Unexplainable - How scientists are searching for aliens

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

They’re not looking for UFOs or decoding government secrets. They’re doing something much simpler. For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to view show transcripts and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This episode is brought to you by Defender. With a towing capacity of 3,500 kilograms and a weighting depth of 900 millimeters, the Defender 110 pushes what's possible. Learn more at landrover.ca. Okay, now to the issue of UFOs in a very interesting congressional hearing. The subcommittee hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs will come to order. Good morning and welcome to the most exciting side. Committee in Congress.

Last summer, former U.S. military personnel testified in front of Congress. They said the government was in possession of a UFO. You believe our government has made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials? Something I can't discuss in public setting. These hearings were not a one-time thing. Lawmakers seem kind of fixated on this UFO stuff. Recently, Axios reported members of Congress are going to get even more classified information this year, and there might be another hearing in the future.

So I turned to Robin George Andrews to figure it out. He's a great space reporter, and he spoke with a lot of experts, planetary scientists, astronomers, and they just don't think this UFO scenario makes much sense. It's not impossible, but you would think if you're closing interstellar distances and you've spent all that time journeying across the stars, you either really want to be seen, or if you're that technology advanced, you'd just be completely invisible. Yeah. The only feasible scenario in which a UFO

sighting is a legit sighting, and these aliens are just, like, dipping and out and just like, oh, God, they saw us go. Is if like, aliens are basically teenagers cow-tipping, and we're the cows. You know, that's the only scenario in which it makes any sense

whatsoever. Or ringing the doorbell and running away. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Unless we're being pranked, Again, not impossible, but that's a hell of an elaborate prank. I think this is the thing that inherently both interest and bugs me at the same time is that there is actually a serious ongoing effort to actually search for extraterrestrial intelligence and all the attention that these kind of hoaxy, deluded attention-seeking kind of people get just takes away from the actual science.

It makes it seem like the whole thing is crazy, when actually there is a dedicated effort to doing this, and it's nothing like what people generally assume it is. It's a serious science that uses really advanced technology to try to answer one of the biggest questions there is. Are we alone? I think, like, fundamentally, it would be just so unusual if we were alone in some way.

Like, almost every star has a planet. And yes, sometimes they're not like ours at all, but there's just an unbelievable, an uncountable amount of planets out there. I'm Brian Resnick. This is unexplainable, and we're doing it. We're diving into the real search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

You're looking at a kind of world that hasn't existed for millions of years. There hasn't existed. Millions and millions and millions. It's almost as if time forgot this place. Is there life on Mars? There's a whole universe out there, Steve, beyond anyone's comprehension.

The scientific search for alien intelligence is complicated. Yeah, so, I mean, obviously people debate what intelligence is, but you'd need some sort of technological ability. Something where it's outward looking, you know, it understands it's a world in the cosmos. It can send messages. It's curious. So how exactly would they open a channel of communication?

Maybe radio would be good. It moves at the speed of light, you know, broadcast everywhere in all directions. essentially the equivalent of twiddling the dial on a radio and picking up a radio station recorded a long time ago from an extraterrestrial intelligence far across the galaxy. Radio isn't something we've invented here on Earth. Radio waves are everywhere. All humans learn to do, not to downplay it,

but it was just essentially work out how to tune into those radio waves. So to find an alien signal, scientists use radio telescopes. These are basically huge antennas. If you went to one of these observatories, you would see they kind of look like a field of giant satellite dishes. And in theory, using them should be simple.

Yeah, it's funny. In concept, it is quite simple. The first thing you have to do is point your radio receivers essentially at the sky and hope that you pick up a signal. And you would think that maybe a good idea would be to aim it at, you know, star systems that we know have a rocky planet, orbiting them or something like that. And you could do that, but the universe is so big,

and that's such a small target. Actually, it's better just to kind of open up these mechanical ears and listen to all the radio waves and hope you find something that is coherent in some way. Of course, there are some challenges to work through. The biggest problem is that space is really noisy. The universe is cacophonous. Stars emit radio waves, you know,

black holes burp out radio waves. A lot of the world. radio waves from space are gonna sound a lot like random static. And so it's kind of like a needle in a haystack thing. What type of signal should scientists be listening out for amid all that noise? I mean, it's fair to say that no one 100% knows what they're looking for. I think people are just very confident they know what it shouldn't be, which is just a radio signal that goes across all kinds of frequencies, you know,

the sort of randomized processes that we often see with nature. I mean, obviously not everything in nature is random, compared to, say, just writing a sentence out on a keyboard. That is incredibly non-random. You know, nature does not do that. Nature does the equivalent of just, like, nuking the keyboard. There needs to be a pattern, but sometimes nature can trick us. There are these odd stars called, well, the remnants of stars called pulsars,

which are basically, if you imagine a hypercaffeinated lighthouse. Essentially the corpses of dead stars spinning around, beaming out radiation. When they were first discovered, it was kind of thought, you know, maybe this is an alien signal because it's kind of coming out constantly, like beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And nature doesn't tend to do constants. But once that was understood to be a natural process,

and it was also very noisy, you know, it was emitting radiation and just like screaming noise again, then, you know, astronomers had a better understanding of what to look for. Just a regular repeating pattern isn't enough to say, ooh, yes, aliens. there needs to be some variety in that pattern. This is the difference between something like a metronome, which just makes a regular sound that doesn't contain a lot of information in it.

It tells you a single number beats per unit of time. But think about something more complicated, something like Morse code, which mixes up different lengths of sounds to communicate full sentences. It's that balance, the balance between repetition and variety that contains information, something Robin refers to as coherence. That's the type of signal from space

that would be a huge moment for science for our entire species. And it turns out that astronomers find those all the time and every single time we hear coherence. It's today explained and let's start with some facts. It's coming from interference from our own technology. As it turns out, radio waves are everywhere on the planet. We broadcast them out.

in every direction, they bounce off the atmosphere, they bounce off the moon, they come from satellite, so actually a lot of this effort is ruling out terrestrial radio signatures, and yeah, sometimes that gets quite far before they're ruled out because they look very convincing. So far, this listening for alien communications from super far away in the galaxy, we haven't heard anything yet. But what about other ways of searching for aliens? Like, If an alien spacecraft actually were to enter our solar system, would we be able to spot it? That's after the break. It's all about you.

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Like, let's say there was a craft in the solar system. Like, would we be able to see it? Yeah. Like, you know, space is big. Yeah, space is big, which means the solar system is pretty tiny. So there's the Vera Rubin Observatory that's coming online in about a year. It moves a bit. But basically, it's like the world's best digital camera.

It can see all of the night sky and very faint things far away. So it's going to find, you know, millions of asteroids and comets we haven't seen, moons of Jupiter and Saturn that we haven't seen. It's going to see the outer solar system, the Kuiper Belt, where Pluto is. It could even find the elusive planet nine, you know. It's going to basically be like the census of the solar system. It's going to count every little thing and beyond, which also means it will find more interstellar objects. These are objects that have popped into the solar system and then kind of yeated themselves out again.

And the natural one. The natural ones. Yeah, like natural ones. I've only seen two, but the Vera Rubin observatory can maybe see several a year. That means that if there is an alien spacecraft of any sort, we would be able to detect it with this telescope and then get telescopes that are specifically designed

to zoom in on things to then track it as it's moving through the solar system. And it would not look. like anything else, it wouldn't behave like anything else. So actually, it's a fantastic time to do optical work in this regard to look for alien intelligence sort of thing. So, yeah, if there was a UFO coming into the solar system, like, in the next 10 years, we're almost guaranteed to see it.

You know, if it wanted to be seen, of course. I hope we see it. But if we don't, what is the future of listening out for those signals that come from farther away? Well, part of it is patience. And in that way, we're the lucky ones, because it isn't our job to look for this stuff. And even that might sound exciting,

like, oh, you might come across a signal. Like, the probability of any of these research in their lifetime actually finding one is very, very close to zero kind of thing. But you have to admire scientists that kind of persevere with this. You know, they do other astronomy at the same time. There's very few people who only do this. But at least we get to then check in

when something interesting happens. Yeah. And then, you know, kind of going back to, like, the main motivation of just, are we alone? it seems like the likely scenario is that we will be alone because even if we know extraterrestrial intelligence exists, you know, signals take tens of thousands of years to traverse stars. It strikes me that we can know we're not alone,

but also feel deeply alone at the end of this, you know, process. Yeah, yeah, and that's, I mean, that's just a, it's nice to know that there's another, intelligent species out there that's also in the same situation. So we may not be able to see them or ever visit or do anything like that, but I'd still prefer that than knowing that like, we're the universe's only half decent attempt at kind of becoming conscious and understanding itself.

Yeah, why would you rather know that, that there's something else out there, even though it's kind of untouchable? I think, for me personally, it's just nice to think that, we aren't the only ones trying to work everything out. You know, it's just, like you're basically sharing in this weird universe, even if all you can say is hey, which I think is just so much nicer than an echo that doesn't get a response. This episode was produced by Brian Resnick and me, Meredith Hadnott.

We had editing from Jorge Just, music from Noam Hassanfeld, and fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. Sound design for me and Christian Ayala, who also mixed the episode, Mandy Nguyen is contemplating the sky, and Bird Pinkerton felt a sharp pang on her leg and saw a small webbed foot quickly pulling away. As pain started to course through her leg,

she heard a harsh whisper. Good night. If you have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at Unexplanable at box.com, and we love to hear your thoughts, your criticisms, your suggestions. And if you can, go leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us find new listeners. This podcast and

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