Stuff You Should Know - How Alien Contact Might Work

Episode Date: June 28, 2022

If we ever found evidence of intelligent alien life (or they found us) what would we say? Who would say it for us? These seemingly silly questions are vitally important depending on your view.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and Chuck's here too, and so is Jerry. And this is Stuff You Should Know. I don't have a shirt on. That's cool. I don't have pants on. I probably should have told you that before we got going, but or not at all. That is definitely the state that we're in these days. It's totally fine that you're not wearing a shirt while we're recording. I went to put one on and then I was like, why? That's a great question to ask yourself every morning, really. By the way, we should point out, I just noticed, I don't even think I told you this, but I noticed today, I always have a Google search setting for Stuff You Should Know when that pops up, and it popped up that our board game is for sale on Amazon.com. Again, finally. It came back

in, huh? I guess so, and it's on sale, so it's like 20% off even. If anyone wants it, we should point out, I looked at the negative reviews. This is not Trivial Pursuit. This is this completely different Stuff You Should Know game that Trivial Pursuit loved and wanted to co-brand. So as far as the one-star reviews that say, this doesn't work with my Trivial Pursuit board. I've tried to mash them together. But it's out there again, I think, if people are interested in that. Yeah, hopefully they are. I didn't realize that was a plug until about halfway through. You were still thinking me without a shirt. I thought there was some story coming out of it, and then I was like, oh, I see where he's going with this. No, I just noticed that this morning,

so I thought I'd mention before we get into what will admittedly be a bit of a freewheeling discussion. I think on Alien First Contact, this one didn't quite fit into what we like to do, which is sort of a tighter beginning, middle, end type of thing. So I think this will be a little more freewheeling. Yeah, it's actually super appropriate because that's basically the same Insution attitude that humanity has shown toward the possibility of having to communicate with aliens thus far, freewheeling. It's just kind of like, yeah, we'll figure that out on the fly after it happens kind of thing. And that's really, I mean, in some ways, it's like, well, yeah, I mean, why would we waste any time figuring out what we're going to say to aliens if we're not even

certain that aliens exist? But in another way, if you look at it, you can say like, that is extraordinarily irresponsible. And like really, how much time and resource and money would it take to say, hey, you group of humans who are into this, can you go figure out what we should do and what we should say some contingency plans just in case, just in case? So I mean, it kind of just depends on your perspective, I think, but there are people out there, Chuck, who are working on this, they're just not really receiving any government funding, and they may or may not be being listened to by governments around the world. But there are people who have us covered to an extent. Yeah, that's a good preamble.

Thank you. I think, I guess, you know, the first thing we should talk about briefly, at least, are the couple of ways that this could go down. One of them is far less interesting than the other, which is to say, if we find evidence of primitive life, let's say, let's say the Mars rover finds, and there has been some promising evidence of life on Mars. But if we find like a mold or some weird, you know, virus or just microbes or anything on Mars, not super exciting, but they still have to sort of prepare how they would handle that. And they have talked about that kind of thing. And they basically have said that if that happened, there would be like a joint press conference, and all the scientists would be involved, and then they would start studying that

stuff. I think the real money and sort of the fun of this discussion comes when we talk about intelligent life. Right. Because, you know, that's what, that's the money topic is something more like close encounters of the third kind. No, definitely. But there's a little more on discovering primitive life. What you just described with that press conference, that already happened back in 1996, with the ALH84001 meteorite that turned out to be a chunk of four and a half billion year old Mars, basically, that had broken off at some point and landed in Antarctica. And there is multiple circumstantial evidence on this rock that suggests that a magnetic microbe inhabited this rock at some point. That maybe within, you know, four and a half billion years ago,

there was microbial life on Mars, and we have evidence of it. There's a lot of people out there who are, you know, very well versed on this who say it's still not proof of life. It's still all just circumstantial evidence that, yeah, put together is pretty convincing, but it's not convincing enough to say, yes, there's life out there. But it's still up for debate even all these years later. So that press conference with the scientists who discovered it, with skeptics who present the opposite side, like that has actually been put into practice before. But yes, I agree with you. Finding the, like, intelligent life elsewhere, what are commonly referred to as extraterrestrial intelligences or ETIs, which sounds way smarter than just saying the aliens.

Yeah. That's the money contact for sure. Right. And, you know, within that becomes a whole host of issues. And we're going to just kind of talk about all those because there are a lot of things that play here. You know, one is like, we have no idea what that could look like. We have no idea if, you know, and we'll talk, you know, all throughout this about different ways we might try and communicate or pick up communication from them. But we have no idea if that would even be possible, or if they even have brains like we do that could process any kind of communication like we do. So there's just a lot of speculation when it comes to stuff like this. And I think that some of it probably has been informed by the movies a little bit, right?

Yeah, I think it absolutely has been informed by not just movies, but like the science fiction genre of like books. And rom-coms. For sure. A little bit of definitely maybe in there. But yes, the reason why is because science fiction writers have like a really long upstanding history of making fairly accurate predictions or figuring out, you know, paradoxes, weird solutions to issues that, you know, normal scientists aren't necessarily thinking about. And they've contributed to the field. So it makes sense that we would kind of lean on science fiction to come up with some of these or let it influence us, too. Yeah. And, you know, there are a lot of smart people thinking about this stuff. There's a

gentleman named Jacob Hock-Misra who works at Penn State University, go to Nittany Lions, and is an astronomer there and said basically, and this is in an interview with Live Science, said, you know, what we would probably do if we did spot some sort of intelligent life is we would probably or we should probably slow our roll and just sort of watch them for a while from a distance, try and gather information, learn as much as we can. And then maybe at some point, before we even send humans, send out like a robot or something. Right. So what he's talking about bears are really strong resemblance to a military document from the fifties that no one has a copy of, but has been written of

by people who supposedly have read it before back in the day. It's called Seven Steps to Contact. And it was basically that plan, you know, we find something, we sit and observe it from a distance, we get a little closer, there is a procedure where we abduct a member of that species or whatever if we can to like learn what we can from them. Then we announce our presence and then we try to communicate, right? And communicating using like a probe or some sort of like computer makes a lot of sense, but it leads us to a really important kind of rule of thumb in this field. And that is that if we humans have come up with it, there's a really good chance that an advanced civilization that we will come in contact with

has actually done it already. So if we've decided that a space probe is probably the best way to contact people, that's probably what we should be looking for because that's probably what they will actually do. Yeah. And this is where, you know, it's sort of a, it's sort of a heady thing to think about. But the idea is that they would be in advanced, like way more advanced civilization than we are. It's sort of an assumption that if they contact us or if we can make contact with them, that they're way far ahead of us in technology, and that they have actually survived beyond where we are now, which is a technical or technological adolescence. I mean, it seems like we've done a lot, but you know, Livia points out that we've only been communicating, you know,

view radio via radio for like a hundred years. Right. So like we're super, super young. So the idea is that if there is something out there, they're way more advanced, they've survived beyond that. They have technology that is, they have advanced that did not end up killing them. So they survived what's called the great filter, which we're not even, I don't know, you know better than I am. How close are we to approaching that? The predictions are within the next hundred years. If we can survive the next hundred years, we might be okay. Of like advancing tech to the point where tech then takes over and wipes us out. Yeah. So if we can survive that, the great filter, that means that we'll have such a mastery of technology that we can defend ourselves from

extinction in any form, natural, self-imposed, whatever. We'll just, we'll have such a mastery of technology that it can't wipe us out and we can't be wiped out. And so the lifespan of humans could go on for billions of years. So if we detect an advanced civilization, what they tell us, Chuck, is that it's possible to make it through the great filter, because we don't know if that's the case or not. All the evidence we have is that we're the only intelligent life in the universe. So that raises the question, are we the only intelligent life in the universe? Because all other intelligent life has destroyed itself as it's tried to go through the great filter. And if so, does that mean we're about to destroy ourselves because we're about to go through the

great filter? Or was there never any? Or was it already in the past? Was there some other stage in evolution that we've already gone through? And so if we come in contact with an advanced civilization, they show us that the great filter is probably behind us and we have a long, happy, technologically advanced life ahead of us for our species. Right. We should probably break, but before we do, I do want to mention that that same Jacob Hawke-Misra also points out kind of the obvious, but we do need to mention it, that they may, like this whole idea that we could be out there watching them potentially, they may already be out there watching us and we just don't know about it. And then we would be in

a reactive mode rather than a proactive mode. And it's just something to think about. We're not like trying to say aliens, man, but just because we don't know what's out there yet doesn't mean that they don't know that we're out there. No. And it's, again, it's probably not aliens if we're being observed. It's probably a probe of some sort. And the spot du jour that people are suggesting where it would be hiding out is in a co-orbital asteroid out in the asteroid belt that has the same orbit as Earth around the sun, but doesn't orbit Earth. That would provide a really great hidden spot to check out Earth and kind of keep tabs on us. Because he would be crazy enough to fly their spaceship into an asteroid field.

Well, what's really exciting is like we'll probably be mining asteroids in like the next 20, 30, 50 years. So if that's the case, we would find that probe. And possibly Han Solo. That's right. Super old Han Solo with a single diamond earring for some reason. All right. Let's take that break and we will come back and talk about a topic that we previously covered, SETI, right after this. All right. We have a whole episode on SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Was that one at Comic-Con? No, because we got a UFO one at Comic-Con. I think that's the one

you're thinking of. That's the one I'm thinking of. Yeah. Those were always fun. I enjoyed those. Definitely. The Comic-Cons, that is. They were always fun because we had a mix of like stuff you should know listeners, but also sort of arms crossed nerds. It entertained me. Yeah. That ended up liking what we did, generally. Yeah. So I just have to say now, anytime I hear Comic-Con, have you seen Love on the Spectrum US, the new season of Love on the Spectrum? I never saw the old edition. Oh, you got to see it. Or the new one. So there's a new one and there's one regular person. I want to say character, but it's like, you know, real life. Sure. So there's one person on it. Her name's Danny and she's like super into

animation and is just laser focused on finding a partner who is equally into animation as she is, which is really tough because she's really into it. But one of her first questions in any one of the dates she goes on is, have you heard of Comic-Con or do you feel you would ever want to go to Comic-Con or something similar to that? It's really super cute. I think you can say cast member. I think that still covers reality. Oh, it does. Okay. Yes. So one of the cast members named Danny. Yeah. All right. So SETI, like I said, search for extraterrestrial intelligence. You can listen to that full episode. There is a body, a key body for SETI called the International Academy of Aero, I'm sorry, Astronautics. And they are non-governmental and they were founded in 1960.

And what they try to do is bring together experts from all over the world. I think there are 77 member countries at this point. It is UN recognized. So it's not just, you know, a bunch of crackbots out there talking about aliens. Yeah. And they helped establish some protocols in the late 80s and then updated them in 2010. Just sort of some guidelines about how to handle it if SETI did find something. Yeah. And they're really kind of basic and boring even when you stop and think you're talking about discovering and searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. But it's good that they did this. They provided a baseline so that if you're a scientist working in this field, you know, oh, I can speak to the press or, oh, I haven't really confirmed this discovery,

so I shouldn't announce it yet. Like there's just really basic guidelines that I think if you are in the grip of having discovered something like this, it would be really helpful to be able to refer to them, I think. Yeah. And I think what's promising about these guidelines is they talk a lot about being honest and open with the press, like you said, and working together with people from all scientists from all over the world, informing task groups and not jumping the gun. And like if you, you know, in the movies, if you get a, you know, the computer screen pops up an alien signal, like the first thing you do is type back an answer. Like they say, no, no, no, don't type back any answer. You're not the guy in the chair. What we need to do is like take our

time with this stuff and consult everybody, including the UN on like best next steps. Right. The guy in the chair who's big, sweaty, bearded, and has a really affectionate relationship with the heroine who's actually interested in the male lead. Yeah. You just described me right now, except that guy has on a shirt. Right. So you've got what? You've got searching. You do it transparently. You're supposed to communicate with the public. And as we'll see, that's, you know, if you think about it, if you pay any kind of attention to science journalism, there's all sorts of discussion and talk about searching the stars for extraterrestrial intelligence these days. And that is part of this protocol. Like keep the public informed, tell them everything

you're doing, tell them what you're finding, and then later on, as we'll see, tell them how excited they should be about that. Well, yeah. I mean, I guess we should talk about that. They actually have a scale that they've developed to gauge how excited the general public would be about finding something out. And it's called the Rio scale. And it was proposed by astronomers, Yvonne Almar of Hungary and Jill Charter of the United States in 2000. And it's kind of funny. It's based off the, or at least modeled on the Torino scale, which is a scale of like the effects of an asteroid hitting the earth. But it's how excited would the public be? And what's funny about it, it's a zero to 10. And one of the examples that Libya gives is, all right, let's say they found a

like a pretty foolproof report that they found of a signal from intelligent or potentially intelligent life, but they found it in the archives like, hey, we dug this up from 2002. And it's confirmed. And it was a signal of alien life trying to speak to us. That ranks a two out of 10. Right. And two is nominally low importance. I just think that's so telling of people in there having to be so in the moment. Like, when did this happen? Oh, okay, Yvonne. Right, right. So it's not just like how excited the public will be. It's also how excited you should tell the public to be, like how important and finding this is, right? So you would turn around and it still, it strikes me as really weird

too that, hey, we found a beacon that we've confirmed is from an intelligent life outside of our galaxy, but it's not that important. That's weird. The wow signal wasn't the what ebbs signal. Like they were excited about it. They included an exclamation point. Right. I should point out, though, that same signal, if they found that like right now, tomorrow, they said that would rank a seven out of 10. So it would be newsier, I guess. Right. So seven is high importance. And then 10 is, oh my gosh, oh man, oh geez. Yeah. That's that level of importance. Yeah. Well, which is potentially like a panic level, right? It is because basically you've got a, you essentially have contact as what a 10 would be,

or a signal that is coming to us from our solar system that we can like study. It's all about how credible and reliable it is. And the first Rio scale that was introduced in 2000, I think you said, that was updated here there, I think in 2003. And then in 2018, I believe there was an update to it. So much so that they call it Rio 2.0. It was led by Duncan Forgen of the Center for Exoplanet Science at the University of St. Andrew in Scotland. Go Scotland. Go golfers, I'm sure, is the University of St. Andrew. Sure. And so he and company updated the Rio scale to make it even more robust. And again, it all comes down to how credible is this information, right? Like how credible is this discovery? Can we study it? What do other scientists in the field think about it?

You put all this together and then you say, this is low importance. This is high importance. This is as important as it comes. And then you tell the public, we found something and the importance of it is as important as it comes. Or it's not that important. Which would be a 10, which is she dances on the sand. I don't know what that means, but I like the sound of it, Chuck. All right. Should I point it out or should I let you just discover it later or never at all? Or maybe someone will email and tell you. No, point it out. I hate it when people email and tell me stuff that I missed. It was a dad joke. An 80s kid of the 80s dad joke. Okay. All right. I'm getting warm. You got nothing? No. I've got maybe Mr. Mr. No, you're close. It's the Rio scale. She dances on

the sand with the highest level. Yeah, that is great. I can't believe I missed that. All right. It was great. It's a great song. Oh, okay. Bad joke. So when you reference to it is by proxy great. Should we talk about setter? Yeah, just one more thing before we pass on from the Rio scale. Like one of the important things is the reason why the scale is so varied from low importance to she dances on the sand importance is you're supposed to communicate this to the public. If it's low importance, that doesn't mean don't bother. It means go tell the public we found this, but it's actually not that big of a deal. It's instructing astronomers how to present this to the public. How excited you should tell them to be, how important it is. Yeah. And then

also before we go on to setter, once you actually have a detection, there's that SETI permanent committee from the IAA, they have protocols for when you do actually confirm you have detected an alien signal or presence somehow. Right. So it's all sort of set up. Yeah. And so if they're broadcasting on the electromagnetic band, which we are out there looking for, so hopefully that's what they're using, that band would be protected. Everybody else would get kicked off of that band, and then that band would be studied as intensively as an electromagnetic band has ever been studied in the history of humanity. I love that. And then lastly, Chuck, there's a protocol not to respond. Again, you're the guy in the chair, like you said, you don't get to respond. But so neither do the

astronomers, neither do the IAA. It's meant to become an international global discussion on how humanity should reply to this. And that's based on the idea that how we reply is going to have a really big impact on how the conversation goes from that point on. Well, yeah, because what we don't know, and one of the things that I think would be the most pins and needles sort of thing to find out is whether these ETIs are what they call selfish, or whether they're universalists. So are they here to help us and say, you know, we have all this great technology, then we can help you out. By the way, we have a cure for cancer, you might be looking for that. Sure. Or are they, well, I guess that would be the universalist, or are they selfish,

and are they here to conquer us? And there was a researcher that you dug up that pointed out something kind of key, which is, sure, we wonder if they're selfish or universalist, but I don't know if anyone's noticed. Everything we talk about is how it benefits or is bad for us. So we are definitely on the selfish side, because nobody at all is talking about how we might be able to possibly help them. Right. And it sounds pretty goofy and childish to say, like, you know, oh, they want to conquer us or whatever. But there's actually like legitimate reasons in alien intelligence would want to conquer us. They might want our resources to exploit for their own uses. That's a big deal. They love corn. They may also basically have

a their own protocol where anytime they meet intelligent life, they snuff it out because they don't want any potential future rivals to come along. And it's not worth their while to investigate that life further to see if it ever would be a rival. So they just wipe it out wherever they encounter it. So yes, it sounds childish at first. But when you start to think about it, it becomes a little eye-popping because there are universal, you would expect, universal reasons for them to harm us. And they're predicated on the idea that natural selection is a universal phenomenon that all life, or more to the point, no life just comes fully formed into being out of nowhere. It progresses from other forms of life and develops along the way. And so you can,

it makes sense that it would happen elsewhere in the universe. And if that's the case, then yeah, you can make a really good case that there are, that there are destructive intelligences out there that just wipe out competition and rivalry, or rivals. Or yeah, the other option too, though, is this hanging out there is they may have initially been selfless or universalist or benevolent. And then they either accidentally infect us somehow. I mean, we've seen that if you look to our own past of when conquering colonialists invaded foreign lands and brought their disease with them. I mean, it's not a far stretch to think that could happen on an interplanetary, or I guess, well, sure, interplanetary level. Or that doesn't happen. And they come here and

they want to help us out. But then they study us for a while and hang out. And they're like, you people are awful, right? Either they undermine us some way by accident or on purpose, or then they decide to wipe us out. Right. Because they place a higher value on life in general. And they're like, these guys are actually a threat to life in general. So maybe if they're utilitarians, it would make sense for them to eliminate us to save more life. Right. Because again, let's say we actually did encounter an advanced civilization, their perspective is much different than ours. We have no idea how long humans will be around. And frankly, those of us living today in the 21st century probably have a shorter idea of what the human

lifespan is than people in the past did, right? So they're coming at it like these guys might be around forever. And who knows how technologically advanced they could become. So they could see it as beneficial to the greater good by getting rid of us now. Like going back and strangling Hitler in his crib when he was a baby or something like that. That would be their opportunity to do that, because we would be utterly defenseless against a civilization that was so advanced, it could come visit us. But baby Hitler is the human race. Exactly, in this case, which is really sad, but yeah. Right. Let's just move on to set up, which we were gonna do minutes ago, but I told you this would be freewheeling, everybody. It was so freewheeling, I have one

other thing. Do you really go ahead? I have two other things actually. So we actually have legitimate reason to believe that they wouldn't be a conquering type, because number one, they're very long lived. That's our assumption, right? Okay. And if they're very long lived, they're probably a cooperative society, because non-cooperative societies fight amongst themselves and can end up wiping themselves out. They're much likelier too. So if we encounter an advance civilization that is very, very long lived, has been around for millions or billions of years as a species, they probably are super peaceful because they learned along the way and maybe even evolved along the way to cooperate. So it would be more likely that they would be those universalists

that we met. Okay. And then there's one other example of life here on earth, where there was like positive contact, not necessarily between societies, but between an encoded version of a society and a new society. And that was when the Spanish Moors of the 12th century discovered lost Greek knowledge, and they turned around and introduced it to Europe, and it brought Europe out of the medieval or dark ages into the Renaissance. It was triggered just by this knowledge that had been lost. So you can imagine that if we were suddenly bestowed with a tremendous amount of new knowledge, who knows where we could go with it? Well, yeah. And that brings up a point, which is if we're talking about what might happen if a super advanced civilization got in

touch with us, and you want to do that brain experiment, one way to sort of go about that might be to look back at our past and say, well, what's happened in the history of humanity when the equivalent of that has happened, which is like, let's say, a more advanced, and it might as well have been aliens contacting humans, but a much more advanced European nation, and like going into a primitive tribe and deep in the Amazon. And the answer isn't pretty, if you don't know anything about world history. So if you want to look to the past of how humans have kind of operated when they're the advanced civilization, maybe a little humility going forward in what might happen to us is in order. Right, for sure. And we'll talk about societal

impacts, but that really kind of sheds a little light on that foreshadows it at least that like, whether we wanted to feel humble or not, we probably would if we encountered an advanced civilization. All right, I think we beat around the bush so far that we can actually take a break. And then talk about SETA. SETA, poor SETA is just sitting out there. It's a fun bush to beat, though, isn't it? It really is. I like this kind of stuff. Good. All right, we'll be right back with SETA, I promise. Okay, Chuck. SETA. I got a few more points to make. So if SETE is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETA is the search for extraterrestrial

artifacts, because again, there's a lot of people out there who say the best way to explore the universe is through machines that we deploy and then send back information and maybe are so advanced that they can actually serve as ambassadors for the civilization. Right, so not only maybe that should be our way forward for us, but with SETA, it's a search for extraterrestrial artifacts is maybe we should also really, really keep an eye out not just because typically we've been listening for things. And they said maybe we should also be looking for evidence of a probe. As far as us doing it, there are some benefits. One is that maybe they wouldn't know where we're coming from. We're not literally sending out a beacon from where we are just in case they are

dangerous. So if they found our probe, unless it was stamped, made in the USA, which it probably would be. With a map to get to the USA. Dallas, Texas, they wouldn't know where we are. So there is potential benefit there. But I think SETA is interesting, the idea that we should be looking for stuff out there maybe in those asteroid fields. Yeah, so back in the mid 80s, a couple of SETE researchers, Robert Freitas Jr. and Francisco Valdes, they basically said we can conceive of three different classes of artifacts that an intelligence, an extraterrestrial intelligence might send out. And they weren't talking about this kind of Von Neumann probe or something like that. They were saying as far as detection goes, it would be put into three categories.

The first one is ones that actively seek out other intelligences. The second one is ones that avoid detection. And then the third one are ones where the extraterrestrial intelligence is indifferent to whether we find it or not. And after examining it, they said we should be looking exclusively for class three artifacts because class one, we would have detected already because they would have come and found us if they were seeking attention. And then class two, we're never going to find because this is an advanced civilization. So we would just guess that they would be able to keep us from knowing that we were being watched. Yeah, like maybe they have just figured out invisibility. Something is basic as that. Sure, yeah. So we should look for

the ones where they're like, who cares if they find this old space junk? Right. And that's actually what Uamua Mua is thought to be by at least one astronomer. You know about that? Excuse you. Uamua Mua, was that the guy that's working on the Galileo project now, Loeb? Yeah, Avi Loeb. All right. Well, yeah, let's talk about Uamua, then we'll talk to about the Galileo project, I think. Okay, so Uamua Mua means I think like visitor. And it was found in 2017. We're not quite sure what it is. It's probably a hunk of a planet, but the one thing everybody agrees on, it's not from our solar system. It's from another star system, because it doesn't move like anything in our star system does. But it supposedly has been observed exhibiting gravitational acceleration,

non-gravitational acceleration, meaning it's accelerating faster than gravity would suggest it would on its own, right? Which means like it might be propelled by something. Which is crazy to think about. And that Avi Loeb we were talking about is a Harvard astronomer and came out and was one of the only people that came out and says, you know, straight up, I think this is alien technology. And so Avi Loeb is who launched the Galileo project in 2021, which is the only sort of active set of thing that we have going right now. And right now, there was the unidentified aerial phenomenon report last year from the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And that's basically, I mean, they were meeting about that even just recently,

you know, the government, the US government that is finally saying like, all right, we don't need to be like embarrassed about talking about this stuff. There are things that we've seen that we can't identify. They are unidentified flying objects that like our military has seen, like our best pilots are reporting about. So we should start talking about this. And part of that was this report, the unidentified aerial phenomenon report. And the Galileo project is sort of coming through that also has some telescopes going now watching for objects. I'm not sure like how vast that is at this point, but it's just launched a year ago. So I'm sure they're getting going. Yeah. And we should say Avi Loeb is viewed alternatively as a genius or a maverick or

rogue or a crackpot. But he does have, you know, legitimate bona fide. He's not one of those guys who's like, you know, he parks his camper on the campus of Harvard. So he's Harvard astronomer, like he's a legitimate, he was the head of the astronomy department for quite a while, I believe. Yeah. So yeah, he thinks from what I read that is billions of year old defunct alien probe that no longer works or operates and just happened to stumble into our solar system for us to find accidentally. What does it look like? I didn't even look it up, I should have. It looks like a kind of cigar shaped. It's apparently between 300 and 3000 feet long and 115 and 548 feet thick. I'm looking at it now. You were generous with the cigar. It looks like a joint.

Okay. Straight up. Yeah. It looks like a spliff. It does. So yeah, it looks like an alien spliff is probably what it is. Maybe they're sending us a message. I've never used the word spliff before in my life until just now. Yeah, I don't say that word either. No. It's way too hip for us, I think. Oh, is that hip? It didn't used to be. Oh, I don't know. I think it was European maybe at first. Right. It didn't used to be. Yeah, I don't know. We are so uncool. I have no idea. So Chuck, if we run into somebody or somebody finds us or we just detect life and figure out a way to communicate with it, we're going to immediately hit a wall because the idea that we'll be able to communicate with an extraterrestrial intelligence presumes a lot of factors and

variables that would have to be in place that may or may not. And if you take one or two of them out, we're totally up the creek as far as communicating goes. Yeah, that's why I always loved close encounters of the third kind because even as a kid, I remember thinking how cool it was that they didn't just like hold up a sign that said, hey, how are you? And that they used this. And that they used the doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo and the lights. I thought that was kind of cool because that is, you know, we don't know if they even have the same senses that we have as far as hearing something or seeing something. There is a book that someone put out a German mathematician named Hans Freudenthal called Lincos, L-I-N-C-O-S,

colon design of a language for cosmic intercourse. And by that he means speaking to one another, I think. And this it's kind of funny, Libyan included a quote from an astrophysicist that said, it's the most boring book I've ever read. Logarithm tables are cool compared to it. And it sounds like it's not anything you'd want to read, but it is. Lincos is this radio wave language that this guy came up with that basically conveys symbols from math and science, from Latin, symbolic logic. And it starts very fundamental and then gets like these are numbers and they're conveyed to you through pulses. And then it gets a little more advanced as it goes. Not to say that Lincos is like everyone's like, oh, we should just use Lincos. But it is to say

that very, very smart people have thought about like, how do we even think about, think about communicating with these things? So from what I can tell, like you could use Lincos, it would be something that we could try to use. Yeah. It's like that established, you know. And that book actually kicked off a field of study that's still around today. And I think just kind of getting going called Xenolinguistics, which is basically the idea of how do you speak to a culture that you don't share anything in common with? Potentially, yeah. Yeah. Because if we talk to an extraterrestrial intelligence, it'll be unlike talking to

anything that we've ever tried to talk to before, including non-human animals. Because non-human animals have shared a lot of the same experiences that we have here on earth. I pointed out in one paper, humans share 50% of our DNA with a carrot, right? These intelligence, we would have basically nothing in common with, no shared experiences. And like you said, we might not even have the same senses. And so when you start to see what's stacked up against us, like what if they don't communicate using their eyes or their mouths or sound, and they use magnets instead or magnetism, it would be totally lost on us. We might not even sense it in any way, shape, or form. And even if we did,

we wouldn't know how to put it into whatever thought they were trying to convey. Yeah. I mean, there are very smart people. There's a gentleman named John Billingham, who is a leader in that field, and a social psychologist named Roger Haynes, who have worked a lot with historians and scientists and psychologists about how to do this and the repercussions. But there are people like Billingham that have said, hey, this is likely impossible. Like we should think about these scenarios, but we should all prepare ourselves for the fact that we just may not be able to communicate with them at all, ever. Right. And even if we do, we would be communicating with them on intergalactic

distances, which is Carl Sagan put out. Even if we communicate with somebody 50 light years away, which is pretty close considering how big the universe is, our conversations back and forth would still take 100 Earth years. So not only would we have to gather everybody together to come up to some consensus on what we're going to say, we would have to keep that consensus and that level of coordination and cooperation going over multiple generations just to have one back and forth. Yeah, like people are working on this and they know that their great granddaughter is going to follow through on it, or the hope is that they will. Right, which is kind of cool if you think about it. It is something that could really

bring humanity together. It could also be just another thing that divides us further, because I mean, when's the last time we came to a global consensus on anything? Have we ever? Yeah, I mean, yeah. It is an interesting thought experiment, though, to think about, and these are the things that these groups of people that John Billingham and Roger Heans get together and they talk about this stuff, is to explore the idea of like, is there like one of some of the first things that we should want to find out is, is there a universal set of ethics or morals? Do they believe in something like a God like we do? Did they evolve at all? Are they, do they only look at things as like predators and prey? Like, are we screwed to begin with?

Would they mirror us at all? So, it's all really, really heady and interesting, I think, and I just think it's cool that people are out there thinking of this stuff. Yeah, and there are people thinking of it for sure, but probably not enough. And in 2020, a group of researchers got together, led by Catherine Denning and Stephen Dick, and they created a white paper that was signed by NASA researchers, SETI members, other experts who basically said, hey, we need to be throwing a lot more funding at it. We need to be doing a lot more research, and this is important. And they, they cited the World Economic Forum back in 2010. Every year, the World Economic Forum puts out a global risks paper. And in 2013, they included a list of X factors, which are possibilities in the

not too distant future that could happen to humanity that we just couldn't possibly predict for, especially because we're not doing anything to try to predict. And one of those X factors was being contacted or discovering life off of Earth. Yeah, I would say that's pretty high on the list. Do you know the other ones? Yeah, runaway climate change, profound cognitive enhancement. You're like, I have them tattooed on my forearm. What else? In Elfish. Rogue geoengineering projects. That could be a problem because there's actually like rich people

thinking about doing stuff like that. And then the cost of living longer, which I found fascinating but it's true. Like we can barely support humans through age 80 now, socially speaking. How are we going to support people if the life expectancy doubles in the next like 20, 30, 40, 50 years? Yeah, that's a good question. Hey, I got to say, if you're probably too shy to plug your own show, but if this kind of stuff interests you guys, you should definitely, if you haven't already listened to the end of the world with Josh Clark, your 10 part series, 10, right? Yeah, 10. Thank you. It's great and it's very heady and smart and thought provoking. So I'm plugging it.

That is very nice. Thank you, Chuck. I appreciate it. It lives on. It's still there. It is. It's still there to go be listened to if you want to listen to it for free wherever you get podcasts. It's not old news. It's free. Yeah. No, it's definitely still out there because the world hasn't ended yet. That's what I always say. Somebody should jump on that and do a limited series documentary on it. I've talked to a couple of people about it and just hasn't ever quite worked or worked out. So it's still, I'm still open to the idea for sure. Well, that just goes to show how hard it is to get any TV project off the ground,

which we know. It really is. But if anyone out there does that kind of stuff, you should get in touch with Josh and do it. Man, Chuck, I owe you a fiver at least for this. Well, just don't quit the show if that happens and we're all good. I definitely won't. This is where my heart is, man. Good. Work-wise. Yeah, sure. Didn't have to pour that out, but sure. You got, well, I didn't want everybody to think I was like a total weirdo loser, you know. Right. He loves work like that. Yeah. Usually home is where the heart is, Josh. Right. You got your priorities mixed up. You got anything else?

Nothing else. All right, everybody. Well, since Chuck said nothing else and plugged the end of the world with Josh Clark quite nicely, that means it's time for listener mail. That's right. And there's nothing like a nice, intelligent, heady discussion followed by pedantic. You said the wrong words email. This is a nice guy though. I like Danny. Hey guys, long time listener. He was very squeamish about even mentioning these things. I'm a long time listener. I love everything you guys do and I hate that I am giving in to pedantry, but the amazing free press episode was all I could take.

Naturally, with that topic, I believe Chuck said people's voices were being squashed. I hate to say it, Chuck. The word is quashed. And the reason I hate to say it is that squashed is a much more fun word to say. Yeah. I'll probably still say squashed because I just like saying it. You're not off the hook though, either, my friend. While I'm on it, so sorry, I have to get it off my chest that it bugs me when Josh says to look up contemporary articles about a topic, meaning from the topic's time period. This is an amazing insight, but the word he's looking for is contemporaneous. Contemporary will always mean articles from right now.

Contemporaneous means from the same time as that topic. Can't you see Danny like at his computer and his hands are shaking because he's using all his might to stop himself? He's like, can't resist correcting. I think that was the deal. He says, please don't roast me for being a pedant. You guys are a true inspiration. I wouldn't say anything about it if I thought it would offend you and know how graceful you are about such things. So Danny really set us up where we had to do it. You really did. That would be nice. Yeah, good email, Danny. Thanks for sending that in. It was. And Danny, if I start using contemporaneous in reference to articles from a certain time,

it's because of you. That's right. And we, as evidence that we didn't squash your voice, we are open to criticism. That's a very good check. If you want to be like Danny, just don't. Just send us an email about something else. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.