StarTalk Radio - Listening for Aliens, with Carolyn Porco - StarTalk All-Stars

Episode Date: August 2, 2016

Explore SETI and the Breakthrough Listen Initiative, the most comprehensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence ever, with host Carolyn Porco, co-host Chuck Nice, and Dan Werthimer, the Initiative’s principal investigator and SETI@home co-founder. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

This is StarTalk. Hello, and this is StarTalk All-Stars Edition. I'm your All-Star host this evening, Carolyn Porco, and I'm a planetary scientist and leader of the imaging science team of the Cassini mission in orbit around Saturn as we speak. My co-host today is Chuck Nice. Thanks for being here, Chuck. Thank you.

And who else do we have with us as well? Well, today we're talking about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which is an ever-popular topic, and the new Breakthrough Listen project, which is the most comprehensive, well-supported search for alien life to date. And to help us dig deeper into this enormous topic, I've brought on via Skype the principal investigator of this project, Dan Wertheimer. Welcome, Dan, to StarTalk.

Thanks, Carolyn. It's great to be with you. Okay, Dan is, he's many things. He's one of those people who spends his time wondering how we should be communicating with aliens on other planets. So I think that's a pretty cool job. He's the chief scientist at SETI at Home. It's a program at Berkeley to involve the public in the search for aliens. He's published lots of papers in this topic. He's a radio astronomy instrumentation geek.

And this is a cool thing about Dan. He was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. And he's the only one who did not get filthy rich. Oh. Sorry about that, Dan. But I'm going to guess you are much happier. I'm a happy guy. You're a happy guy.

I got a really cool job. Right. You got a really cool job. So here's the thing. We're going to talk about SETI. And first, I just want you to confirm something for me. I'm under the impression that the most sensitive SETI searches we have conducted to date would not have detected signals coming from our nearest neighbor star that's only 4.25 light years away unless those beings had an energy consumption that's something like 10,000 times the energy that humans consume on our planet today. Am I right about that? Yeah, well, it depends on what another civilization might be doing. We don't know what they might be doing. Are they sending off something

like television or radio? Are they sending off something like our radar signals that leave the earth that are much more powerful? They might have something like our Arecibo transmitter, which is incredibly powerful that you can hear almost to the other side of the galaxy. transmitter, which is incredibly powerful that you can hear almost to the other side of the galaxy. But if they just have something like television, these omnidirectional transmitters, that's going to be very hard for us to detect. And we're just beginning to learn how we might detect those kind of very weak signals like television signals. Something tells me that if they are a civilization who has television, they're not smart enough to try and contact us. Judging from our television, I'm just saying.

If you look at what's on our television, you know. Alien couch potatoes. Exactly. Alien couch potatoes are not coming to find us. I know. That might be like the evolutionary dead end for a lot of civilizations out there. Our early television shows like I Love Lucy and Ed Sullivan left the earth about 70 years ago and have gone past about 10,000 stars.

And the nearby stars have seen The Simpsons. I see. I don't know if I feel good about that. But anyway, let me. So what I want you to tell us is what Breakthrough Listen will do. I mean, there are things that you guys have on your website and your announcements. You're going to cover 10 times more of the sky, 50 times greater sensitivity, five times

more of the radio spectrum. I mean, it sounds like you're making gigantic advances. So give us a sense of how good this is going to get. Okay, well, I'll tell you about breakthrough listening, but let me just back up a little bit to just explain the kind of search that SETI scientists do. earthlings send off radio and television. And maybe other civilizations, if they're out there, maybe they have something like radio or television or radar or navigational beacons or something that we could detect. Maybe if we're very lucky, maybe another civilization might send us a deliberate signal, which would be quite spectacular. That would be sent anti-cryptographically, probably. They'd want to get in touch and make it easy for us to decipher the message

with lots of pictures and language lessons. They might send us their whole Library of Congress, all their music, poetry, literature. They might tell us how to get on the galactic internet and tell us how to talk to the other million civilizations they've been talking to. So we could learn a lot. Let me just parse that.

So the first type of signals, it's we eavesdropping on them. And the second is a deliberate beacon where they are trying to get in touch with us, kind of like we have done in the past. Earthlings have sent a few messages deliberately, which is quite controversial. But most of the stuff that Earthlings transmit is not deliberate. It's our television radar, that FM radio. You should be careful what you say when you're on StarTalk, because if it's being broadcast, it'll go out traveling at the speed of light. So you can't withdraw that kind of communication. Okay. So nothing that wouldn't pass the NAS. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I got to tell you,

that just killed my entire career here. I'm totally finished now. I've got nothing to say anymore. Okay, so now tell us what Breakthrough Listen is going to do for us. Okay, so we want to find out the answer to this question, are we alone? Is anybody out there? And SETI is the search for technology, looking for laser signals or radio signals. But the problem is, in SETI, we don't know. There's a huge number of unknowns. What frequency will they be transmitting on? Where should we point our

telescope? Or should we point it to a star or a galaxy? There's trillions of stars we could look at. We don't know what kind of signal type it is. There's a huge number of unknowns. And we cannot do a thorough search. We can't look at every place in the sky, at every channel for all the signal types. But luckily, we are limited in the search by computing power. And the more computing power we have, the better job we can do. And right now, we're just getting in the game. We're just learning how we might get in touch with these other civilizations if they're out there. But the good news is that because we're limited by computing power, that is growing exponentially with Moore's Law. Computers are getting better and better.

So we can do more thorough searches. Every year, the capabilities are almost doubling. We used to listen to one frequency, one channel at a time. Now we're listening to 100 billion channels at a time. And so this Breakthrough Listen project that you've been asking about is a new leap forward in capabilities in terms of frequency coverage and sky coverage and signal types. It's about 100 times better than anything that we've ever done before.

Okay. And isn't it true, will it still be true, though, that the aliens we'll be communicating with or listening to will have to be significantly more advanced than we are? Is that something that we could deduce from a signal that we receive that they must be more advanced than we are, or is that no longer going to be true? We could hear beings with the same capabilities that we have. Which is it? I think that the likeliness of detecting a civilization that's just discovered radio like we have. We just learned about radio and ways we could communicate with other civilizations 100 years ago.

That's a blink of an eye in our history. So the chance that we'd find one that's just entered this kind of communication phase is very small. If we ever find ET, it's likely that that civilization will be 100 million years or a billion years ahead of us. We cannot find them in SETI if they are more primitive than we are. If they're still trees or bacteria or amoeba, we cannot find them. Although that's, as you know, Carolyn, because you're an expert at this, there are other technologies which might be able to detect primitive life, and maybe we could talk about that.

But in SETI, we're looking for technology. And so the easiest kind of civilizations to detect will be the ones that are more advanced than we are, not the emerging primitive ones like you and me. Okay. We're primitive. Yeah. All right. Okay. So we have some questions. Well, yes, this is what we're doing today is Cosmic Queries, all about SETI. And we have questions from all over the Internet, wherever we live, whether it is Facebook or Twitter or even Patreon, which is a place to support StarTalk. If you are so inclined, and one of the benefits that you receive by supporting StarTalk

is we read your questions before anyone else's because we are like that. So let's start things off with a Patreon question from Gabriel Thelen. Gabriel says, Hi from Australia, or should I say, G'day. He says, based on your experience in the Saturnian system, what do you think about the chances of a habitable or mostly habitable moon for humans developing around an exoplanet? Also, what are the challenges in detecting such a moon or moons in nearby star systems, such as Alpha Centauri. Here's a young man from Australia who's put no thought into his question whatsoever.

Well, well, but he's he's eager. He's he's interested. So we love him anyway. Yes, we do. OK, so but I have to think of those. The first one was would we I think he's saying he first one was, would we, I think he's saying. Well, he's talking about, you know, when you look at the moons around Saturn, and I'm not sure if it's Enceladus that is mostly water. And, you know, maybe it has the greatest potential for life.

So, you know, judging from that, I believe what he's asking is, what are the chances of us finding a habitable moon around an exoplanet? Not just Saturn, but an exoplanet. So, you know, considering that, I mean, what is the likelihood that that would happen? Well, okay. So now we're not talking about intelligent beings. We're talking about microbes because that's kind of what we're thinking about on Enceladus is we might have microbes. Chances are excellent. There's nothing in particular about Enceladus or any of the other moons in our solar system

that we think might have microbial life. There's nothing special as far as we know. It's just all the materials that we believe are cosmically distributed. So the chances that there are moons that have interior hidden oceans that might have organisms in them, I think is very high. That's very cool. Whether intelligent life gets started is a big thing because intelligent life needs lots of resources on the earth. We have metals that are available to us and minerals right under the surface, you know, at the surface of Enceladus is just ice. The ocean is underneath. So, yeah. So, a lot more involved

to actually get intelligent life, you know, so that, you know, and some would still argue that hasn't happened on earth yet. So, and the second one was And the second question he wanted to know was, what are the challenges in detecting that kind of life in a nearby star system such as Alpha Centauri? Okay, so Dan, you're the detector guy. You know, I know that in the exoplanet community, they have gotten, because I've seen a paper on this, they have gotten to the stage where they're wondering if there are moons equivalent to moons like Enceladus around other planets, around other stars, and how they might detect them. Do you have any insight into this? So people have started looking for moons going around other planets. And I think that's going to happen in the next maybe decade or so. We're going to have instruments and capabilities to find out whether there are moons going around exoplanets, going around other stars.

And as Carolyn mentioned, there are probably going to be lots more moons than there are planets. And some of those moons, well, two of the moons in our own solar system have liquid water on them. So that means there's going to be a lot of places for microbial life. I suspect the universe is teeming with microbial life. Intelligent life is less rare, but there are 200 billion stars, a trillion planets in the Milky Way galaxy, and 100 billion galaxies. So it would be surprising if we're alone. You mean it's more rare. Intelligent life is probably more rare.

Yeah. I think we're going to find microbial life everywhere. It would surprise me if we even find it in our own solar system. There's microbial life in our guts, right? There's more microbes in our guts than there are whatever, stars in the galaxy or in the cosmos. There's a lot of... Yes. Okay. Mine are actually having a bit of an uprising right now. Oh, dear. Okay. Well, maybe we ought to get to the next question in a hurry. Okay, here we go. This question comes from Anthony Edward Stark, coming to us from Twitter.

Anthony Edward Stark coming to us from Twitter. And I have to say, let me preface his question by saying, this is something that so many people, I believe, want to know and believe that this is the case. Here's what Anthony asked. Do you think we humans might be some alien species brought to Earth from some other planet. If yes, how? Now, of course, that is the Prometheus model where we've been human life was seeded on Earth. OK, so we were seeded here. Maybe not deliberately, though.

Maybe it started on Mars and came. You know, there's lots of rocks flying around the solar system. That theory is called panspermia. Okay. If life got started, for instance, on Mars, a big rock might- Say that again now. The theory is what now, Dan? Panspermia.

Okay. That life might get started on another planet or a moon. I'm just letting you know, Dan, if you notice, I did not make a joke there. You should be very proud of me. There was plenty of opportunity. Okay. I just, I let that go, Dan. Enormous restraint. I let it go. Did you see the restraint? Yes. Panspermia. Let's hear more about panspermia. So suppose life got started on Mars. We know that big rocks smash into Mars occasionally and then rocks go flying all over the place, Martian rocks. And some of them have come to Earth. You can go to Antarctica and find these rocks. If you find a black rock on

the snow, then you see, you can find out that it's got Martian atmosphere in it. So we have rocks from Mars here on Earth. And maybe life got started on Mars or some other place and came here. And that's how life got started on Earth. We really don't know where it came from. It might have gotten started on Earth. Probably most likely it did get started on Earth, but we don't know. But if we do find life in our own solar system, a really interesting thing will be, is it a completely different kind of life? Does it use different chemicals, different chemistry, maybe a different kind of DNA, different amino acids? If that happens, if we find a different kind of life with a different chemistry, maybe a different kind of DNA, different amino acids. If that happens, if we find a different kind of life with a different chemistry, that means that life got two completely independent starts in our own solar system.

Wow. That means the universe is teeming with life. Wow. I mean, just the prospect of that is mind-blowing because it means that throughout the entire galaxies, you could have like an unlimited disparate amount of life and life forms. Dan is absolutely correct. If we ever find that a second genesis took place in our solar system, it means the spell's been broken, right? And it means that life is no longer a bug but a feature of the universe in which we live. And that's why, you know, we're so passionate about wanting to find out the answer to this.

Wow. But anyway. That's exciting stuff. is that you could have an impact on a body like Mars or the Earth and have rocks from it go flying through the solar system and maybe even end up in the outer solar system on a moon like Europa or Enceladus. But the further out you go, the less the chances are actually for that to happen. So it's why some of us really think that in our solar system, Enceladus is probably the best chance for us actually being to ask the question whether or not life has gotten started a second time in our solar

system. And it could be. The answer also could be that the chemistry, the biochemistry is the same. Maybe that's the best biochemistry that the universe has been able to come up with. Yeah. I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? Okay. Anyway, we have to take a short break now, but when we come back, more of your Cosmic Queries when StarTalk returns. Hello, and welcome back to StarTalk Radio All-Stars Edition. I'm your All-Star host, Carolyn Porco,

and joining me in the studio is co-host Chuck Nice. That's correct. And special guest Dan Wertheimer of UC Berkeley. Yes. Nice for you to be here, Chuck. It's good to be here because we are doing Cosmic Queries, and we have questions from all over the Internet, and they all want to know about SETI. Well, everybody

wants to know about SETI. Yeah, I think we have two of the best people in the world to talk about SETI right here. And so these questions are going to be pretty easy for you and pretty fascinating for everybody else. Let's jump back in with Anthony Edward Stark, who gave us a great question. So he's got a second one here that I want to follow up with. And he says, do you think that there might be a chance of extraterrestrial life on any other planet or satellites in our own solar system? And can it be possible for us to actually converse with them in the near future?

So he's just talking about right here in our eight little planets, and then maybe out to the Kuiper Belt, surrounding our little star. Is there intelligent life? Do we know for a fact that there is or is not intelligent life in our own solar system? Well, put aside the question as to whether or not there's any intelligent life on the Earth, I would say that no, we have seen nary a piece of evidence of intelligent life. That's not what we're looking for in our planetary exploration program. Dan, do you want to weigh in on this?

for in our planetary exploration program. Dan, do you want to weigh in on this? It seems very unlikely that there could be intelligent life in our own solar system. However, there could be microbial life. And the best places are Enceladus. Carolyn is an expert on Enceladus. Maybe Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Possibly there was microbial life on Mars. There still could be, but these moons of Jupiter and the moons of Saturn are better places, I think, than Mars.

And could we also have microbial life in stasis on some of these comets that inside of the ice that's frozen on one of these comets? Could that be? I think that's part of our mental picture that you could have, uh, organisms that go into a state, a dormant state, and they can stay there for a very, very long time.

So, um, you know, that, that's not out of the question and it's, it's part of the, the, the,

the, uh, spectrum of possibilities. Okay. Okay, cool. Hey, that was actually a very good question.

And I think I know where he's coming from. Here's the thing. Me, as a sci-fi fan, what you fantasize about is a very advanced civilization who is hiding in our own solar system

in a cloaked device on a planet nearby, using that planet as a base of operations to observe Earth. But they don't want to let us know that they're there because they would be violating some type of moral code by interfering with our natural development. You sleep well at night? You fantasize about this and you can sleep at night?

Dan, what were you going to say? I think you're watching too much Star Trek. You know about the prime directive. Yeah. Actually, you know, I was a consultant on Star Trek 2009. Really? And the director, J.J. Abrams, he invited me to just be a consultant.

I thought I was going to be a consultant on the planetary scenes or something. And the first question he posed to me was, he says, you know, we have a problem. We have the Enterprise, the Starship Enterprise, coming back into the solar system to destroy the Earth, or to save the Earth, excuse me, from the bad guys, and we have to figure out where to hide it. And I said, well, you should hide it in the atmosphere of Titan and then have it rise up

submarine style out of the haze so that, you know, that would make a great scene and so on. And I thought I was being tested. And it turns out they liked it so much they used it in the movie. Yeah, yeah. Of course, they got it wrong because they thought that you could hide its electromagnetic signals in the magnetic field of the rings. And Saturn's rings don't have a magnetic field. Right. But anyway, it was the thought that counts.

That is awesome. Yeah, I thought so. I thought so. I thought maybe you saw that Star Trek and that's why you're having these nightmares. Oh, no. Even though I did see that Star Trek, yes. Okay, good. I have these, you know, I'm not a stable person. Might as well go ahead and let you know.

All right. Well, it's okay. We all have our quirks. Exactly. All right. Well, it's okay. You know, we all have our quirks. Exactly. All right. Let us move on to, oh, my God. All right. This is, you know, sometimes our listeners, they ask questions.

We don't tell them what they can and cannot ask. You know, sometimes I read them and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I read them and sometimes I don't. But I got to read this just because, you know, when I have two people like yourselves in the room, I'm always interested to see what kind of response I'll receive to a question like this one from James Haney. And James says, if, if Trump should win the election, what effect do you feel he will have on space exploration and STEM programs? And since Donald Trump has made his way into every single fiber of the zeitgeist, I figured, what the hell? I might as well put him in the cosmic queries.

Well, OK, so I wasn't prepared for this. I know, I know. To be perfectly honest with you. You weren't. So what effect would he have on space exploration? I think if he thought that we could, with our robotic explorers, go and bomb the hell out of Mars, he might like it. He might like it. It might actually do wonders for our

budgets. But actually, no. Dan, do you want to take a chance? I don't want to be the only one here. Sometimes our listeners throw us for a loop. And so I'm interested, Dan. What do you say there? He's a scary guy. He's so poorly informed. You know, he doesn't know anything about science. He's denying climate change. So I think, you know, he's going to probably cut the budgets for science and space explorations. That's bad news.

So it's a scary thought. That is a scary thought. Maybe he's an implanted alien. Did anyone ever consider this? No one has ever considered that. And you know what? That's a consideration. However, I do believe that if you guys were to come together, and I'm talking about all of you

in your community, and so everyone who's searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, everyone who is searching for extraterrestrial life, if you were to come to Donald Trump as president and say to him, we have found a planet of Trumps. You will get all the funding you needed. Well, if we could tell him how to put his name on it. Yeah. We found a planet of Trumps and you're going to be able to put your name on it. Believe me, you'll get all the money you need. We probably would.

Yep. Probably would. All right. That was fun. So let us move on. This is from Tony Segner. And Tony would like to know, what, if anything, do we expect to find as far as extraterrestrial life, if and when we do find it? My impression is that the consensus is we'll find some sort of bacteria or microorganism, but pretty much nothing else.

So, I mean, that's a little bit of a pessimistic view on your life's work from Tony. He's saying that, yeah, microbial, we'll find, but anything else, not going to happen. Well, I think, okay, so he's basically saying that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is going to turn up a null result despite all our efforts to improve our sensitivity, improve our signal processing. So that gets into, that kind of takes us to the Drake equation. chances that we have intelligent civilizations out there who have reached a state where they can communicate and in fact are doing cross-galaxy communications. So Dan, I think you... Can you talk more about the Drake equation? Because I don't know it, to be honest. Okay, well, this is... I would like to know what that is.

Dan is an expert on these things. Dan, can you tell us about the Drake equation? Yeah, so Frank Drake formulated this way that you could calculate how many intelligent, communicating civilizations there are in the galaxy. And what you do is you multiply all these numbers together, like how many planets there are and how many of those planets are good

and how many of those planets have the right temperature and the right chemicals. And then if you have a good planet, we call it a Goldilocks planet, how often does life get started on that thing? And then if life gets started, how often does it evolve intelligence? And then the last factor in the Drake equation

is once you get an intelligent creature, how long do they live? Do they blow themselves up with their biochemical weapons or do they live together for billions of years? Our sun is 5 billion years old. It's kind of middle-aged. It's going to be around another couple billion years. Some stars are 10 billion years old.

So there could be very advanced civilizations out there billions of years ahead of us. So the problem with the Drake equation is that we don't really know what any of those factors are. We're just beginning to learn what's out there in our universe. We know a little bit about the first part of the direct equation about planets and maybe a little bit about how many of those planets are good planets. We think there are a trillion planets in the Milky Way galaxy. That's more planets than there are stars. We think maybe 5% of those are pretty good planets, places that might have the right conditions for life. Lots of places for life. But after that, how often does life get started? How often does it get intelligent? We really just don't know. And so we got to go out and look.

Isn't it also, you know, you have to take into, all right, just think of it this way. Before the ubiquity of human beings across the globe, let's just say we were, you know, like the black plague happened when we were all in one little landmass. We might have been wiped out. We might have been life and then all been wiped out. That's right. It might have happened many times. And so, right. So this is something that could, there could be life and intelligent life that somehow ends up through some natural disaster being just wiped off of that particular planet. That's right. It resets the clock and maybe evolution starts all over again.

That's a factor. That's why Frank Drake did it the way he did it, right? He separated it out into these various factors so we could take one at a time. And isn't there, Dan, there's a factor near the end of that equation that tries to describe the duration, the lifetime of a civilization. And I think that's kind of up to us. It's up to our civilization to figure out how long we're going to live. We're getting into this kind of dangerous bottleneck where we have weapons that we really aren't prepared to deal with, biological, chemical, nuclear weapons, and it's getting easier to kill a billion people. And so there are probably going

to be two kinds of civilizations. There are the ones that wipe themselves out and the ones that have learned to live together in peace and get through that kind of bottleneck where they have these dangerous weapons and they kind of figure out how to do it. So a lot of people think that SETI is the archaeology of the future. Phil Morrison said it was the archaeology of the future. So if we get in touch with a civilization that's gone through that difficult period and figured out how to survive through that, we could learn a lot. We could learn what's in our future. So I think the answer to Tony's question about are we going to find intelligent life, we really don't know, but I think it's profound either way. If we find out the universe is teeming with intelligent life, get on the galactic internet,

we can learn about our future and how civilizations survived through that difficult time. It's also profound the other way. If we learn that we are the only intelligent creatures in this vast universe, that's incredibly profound as well. That means we better take incredibly good care of the precious life here on Earth. So true. We're here. I agree. All good stuff. Wow. Well, Tony, that was actually a great question. We certainly appreciate it.

And even though you're quite the pessimist, we don't side with you, Tony. We are optimistic about the future and about life, Tony. So there. No, I'm joking. Wow. Let's move on. This is Demi Clinton. And Demi is kind of a follow-up to what Tony was saying. And Demi is very concerned about just individual planets. And she says, what different categories of data are used to determine a planet's probability for supporting life as we would recognize it? And what about life we would not recognize it? Well, this falls more in terms in the category of the kind of life we are going in search of within the solar system. Okay. Okay? And it's true, there could be a biochemistry or morphology that looks completely alien

to us. And it's hard when you, you know, in space exploration, where the rubber meets the road is when you have to put an instrument or a suite of instruments on a spacecraft and send them very far away. You're not bringing that thing back into the shop to change it if you designed it incorrectly. You got to design it. You have to have specific questions that it's going to ask. And then actually you also have to, if you're wise enough, you design it so that you might find something surprising. You know, a lot of science is serendipitous. So anyway, that's more a question of what we do here in the solar system. As far as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, I know that there are people within the exoplanet

community who think that the detection of a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence will be the only way we will be 100% certain that we will have found life because it might be hard to detect? That's pretty much it. The answer is we know what we know. But we might not know what we don't know. We might not know what we don't know. So there you have it.

I think that's excellent. We're going to take a short break now, but when we come back, more of your cosmic queries when StarTalk returns. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio, All Stars Edition. I'm your all-star host, Carolyn Porco, and I'm here in the studio with co-host Chuck Nice, who's actually very nice. Nice to have you here, Chuck Nice.

Thank you, Carolyn. Okay, and my special guest is Dan Wertheimer of UC Berkeley, who is the principal investigator for the new Breakthrough Listen project, which is a new era in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Welcome, Dan. Thanks, Carolyn. Fantastic. Okay, so I saw on Twitter some questions that I would like to bring up. I don't remember who asked this, but this was a really good question I saw, and that is, and this is for Dan, um, has there been any discussion, a la what Carl Sagan put in contact, about a protocol that the United States, together with the world, because this certainly would be a worldly, a global response, that a protocol for how we would deal with and how we might even think about responding to a signal from an obvious extraterrestrial intelligence.

And I know a signal going back, you know, if it took 12,000 years to get to us, you know, we're not going to have a lengthy conversation, but still that will be a signature day in the history of humanity to receive such a thing. And, you know, at some point we have to grapple with the issue of how we would respond. So take it away, Dan. What have you guys in your community, if anything, thought or said about this? There is a protocol for what to do if you find something that looks interesting. The very first part of the protocol is, did you really find something interesting, or was it a

student playing a prank on you or a bug in your software? And so the part of that is to go to a different telescope, a different radio telescope, or a different optical telescope, and perhaps use different instrumentation and different people and see if you can do an independent verification. If a different group with different instruments on a different telescope can see it also, then you know you found something interesting. And if you have two telescopes, you can kind of triangulate on the source and measure its distance and make sure you haven't found a satellite going around the earth

or some earth kind of technology, make sure it's way out there. We still won't know if it's another civilization probably at that point, but we will know it's very interesting. And so what the protocol says is that at that point you make all the information, everything you know about that signal, public. You say you make an announcement, we found know about that signal, public. You'd say, you'd make an announcement, we found a really interesting signal, these are the coordinates in the sky, this is the frequency we saw it at, everything you know about the signal. You'd probably say at that point, we don't know

what it is, it might be some other civilization, but it might be some new astrophysics phenomena. When pulsars were discovered by Jocelyn Bell, they called them LGM-1, LGM-2, Little Green Men, Little Green Men 2. They didn't know what they were. They turned out not to be Little Green Men. Little Green Men. They turned out to be pulsars. But it could be some discovery like that. You find new phenomena out in space that are not extraterrestrial.

Anyway, I think at that point, everybody will start to look at it. And also, we can't only track it for a little while from our telescope. will start to look at it from, and also we can't only track it for a little while from our telescope. So other telescopes in other countries will be looking at, try to figure out what it is. Is there information content? Can we decode the message? If it's sent deliberately, maybe it'll be easy to decode. If it's accidentally coming our way, like television comes off the earth, it's going to be very hard, probably impossible to figure out what the content of the message is. We'll know that there's another civilization out there that's transmitting something, but we probably won't be able to figure out what the content is. Still interesting though. Then the next part of your question is,

well, if you find a signal like that, that you think is from another civilization, what do you do after that? And there have been a lot of conferences and books written about the potential kind of scenarios. And one of the questions that you alluded to in your question is, who should speak for Earth? Should we respond?

And I think that's a question for all Earthlings. SETI is a project, an international project for all of humanity and maybe even all the species on the planet. And so I think whether or not Earthlings should reply and whether or not what we should send back and what the content of a possible transmission back probably depends a lot on what we receive.

But it should be a question not just for me and other SETI scientists. That should be a question for people from all over the world and all kinds of disciplines and all of humanity. Okay. Pretty cool, man. That is, I like that idea. I just think the irony of what you just said is I could see a world war breaking out over who should speak for Earth.

The problem is that it's pretty easy to transmit a signal anybody can operate a transmitter or a laser and uh so i imagine one scenario is there'll be a hundred thousand replies uh you know it's gonna be hard to control and maybe that's a good that's maybe that's a good way to reply is that they learn about all the different cultures and all the different craziness on this planet all at once. Well, this brings up a topic that Dan, you and I have discussed in private and around a dinner table. And I know the conversation got quite heated, but I'm going to bring it up here. There are two camps about this sending of messages. There are two camps about this sending of messages, okay?

And there's the camp that feels it, and, you know, Frank Drake and Carl Sagan did this. Frank Drake did it with the Arecibo message in 1974. He broadcast a simple 1,700-bit message. Actually, it was to test the Arecibo, but he aimed it at a globular cluster and they broadcast. And then, of course, Carl headed up the famous Pioneer plaque and the Voyager records. It was all an attempt to say something about ourselves to the galaxy, like a long distance, hopeful call to our galactic cousins. Reach out and touch someone. Reach out and touch someone. Exactly. And I, you know, I was a great fan of Carl. He invited me to be the character consultant on the movie

Contact. We had conversations about these things. And I initiated just a few years ago my own message to the Milky Way that I was going to redo the Arecibo message. I have an illustrious board of advisors. I've got people like Frank Drake on it and Steve Soder, who is part of Cosmos 1 and Cosmos 2 and just other, Rick Armstrong, the son of Neil Armstrong. Lots of people feel that it's a wonderful, even Steve Pinker, who's a famous linguist at Harvard, is part of my advisory board.

And we were going to construct a message. And, you know, is the idea really that someone's going to pick this up? Well, who knows? But it's really more to get the humanity on Earth to be more cosmically aware, to realize they are one planet in a big galaxy that might be teeming with life, and so on. But I know that the Breakthrough Listen Project doesn't think that this is a good idea, and they don't like groups like, I'm not taking this personally, but they don't like groups like mine to take it upon ourselves to put a message together and use the Arecibo telescope.

So why don't you weigh in on this and say why this is such a hot topic? Right. So as you pointed out, it's very controversial. Their informal polls indicate that about 99% of astronomers think that it's a bad idea to transmit. Now, we're not talking about if we receive a message, should we transmit, but just should we take the first action of transmitting messages? Now, of course, earthlings, as you know, transmit all the time.

There's radio and television. But you're talking about deliberate, pointed, powerful transmissions. And most people think that's a bad idea, that we're an emerging kind of primitive civilization. We should listen at first and see what's out there before we deliberately transmit messages. Maybe in a thousand years or so, after we learn a little bit more about the universe, then we could think about transmitting. But most people think it's a dangerous or potentially dangerous thing to do. Why? Why? Why is it dangerous? Why is it dangerous?

So some people say that, oh, all the advanced civilizations are going to be peaceful and, you know, they've learned to live together in peace and they're not going to harm us or mine our, you know, rape our daughters or mine all our planet or blow us up. But we really don't know. I mean, that's sort of, maybe that's naive thinking. We just don't know what's out there. So there is some danger because we just really don't know what other civilizations are like. So most people think that if you want to transmit, you shouldn't just do it, take it upon yourself to transmit a message, but there should be a, what we call the Asilomar process where they process where if you're doing some dangerous thing in science, like researching viruses or doing kind of genetic engineering that's potentially dangerous,

then there's a process that scientists go through where they talk about the potential risks, figure out how to kind of contain some of those risks, what the potential benefits are. some of those risks, what the potential benefits are. So we think that this is a potentially dangerous thing that should be an international body of all kinds of people from different disciplines should get together, take a few years to figure this thing out. What are the potential risks? What are the dangers? What are the potential benefits? So far, the messages that have been sent by Earthlings have been not scientific messages. They've been mostly publicity stunts or fundraising stunts. Nobody's actually done a scientific experiment where they send a message out, and then maybe the thing is 10 light years away.

So they wait for 20 years because it takes 10 years to get there and then 10 years to get back, and then they listen. Nobody's done any kind of science. It's so far been just sort of publicity. to get back and then they listen. Nobody's done any kind of science. It's so far been just sort of publicity. Most people think that it's a bad idea because of the potential dangers. Stephen Hawking is one of the people that's... And that's because I'm a Star Trek fan and so probably one of the most famous Star Trek episodes is The Borg. And The Borg

had no idea that Earthlings or Terrans existed. But then they got a message, basically, that said, hey, these guys are... And then they were like, we will not stop until you are all destroyed. Okay, but I'm on the other side of this, you see. I'm thinking, I mean, I don't know, can I say this on radio? You all sound like you're members of the National Rifle Association. You know, I mean, there's no reason to be that paranoid. First of all, there's an argument.

It's not new with me. And I'm sorry, I meant to come prepared with the guy who wrote this. There's actually a paper on this, but there's an argument to be made that if a civilization were that aggressive, they probably would have destroyed themselves long before they ever got here. And also the time scales, the time scales are so long.

And right now, like you said, we're pretty, I mean, sure, Arecibo could get reasonably far, and I was planning to use Arecibo, but I just think it's over-the-top paranoid. I think that you're right, and here's why. For this reason and this reason alone, to find out that you are not alone, I think you would be so happy to go and say hi to somebody, you know, just because when you look at the vastness of the universe and then you see, oh my God, there's some people over there, like that would be so exciting that I don't believe like let me go and conquer them would be the thing

that would pop into your mind, especially if you're advanced enough to actually make your way there and get to them. Dan? I think you're probably both right that it's unlikely that advanced civilizations are going to be dangerous to us. But the problem is we really, it's a very difficult thing to say, yeah, absolutely, we know that for sure. There are no dangerous civilizations out there that conquer the galaxy. So we just don't know. So I think you need some kind of a Selimar process. The Academy of Sciences from all over the world should get together and assess the dangers.

And it shouldn't be up to a single individual to put Earth at risk. But after you go through that process and try to assess the risks and the possible benefits, then if they say it's okay, there are no risks, then I'm all for it, or if the risks are minor. But right now, we just don't know. I wish that this kind of care that you are hoping to see with regard to this issue had been applied to things like the use of fossil fuels and all the technologies that have really come back to harm our environment. Yeah, but just because other people have made mistakes with technology doesn't mean that we should do that too.

But Dan, the chances, it's such a low, low probability. It's like maybe high risk, low probability. It's one of those, falls in that category. I just don't think you should put Earth at risk, even if with a low probability. I think, you know, maybe there's a 1% chance that you could wipe out all of civilization. Are you willing to take that risk?

No, wait, it's way lower than 1%. Listen, life might be better under the alien overlords. I mean, honestly. There could be potential benefits. Yeah, they're very advanced. I mean, they could cure our diseases, world hunger. I mean, so what? Maybe they rechip us.

Yeah, they rechip us. Right, we don't. They get rid of our aggression. We're a collective conscious now. You know, we're able to accomplish so much more. Okay, wait a minute. Okay, we have to wind down now, Dan and Chuck. Thank you for helping us out here today.

Such a pleasure. This was a lot of fun. Thanks, Dan. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio All-Stars Edition. I've been your All-Star host, Carolyn Porco. Until next time. This is StarTalk.