Are We Alone? with Jill Tarter

Are we alone in the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Matt Kirshen sit down with one of the founders of the SETI Institute, Jill Tarter, to explore the search for intelligent life beyond Earth, technosignatures, The Drake Equation, and more.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, we got the top dog at SETI on StarTalk to catch us up on Jill Tarter.

• 0:06Matt Kirshen?

  The number one, the alien whisperer. Can you call her the alien whisperer?

• 0:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I love that.

• 0:11Matt Kirshen?

  The million alien person. We went to the number one alien person.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk, the alien whisperer Jill Tarter. Check it out.

• 0:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me my co-host Matt Kirshen. Matt, how you doing, man?

• 0:41Matt Kirshen?

  I'm very good, thanks, Neil. How are you doing?

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we caught up with you. You're in port in Bermuda. Why didn't you invite us for that?

• 0:48Matt Kirshen?

  I am. I'm in a very small cabin on a cruise right now. So I'm on tour right now. I'm doing I'm doing some lovely theater shows with Sarah Millican, who's a fantastic UK comic, and I'm doing some headline spots off the back of that. And then in between those, I'm on a boat. So

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On a boat. Why not?

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what we're talking about today? It's a cosmic queries. We're catching up with this search for alien intelligence. We should do at least two of these a year because that's what the public's appetite surely wants. And there's so much misinformation or speculative information. And I think our audience expects us to at least anchor what's going on. And that's definitely what we intend to do today. We're reaching into into the depths of the search for alien life and finding an old colleague of mine from way back,

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  one of the founders of the SETI Institute, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and that would be none other than Jill Tarter. Jill, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Well, hi, Neil. It's great to talk with you again.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not many people know that you cut your teeth studying stars, correct? You're a co-discoverer of a just remind us of that, of that discovery, just to put your early chops on the map here.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  My thesis was about what I call brown dwarfs, stars that are too low mass to stably fuse hydrogen at their cores.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can we just call those planets?

• 2:27Speaker 02

  No, these are, these are a little different. They're a bit more massive than Jupiter. And I was trying to figure out, because I wanted to go looking for them. We thought at that time that a problem that we had that we called the missing mass, where the mass of the galaxy that we inferred from dynamical motions of the stars differed from the mass that we calculated when we added up all the individual masses of clouds of gas and stars.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  And so there was this missing mass. And I thought that stars that were too small to fuse hydrogen and burn normally might be what was, what could explain that missing mass. And so.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could be hidden in those, in those, in those objects, yeah.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Yes. And the thing was, I tried to put an atmosphere on my model of the star so that I could tell what the temperature or the color of that star would be to help observers go looking for them. And I couldn't do it. It was, so I couldn't get a color and I called them brown dwarfs. To Edmund Land, brown is not a color. So they're brown dwarfs. And it took us 25 years to find the first one. But now we know they're very plentiful.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So who would have thought that there was an entire category of object living there between the highest mass planets and the lowest mass stars? It's easy to just discounted that as it's a fuzzy boundary. Remind us what got you interested in aliens?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  It was a very fortunate accident. When I was doing my thesis, I learned how to program.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  The first computer that we ever had on our desktop. Now, it took two people to get the computer up on the desktop. But once it was there, it was ours, right? And so you had to, there was no language, nothing like FORTRAN or anything like that. You had to program each step in Octal, right? So you had to set all the ones and zeros by hand. And I learned that skill. I thought it was great fun, as a puzzle.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  And so when I was asked to join Stuart Boyer and X-ray astronomy and his group at Berkeley, who were interested in looking for signs of someone else's technology. I was asked because I knew how to program this computer and that was the only tool we had to use. And so I did it. And it was, again, a fortunate accident.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, as any good collaboration unfolds, every person in that collaboration brings their unique abilities, right?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  That's right. And they wanted me because I could program this computer. And so I often tell young people to, to get some skill, to find something they like to do, and then get better at it than anybody else. So then they have a tool set that they can go shopping to look for programs and problems that they're interested in solving.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And people will beat a path to your door for that expertise.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 6:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 6:19Matt Kirshen?

  And to be clear, you don't still program in ones and zeros. You go to languages now?

• 6:23Speaker 02

  No, now there are all kinds of languages that you can use and much better computers.

• 6:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Obviously, biologists would be intrigued by any kind of life at all. Yes. Discovered on anywhere, you know, microbial even. But your sights are set to even higher goals than that. If I... Can rank them in this way. Maybe that's kind of a bias, I guess, a brain bias. But you're not just looking for any life, you're looking for intelligent life. And what's odd is there, you know, you get this sense that people think that somehow we don't want to know if there's intelligent life, or that it's being suppressed, or that it's being, and it's like, nothing could be farthest from the truth.

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And given the efforts that we as a, as a community have put in, especially focused at, at the SETI Institute, I'm just surprised by this overall sense that somehow people think it's gonna, there's some kind of cover up. Have you had to contend, I presume you've had to contend with this?

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Well, at one point, I had to talk to a military panel and, and promise that our SETI algorithms and antennas would not be able to detect frequency hopping, spread spectrum signals. Because I believed it. And then it turned out when we got on the air, yeah, we could see those too.

• 7:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are they saying they restricted your bandwidth access because they were doing their own searching?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  No, they were curious about what I might see, what we with our equipment and software might see that they weren't advertising that they were doing.

• 8:14Matt Kirshen?

  So you were searching not just for extraterrestrial intelligence, but accidentally bought for military intelligence?

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. But, you know, I, I literally, I said, no, no, we can't see that. Not the way we written our software. No, it turned out, you know, our software was, was better than I thought.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how do you, how do you go about thinking this up? That surely takes a bit of hubris chutzpah to just declare that if there's intelligence out there, we would be able to communicate with it. We can't communicate meaningfully with other animals here on earth with whom we have DNA in common. Even a chimpanzee. You're not hanging out with a chimp, say, let's go have a beer later. Oh, sure, Joe. I'm good with that. No. Where do you, where do you get your confidence that this even would work at all?

• 9:05Speaker 02

  What we can do with our equipment and our software.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Limits what we could possibly find. And so we're looking for something, someone that can modify its environment in ways that we could sense over the vast distances between the stars. And it's it's a limited subset of what possibilities there are. Because we have the equipment of the 21st century, which is better than the equipment of the 20th century, but not necessarily all powerful.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  So we can look for certain kinds of what we call techno-signatures that would indicate somebody is doing something that nature can't do.

• 10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't search for intelligent life that does not have technology. So if you found an Earth that had a Roman Empire, you know, their version of a Roman Empire, that certainly that's advanced, certainly they're intelligent, but they don't have radio telescopes. So so you would pass them by saying, nothing here, keep keep walking.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Yes, with the technology that we have today. But, you know, ChatGPT and all the other large language models are gonna be able to do some incredible things in the future. And in particular, I think the interesting thing is that whereas any particular search technique looks at certain phenomena at certain frequencies in a certain amount of time, the chatbots will be able to combine or look at simultaneously

• 11:10Speaker 02

  data sets collected for completely different reasons across the spectrum and across technologies and might be able to find some correlations.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  That, you know, we were totally unaware of.

• 11:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're developing a dependence on AI to take you to that next step that you wouldn't otherwise be able to.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 11:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Accomplish. Remind me why radio waves is the bandwidth of choice? Because that was clearly displayed in Carl Sagan's novel Contact, later becoming the film, the hit film with the character Ellie Aroway. She was a radio astronomer, basically, who is listening for, looking for radio signatures out there in space. And rumor has it that Carl Sagan knocked on your door a few times to try to get some insights into this character. Can you confirm or deny those rumors?

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Carl was a member of our board of directors. He wrote a book about a woman who does what I do.

• 12:22Matt Kirshen?

  Perfectly put. Perfectly put.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  That character is Carl. What comes across as Ellie Aroway is actually Carl and his, his musings and his thinkings and his, um, it's probably too long to go into, but basically Carl would have loved to be able to have one more conversation with his deceased father. And that drove a lot of the thinking.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  I'm Joel Cherico and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why radio waves and not visible light or any other band of the spectrum?

• 13:33Speaker 02

  The fact is that space is not empty, but there are clouds of gas and dust out there between the stars and infrared or optical wavelengths are absorbed by these clouds and they can't travel very far through the galaxy. We've never seen the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at optical wavelengths because it's just too dusty. But radio, the wavelengths of radio waves are not anywhere near the size of the dust particles in these clouds.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  And so they basically don't see the particles, they don't see the dust and are not absorbed by it. So we've been looking at the center of the galaxy at radio waves from very early times in this scientific discipline.

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Any aliens would have to know enough astrophysics to conclude that radio waves would penetrate space in the way other bandwidths wouldn't. So we're assuming they'd be on exactly the same track we are in our learning and understanding of the galaxy.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  At least at some point in time, they are or were, right? Because they could in fact create technologies that outlast their civilization. There are a couple of spacecraft in orbit around this planet that will be there 10 million years in the future. The orbits will not decay. And it's a really interesting question about whether what we're looking for and what is being transmitted overlap in time in this 10 billion year history of our galaxy.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's part of the parameter space that you speak of so dauntingly, right? Because you can search in frequency, even within the radio wave bandwidth.

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could be sending a signal or listening, trying to observe a signal in one band of radio waves, but then there's another bandwidth within the radio waves that could be where the action is and you would miss it. And maybe they sent a signal that got here 100 years ago instead of today, because it is light travel time for wherever it is. What's this analogy you gave to the ocean? It was the best thing I ever heard. What was it? About how much we have searched thus far for aliens? Because you hear people say, "Well, we've looked for aliens and we haven't seen any, so there probably aren't any." And it's like, what's your reply to them?

• 16:20Speaker 02

  My reply is that we've hardly begun to look. At one point, when SETI turned 50 years old as a discipline, I did a calculation that indicated that all the searching we'd done to date was as if we said, "Oh, we're going to look for fish in the ocean." And what we did was take one eight-ounce glass and dip it in the ocean and take a look and say, "Oh, are there fish in there? Well, there are fish small enough to have fit in that glass, but if you didn't see any, you'd hardly make the conclusion that there were no fish in the ocean. You'd just simply say, 'You have to look harder.'" That's where we are.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  We can do so much, but we can't do everything. And we are always looking for new ways.

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you had told me that calculation when I was just coming on and I wanted to be like a SETI researcher, I would have given up in that moment. I would have said, "Okay, I'm taking up another job."

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Well, you might have, but on the other hand, if you're stubborn, you might have turned that around and said, "Wow, this is one of the most interesting questions that humans can ask about themselves and their place in the cosmos." And, and if you were to succeed, you would by inference know that it's possible to outlive your technological infancy.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  And to have a long future. Because if the future isn't long for technologies in general, there aren't ever going to be any two that overlap in time. But if you find something, you know, that there's a long, you know, path ahead for us potentially. We don't necessarily have to destroy ourselves.

• 18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's a, that's a, that's a profound inference from such a simple bit of information you would glean. Let me see if I can restate it or make sure I understand it. You're saying if technologically proficient civilizations lasted only one or two centuries, and then they rendered themselves extinct, something bad happens, or it took them that long to even get to that point, and then it doesn't last long, then when you come upon a planet at a random time in its own evolution, because it could have just been born a million years ago, or a billion, or 10 billion, you don't know if you're hitting it at exactly that time. And so if everybody only were short-lived, nobody would be talking to anybody, and it would give us very little hope

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  for the future of our fingerprint in this world. Is that a fair characterization of what you just said?

• 19:15Speaker 02

  That's correct. But if you don't go looking for it in as many ways as you possibly can, you'll never find it.

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're an astrophysicist posing these questions, presuming that they have astrophysical tools. And I'm wondering, if comedians were doing this search, would they presume that the other civilization would have comedians? Is this, is this a natural extension of our own bias?

• 19:41Matt Kirshen?

  I mean, I, I don't, I don't know about that, but I definitely know that I've played some gigs where I've wondered whether there's any life out there.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Intelligent life, intelligent life.

• 19:52Matt Kirshen?

  Intelligent, intelligent life, definitely, definitely. Is there anything there?

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's head out to our cosmic queries about now. You've collected them, Matt?

• 20:01Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, absolutely. As always, Betty from Maine has asked, if you find life outside of Earth, what are you gonna do with it?

• 20:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Jill, are you gonna conquer it and, and enslave it and colonize it? What are you gonna do?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Me, I'm gonna tell the world about what we found, and at least my interpretation of what that means. But the world is gonna decide how they're gonna react. It's not going to be me that makes that kind of decision.

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what confidence do you have that that response would be what you would consider appropriate?

• 20:35Speaker 02

  I don't know, Neil.

• 20:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not very hopeful. Come on, Jill.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Aw, come on. Given the politics of our country, I don't know. But all I can say is that you'll know what I know.

• 20:53Matt Kirshen?

  So Atticus from Saudi-Daisy, Tennessee, who is 10 years old, says, "The quote from Arthur C. Clarke, 'Two possibilities exist. We are either alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. This keeps me up at night in an amazing, not scary way. Please give your thoughts on the idea behind the quote."

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Oh, Atticus.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are 10-year-olds allowed to have these kind of profound thoughts?

• 21:18Matt Kirshen?

  I know. Also, go to bed, Atticus.

• 21:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the playground or something?

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Or at least not having to stay up at night worrying about it.

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Atticus, we all share that profundity of thought that delays your slumber. And Jill, let's hear from an expert here. Jill, are both terrifying to you?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Both are extremely significant. One is not so hopeful in terms of the continued existence of life on Earth. The other is something that would be incredibly exciting and impactful to know. Because if you know that somebody else has made it through this very precarious technological phase that we're in.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Then, you know, there's an answer. There's some way to do it, and that inspires me anyway, to go looking harder for that answer.

• 22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here on Earth?

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody else made it through. We can too.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I like that.

• 22:37Matt Kirshen?

  Well, while we're talking about the actual process, it's a pretty top level question. Vincent Thomas says, "What exactly do you listen for out there in the stars?"

• 22:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, I just want to like, just, the radio telescopes are like other telescopes. They're detecting light. So somewhere in the decades past, people have equated a radio telescope with listening to sounds. And people think we're listening for sounds. And they, they did that with, you know, in the movie Contact, where Ellie Arway is listening to her data. But these are observations of radio light, correct? And we're just being loose when we say we're listening. Is that, that's like saying, "Let me listen to the sun and just like, look at it, okay?" No, you're like, receiving light.

• 23:28Matt Kirshen?

  Martin LeBlanc from Montreal does end the question with, "And Neil, for this episode, I dare you to change your saying with, uh, keep listening up."

• 23:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, haha, okay, maybe I'll do it just for him, okay? But Jill, let's get your reaction to that.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  What we use instruments to try and detect is the kind of emissions that nature can't do. And that generally means, uh, some kind of transmission that is very compressed in frequency. Because nature doesn't do that. Nature's emissions come from gazillions of molecules and atoms, each of which is, um, vibrating or rotating and emitting a very specific frequency.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  But all of the atoms and molecules are moving with respect to one another so that the ensemble signal is Doppler broadened. So each of these individual, uh...

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Transmissions from a molecule or an atom gets added with all the other molecules and atoms that are all moving relative to one another and you get a broad signal. But technology can get around that. We have means with lasers and masers of compressing a signal into a single frequency or a small range of frequencies, what we call narrow band transmissions. And either we'll learn something expect unexpected about nature and find that nature

• 25:29Speaker 02

  can do this job and trick as well as we can or better, or we'll find evidence of the technologies that we're looking for.

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so it's not just that the signal exists. You might want or expect or hope that signal to also contain information within it. Again, in the, in the film Contact, the signal was, at least in the film version, it was prime numbers, I think it was, right? And whereas I think in the novel, it was digits of pi perhaps, but I might be confusing my memory. But within the signal, there were, there was information. So are you, can you decode if you did find the narrow band or do you have a next layer analysis to see what they might be trying to tell us?

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Well, again, that's one of the reasons that I want to tell everyone what we may have detected and what we've interpreted, because there are far better code breakers out there than me. And so we'd be eager to engage the intelligence of the rest of the world to help us understand any information. And one thing that I should mention is although we talk about listing and we talk about radio and I've argued that other frequencies don't travel as far through the galaxy as the radio

• 26:58Speaker 02

  wavelengths, we are also trying to use the, take the techniques that we have and push them into the infrared and the optical.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  For sources that are closer by.

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Well, it sounds like you're on top of that situation.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Well, who knows? I'll let you know when we succeed.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  We'll know we've done the right thing when we succeed.

• 27:25Matt Kirshen?

  So Jonas Dravland says, "Good day, doctors and lords. Jonas from the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina. If there were a SETI-like organization on a distant star system, how close would they need to be to detect us? Would they be able to watch I Love Lucy? And should they expect to pick up their domestic radio activity, or are we basing our search on the presumption that they are sending signals intended to advertise their existence?"

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. So I'd love that because our earliest radio signals are just our earliest escaped television broadcasts, right? Now going into 100-year, you know, 80, how many years ago? Early, well, I Love Lucy was 1950s and 60s. Were the honeymooners, are they going to learn how men and women interact on Earth from those two shows?

• 28:13Matt Kirshen?

  From 1950s TV and earlier radio?

• 28:16Speaker 02

  I think what might be detected is not the information content of the television program, but the existence of the carrier signal that transmitted the information.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Or maybe, once we detect evidence of someone else's technology, they're going to explain, and we translate it somehow, they're going to explain to us why Lucy and Ethel shouldn't have had subservient roles.

• 29:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or Alice and the honeymooners, yeah, all of the above.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Catch us up, just briefly, take a break from the questions and ask you, what telescopes do SETI are in the arsenal of SETI's control?

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Well, we have a special telescope that we've developed for working in the infrared and optical that we call optical SETI, or laser SETI, I should say. These are special instruments that we've developed. Otherwise, what we use is

• 29:44Speaker 02

  existing telescopes that are part of the astrophysical realm. And we can essentially piggyback on the signals being detected by those telescopes, which are looking for other things in other ways. But we can carve out a piece of that signal without affecting the primary observer. And we can analyze it looking for these techno-signatures. So it's really anything out there that's looking at the universe. We are eager to replicate

• 30:30Speaker 02

  their data so that we can analyze it in a different way.

• 30:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the SETI Institute is mostly privately funded, is that correct?

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, we have, we do, well, I shouldn't say that. SETI at the SETI Institute is privately funded. But we have over 100 PhDs at the SETI Institute who are looking in many different ways to discover life beyond Earth. And these programs are typically funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. So we do have government funding and we're very nervous right now about what's going to happen.

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science funding in many realms today feels like...

• 31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, science is just optional. You know, other things are more important. That like there's been a shift in priorities, which will have consequences that people do not, we foresee, but the general public doesn't really, given how much of modern civilization pivots on the moving frontier of science. But, okay, let's keep going. Matt, what else you got?

• 31:43Matt Kirshen?

  Yui Kia from India, living in California, says, "How detectable is Earth as a life-hybriding planet from a nearby star system? Should we put any large visual structures around Earth or Jupiter so that intelligent aliens can detect them as non-naturally occurring structures when they monitor the transits around the Sun? Thank you to SETI and StarTalk for trying to answer the most fundamental questions and promoting scientific thinking."

• 32:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, cool, cool. Yeah, are we doing all we can to get noticed?

• 32:12Speaker 02

  No, we're not. Because there are other priorities for funding. To do the kinds of things that are being suggested in this question is not cheap. To build structures, to modify orbits of asteroids or planetesimals, that's all really difficult and expensive. And while it might happen for other reasons, such as mining rare earth elements, which we are depleting on this planet, it's not likely anytime soon

• 32:57Speaker 02

  to be done specifically for attracting the attention of any technologies out there. It's just unfortunately not a high enough priority.

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jill, I remember a zillion years ago, I asked you a question after a colloquium you gave, and you gave the cleanest, simplest answer to a question similar to this one, which was, you know, why would, I asked, "Why are we spending so much time just, quote, 'listening for aliens'? Why don't we..."

• 33:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just blast the universe with our own signals. And at the time, what you said was it costs almost nothing to just passively listen for signals. So you can get away with that without breaking the piggy bank. If you want to actively send signals out, that's orders of magnitude, way more money than what it would cost to just listen. And because I thought it was unfair that if everyone were doing what we're doing, then the whole universe would be listening for other aliens. And no one would be transmitting and everyone would conclude there's no other life, intelligent life in the galaxy.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  That's right. If everybody's listening and nobody's talking, we're not going to succeed. But another impediment, if you wish, to this idea of deliberately transmitting to make ourselves known to the cosmos is the fact that if we do that, that's going to interfere with an enormous number of other disciplines and searches and technologies. I mean, it probably would mess up your GPS just enormously, right?

• 34:47Matt Kirshen?

  Right.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Uh, yes, cost is the major impediment, but there are unintended consequences of doing powerful transmissions.

• 35:03Matt Kirshen?

  Well, while we're talking about ethical considerations, Hugo Dart from Rio de Janeiro, with Hugo's seven-year-old daughter Olivia, who's also a big fan of StarTalk, asked, "What parallel, if any, exists between how we treat animals and vegetable species on Earth and ethical parameters we can establish for dealing with alien life?" And I'm just going to add to that, how do we know in this equation that they're the vegetables slash animals? And not that we are the vegetables to them?

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so Jill, is there sort of ethical standards that you guys, like a manifesto that's plastered up on your walls at the SETI Institute?

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Yes, a long time ago, back in the 80s, we worked with the International Institute of Space Law to create a declaration of principles for dealing with the detection of extraterrestrial technologies. And one of the important bullets in that protocol is make sure you got it right. Make sure that whatever you're going to announce is not some flaw in your detection system, that it really is what you're saying it is.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  And that's so important, that now we actually suggest that the most valid way of searching is to search with at least two instruments widely separated on the surface of the Earth, so that the signals received by those two instruments will have a calculable Doppler shift between signals arriving here and signals arriving there. And that is a good

• 37:14Speaker 02

  signature to be looking for, in addition to whatever's embedded in the information content of the signal.

• 37:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but that's not related to the ethics of how you would treat aliens, right? So in the code of ethics, that's good to make sure that you measure that what you say is what it is, but if we come upon aliens, is there some code of how we would treat them?

• 37:44Speaker 02

  You're talking about ethics, and I was talking about a declaration of principles. The ethics are going to come from probably the religious entities across the planet. And those are different, and they have different perspectives. Some would be threatened by this discovery because it doesn't, it isn't consistent with their teachings. And others would simply say, "No, no." Many different life forms in the universe are just another example of gods, or let's

• 38:28Speaker 02

  say God, omnipotence and power. So the ethics come not from the technologies, not from the principles that I can have anything to do with, but they're going to come from religious entities. And as long as you're talking about microbes, nobody much cares. But once you start to talk about intelligent beings, then these other codes of ethics get brought to bear. And again, as I said, they're not all going to have the same conclusions or the same desires.

• 39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would make it very difficult, given how many religions there are in the world, and what they're, they'd all have to agree on what a code of ethics would be. And if they're all coming from different religious traditions, that could be very hard to arrive at an agreement when we have our first encounter. And so, so we have to see how that unfolds, for sure.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's, there's another unintended consequence that you might not think about, and that's geographical. So suppose that whatever techno-signatures are detected or detectable are only detected from extremely southern locations or northern locations. Now, if it comes from the south, from the Antarctic, we already have some...

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Uh, methods or agreements for how to share data that's collected in the Antarctic. But if you get to a point where it can only be seen from the Arctic, now you're in really hot water because so many different countries and nation states are claiming sovereignty over this different pieces of the Arctic.

• 40:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Chinese have the biggest radio telescope in the world today, so it could be that the first alien contact will be with Chinese astrophysicists.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  That's correct, and they built an amusement park right next to that telescope.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Yes, I worry about the potential for creating a haves and have nots.

• 41:25Matt Kirshen?

  We got some more. So Dave McNeely from San Diego, California, says, "Dr. Tarter, it's a huge pleasure. I met you once at the inaugural SETICon in 2010 in Santa Clara. I'm studying for a master's degree in space studies, and SETI is an enormous driving force in my life. My question," I'm sure you get this all the time, "but considering radio technology is limited to the speed of light, doesn't it make sense that more advanced extraterrestrial intelligences would be communicating with each other using something different? Surely they are not using radio communication internally across vast interstellar distances."

• 42:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, how much of the physics that we know today is limiting us on the possibility that there's new physics in the future? Yeah, I mean, again, we have the bias of our own times, all right? And we're thinking they would use radio waves moving at the speed of light. And do you guys think about possible future technologies that could be game-changing in this, on this landscape?

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, we think about it, but we don't know how to do it, right?

• 42:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's the answer. That's the simple answer.

• 42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think in Star Trek, they their communication channels are on, what are they called that subnet? Where's Charles when you need him, our geek in chief? In Star Trek, it wouldn't be helpful to talk to Starfleet Command using radio waves limited by the speed of light, because there would not be a witty repartee between the captain and headquarters. So there's some subnet or something that apparently there's signals that can get through instantly, just like a regular phone call. And so it's solved in Star Trek, which is several centuries in our future.

• 43:16Matt Kirshen?

  Something to look forward to.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Right. Hey, if the Star Trek folks, the producers and creators can tell us how to do it, then we should listen. But so far, superluminal communication is not within our reach. Superluminal simply means faster than the speed of light. And we talk about it. People write papers about it, but we don't know how to do it.

• 43:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's a cool word, anyway, that kind of means what it sounds like it says. So I like words like that. So I think, Matt, we have time for one more, a good one. You got a good one there?

• 43:56Matt Kirshen?

  Okay. Well, I think this is a good, a sort of less technical but deep question. Pinky MacGyver asks, how lucky do we have to be for our ability to detect life to coincide in time with that life's ability to be detected?

• 44:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that take us back to your glass of water in the ocean analogy?

• 44:15Speaker 02

  That's absolutely correct. We have to be pretty lucky in order to end up being cotemporal, being able to be around at the same time for both transmitter and receiver. So unless...

• 44:38Speaker 02

  L, the factor in the Drake equation, which says how long technological civilizations or the technology persists, unless L is large, there's not going to be any success. There won't be any overlap. But again, I'm of the opinion that I like to think about turning that around and saying that if we detect someone else's technology, it means that L has to be large and that we have a long future.

• 45:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And remind us about the Drake equation, which played a role in the movie Contact. If someone wants like a full celebration of the Drake equation, but can you just remind us where that came about and what it attempts to do?

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Well, the Drake equation is actually the agenda for a scientific meeting that Frank Drake put together at Green Bank, West Virginia, the telescope there. And it says, the number, and it's actually not an equation because it doesn't have a solution, but it's written as the form of an equation. So it says, the number of technological civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy with whom we could communicate can be estimated by taking the rate of star formation in the galaxy and multiplying

• 46:07Speaker 02

  that by the fraction of stars that have the appropriate conditions to be suitable hosts for living planets.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Multiply that by the average number of such planets around each star. Multiply that by the fraction of those planetary planets that develop a technology. Multiply that by the average longevity of the technologies. And you end up with an estimate of the number of communicators.

• 46:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zero.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  It can't be zero because we're here. It doesn't say.

• 47:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, we're here. Okay, we got to get at least one out of that equation.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  It's at least one, but unless L is large, it's a small.

• 47:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 47:15Matt Kirshen?

  So you're saying we use the length that we've existed as a civilization as our best guess for how long civilizations can run on average?

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have no other guess. Correct.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Matt, it's actually a lower limit. We know that it's possible to have a technology exist for at least as long as we have, and that's a hundred or so years, but we don't know what the upper limit is.

• 47:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that hundred years comes from the earliest radio telescope signals that we could detect. That put us on the map, on the SETI map.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Right, back to Caccone.

• 47:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are your thoughts on all of the congressional hearings regarding sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena rebranded from UFOs? Were you tapped for your expertise in any of this? And what are your reflections on it?

• 48:12Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, I have no expertise in that and no, nobody came knocking on my door. But there's a gentleman by the name of Nick West. Who has done a lot of careful studies of some of the most touted and the most recent releases of videos from different, the Navy in particular, and has come up with, all right, if you actually analyze what you're seeing and not looking at it with a bias that what you're seeing is something having to do with an extraterrestrial spacecraft, you can come up with very plausible explanations.

• 48:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So at least, so somebody is tasked themselves to just be sort of not jump to extraordinary conclusions. As you quoted Carl Sagan earlier, if you have an extraordinary claim, there should be an extraordinary evidence behind it. And if you can explain the evidence with ordinary means and ordinary physics and ordinary technologies, ordinary detector glitches, then, you know, go home.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Occam's razor, yes.

• 49:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, what we should do is if aliens ever land, we should bring them to you, I think.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  I don't know, maybe you should bring them to the cats of the world or the elephants of the world who have amazing memories and capabilities we're just beginning to understand.

• 49:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other species. This topic will never go away because it has unlimited public appetite and as evidenced by every next movie that addresses that phenomenon. In fact, just now there's Alien Earth just came out, which is, that's the Alien franchise, but now the aliens no longer in space, it's on Earth.

• 50:18Matt Kirshen?

  Ah, it's the last thing we want.

• 50:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I know.

• 50:22Matt Kirshen?

  Who let that happen?

• 50:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who let that? Somebody left the door open. They forgot to close the door behind them. So, yeah, there's no end of this and movies are making money hand over fist. They should, so.

• 50:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jill, you should, they should have a volunteer tax that any percentage of a movie that depicts aliens should be given to SETI. I think I'm gonna post that on social media. That's what I'm gonna do.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  That's great. I've been making that argument for a long time and it hasn't taken hold. So maybe if Neil...

• 50:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me see what I can do with it.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  We'll get there.

• 51:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, hi Jill. It's been a delight to have you back on to StarTalk. I like checking in with you on the latest developments in the SETI universe, the SETI-verse. And good to hear that it's alive and well and funded, at least at levels that, at least for now, it's funded. And we're also delighted to learn that when you make contact, you will tell the world. You're not gonna run to members of Congress and keep it in a lockbox in a back room. That's, you'll do what any scientist would do in your situation. And so we look forward to that day.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Me too. I look forward to that.

• 51:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What was that question, Matt? Unless they think we're carrots? What was it?

• 51:48Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah. Are we there animals and plants? I don't know.

• 51:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, yeah. Are we there, yeah. Are we the, something to be eaten? Because they're long voyages, they're hungry. Mmm, tasty humans.

• 52:00Matt Kirshen?

  Let's hope they're fussy eaters. They don't like their broccoli.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  They have the technology to come here and consider you as lunch. They don't need that. They can manufacture you.

• 52:14Matt Kirshen?

  Oh, that's true. But you know, it might be, it might be a gourmet thing. You know, we don't need meat, but people still do it. It could be a status thing.

• 52:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will die knowing I am tasty. How's that?

• 52:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we got to call it quits there. So Jill's been a delight to have you back on.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Oh, it's a pleasure, Neil. It's always great stuff to have you.

• 52:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we'll check in with you again every now and then to make sure we don't fall too behind, too far behind on the latest SETI developments. And Matt, you're, you're, we can find you on mattkirschen.com. You're on the road.

• 52:54Matt Kirshen?

  Absolutely. I'd love to see StarTalk listeners out in my audiences. So yeah, mattkirschen.com for all my dates and probably Science is the Podcast.

• 53:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this has been another episode of StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the SETI edition. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, and as always, I bid you to keep looking up, keep listening up.