StarTalk Radio - StarTalk Live! SF Sketchfest

Episode Date: November 16, 2014

Where did we come from? Are we alone? Explore these questions with guest host Bill Nye the Science Guy, co-host Eugene Mirman and their guests comedian Dave Foley and SETI Institute Sr. Astronomer Seth Shostak.(Warning: Since this show was recorded live before an adult audience in San Francisco, be prepared for some suggestive language and humor.)Read more and listen to the full track: http://www.startalkradio.net/show/startalk-live-sf-sketchfest/ 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. Welcome to StarTalk Live! Welcome! Very special edition from San Francisco's Sketch Fest. It is my great honor to bring on your guest host for this evening, the amazing Bill Nye, the Science Guy! Science! So it's great to see you all. Thank you so much for coming.

I am here on behalf of my beloved, dear colleague, Neil deGrasse Tyson. But tonight, we are going to talk about some serious business. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And you could say, well, that's crazy. Or you could say it's serious business. And to that end, we have the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, the SETI Institute Senior Astronomer, give it up for Mr. Seth Shostak. And then, as though it's not funny enough, people,

a former colleague, co-worker of mine, for those of you who never miss an episode of Stargate Atlantis, from Kids in the Hall, Dave Foley. Hall, Dave Foley. So, no, it's great to see you all, and we're going to talk about something very serious and remarkable and cool and something that, in my opinion, which, as you know, is correct? Will, dare I say it, change the world? There are two questions, two questions deep within us, two questions each and every one of you has asked at some point in his or her life. Where did we come from? And well, that's pretty close. But for those of you listening on the radio, he said, why are we here? And I think this is a sketch fest, and you bought admission ticket, and you came and you had to take it up with the people you're sitting with.

Where did we come from, and are we alone? And if you meet somebody who says, I've never asked those questions, they're lying. Okay? I've never asked those questions. They're lying. OK, so it's it's an exciting time. And this is something that goes back all of my academic life. I'm talking about since somewhat before kindergarten. I've wondered these questions. And we have here a guy that really tries to answer this question for real. Seth Dave Foley. So, Seth,

what is it you do exactly? We're trying to find out if there are any cosmic confreres, if there's any cosmic company out there. Not just aliens, not just pawns scum on Mars, dead or alive, but are there any people or things or Klingons or intelligences that are at least as clever as the average resident

of the Bay Area. So how would we go about doing that? Are you looking for the Grateful Dead in space? You know... Seth, how do you go about actually looking for extraterrestrial intelligence, actually? This is something you can use at your next cocktail party. There are only three ways to look for aliens that we're

using today. One is to just go there and try and find them. That only works if you're going nearby. I mean, you might go to Mars and maybe you find pond scum. But on the other hand, you could probably go to your bathroom and find pond scum. So that's around the bathroom. That's one way. The second way is build a really big telescope and look at the light coming from some

planet around some godforsaken other star. Split up that light with a prism, look at that. Is this getting too technical? And then... Not yet. All right. What is this prism you talk of? Are you saying prison wrong?

You split it up with a prism, and then you look for things like oxygen or methane. You know, if you find a lot of... You know, that's right. 21% of the air in this room used to be oxygen or methane. You know, if you find a lot of oxygen, you know, that's right. 21% of the air in this room used to be oxygen before you guys got here, and that's because there's life on this planet. So that's scheme number two. Scheme number three, which is what we do, we train big antennas on the sky,

hoping to imitate Jodie Foster by finding a signal coming from intelligent species. Intelligence means you can build a radio transmitter, and you should probably ask the person sitting next to you, hey, can you build a radio transmitter? And you'll know what you're sitting next to. Yeah. So how long have you been at this? How long have you been at this, Seth? What?

Somebody's been at this search for a long time. I think it's in 1960, Frank Drake did an experiment. Frank Drake? Who is Frank Drake? Frank Drake is an astronomer. He did the first experiment along these lines back in 1960, before most of you were born. That was after I had reached middle age. 1960, he used an antenna in West Virginia.

I want to emphasize that. West Virginia, he pointed at a couple of nearby stars, hoping to hear signals from E.T. And did he? He did hear a signal. Turned out to be the U.S. military. That did not count as intelligence. You grew fascinated with this at some point?

Yeah. Something happened to you? You're an astronomer. Yeah. Lots of cheesy sci-fi films when I was a kid. Think about it. Aliens are terrific bad guys for the movies, right? When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991,

all the handy bad guys kind of went away. But aliens, you can make them... Yeah, now we have no more enemies, so that's good. That's right. Yeah. Terrific. So, why did you decide to do this with your professional career? Well, you could have

been a chef! Let me say, in a sense, you've been looking for several years. 1960's getting to be quite some time ago. No, that was Frank Drake. No, I didn't get into this until quite a bit later. 1981. Yeah, okay, since 81. What are we now? We're some other bigger number, right? Yeah.

So, you haven't heard anything. It's the American education system. Hey, I can do a little bit of calculus. No, no, no, look, look, look, look. The point is it's a special moment in time. I mean, you know, everybody thinks they're living in a special moment of time. They probably thought that, you know, in the year 1000. God, it's a special moment in time, Bob.

Those people are idiots. Look what's going to happen in this century that you're going to see. One is we finally understand biology. So a lot of diseases you're worried about now, you won't be worrying about in 50 years. The second thing is we're probably inventing our own successors. We're making thinking machines. I don't know how you feel about that. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but that's this generation. And the third thing is we're going to, I think, find that you have some company out there. How do you say that now? Just the way I said it.

But if you ask me... Oh, I see. Let me rephrase that for you. You'll die. Takes it in the gut. So, Seth, what's a reasonable population of nearby stars in distance of light years? Well, just consider our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy. They're like a couple of hundred billion stars.

Okay, the number of planets is probably close to a trillion. Within a thousand light years, that's not very far. I've got that on my Honda. A thousand light years, there are on the order of millions and millions of stars. Okay, so here's what I'm saying to you. There are on the order of millions and millions of stars. Okay, so here's what I'm saying to you. We're listening for one that has been broadcasting for the last thousand years, right? Not necessarily, but you have to assume that if they're a thousand light years away,

they broadcast something there. Come join the Klingon book club or something. And maybe for only ten minutes, and it arrives today when you happen to be looking, that's good enough. If we were to broadcast something with our current technology, how long would it take for somebody a thousand light years? It'd be a thousand years? That would be... Meaning that's the speed sound would travel. Speed of light. Or signal. Well, it'd be the speed

of light, but would a signal travel at the speed of light? Yes. If it's a light signal. If it's a light signal. No, Eugene. I'm just saying, explain it to someone who maybe didn't major in anything to do with science. So, hang on. Radio waves. Can you pick one? I'm hinting at it with my idiocy.

So, radio waves and light waves go the same speed. Ah-ha! I caught you in a piece of information I like. So, but this, you guys, this goes way back. Dave. No, I was going to say, I actually heard you interviewed recently

where you said that we may have gone silent now because we're all broadcasting digitally and the digital signals don't propagate through space.

I hope I didn't say that. It is true. It is true. Right? I don't know, how many of you have rabbit ears on the top of your TV set?

The thing is that we're shutting down the big towers, you know, how many of you have rabbit ears on the top of your TV set? The thing is that we're shutting down the big towers, you know, the red and white antennas on the outside of town, because in fact, you're getting all your information digitally, or you will soon enough, you'll just have a, if you don't already have this, you have a fiber optic that comes into your house, you get your internet, your TV, your phone, some of you have this already, that's the way we're going. So a lot of TV broadcasting will go away, That's true. But there is the but, is that some things aren't going silent, like the radars down at the San Francisco airport. You're probably not going to shut those down. Yeah, right. Unless they shift to GPS. I don't know how GPS is all very... And a hot 94.5. That's what's going on now.

But this search, people have been fascinated with this for centuries, yes? It does. The ancient Greeks thought about it, too. They thought everything they could see in the sky was inhabited. Were they all murdered? For saying it out loud. This is when thoughts were murdery. But that was in Greece. Some people, they voted and they had democracies and stuff. But Seth, why did they think that?

You've given this some deep thought, it is to be expected. I'm not sure I have. I haven't thought too much about why the Greeks believed that. The Greeks were kind of upbeat. They figured, we're here, there's stuff up there. They came up with nifty ideas like the atom and geometry. And sodomy. And science, yeah, right.

He said that, and he's right. So, well, they couldn't be the only people that had that idea. No, but they were the first to perfect it. They were just really, really good at it. So, first thing was the tunics were just perfect for it. First of all. Yeah. Yeah.

tunics were just perfect for it. First of all... Yeah. When you say tunics, do you mean togas? No, tunics, not togas. That's all drapey. A tunic is a nice, tidy little number that your slave boy would wear. So...

Of course, the Greeks were upbeat about it, right? Yeah. But Galileo, then his contemporary Bruno. Bruno was burned at the stake over this business, right? Well, he was burned at the stake. That's true. Kind of a bummer for Bruno. But the facts are...

Giordano. Well, a burner for Bruno. How's that? But the reason he was incinerated actually wasn't because he said that there was a multiplicity of worlds. He did say that. So that was what? 1600 he was burned. He was burned at the stake

for suggesting. No, not for suggesting. No, not for suggesting. Did they burn him for a different reason? They did. They burned him for heresies against the church. Sorry, but... So that was unrelated to saying there's alien life. So one, he's like alien life and they're like, because they burned him for heresies against the church sorry but so that was unrelated to saying

there's alien life so one he's like alien life and they're like fine and then he's like you're God not totally real

not fine you get the drift yeah so he he deserved to be burned this is what you're saying he did do a

Bernie thing yeah so Bruno did not have a telescope, did he? Did he look through Galileo's telescope? He was burned in 1600. Galileo turned a telescope to the sky in about 1609. But was he influenced by Bruno's trauma? Bruno Flambe. No, I don't think he was, no. But that's the case when this was a military instrument, a telescope. But keep in mind,

Galileo wasn't looking for life in space. He just took this toy that came out of Holland. He didn't invent the telescope, of course. Dutch probably did that. But he built one. This crowd? He was the first person

to point it not at the ground? Yeah. The first person not to point it at the neighbors. That's what he did. He pointed it up. Yeah. There's your whole tun point it at the neighbors, that's what he did. He pointed it up. Yeah. There's your whole tunic thing.

Yeah. People are remarkably stupid. So Galileo looks at this thing and did he speculate that there was life on the moon? Well, in the beginning he was just sort of astounded to find that, for example, the moon wasn't perfect because- It's all beat up. Yeah, it's all beaten up. And you see these dark areas, and they kind of look like oceans.

And he thought, well, maybe, maybe, maybe. But it was actually a guy by the name of, you know, Johannes Kepler, I guess his buddies call him John. Kepler actually... I always called him Keppy. He thought he saw buried cities on the moon. I mean, for a long time, the moon was believed to house sentient beings.

But then this goes on for another century. Huygens comes along and thinks that there's life everywhere, right? Not Huygens, but Herschel. Maybe you mean Bill Herschel. Herschel, Herschel. Yeah, William Herschel. Bill Herschel. Bill Herschel, probably the greatest astronomer who ever lived, actually.

And Herschel thought there were inhabitants on the sun or just beneath the luminous layer of the sun. That turns out to be wrong. Probably, yeah. Wait, are you saying he was the greatest astronomer? I'm not denying it. I'm just asking for a second reason other than he

thought people lived under or in the sun. We call it a follow-up in journalism. I get that I didn't know that signals are the... Anyway, but... I could show you number two and then you'd understand. Yeah. The second greatest astronomer thought his shoes could sing opera.

Right. But, whoa, what? True story. Really? True story. I heard that. Yeah, I heard that. I heard it on the radio.

Yeah. Well. But what was great that Herschel did? Yeah, I was going to get to that. Or Huygens. Herschel. Herschel. Herschel had a telescope good enough to look at Mars, everybody's favorite inhabited planet,

Mars. And you could see the white, you know, polar caps at the top and the bottom. You know, the tilt. The caps are made of dry ice, frozen carbon dioxide. There's some water ice. There's some water ice, too. But whatever. I mean, it has, you know, seasons because the axis of tilt. Eugene's just nodding along. Yeah. Mars. water ice. There's some water ice, too. But whatever. I mean, it has, you know, seasons because the axis is...

Eugene's just nodding along. Yeah. Dry ice. Whatever. Anyway. Whatever. You know this for years. The length of a day on Mars, 25 hours.

He gave a talk to the Royal Society. I think it was 1784. 1784. This is just at the end of the American Revolution. 1784. 1784, this is just at the end of the American Revolution. 1784, and he says that the Martians probably enjoy a lifestyle, or a climate at least, rather similar to our own. Really? Yeah, he said that to Royal Society. But if we go there now, it's 20 below on a summer day, and there's nothing to breathe, which you would notice. You would notice that.

And you can say the same about certain times of year in Oakland. Not anymore. Wait, my question of so what makes him particularly great? Is it that he was the first to postulate or the first to look at Mars?

No, he wasn't the first to look at Mars. What was he right about? Get that he first of all he sounds awesome And he sounds creative, but yeah, what did he? He sounds high I'm gonna tell you but this is too much of a straight line for you. That's fine. Okay. He found Uranus. I'll leave it alone. Not trivial. Not trivial. I prefer the old pronunciation from when you and I were children. So these are telescopes from a long time ago. We have modern telescopes and people look out there and they observe planets.

And they can infer from here that these places are probably inhabitable. But what does it take to be habitable? Well, that's actually a good question. Because all we know is what it takes for life like our own to be habitable. So you have to start there because you don't have any other data points. But that means, yeah, maybe something to breathe, but not necessarily. I mean, if you dug a hole one mile deep here, take you all night. But if you did that and you pull up the muck at the bottom and put it under microscope, you'd see microbes.

That don't need air to breathe. They don't need air. In fact, if you give them air, they're down. They don't need sunlight, no photosynthesis. I mean, they're alive, but they're down there. So there's no good definition of life, life right you might think of Justice Potter talking about pornography I'll know it when I see it life is kind of the same way right mm-hmm so it can definitely high-five I think we can all kind of agree that it's not like if it can't go yeah but what else and you know know what? And if it leaves you hanging, it is dead to me.

Well said, Dave. And so with that, ladies and gentlemen, if you're listening, you're listening to Sketch Fest from San Francisco at the Marine Memorial Auditorium, Marine Memorial Theater. And this is Star Talk Radio Live Live and we will be right back. Welcome back to StarTalk. Yes! StarTalk Live, as you may have heard,

at the Marine Memorial Theater, San Francisco, California, at Sketch Fest. So, Seth, I very much enjoy and am fascinated by the history of the search for extraterrestrials, especially the speculation about what's living elsewhere. But what's going on now in the search? What's going on now is that we're continuing to do radio searches, in other words, using big antennas to try and eavesdrop on ET. Where are these antennas?

Well, the ones we use are about 300 miles north of where we're all sitting here tonight in San Francisco. So they're up in the Cascade Mountains. They're there not because of the cuisine. They're there because, in fact, it's shielded by these mountains from all the radio noise from San Francisco. It's really effective in our modern world of today in which we now live that this Hat Creek Valley is noiseless or quiet? It's not noiseless but it's it's not because of noise from cities like San Francisco actually it's noisy simply because we now have telecommunications satellites wheeling overhead all the time and of course they have transmitters and you know that gets down the valley good wheeling yeah. Except they're in outer space so so they just go... Yes.

Because in outer space, no one can hear you. Boop, boop. Exactly. So, Seth, in our first segment, you asserted, you claimed, that in the next 25 years, we're going to get a signal? Well, I didn't say that, but I will. Yeah. Well, how are you going to say that? Well, no, I said in this century, but I think your number's a good one.

I think the next couple of dozen years may do it. And if you want to know why I think that... Yeah, well, kind of. I feel like... Maybe you do. We're all fairly curious. I think Bill's ready to punch you over this. Yeah.

Not over this. Not over this. Okay, well, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. If somebody says, look, there's a needle in a haystack over there, and you want to make an estimate, how long is it going to take me to find that needle? It only depends on three things. How big is the haystack, how fast are you going through the hay, and how many needles are in there? Now, in the case of looking for ET, we know how big the haystack is.

It's pretty fast talking. So say it again. If there isn't any other intelligent life in the galaxy, why look at another galaxy, right? I mean, it's like saying, you think there are any other mammals in North America? And if it turns out there aren't any, then does it really pay to also look in South America? Okay, I'll finish this up. This idea is too complex, apparently. So you need to know how big is the haystack, how fast are you going through it, how many needles are in there. In the case of looking for ET, the haystack is our galaxy. Let's look in our galaxy. 200 billion stars. Roughly, plus or minus three. Right. How fast are we going through the hay? That we know. That's

a technical question. And we know how quickly we'll go through the hay for the next 10 or 20 years as well. You can sort of predict technology. How fast is that? A star a second? No, nothing like a star a second. But the speed actually follows something that's a very famous relationship here near the Silicon Valley, namely Moore's Law. In other words, it doubles in speed every 18 months. So that will continue for another decade or two.

The only thing you don't know is how many needles are in there. You know how many aliens are in there, but there are people who've guessed, like Carl Sagan has guessed, Isaac Asimov guessed, Frank Drake has guessed. Have you guessed? Eugene? I have 80, but what's your guess? It's going to be more accurate.

80 may be good, Eugene. I don't know, but if it isn't at least a few thousand, then this is going to take longer. But if it's as many as 10,000, right? 10,000 stars with planets that are habitable and so on. And not only habitable, but there's some inhabitants that are broadcasting.

But they'd have to be at our level of technological advancement. No, they can be more advanced. Oh, sorry, but they couldn't, how much less than us could they be? Not much, nothing. Okay. 50 years. We're the basic.

We're the dumbest. We're the people who are like years in negatives. They have to at least be at like Marconi phase. Yeah. Not even that. Or Tesla, if you want to really be honest about it. They would have to have... Marconi was a fucking asshole.

Tesla had a belief in this, yeah? He did. Tesla thought he'd heard the Martians. Nikola Tesla. After whom? What's a Tesla, anyone? They named him after a car. It's Weber per square meter. A delicious salami? I know that's not true. Jesus, people.

Good with sauerkraut. But he was a guy who, after whom we have a magnetic unit of flux named, yes. And he was the guy who pioneered alternating current transmission right through the air and everybody's just going to glow. And along with that, he speculated. Well, he built this big tower for his wireless power transmission scheme, which, by the way, did work. The trouble is it also conveyed power to your hair and everything else. But he eventually built the generators, you know this,

at Niagara Falls. That was the important thing for Westinghouse. A bit of electrical engineering history. It's good for what's left of your soul. Yes. And he and Edison were dread enemies. That's true. Killing elephants left and right.

Yeah. That's, you know, apocryphal. But okay, okay. In any case, Tesla had this big tower outside in Colorado. I think it was Fort Collins. But in any case, and the idea was he was doing these experiments, and he found these signals coming in on it, radio signals.

And he thought, these are the Martians. It was sort of jumping to conclusions. Probably they were what are called whistlers, which are caused by electrical storms that just produce, you know, electromagnetic disturbances, radio waves in the atmosphere that propagate around. Like from lightning, while you're producing light. Not the Martians, it was lightning. You produce sprites and radio waves and stuff. So he was wrong about that.

He was wrong about that, yeah. And that's why he was the greatest astronomer ever. So, Seth, i remember very well i was in carl sagan's astronomy class i know some of you are skeptical it was i'm sure it was some sort of clerical error at the university but i was in the class and they speculated at that time that about one in a hundred stars would have planets. And now we speculate that every star has a planet or two or eight or more. And then one out of five has an earth-like planet. Is that right, Seth? Is that a current number? There was indeed a result announced a couple of months ago. Dave's right. This was an analysis. You don't have to sound so... That's why I am a terrible astronomer.

This was an analysis done by some guys at a state institution across the Bay Area. Their name escapes me. But they published this result. They did a preliminary analysis. If you're scoring along with us, it's University of California, Berkeley. Yeah. Not everybody's here.

And their estimate was that sun-like stars, maybe 30%, 40% of them might have an Earth-like world, 20% to 40%. Red dwarf stars, which dominate the heavens. Dominate. The little runty guys. Somewhere between maybe 15% and 40, 50% of them might have a habitable planet. So, bottom line, you average it all together, you weight by the number. Dave is right. Roughly one in five stars will not only have a planet, but a planet that might be salubrious enough for you to go into the business of constructing condos on it

because it would have liquid oceans and maybe some air. So if you have 200 billion stars in our galaxy, that's a lot of habitable planets. 40 billion. 40 billion in our galaxy. Right. So you start doing the universe, you get into hundreds of billions.

And then it's just whether intelligence evolved on any of them. Yeah. And life, for that matter. Are you saying that intelligence that is And it's just whether intelligence evolved on any of them. Yeah. And life, for that matter. Yeah. No one's going to make it, Joe. Are you saying that intelligence that is not alive, is that a fear? That sounds like something we should be afraid of. A planet that evolved a dead intelligence? Well, Eugene, look at it this way.

I mean, we said earlier that one of the great advances of this century, probably the thing that people will remember the most about this century, if they remembered it all, is that we invented thinking machines. Now, a lot of you think I ain't ever going to do that. I think it'll be Lindsay Lohan. You might, yes. You will, but not 500 years from now. But once you do that, once you build a thinking machine, the first thing you ask is, you design something smarter than you are. And then you ask that machine, you design something smarter than you are. And within 20 years, you have a machine that's smarter than all

humans put together. So, the scenario... Why, that's a good thing? I don't know. I don't know if it's a good thing, but it's an inevitable thing. And the point is that most of the intelligence out there is probably synthetic and probably in their, you know, synthetic brain somewhere they were, oh yeah, yeah, somewhere back in the past we were soft and squishy and organic. That must have been terrible. Oh, wait, so you're saying whatever life was there died but had first created Somewhere back in the past, we were soft and squishy and organic. That must have been terrible.

Oh. Wait, so you're saying whatever life was there died, but had first created something smart that kept creating smarter things, and now... They don't have to die. They don't have to die, but they might have. They could be kept around as, like, hats. Oh, wait, so there might be a lot... Oh, so there...

But anyway, there could be super smart intelligence that is artificial that has now moved on. Another planet had a singularity. So, Seth, is this a just-so story that, in other words, we build computers so we infer that we figure that everybody else is building computers, building machines smarter than they are? Yeah, you're right. Maybe it's a just-so story.

And maybe 99 out of 100 of them don't do that. They just sit around with their Wiis or contemplating their navel or whatever they're doing. Okay? Those are the only two options. What is my navel? Ooh. I can play golf. That's great, Eugene.

You just simplified my life. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Just a little. Yeah, but if one of them does it, you see, that intelligence becomes so incredible that it really doesn't matter what the others do. Yes, so tell us about that. What happens to the Earth when we get a signal?

Well, most people, you walk the streets of San Francisco, and you ask people, what do you think would happen if scientists 300 miles north of here pick up a signal? Most people would say, well, the government would shut it all down. Really? I'll give you a 90-minute speech about organic food. They're monsters. That's what the public thinks. They think it would all be kept quiet. And when I ask them, why do you think that?

They say, because the public couldn't handle the news. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Could you handle the news? If you picked up your newspaper tomorrow, you won't do that. Picked up your browser tomorrow and you read, you know, scientists find signal coming from 800 light years away. Would you say, that's it?

I'm not going to work today? Is that what you do? Would you ride in the streets? No, you wouldn't do any of that. We have historical precedent. You wouldn't do that. It would just be a very interesting story. Are you sure we wouldn't have to burn somebody at the stake? Somebody would, somewhere, but... We would murder One Direction.

And then move on. So... Because at our hearts, we're good. Really? So, because in our hearts we're good. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio Live. I'm Bill Nye the Science Guy, sitting in on a four-legged stool for my esteemed colleague and dear friend, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yes! So, Seth, deep within, you know, one might ask, astronomers have been looking at the heavens for a long time. You guys have been looking at the heavens for 60 years.

Is that accurate? 50-something years. And you haven't heard a thing. And this gets back to Fermi's paradox. If they're out there, why haven't we heard from them? Well, I don't know if everybody in the audience knows Fermi's paradox, unless they're related to the guy. But Fermi was having lunch with a couple of physicists,

and at some point between two bites of a tuna fish sandwich, he says, so where is everybody? And he wasn't referring to the lack of company at the lunch. What he was referring to was the fact that the time that it would take to colonize the galaxy, if that's on your agenda, if you're the Klingons and you decide you want to colonize the galaxy, and even if your rockets aren't all that fast, but if you stay at it, you can

do it in a few tens of millions of years, maybe 30, 40, 50 million years. That's a long time if you're waiting for a bus in San Francisco. But that's not very long compared to the age of the galaxy. So what he was saying is, if there really are advanced societies out there, some of them, one of them, would have colonized the entire galaxy by now. We see no evidence of that,

and that's why I said, so where is everybody? At which point you let the subject drop. And ruined lunch. Well, no, I'm still enjoying that lunch. Seth, tell us what happens to the Earth when we get a signal. I claim it would, dare I say it, change the world. It would be, humans would be humbled yet again. But already most people believe aliens are already visiting the Earth. The majority of people believe that.

That's not the majority. You're talking about a third. The majority of Americans. You guys are talking about the History Channel, right? Believe that aliens visit the earth. The majority of people... But it's not the majority. You're talking about a third. A majority of Americans. You guys are talking about the History Channel, right? Believe that aliens visit here. How many people watch that show? How many people watch that show? Which one? Ancient Aliens.

Oh, those are horrible, yeah. Is it a show called Misinformation? But if we heard that there were... If we got proof that there were aliens, I think most people would just go, well, yeah. Well, that may be part of the reason why they wouldn't riot in the streets. Yeah. Right? I mean, they're already here.

Then people were fat and lazy. It's not like the old days when they'd riot in the streets. Apparently there were never those old days, really. So what would actually happen is it would simply be a very interesting story. If you could understand anything they were saying, now that would be good because, remember, they can't be less technically advanced than you are because then they're not making any radio waves that we could pick up. So they're at least at our level, and it's very unlikely that they're within 100 years

of our level. They'd be thousands, millions, conceivably billions of years more advanced. Suppose you could get information from a society that's millions of years more advanced than ours. Here's the cure for death. Here's how to get along. Whatever. Now, would that be interesting, or would you say, no, I'm just going to ride in the streets? That is a very hopeful view.

We were like, here's how to avoid death and all that, but they could also come here and be like, you now do all our chores. It's people! It's people! It's people! What if they show up here at the same time that the Lakers win a championship?

And they think the riot is about them. Well, there's no shortage of unrest. Thank you, Eugene, but you're not sure. So how close in light years is the closest inhabitable planet?

We don't know, but take that number one out of five. No, you could. I'll double anything. You just give me an hour. Not a real thing, go on Yeah, okay Well, I mean, all you need is at least five star systems

And now you have a good chance for one habitable planet And five star systems, you'll find those within 10, 12 light years Oh, really? Wow, that's right down the galactic street So wait, you don't even need to fold space? They really could have... Well, let me just tell you how long it takes to go 10 light years at the speed of a NASA rocket.

Okay? Oh, probably at least two weeks, maybe years. You're right. It is years. It's about... Well, it's also weeks. Yes. I'm not technically wrong.

It's just very inefficient. The number gets big, that's all. Well, there's no way you can get the answer wrong. That's true. It takes about, what does it take? 70,000, 100,000 years to go to the nearest star at the speed of a mountain. That's even if you punch it. Yeah.

But we know for a fact that one advanced civilization exists, us. Well, by our own definition. We do have microphones. Yeah. So that's not bad. And look, no wires. What? Why, this is witchcraft.

And we can tell horses to go left, so we're really pretty good. Hee-haw. So we're really pretty good. So it is one thing to speculate on intelligent life and hope that we will find intelligent life. But I, for one, am thoroughly charmed by the idea that we go to Mars on a summer day near the equator where there's some sub-sand glacier on Mars that's oozing some crazy super salty water out there and we find some Martterranean, sub-sand glacier on Mars that's oozing some crazy, super salty water out there,

and we find some Martian microbes, right? It would change the world. People would ride in the streets, pitchforks. The government wouldn't let them know about it. But with that said... Yeah, if we found the flu on Mars, we would kill each other. I would kill everyone here. You know, Eugene, we've run that experiment, and it turned out you didn't kill them.

Because in 1996, biggest science news story in the entire year, a little Martian meteorite, you may remember this, ALH 84001, came from Mars and landed in Antarctica where it was very easy to find because it's on top of the snow. Or a mischievous child left it. My first thought would be, why am I in Antarctica? Because we're exploring. Well, I don't.

Yeah, well, the people do. I'm from Canada. I don't go anywhere colder than Canada. Is there such a place? Enlighten us. But did this rock have things we thought were life but really aren't? There was a fossilized microbe. Right, right.

The claim was, the claim by some guys at NASA and also Stanford University and President Clinton. Yeah. Well, Clinton made the announcement. By sex addicts and nerds. Go on. You got a problem with that? That there was life. Both are wonderful. That there was life

in this rock. Or dead life. I mean, it was dead. But, it was dead Jim. But it was a little microbe. And the claim was, it was a Martian from four billion years ago. This was front page, above the fold, giant font, news in the New York Times for three days, four days running. Liberals.

So, but people didn't write in the streets. No, no, no, they just found out it wasn't true. But it was fascinating because it's not unreasonable that life started on Mars. You guys, it's extraordinary, but it's not crazy to suggest that life started on Mars when Mars was very

wet and then it got hit with an impactor. I mean, I'm sure it was excited also. You are all a bag of perverts! I didn't know science was so dirty. Any chance! Any! Tiny!

Hey, that's your problem. Yes, I know. Okay, so, this thing gets hit with an impactor three billion years ago. Stuff's thrown into space. It gets in a few bits of it, get in this extraordinary mathematical thing called a home in orbit.

Yeah? And except it's in outer space, so it goes and lands on the Earth. And you and I are somehow descendant from a Martian microbe. And let me just say do-do- do do do do do do do do it would be an extraordinary discovery about the course of events it would really be something and so along this line if we are all descendant from a common ancestor which

seems a reasonable conclusion when you look at your DNA and all those primitive life forms, like anyone? My old boss. Ted Cruz. And so it is another question, though. Could have life started a second time, or the time before us here on Earth, and if we just had the right place to look look we would find the so-called second Genesis we are the aliens we're

looking for and that theory has is called what is it called second Genesis no this theory of that that life came here from space. Transpermia. Transpermia. I know. Dave Foley, ladies and gentlemen. Check your servers. Try the chicken. The Loki of words. Transpermia to send seeds across in Latin. Yeah.

But it is a remarkable thing, and it's worth studying here on Earth. So, Seth, you are affiliated. You do a lot of work with astrobiologists, yes? Yeah, we have a lot of astrobiologists, yes. But do you feel they have, did they inform your work at all, listening for radio and light signals and so on? Well, in the very general sense, I mean, they're trying to define, you know, what life is, how you might look for it. I mean, it's easy enough to, you know, look for big things, but for small things, and probably most of the life in the universe is microscopic. There are more

bacteria in your tummy than there are people on Earth. Really? Yeah. I believe you. Yeah, really. Earlier, other than, of course, high fives, what are some of the, what are some of ways that you could categorize something being alive? It's actually quite hard

to do. I mean, you can say, if you pick up your 10th grade biology book, if you still have that, and you open it up, it starts out with a definition of, well, life has metabolism and life reproduces. Homeostasis. All this stuff. Yeah, whatever. It keeps itself. But it, you know, you can think of examples of things that fit

the definition but aren't alive, right? Things like mules, they don't reproduce, it turns out. But you wouldn't, you know, contest the fact that they're alive. Fire reproduces, but it's not alive. So there's no good definition for life. The current working definition, if it evolves in a Darwinian fashion.

What? That isn't even true. Probably not. What if it's in a Freudian fashion? So that makes it hard to build an experiment to look for life. So when we think of life, you're talking about, like, there's living things in nuclear reactors. There's living things that eat the lenses of telescopes, fungi. So it could be just something we literally can't imagine at this point.

Can we hear more about things being alive inside nuclear reactors? Yeah, there are bacteria that make a living in nuclear reactors. I've never really spoken with them but they... Well, you can speak with them, they're called rhododurans, you can speak with them, they just don't talk back. So along this line, suppose we have microbes on Mars and we're going to go looking for them. As soon as you send anything there, there's a good chance that we are going to contaminate Mars and it won't be the good old ecosystem that it was, right? There is some danger there. There are people who worry about that, too, actually.

NASA has an Office of Planetary Protection. I know you're going to say something. No, I think it's fine. Okay. I think it's fine to protect planets. I think it'd be dangerous to send kale to Mars. What if they're like, this is amazing, but then they develop

weird problems. Go on. Really? It's possible. Too much kale is not good, people. Be careful. I'm warning you, San Francisco. It's everywhere. The Planetary Protection Office,

we used to just bake spacecraft. Take the Viking spacecraft, put them in an oven, and presume that you would kill everything. But now our electronics and other... We don't want to be annealing radioactive material and so on. You can't kill it all. But so far, isn't Mars just kind of shitty?

I mean... Is it really a problem if we contaminate it? Yeah, it is. It might be a problem, not because suddenly you would see you know mold all over mars in that but the point is that they fall down there on the surface of mars and mars doesn't have any you know ozone layer and as a result they get cooked by the ultraviolet so yes it probably contaminates the area right next to the spacecraft but you walk a block away and it's pristine mars the other thing though for in the case of Surveyor,

which was there were a couple of surveyors sent to the moon. There was speculation, by the way, when I was young, if we landed on the moon, I say we, professional astronauts landed on the moon, they would sink into dust like quicksand. And so the Surveyor spacecraft landed first, these footpads, pictures of the footpads, all fabulous. And then guys went over there in their car, their lunar rover car.

By the way, that car is worth millions of dollars. And it's not even locked. It's sitting there. They're sitting there. Okay, and they went over there and unscrewed some stuff and brought it back, and there were bacteria alive. And people speculated that these bacteria had survived on the Cerberus spacecraft

for three years on the lunar surface. But the problem was probably, Dr. S., is this correct, that it was stuff that contaminated... The guy's just handling it contaminated, and they fooled themselves. I've talked to people at the Planetary Protection Office, and they say that it's most likely that it was contamination introduced bringing the thing back to Earth. Who knows? Microbes are tough. Talk to an astrobiologist about this. I did once.

I said, if you take, I asked if you take all the biota on Earth and throw it onto Mars and come back a year later, will any of it still be alive? And his answer was yes. He said there are certain microbes that particularly, if they can just get underneath the sand a little bit and protect themselves. Scrape it a little. From the ultraviolet, yeah. They're tough. And those are called communists. Really?

It's a red plant. Uninfection. So what? This is cool. So what... What is so fantastic, seriously, everybody, about this pursuit, to me, is that it's optimistic. There's this thing within us

that the future's going to be better, and we're going to build spacecraft, and we're going to look out there and find out what's going on, because the more we learn about our solar systemic neighborhood, the better off we're going to be. And the more we learn about radio signals in our galaxy, the better off we're going to be. And that is still something that I think drives all of us, is this optimism through space exploration. Guys, this has been a fabulous evening.

Thank you all for coming. Here at the Marine Memorial Theater, San Francisco, California, Sketch Fest 13. The guests have been fantastic. Dave Foley. Eugene Merman. Seth Shostak. I've been your host, Bill Nye, the Science Guy. Fly safely and good night.