StarTalk Radio - Extraterrestrial Mashup

Episode Date: December 22, 2017

Search for ET on this StarTalk mashup – featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, David Grinspoon, Seth Shostak, Michael Ian Black, Chuck Nice, Jill Tarter, David Brin, Allen Saakyan, and Doug Vakoch – as we explore where to look and debate whether to send signals ourselves.NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/extraterrestrial-mashup/ Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Hi, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and you're listening to a special mashup edition. You'll hear a mishmash of some of our favorite moments around a specific topic using a range of expert guests and co-hosts. This week, we're talking about the search for extraterrestrials. We're back on StarTalk at the American Museum of Natural History, and we're talking about the scientific search for alien intelligence, featuring my interview with SETI co-founder Jill Tarter. Let's check it out.

How much of the galaxy have we actually searched for life? Because every time I'm out in the street, someone says, we've looked and we haven't found any. Are we alone? That's right. And I'm trying to find a way to tell them we're not likely alone, but they know we've been looking for a while.

So how do you deal with this? So I try and tell people about all the different ways you might have to look to get it right. All the different frequencies, being at the right time, looking at the right place. All this has to come together. Right. Now, that big volume that you need to search through, set that equal to the volume of the Earth's oceans. Okay. All that water.

So how much have we sampled in the last 50 years? One 12-ounce glass. It's not a lot. And so if you were looking for fish in the ocean, are there any fish in the Earth's ocean? Here's a glass. I'm going to scoop up a glass, and I'm going to look at it. And there aren't any fish in there.

Can you claim that there are no fish in the ocean? Yeah, you'd be stupid to do so. Yeah. Shortsighted. Stupid. You're sticking with stupid. Yeah, you were right in the first place. No, I'm an edgy, I can't say stupid. You're short-sighted. You'd be inexcusably egocentric. That's right. And so it's the fact that it's hard to comprehend how big the search is. So you can't understand how little we've done. However, exponentials will save us because our ability to search, mainly through computing. The growth of technology. Exponential

growth of storage, retrieval of information. All that stuff. It gets faster and better all the time and all the good stuff's at the end, right? It's really getting fast. Okay, so next we might get a garbage pail of water. Swimming pool. Swimming pool of water. And then some minnows come in. Yeah, could be. Okay. And then a lake.

And then very soon, an ocean. Tonight we're talking about listening to the skies for a chance to make contact with an alien civilization. And I got one of the world's experts on it, Seth Shostak, friend and colleague. Seth. My comedic co-host tonight, Michael Ian Black.

Welcome. Thank you. And right now, it's time for Cosmic Queries. Love Cosmic Queries. These are questions called from the internet, and they're all about the search for life in the universe.

So, let's do it. David Hamilton, Mayagas, Puerto Rico. Would it be more likely that any intelligent signal we detect is simply an echo of life now long gone? How could we tell the difference, and if we couldn't, can we still claim we aren't alone? Seth. Yeah couldn't, can we still claim we aren't

alone? Seth? Yeah, well, look, people ask that. You pick up a signal. It took, you know, who knows how many years to get here. Maybe they're gone. Well, maybe they are gone. But you know what? The time it takes for a signal to get here might be tens, hundreds, thousands of years. You know, the U.S. Post Office might give me a letter from my aunt tomorrow, and maybe my aunt has died since she sent that letter. It's possible. But the lifetime of aunts is pretty long compared to the functioning of the postal service,

so the chances are she's still around. I think that if we pick up a signal, yeah, maybe it's a 100-year-old signal, but I'd like to think that they haven't self-destructed in the last century. But I think it's a good question because ultimately, does it matter? I mean, we're receiving this signal.

That answers a fundamental question. Yeah, I think this is an important point because we've talked about the fact that maybe there's different kinds of intelligence and maybe we'll never understand the signal. I think that's pretty likely, actually, but it doesn't matter because what you've learned is that what's happened on this planet

has happened in many other places. Good. Next. Denny North, New Orleans, Louisiana. Could we send entangled particles to an extraterrestrial intelligence to communicate with them in real time? Seth? Well, you could send the particles, but the facts are that quantum entanglement, very appealing,

but it doesn't allow faster-than-light communication, despite what many people think. Physics doesn't allow you to send information faster than the speed of light unless Al Einstein is wrong, and he's never been shown to be wrong. Sorry. Thanks. Yeah, even when he was wrong, he was right. Yeah, yeah. Well, you're talking about the cosmological constant. Yes, exactly. Well, you're talking about the cosmological constant. Yes, exactly. Yeah, the cosmological constant, he put it in his equations,

which would represent some kind of negative gravity in the universe, and it turned out it wasn't necessary to be in his equation for the universe to expand, which he discovered a few years later after Hubble discovered an expanding universe. He said it was the biggest mistake, biggest blunder of his life. And then we would find the cosmological constant in the actual universe. It's called dark energy. And so I've concluded that Einstein's biggest blunder

was saying that that was his biggest blunder. Yeah. So even when he was wrong, he was right. That's how you know you're badass. Good. Next. James Coltis, Bentonville, Arkansas. If SETI discovered extraterrestrial intelligence,

how long would it take to share the discovery to the public, and what is the process involved with making it public? I would say a billionth of a second. Do you tell the president first? Does the president get to know first? No. Look, we don't have a call list. You know, start with this, will you? I mean, we have had false alarms. In 1997, we had a false

alarm that, for most of the day, looked like the real deal. And I kept waiting for the Pentagon to call, the White House to call, somebody to call. The only people that called were the New York Times. And the facts are that they were calling within hours of us finding the signal. Yeah, so this notion that the government is somehow in control, and no, this is not the case. The government is not that high-functioning. You got one. That was it. That was it.

Got the questions. Excellent. Our special guest tonight, all the way here from California, which is even beyond New Jersey, Dr. Doug Vakoch. Doug, come on out. Doug is the president and founder of METI International. That's M-E-T-I, and that's Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. So we're not going to just talk about looking for the aliens. We're going to talk about how you might communicate with them and maybe what you would say if you did. Doug, thanks for coming. Great to be here. All right. First off, how many of you people out there think there is life in space? Not the kind of pond scum you may find at home, but intelligent life? By applause. So,

the people who are listening, how many of you believe in that? Wow. Pretty good. By applause, so that the people who are listening, how many of you believe in us? Wow. Pretty good. On radio, nobody can hear you raise your hand unless you have arthritis. And how many of you think, no, they're not out there? All right, get that guy out of here. All right. Let's start with a panel here.

What do we know about life in space? What have we found so far? Doug, what have we found so far? Well, we've found a lot of static so far, and that's what we've been looking for. So SETI scientists, scientists involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, look for radio signals, unlike the kind of radio that galaxies and stars make. We haven't found those yet, but I think the big news is over the last 20 years,

there have been a lot of things we have found. So just over 20 years ago, we knew of no stars that have planets. Now we go out and look at the night sky, and virtually all of those stars have planets. Maybe one out of five of those has planets at just the right distance that it could support life with liquid water. We didn't know about that when SETI began. And we know that life can survive

in incredibly diverse environments here on Earth, from the Arctic tundra of the north to acid hot springs to the core of nuclear reactors. So even Camden, New Jersey. Yes, yes, even Camden, New Jersey. So if life can survive there, it's a very good chance it's out there. Now we just need to find it.

All right, so what you're saying is there's a lot of real estate, but we haven't seen any condos. No, no condos. Now there was actually a suggestion that there could be not just a condo, but an entire city in orbit. This was a star that actually you looked at the SETI Institute and we looked at METI International, and it was a star that the Kepler mission, this is a NASA mission to look for planets around other stars. And they look at that by seeing the dimming as the planet goes. So if you're the Kepler spacecraft, you're observing a star, I'm a star, and every time a planet goes between us, there's a little dimming. Every time a planet goes between us, there's a little dimming.

And if this is a planet the size of Jupiter or Saturn, one of the big ones in our solar system, the dimming would be less than 1%. There's something strange about this one star, up to 20% dimming. And one of the explanations was maybe it's an alien megastructure. So Seth at the SETI Institute used the Allen Telescope Array to say, well, if there are engineers there, maybe they're sending us radio signals. We used an optical observatory in Panama to see if they're sending brief laser pulses. No sign of that.

And so our expectation is we're going to find a natural explanation. Nature is freakier than we can imagine. And in a lot of cases, these turned out to be false alarms. So, so far, unfortunately, no sign of E.T.'s technology. Seth, before you go any further, can I ask what may be a silly question? Since this is what you do, is it necessary to point and listen in different directions? And if so, how do you know where to point and listen? Yeah, well, that's actually, that's a good question for which there's no terrifically good answer. The facts are, we don't know where the aliens are hanging out.

I mean, you know, I never got a text message, hey, where the Klingons? Love to get in touch. And we're over here. So you can say, well, all right, the way to beat that rap is just to look at the entire sky. The trouble with that is, if you do that, you're spending most of your time looking at the entire sky. The trouble with that is if you do that, you're spending most of your time

looking in the wrong directions, right? You might liken it to finding life in the desert. You can look at the whole desert, but it might be more effective to just look at the oases. Yeah. So we try and do that. We look at nearby stars. Good analogy.

Might have planets, you know, that are the kind of stars and planets that might have life. Okay, so that's SETI. But Doug here has another idea. are the kind of stars and planets that might have life. Okay, so that's SETI. But Doug here has another idea. Why wait for them to call or why hang around hoping to pick up their call? Why don't we try and take the initiative and get in touch? And that's METI. Tell them about METI. Well, SETI has always assumed that any alien that has the ability to transmit

is also going to be motivated, and that they're just altruistically beaming messages here for our benefit. And we hope that's true, at least of some civilizations. So that's why even at our organization, METI, we're still listening. We're looking for laser pulses. We're hopeful that that continues.

But we also want to explore another option, and that is that they're not taking the initiative. That maybe, in fact, life is out there much more widely spread than we had imagined. There was an Italian physicist called Enrico Fermi who, in 1950, said, well, if there's all this life out there, where are they? It's called the Fermi Paradox.

And one of the answers to the Fermi Paradox is maybe in fact they are observing us, but that's it. They want to hear from us before they respond. So it's a little bit like, say you go to the zoo and you're observing a bunch of zebras and it's all very well and good. You're seeing them talk to one another, but what happens? One of those zebras turns toward you, looks you in the eye, and starts pounding out a series of prime numbers. That establishes a very different relationship with that creature. It may just evoke a response. You're not going to say, oh, they're just chattering with one another. They want to talk to us. So that's what we're testing with METI, testing the zoo hypothesis to see whether even nearby stars might be inhabited. Now, in the zoo hypothesis, am I smoking anything, how shall I say, other than

tobacco? You don't need to be smoking anything other than tobacco. You just got to be willing to do the experiment. And, you know, it's something that's unusual for a lot of astronomers, because astronomers are very good scientists, but it's a passive science. You just wait for the information to come in. That's what you have to do if you're trying to study a distant galaxy. It's a different mindset to say, wait, we can actually be more active. We can send out a message and then get a reply back. All right, so I hate to be silly here, because I know this is a serious conversation, but I believe there was an episode of Star Trek

where we kind of did that, and then we got something called the Borg. I'm not sure if anybody here is a Star Trek fan, but they weren't nice people. And the Borg are out there, and there are other people who share your views. Stephen Hawking has said, if you get a signal, do not transmit, or the aliens might come here. I've got bad news for both you and Stephen Hawking.

Okay. Which, by the way, I'm going to write this down in my diary now. That you got compared with Stephen Hawking. Put me in a category with Stephen Hawking. You and Stephen Hawking are overlooking one critical point. What's that? Well, if the Borg want us, it's too late. Because they have already picked up I Love Lucy.

They picked up our radio signals. If you can travel, if you can build one of those huge Borg cubes, then picking up our radio signals is no big deal. Seth, you've run the numbers. If you look at how much our radio telescopes have grown, and then just continue that two, three hundred years, we would be able to pick up our own level of leakage radiation out to 500 light years. So, the bad news is it's too late. The good news is, it looks like there's not a big worry, because not only have our radio and TV signals been going

out a long time, we have been giving evidence that we have life on Earth for two and a half billion years since the plankton started creating oxygen in the atmosphere. So if there are any really paranoid aliens who want to wipe out the competition, they have plenty of time to get here.

And if they are on their way, I say let's be proactive and say we're much more interesting in an interstellar conversation than being annihilated. Look, I think we ought to come back to this, because this is a hot-button issue, whether it's a good idea to broadcast into space, but I'm still back

with that zebra at the zoo that's blinking prime numbers in my direction. My reaction to that would be you and I are going on the road because any zebra that could do that, what else can he do? But I think that the point You and I are going on the road because any zebra that could do that, I mean, what else can he do, right? But I think that the point is you're assuming something about their psychology if you say, look, all we have to do is send them some interesting tweets or whatever,

and then they will do something in return that will justify that effort. Now, you're trained in psychology. Absolutely. in return that will justify that effort. Now, you're trained in psychology. Absolutely. You have to assume their motivations. But that's what SETI scientists have been doing all along. We have been assuming that they are going to do the heavy lifting, that they are going to be transmitting for our benefit. And again, I hope that's true for some of the aliens. But not all aliens may have the same motivation. And even this idea of being altruistic, we know from looking at altruism on Earth that one form of altruism is

called reciprocal altruism. You do something for me and I do something for you. The trick is someone's got to make the first move. And it may be that they look at us and say, wait, we're supposed to go out of our way? We've been doing this for thousands or millions of years. We've been through this. Not a big added advantage to contact you. You're the ones who have the most benefit, so you should take the initiative. You know, sometimes we talk about interstellar communication as joining the galactic club. What I find so irritating, no one ever talks about paying our dues or even submitting an application. But that's what it is to send a signal saying we want to make contact.

Maybe it's what we need to make contact. An application. Yeah, I like it. Let's hope it's not a restricted club. There you go. Yeah, it's like the Groucho Marx comment about not wanting to go in your club. I think that is. It's a sense of an inferiority complex.

What do we have to say that a civilization a million years more advanced than we could want to hear? But I don't think we're the most intelligent or the most wise civilization. I'll put my money on us being the civilization in the entire galaxy that has the best balance between joy and sorrow. I don't think anywhere but the current time right now in our civilization can make us more unique.

I think what we offer, we want to always put our best foot forward, show off how powerful and strong we are. We're not on a galactic scale. The thing that we most have to offer is just saying here is who we are as humans and it might just help a civilization that has been around so long that the idea of annihilating itself, they can't even conceive of. The idea of being mortal is beyond their capacity.

So I think that's where we really have something to offer, of showing them who we are as human beings. Human beings, the sea students of the galaxy. But you had to start somewhere. This is a reminder of kindergarten. welcome back to star talk here's more of this week's mashup all right we're back at star talk all stars with chuck nice alan sakian and doug vack coach i'm your host, Seth Shostak. I'm an astronomer at the SETI Institute in the lovely Bay Area on the other coast. And our job is to try and look for life in space. Doug is interested in communicating with life in space. Let me ask you this, Doug. If you're going to broadcast into space, and I take it that's what METI is all about, right? You know,

what about the message? Are you just going to send an empty tone? It's to say, hey, there's something here on Earth. Are you going to actually give them a message, pictures, something? We're going to be sending a message. So our organization began in 2015. We laid out our plans, what we plan to accomplish by the end of 2018. So by the end of 2018, we'll be transmitting powerful

intentional signals to nearby stars. And we're taking an approach that's somewhat different from the past. First of all, we're focusing on nearby stars. There have been a few symbolic transmissions in the past that we'll actually get to in a minute, I think. But the key issue is, in the past, we've often transmitted to very distant stars. We're focusing on nearby stars. And we're also going to send them repeatedly, over and over again. That helps to actually let the steady scientists on other worlds know whether we are encountering.

So what we see now, we know that there are plenty of stars out there that have planets. A recent discovery is the Trappist star, Trappist-1, 40 light years from Earth. It has at least seven planets, and three of them are lying in the habitable zone, the zone called the Goldilocks zone. It's not too hot, not too cold, just right for liquid water. So there are a lot of places. So this is the kind of star, but there are ones that are even nearer than that so that you could get a response back within a lifetime. Okay. These are not stars. Those are all planets. The stars on the left are scale. Now, TRAPPIST-1 system, 40 light years away, that's not much. de Blasio probably has that on his Honda, right? So you could send a message to this group of planets.

And by the way, you may note that all these planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, the ones we know about, we know about seven. They're shown in this slide, which are particularly vivid on radio. You'll notice they're all about the same size as the Earth. That's very unusual. You think in our solar system,

you've got Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, kind of the same size. But then you have Jupiter, Saturn, you know, they're very different size. Okay, these are all about the same. Three of them are at the right distance where maybe you could have some biology, maybe you have liquid oceans, atmospheres, that kind of thing. So maybe this isn't just a place where there's an inhabited planet. Maybe this is a whole inhabited ecosystem. Now, here's the question then. If you're broadcasting to some system like this, it's 40 light years away, right?

You're going to run out of money before you get your reply, right? Well, there's a common misconception that you need to transmit continuously in order for this to make any sense. What happens if there're SETI scientists are doing what we do, we look at a star for a few minutes, nothing's transmitting, we move on to the next one, and we've lost it because we only transmitted once.

So that mirrors the idea, as you talked about at the beginning, Seth, if we think of aliens as being like ourselves. What we don't take into account is just a little bit more advanced than we are with our SETI search, and they can be looking at us all the time. So in fact, the SETI Institute is now in the process

of building an optical SETI observatory that will look everywhere in the sky all the time. So even if that signal comes by just once, it's enough to ping them. And so you have now an economically viable way of you go to one star, you ping it, you move on to the next star, you ping it, but you don't have to be transmitting all the time. You do, though, need to have one thing that we are in very short supply of here now, and that's patience. Because Trappist-1, you send a signal, and we can get a

reply back. If they don't take too long and take it to their equivalent of the United Nations to get consensus. We get a reply back by the end of this century. So it's going to take 80 years to get a reply back. And there are other stars that are closer. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, a little over four light years away. So it would take eight years to get a round trip.

But I think the biggest opposition to METI from within the SETI community is not that it's a danger to the aliens coming here, but it's just, do we have the capacity as a civilization to take on that kind of a long-term task? The reality is, you know, the early days of SETI have reflected that we are an adolescent civilization. We did the easy thing. We looked in a way that could give us results to benefit us now. What a better way of characterizing an adolescent than us and now. What we're proposing is that as we move into the next half century, we expand that to think about what we can do for others, other civilizations and future generations of humans, and a project

that takes a lot longer than we're comfortable with, decades or centuries. Hi, I'm David Grinspoon, and this is Star Talk All-Stars. I'll be your all-star host today, and today's co-host is comedian Chuck Nice. Hey, David. How's it going, Chuck? Hey, man, it's good. Good to see you again. Yeah, this is great. Really fun to be with you again. And today's topic, we're going to be talking about communicating with extraterrestrials. Yeah. And not only that, there's a controversial subtopic, which is the question,

should we be just listening like we've been doing for maybe 50 years? Right. Or should we actually be sending our own messages? Some people think that's the way to go. Other people think that it's stupid because we're... We don't know who we're talking to, do we? Not even the bad guys over. Exactly. You know, you're just kind of putting it out there, you know? It's kind of like, I don't know, cosmic Tinder, where you don't get to swipe right or left. You're just putting it

out there. Exactly. We can't necessarily choose who we're going to be dating on the interstellar scene here. So, yeah, there's a reason to maybe precaution. Maybe not. Some people think it's silly. So we'll get into that. But today we're going to be fielding your fan questions.

We're going to be doing something that we call Cosmic Queries. Yeah. And right now we've got David Brin on the line with us, award-winning science fiction author. Yes. And also a published scientist who's done peer-reviewed studies of communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence and somebody who's been very involved in the discussion and the recent debate about messaging to aliens. We're very glad to have you with us. Welcome, David Brin. Great to be with you guys. A couple of real brainiacs in StarTalk headquarters. Beam me up. Yeah, well, I know a lot of people have felt like they've been abducted by being so captivated reading your books,

but you haven't personally ever been abducted, being so captivated reading your books, but you haven't personally ever been abducted, have you, David? Well, in the 60s, there was a lot of ambiguity about, you know, whether or not you had, I was abducted as an excuse for what you did on Friday night. Yeah. But I hear they're still using those excuses in your generation, Chuck. Yes, as a matter of fact, they are. And I say there's nothing wrong with mind expansion. Drugs? No. Mind expansion? Yes. Ooh. That's one of the reasons we need science fiction.

Speaking of mind expansion, maybe we should move into some of our cosmic queries and see what the readers want to hear from us. Absolutely. What do you got, Chuck? This is Sebastian Meyer from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, as opposed to New Greenwich. This is what he says.

Let's say we received a response from extraterrestrials to one of the messages we have beamed out into the cosmos over the years, such as the hello from Earth message. In your opinion, back here on Earth, where in society or in our daily lives do you think the knowledge that we no longer are the only known life in the universe, would this have the biggest impact? School, religion, business, what? What do you think, David, about that? Where would it have the biggest impact? Well, you know, if you look back at the science fiction of the 50s or 40s, it was assumed that the biggest impact would be on religion and that people would get all upset and all of that.

Well, that's very clearly not true anymore. Several of the world's biggest religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, were always compatible with a plurality of worlds. always compatible with a plurality of worlds. Judaism, it turns out, in the Talmud, there's always been discussion of plurality of worlds. Mormonism is based on that, the notion of plurality of worlds. And the Catholic Church has, in the last 20 years, done a very, very substantial and impressive backpedaling on this issue and is now fully prepared under the tutelage of the Vatican astronomer, Guy Consimagnano.

So, you know, there are some religions that would find it difficult, and some of American fundamentalists have declared, and for no reason that makes any theological sense that the earth has to be 6 000 years old and there must be no other life form but even these shall we say very emotionally invested conservative religious types have been hedging their bets there was one there was one i saw recently saying that there's no way you'll find real aliens out there and we're not counting little scummy bats of bacteria you'll you'll probably find out there which means they've already accepted the notion that there's probably life they've merely drawn their line in the Drake equation at sapient, intelligent life.

Well, it's a legitimate position to take if you analyze the Drake equation and all the possibilities for why we seem to be alone. Probably, in my opinion, one of the top ranked potential explanations is that intelligence is more difficult than we thought. And believe it or not, we're still having some difficulty with intelligence as we speak. Yeah, I often wonder if there is intelligent life on Earth, not even just saying that as a joke,

although it is a funny thing to say, but that if really intelligent extraterrestrials would look at Earth and regard it as a planet with intelligent life is an interesting question to me. I like to think that one of the biggest effects that such a discovery would have would be on international diplomacy and even inter-ethnic relationships that it seems as though human beings, when faced with an outside threat or even the knowledge of an outsider, tend to pull together.

And I think that faced with the clear evidence that there is somebody else out there that's not at all like us, that we would realize that we are all really like one another. And maybe it's just my wishful thinking, but I do tend to think that it really could have a catalytic effect on the way human beings get along on Earth. And that in turn could help us evolve into some kind of an intelligent species that might be worth talking to from the alien's point of view. So we would all get together because now there's, I hate to say it, a common enemy. Yeah, or at least a common

other. Right, right. But you know, that's the way human beings do it. Like, you know, we come together because, you know, the friend of my friend is my friend, you know, that whole thing. Absolutely. I mean, I think it wouldn't, you couldn't help but

feel like our differences between differences with one another were somewhat diminished by the thought that there's somebody out there really different that we're now interacting with in some way. Okay. That's fascinating stuff. I love it. Welcome back to StarTalk.

Here's more of this week's mashup. Welcome back to StarTalk All-Stars. I'm David Grinspoon, and I'm here with Chuck Nice. Yes. And our guest, David Brin. And we're talking about communicating with aliens, including the controversial question of whether we should be revealing ourselves to the cosmos or whether we should be a little bit cautious, not knowing what may be out there. There have been some famous voices out there.

You may have heard Dr. Stephen Hawking has famously said that aliens could come and do us harm. David Brin has been cautious, and he's told us a little bit about that now, and maybe we'll hear a little bit more. There are other people who say, oh, damn the torpedoes. Let's just send messages and see what's out there. What are we worried about? So it's an interesting debate. My own opinion is that we should, as David says, at least have some kind of a global conversation about it before we just decide that we're going to speak for all of Earth and reveal ourselves for all of time. Maybe we can't know for sure what the dangers are,

but it's probably worth at least having some kind of a consultation and not being so arrogant as to say, ah, the hell with it, let's just see what happens. Man, when you're playing cosmic poker, you don't want to show your hand. I mean, you know, at least until the proper time presents itself. Yeah, I mean, it is kind of a puzzle. I'd be interested to know what David Brin thinks of this. But when do you know when it's enough?

When are we really ready to say, okay, we know enough to start talking? But at least we could attempt to have some kind of a global buy-in. but at least we could attempt to have some kind of a global buy-in. David, do you have a quick thought on when it will be okay to broadcast? Well, it's not so much a particular sum of knowledge that is my criterion, but the rate at which we're learning. We are like a four-year-old who wakes up in a jungle that's quiet, maybe too quiet, to use the cliche.

And what do you do under those circumstances? Well, you try to learn as much as you can quietly because there are some conceivable dangers. I think Stephen Hawking exaggerated. But it would be good if we were to pay attention to the fact that across the last several thousand years, every time a technologically advanced civilization or species encountered a less advanced civilization or species, the less advanced ones suffered very, very badly. And that's 100% of the time. Given that, perhaps we should have a little bit of a conversation before running through the jungle going, yoo-hoo, especially since we're learning so fast. That's the thing. Just 20 years ago, we knew of no planets outside our solar system. Now we know of almost 10,000. So at this rate of learning, why not listen and learn so that our children will have the option, with all that added information, of deciding for themselves whether they want to shout you who. I'll tell you why.

That seems eminently sensible. It does, and that's why you don't do it, because recklessness is far more exciting, David. Let's just get it out there. Show the whole universe, like, you know, when you say reveal, forget reveal. Let's flash the universe. We're here. Oh, you're so bold, Chuck. Wow. You know, this also happens to be coming up at a time when we are faced with a range of global issues that require us to try to have some sort of global decision-making or global consultative process.

I'm talking about global warming and other issues. It wouldn't hurt for us to learn how to at least attempt to make some sort of a global decision about things. You're never going to reach a perfect consensus with every villager of every place on earth, but you can at least make an honest attempt. Yes, absolutely. And by the way, David, you are a science fiction writer. And I just want to say that I'm about to submit a treatment for Disney's Cosmic Jungle Book, which I think is brilliant. You just came up with. Can I write the songs? Yeah, man, let me tell you something. There's room for everybody on this train.

Excellent. This is Nate Carlson from Ottawa, Canada. And this is what he says. With 100 billion galaxies full of stars, there is probably other life out there. Well, thanks a lot, Nate. I'm glad you chimed in on that. But how close together do we need to be to notice each other? If we assume aliens have radio telescopes with similar sensitivity to ours,

how far from Earth could they be and actually discern any of our radio signals? So how close would our neighbors have to be that we scream out of our window and they hear us? Yeah, it's a good question. And that is one of the few questions perhaps in this whole field of SETI that we can actually answer quantitatively. There's so much that's subjective and subject to opinion and interpretation, but that's a calculation. And it goes back to in 1959 when the first ever Sirius SETI paper was published by Giuseppe Cacconi and Philip Morrison in Nature magazine. And they calculated that with Earth's most powerful radio telescope, you could communicate clear across the galaxy with another radio telescope of the same power.

The problem is, of course, that that's going to take a long, long time. You know, if you're going more than a thousand light years, it's going to take more than a thousand years. So there's a time element as well. We have the equipment, and presumably they would have the equipment to communicate over a long distance but the farther away you get then you get into these crazy situations where it might take longer than your civilization has been around to have a conversation um david brin do you have any um any comments on um this relationship between distance and power and how close the aliens need to be to have a reasonable interaction? Well, there are two really important aspects to this. One is for about 30, 40 years,

we used the classic Drake equation, which said, all right, life evolves in these little places around the galaxy, and that's all we have to calculate. But then it was pointed out that interstellar travel is not impossible, certainly not with robots that might copy themselves. And probably colonization of some kind or another is possible, in which case you're talking about more like spreading zones. And how long would it take for such a spreading zone if you had starships that just traveled 10% of the speed of light and made planet colonies, and then they built up their civilization and then spread out and planted more colonies?

It turns out you could fill the galaxy within 60 million years, which is an eye blink. It's nothing. Yeah, so the question of where is everybody and why aren't we seeing them is made vastly worse if you allow any kind of interstellar travel. Right, because then if they started anywhere, they should already be everywhere. That's right. when we get out to the asteroid belt or the Kuiper belt, we may find an entire civilization or perhaps they fought of various types of space probes that were sent by previous cultures. And

we'll probably be sending such self-replicating probes. But the other half of the question is, you know, how likely is it that at any of these spacing intervals, we're going to likely be able to detect others. And those calculations have been done. And it turns out we're at a borderline. The Earth itself would only be detectable to very super advanced aliens with huge antennas that they aim deliberately at us

for a year and then they might pick up i love lucy so right now then they'd probably change the channel the barn door the barn door excuse for metis is it's too late they already know about us. But it turns out that is simply and scientifically wrong. The people who want to use these planetary radars to send focused beams out into space going yoo-hoo, they intend to change the current situation by yelling very, very loudly and very focusedly. So now the fear of that would be that we attract the Borg. Is that basically it?

And before you know it, we're all serving overlords that come here and, you know. Yeah, I mean, the thing is, you can put it that way and it's easy to make fun of because there's so much questionable science fiction about aliens coming to invade us. And a lot of people think it's a silly thing to worry about. But David Brin has written about this, and he's actually persuaded me

that if you use the precautionary principle, you have to ask, well, can we prove that it's not a threat? And are we certain that it's not? And are there some logical explanations for what we observe that might be consistent with dangerous aliens? And then if you admit that you can't prove that it's not some existential threat,

then you have to say, okay, well then, on what basis do we decide that it's okay to risk the future of Earth's biosphere. I got you. It's a big risk. It turns out that there are mature ways to do this. 20 years ago, the genetic engineering and genetic research communities in biology

hold a moratorium on genetic research and had a meeting at asilomar california and came out with better practices best practices that let us have our cake and eat it too let us have advances in genetic research while taking some very very solid and mature precautions and the nasa has a planetary protection office whose job it is to make sure that space probes we land on other worlds have been sterilized as best we can, but not in a way that makes it so that we can't explore, but just as best we can. And of course, these precautions are done 10 times, 100 times as strongly

if we're going to be returning stuff to Earth that might infect the Earth. So there are mature ways of doing this. From what you say, though, it only takes one space herpy. That's all it takes is one space herpy to ruin everything, David. And those space herpies, you know, the viruses, the herpes?

Yeah. They're this big. Exactly. You know what I'm saying? We don't want to mess with that. Yeah, nobody wants to put a salve on the sore that shows up from that space herpes. That's all I'm saying. We're talking about safe SETI here.

Exactly. Remember to practice safe SETI, folks. This is from Jeff Carlisle. He comes to us from Facebook, and he wants to know this. Does NASA or SETI have a set of guidelines for what to do in the event of extraterrestrial contact? How do we respond? Does the public find out? How much information can we share?

Are they already here? What's going on? Oh, yeah. Good question. And the answer is yes. Really? There is a protocol. The SETI community agreed on a protocol that was widely ratified for what to do if a message is received.

Really? And it's been much harder to get the SETI community to agree on the next question, which is what to do if somebody from Earth wants to send a message. We've talked about that a little bit. But if we just get a message, then the idea is first you confirm it. Okay. Talk to another observatory first to make sure they see it too. So you rule out a false alarm. So it cannot be an anomaly.

It has to be a confirmed communication. A reception of communication. So you don't alert the media when you're still not sure. Once you're sure, and you become sure by alerting other observatories so they can check it out too, so it's not just some local thing you're observing.

And then once you're sure, the protocol is you alert the political leaders, the media. There's a list. There's a protocol. I can't tell you the protocol is, you alert the political leaders, the media. There's a list. There's a protocol. I can't tell you the exact order, but it's the opposite of secrecy. It's like total transparency once we're sure. But what we do know is Twitter is not the first to find out. You don't just tweet out, man, they're here.

They contacted us. Well, it's an interesting question because when these protocols were devised, it was pre-Twitter. But certainly the person sitting there at the telescope receiver, if they're being responsible, is not going to tweet out, wow, I think I see an alien. But once the news, it's decided that, yes, this is good, we can release it, I'm sure social media will play a huge role in that. Cool. So let's move on. How about another question. Let's jump into another. And this is from Shelly Sock.

Shelly Sock at Shelly Sock on Twitter. She said, what would you most want to know about the aliens and for them to know about us? So in the game of getting to know you, whether the two most important things that you think should be in that exchange? Yeah, good question, Shelly. What would we most want to know about them, and what would we most want them to know about us? So my personal, if I could ask them one thing, it would be, how did you do it?

How did you survive with a technological civilization? Because I'm assuming, and there's good math behind this, that anybody we hear from has had a technological civilization for quite some time. They're not brand new babies like us. And therefore, they've solved this riddle that we're struggling with now. How do you have this exponentially

increasing more and more powerful technology and yet not somehow and yet use it to survive, not to do yourself in. You could easily see we could do one or the other. I'm thinking somebody we hear from has learned how to use technology in a mature way, learned how to handle this global civilization puzzle. So if I could ask them one thing, it would be like, hey, you got any tips for us? How do we do this?

Nice. Yeah. David Brim, what would you got any tips for us? How do we do this? Nice. Yeah. David Brim, what would you most like to know about them? Well, I would ask, I'm a little bit persnickety. I would ask, why do we have to ask you for that help? Why weren't you helping us all along? You know, this, I've never- What took you so long? where the hell were you? What took you so long? Never been a believer in ancient aliens. The whole notion that we deprecate ourselves is a good thing. We've, we spladulate ourselves about how we aren't living up to our hopes and dreams. But to be honest, as animals go, we're actually pretty damn nice. And we've tried very, very hard.

And I look across the last 6,000, 8,000 years because I've been around the whole time. And all the hardworking, desperately eager, well-meaning people who piled rocks on rocks on rocks to make pyramids in appeals to some kinds of godlike beings to come and help us. And to be honest, we advanced to this level ourselves.

And in my opinion, that's a point of pride. It's a fantastic accomplishment. And I'm not going to let aliens claim credit for it. I like the way you think. That's really good stuff. We're learning a lot about David Brin here, by the way. Not only does he find humans really interesting, but he's been here for at least 6,000 years.

So the plot thickens. The very beginning of the Earth itself, 6,000 years. Yeah, right. You've been listening to a special mashup edition of StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.