found this rock from Mars in Antarctica. It was literally a chunk of Mars that had been blown into space. And it appeared to have what looked like maybe some evidence of fossil life. That turned out not to be true, but it got us starting. It propelled us to start looking at Mars again and thinking about the whole idea of looking for life in microbial life in the solar system. And then in 1995, the really big thing is we discovered for the first time, the first planet

orbiting another star, an exoplanet. This is also a question that goes back to 2500, or goes back 2,500 years. People have been arguing about, I can't tell you how many scientific careers over history were ruined by someone saying, I discovered an exoplanet, right? And then it would turn out to not to be true. and that guy's, you know, or girl's career was, was, was ended. But so in 1995, we had our first conclusive proof of a planet orbiting another star. And then, you know, within 10, 20 years or 10, 15 years, we had a census. We knew that every plant, every star in the sky hosted a family of worlds. And we knew that one out of five of those had a star, or had a planet in the right place,

at least of the sun-like ones, had a planet in the right place for life to form, where liquid water could be on the surface. So this exoplanet revolution just blew the doors off of everything. Suddenly, we knew exactly where to look for life, right? And the original seti, that's not the way it was. You just sort of pointed things at sun-like stars and hoped for the best, right? So the exoplanet revolution was one of the most important parts of this new age of astrobiology. The second thing that happened was the development of what we'll call this technique,

this amazing technique called atmospheric characterization. And what it meant was our telescopes had gotten so powerful and the instruments we put on our telescopes had gotten so powerful that we could see into the atmospheres of these worlds that are 10, 20, 100 light years away, and we could sniff out, so to speak, the composition of that atmosphere. We could tell what chemical compounds were in that atmosphere.

Now, why is that important? That has to do with another astrobiological. revolution, which was learning Earth's full history, seeing the full, you know, 3.8 billion year history of Earth and life together. Because one of the things we've learned from that is that Earth has been many planets, you know, many different kinds of planets across that time. And life has been the driving force for a lot of those. For example, oxygen.

The only reason, you know, I can take a nice big breath of oxygen is because life put the oxygen in the atmosphere. before, you know, about two billion years ago, before like a new form of photosynthesis was invented by microbes, the Earth's Earth had life and it had no oxygen in it. So the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere of Earth is a biosignature. Someone looking at Earth from light years away could look at our planet, see that there's oxygen in the atmosphere and deduce like that planet has a biosphere. So this process of atmospheric characterization where you can see how life has changed a planet, changed the atmosphere, was the beginning of this great revolution that we now

started to figure out how to search for biosignatures, all kinds of biosignatures. Oxygen was the first one, but now we're getting very, very sophisticated in thinking about how to do it. We don't have to rely on Earth's history, right? We're starting to think a lot about agnostic signatures of life where, you know, could be a completely different biochemistry, but we'd still be able to tell that that planet had something going on with it that was not, that could only happen because of life. And then along the same time, while this is happening in the 2000s and 2010s, Jill Tarter, the great hero of SETI, right?

This woman who, you know, has been at the forefront of SETI for decades, said, look, if you're going to search for biosignatures, if NASA's going to fund, at a was a lot of research in biosignatures, how could you avoid also thinking about techno signatures, right? How can you not think about the possibility of looking for, you know, the presence of industrial chemicals in the atmosphere, right? You know, what about city lights? What about, you know, there's all this whole range of things that you could look for in the exact same way that you're going to look for biosignatures that will tell you there's a civilization there, harvesting energy and doing work. Um, uh,

in the service of the civilization. So that was where, that's where the term techno signatures came from. And then it was in 2018 that actually, this is, I talk about this in the book, this conference. Someone in Congress said, you need to spend 10 million, told NASA,

you need to spend $10 million on techno signatures. And NASA was like, what? It's like, okay. So they had to have a meeting. They called us together. They called a bunch of us together who were interested in this, to have a meeting to say, okay, look, if they give us this money, which in the end they didn't, what would we do with it?

So we had this amazing three-day meeting in Houston at the lunar science, a very storied NASA facility to talk about this. And it was the most amazing, exciting meeting I have ever been at in my entire life, right? Everybody's crazy ideas, but also trying to systematize for the first time, the crazy ideas. And out of that came a bunch of us decided to put in this proposal to NASA to say, look, all right, we want to look for atmospheric techno signatures. We want to design a study. We're not going to look yet. We're going to do the theoretical research to tell observers what they should look for if they're looking for techno signatures from planets. And that was the beginning.

And so now what people really need to understand is already with the JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope, It's at the hairy edge, but it's possible that the JWST could detect both biosignatures or techno signatures. We did a paper where we showed that chloroflorocarbons, right, this chemical that, you know, we pumped into the atmosphere, kind of by mistake. But you could detect that with the JWST from like 10 light years away. So game on, man, right now, you know, and going into the future with the better telescopes we're going to build, we have the possibility. the capacity, or we're going to have the capacity, to find alien life where it lives on alien planets. Wow. You know, and I feel like that, Adam, it's like the only positive to come out of any sort of pollution is the possibility that it could lead us to finally finding some sort

of alien life. Or them finding us, let's be completely honest. Right. We've had, yeah. And the thing is about the pollution. You know, CFCs, right, we did that by mistake. But, you know, there's lots of reasons and we have a paper that we're working on right now that you might purposely put chemicals into your atmosphere. So, for example, chloro-fluorocarbons, they're bad for the ozone. But if you wanted to turn Mars into a habitable world, which we do, eventually we may try. CFCs are great. They are very, they're chemically inert, but they're great greenhouse gases. So that means that like, yeah, if you could pump Mars's atmosphere up with CFCs, you could raise. the temperature to the point where like it would be warm enough to wander around with just like an air mask on.

So, you know, absolutely these different kinds of chemicals, you might have reasons. But it's not just, it's not just chemicals. City lights. There was a paper that showed that you could, for a world that had larger amounts of artificial illumination, you would be able to see that in the light from the, you know, from the planet. You'd be able to see that there was artificial illumination. You'd be able to see the possibilities that they were using, that a civilization was using solar panels of any form, the reflected light would actually carry the signature of the solar panels.

So the list goes on and on and on. And that's what we're developing. That's what our job is, is to carry out these studies to explore different kinds of techno signatures because starting now, you know, we can start looking for them. I love it. I love that. It's amazing. Well, it is. I can hear the passion in your voice at him. I would what I would have given to be a fly on a wall at that conference, by the way. That I can't even imagine. Nobody got me sleep. I was going to say how hard you guys probably party.

Yeah, a lot of beer. I mean, it's just, I got, you know, the, you know, sometimes people in the UFO community can say like, oh, scientists are closed-minded or whatever. You had to be at this meeting to hear some of the ideas that were getting batted around. We were talking about billion-year-old civilizations and how they evolve. Like, what happens to a civilization after, you know, a hundred thousand. thousand years, a million years of continuous evolution. Does it stay hold? Does it break up? What kinds of, you know, what kinds of technology might they evolve? You know, if you become, uh, if you, you know, become AI or if AI takes over, what does that look like? I mean, there were some really cool

ideas that we're getting bounced around. That's, well, and that's kind of, um, what you cover in sort of the remaining chapters of the book. Again, without giving away too much, I, I cannot recommend this book enough. I'm just going to say that flat out. Oh, great. Of course, of course. You cover everything from how we may like communicate with aliens if we do make contact. And you cover things as like the ethics of making contact and what that would look like too. And kind of the possibility of everything, even ancient aliens. Like you said, you guys theorized about a billion year old civilization somewhere or, you know,

in ancient aliens is a big thing in the world today. No matter what you think of it or how controversial it is, it's out there. The theory is out there. So could you maybe break down that last chapter of the book for us? This was by far my favorite chapter of the book in terms of, yeah, how would we communicate with something? Let's say it is AI or it's so, forgive the pun, alien to us that we don't know how we could possibly communicate with it. Yeah, maybe break down that last chapter for us a little bit if you

don't might. Yeah, that chapter was super fun to write too, because really what I wanted to explore was how aliens will alien be or how alien will aliens be? And the answer is very, right? That's really the thing. You know, what's cool about this subject is you've got to push your imagination to the edge, right? But still bounded with science, right? So science is really constrained imagination, right? You can go to whatever heights you want, but you got to use like the laws of physics and chemistry and Darwinian evolution, which we think is going to be pretty universal to somehow bound your thinking. So you don't just fall off into writing science fiction novels, right? We want to somehow ground ourselves so that we can kind of systematically explore the options. So one of the

first things I talked about was alien minds, right? Because alien minds are really, you know, what the what is the cognitive structure of a mind that has evolved under entirely different kinds of evolutionary backgrounds going to be like um you know so there's this great and when it comes to communication right you know people there's this great idea from carl sagan that oh we'll teach them our math right that's been the whole foundation like in the movie contact you know we're you know we'll meet aliens and then we'll teach them like oh look this is how we do one plus one and that equals two and we'll show them the symbols and then we'll work our way up to pie in the circumference of a circle and then you know after a while, you know, we'll all be friends.

You know, we'll all be, you know, sharing our favorite Netflix shows. Yeah. But really, that idea may not, I mean, maybe it'll work, but it may not work at all because it assumes that our math, the way we structure think about math, is universal. And that's, it's entirely possible. That's not true. That really are the way, we invented our math in a way that our brains, which grew up on the, you know, the, the, the, um, the planes of Africa were useful for.

imagine, as I said, imagine a species that is what we would call like a liquid brain, a liquid body, like, you know, amoeba. They have, you know, if they want to grab something, they kind of reach a pseudopod out, like, you know, grab something and pull it back. They don't have digits. Would they even have integers? Would the idea of one, two, and three make any sense to them, right? So that's a really interesting possibility. And there's that great movie, Arrival, which maybe some people have seen. where I think that's one of my favorite really smart. I mean, I love, you know, I love Star Wars and Star Trek, you know, give me all the laser blasters you can give me.

But Arrival was like one of these really quiet, thoughtful movies about aliens. Yes. And so they send in like, you know, these heptopods arrive, and they send in a Carl Sagan kind of physicist guy and then a linguist, right? And the Carl Sagan guy goes in and, you know,

tries to do the Carl Sagan thing with math and spectacularly fails immediately. And it's the linguist who understands that language has to do with like the whole embodied experience. You have to be, it's not abstract. It's actually very much about being in a body and having experience. She's the one who makes contact. And then realizes that their whole experience is entirely different. Like they are, they move, they live simultaneously in the past, present, and future.

And I really thought about that a lot, how, you know, maybe it's biology that determines physics, not the other way around. some sense. It determines what parts of the big book of physics are actually accessible to you. So that's a great idea. And then the ethics part was really, I wanted to talk a little bit about, I talked a lot about just the ethics of what kind of ethics might, you know, different, depending on your evolutionary background you might have. But I really wanted to cover the idea of many messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. We're like, you know, a few times people have pointed giant telescopes and sent some kind of message to a distant star. And that's been very controversial because, you know, as anybody who's read the three-body problem, you know, maybe you don't want to do that,

right? Maybe you don't want to stick your head above the grass and be like, hey, I'm here, I'm tasty, you know, come on over. And I kind of, I'm kind of in that thing. I think like, we just don't know what's out there, right? And it's, it's, it's, I don't think it's a good idea, just assume that because civilizations will be older that, you know, that may be older than us, that they're suddenly like wearing togas, you know, and meditating, right? You know, who knows what? And this is, you know, I love science fiction. As I said, I read lots of science fiction.

This is a theme that shows up in a lot of really good science fiction stories about this idea of, you know, the dark forest or one idea, oh, it's a book. I've forgotten the name, but the idea that there are wolves between the stars, you know. And you've got to be careful. So that's why that was kind of part. And there's a lot more in that chapter about ethics. And then finally, the ancient alien, I think for us, ancient aliens meant something different, where we did a paper with David Kipping from the Columbia.

And it was a very sort of detailed theoretical paper to ask this question, if we find aliens, if we find signals of aliens, not necessarily communications, but we just find evidence for a civilization, would we expect it to be younger, older, younger, our age, or older? And by, you know, by our age, we're talking anything within, you know, a few thousand years, right? So we're doing the science thing of being very sort of order of magnitude, as we call it. And the result of these calculations using what's called Bayesian probability,

you know, David was very good. David's a real master, kung fu master with this kind of thing. And we, the conclusion was that it'll be older, you know, quite possibly much older. So, you know, that's where the ancient aliens comes from for us is that, if we make contact with a civilization or find a civilization, it will probably be quite a bit older than us. And what does that imply? How can you think systematically, right? How can you lay, again, because this is what science does. We don't just want to write a science fiction story. We want to somehow lay out in a systematic way the possibilities for civilizations that have been around

and contiguous, you know, or continuous for a million years. years. We've been around as a technological civilization for a century, maybe two, depending on how you define it. What does a million years look like? Like, what do you become? You know? So, super cool. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free. The truth is our sin. It's just so beautiful.

On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. Yeah, absolutely. It really does. And that's what I love about this question of alien is it tells us so much more, I think, about ourselves than actually the aliens. It really does put that mirror back on us. Be like, hmm, what could we be?

What could we aspire to be? Or it could be a warning, a cautionary tale. Exactly, both of those, right? I think that's the importance of looking is that, you know, if we did find a civilization and it would probably be older than us, that would be enormous comfort, right? Because as of right now, you know, we've got all these problems in the world, climate change and, you know, the rise of AI and, you know, whatever, just our nuclear war is still clearly hovering over us. You know, does, so the question is, does any civilization make it?

Does the universe do long-lived technological civilizations? That's an open question. So to find just one civilization, it doesn't matter whether we talk to them or not, just to know that like, oh, yeah, okay, yeah, sure, this is something the universe does. Yeah, that would be good. Absolutely. And hope. Yeah, that would be very good.

Very comforting, like you said. Well, last question for you, Adam. What do you hope people will take away from the book? What's like the big thing you hope that this will contribute to the question? Are we alone? And if not, where do we go from there? Right. The main thing I want people to get take away is excitement. Like, you know, people should be pumped. This is amazing. We live, I mean, really, how often, how many generations, you know, how many people get to be around when a 2,500 year old question gets answered, right? Now, you know, I don't know. I can't tell you for sure it's going

to get answered. I can't tell you for sure that what the answer is going to be. But here's the thing I can be sure of over the next 10, 20, 30 years, you know, and science is always about a long game. You know, you can't learn something amazing unless you put the time into it. But the thing I can't tell you is we're going to have data. For the first time, we're going to have actual hard data related to the question as opposed to just yelling at each other's opinions, man, you know, about it. So this is, I want people to see like, wow, man, this is amazing. We're about to find out. And then I want them to really start to, you know, to understand. So when I want them to be ready so that whether it's UFOs or science, you know, astronomical science, when someone says we found it, I want them to be ready with their skeptical hats on, but also their, you know, their background that the book gives them to be able to know how to evaluate that claim, right?

And then be ready to think about it. And then if that claim is true, what the consequences of that claim are. I love it. I love it. Be ready. Guys, be ready, October 24th when the book releases. It's the little book of aliens by Adam Frank. And Adam, first of all, thank you.

Thank you for being so open to coming on a UFO podcast, first and foremost. I think it's very important to have these conversations when you deal with such a speculative, theory-based conversation like I do as a UFO podcast. to get on the ground and think objectively about, oh, yeah, who could be piloting these possible aerial phenomena or at least behind them. I think it's important to really step back and look at these questions. Because like I said, no matter what UFOs are or aren't or no matter what aliens are or aren't, it tells us so much more about where we've been, where we're going. And I think that's what I really took away from your book is hope. There's so much hope and it was so accessible.

Like I said, guys, October 24th is when the book comes out. I cannot recommend it enough. Where and when can we get the book? I said when, but where can we find it, Adam? Well, you can already pre-order at your favorite pre-ordering book, you know, Amazon or the Harcourt or Harper Collins, excuse me, Harper-Colins, or, you know, pretty much anywhere that you can pre-order books. So it's available now. of course it'll be delivered on the 24th. So yeah, that's what I encourage people to pre-order.

Get yours now. So, yeah, and I hope they enjoy it. I hope they, you know, that it's, I wrote the book in a way that was really meant to be fun. You know, even if you don't usually read science books, science-based books. You know, I'm from Jersey, as you can, you know, New York Mets here. You know, I'm from the tri-state ethnic. And I kind of just in this book, I've written a lot of science, popular science books, but this one I just let loose with, you know, as if, you know, I was just having a conversation

with my buds, you know, and that's kind of the way I did it because that was fun. That was actually the most fun for me. Yeah, yeah, it was. Like I said, it did feel unlike any other book I've really read on this topic in a very long time. So again, I got to thank you for that, Adam. And once more, I got to thank you for coming on somewhere in the skies today. I really enjoyed this. This was a great conversation. Thank you.