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

Explore SETI and the Breakthrough Listen Initiative, the most comprehensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence ever, with host Carolyn Porco, co-host Chuck Nice, and Dan Werthimer, the Initiative’s principal investigator and SETI@home co-founder.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is StarTalk.

• 0:08Carolyn Porco?

  Hello, and this is StarTalk All-Stars Edition. I'm your All-Star host this evening, Carolyn Porco, and I'm a planetary scientist and leader of the imaging science team of the Cassini mission in orbit around Saturn as we speak. My co-host today is Chuck Nice. Thanks for being here, Chuck. Hey, Carolyn. And who else do we have with us as well? Well, today we're talking about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which is an ever-popular topic, and the new Breakthrough Listen project, which is the most comprehensive, well-supported search for alien life to date. And to help us dig deeper into this enormous topic, I've brought on via Skype, the principal

• 0:52Carolyn Porco?

  investigator of this project, Dan Wertheimer. Welcome, Dan, to StarTalk.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  Thanks, Carolyn. It's great to be with you.

• 0:59Carolyn Porco?

  Okay. Dan is, he's many things. He's one of those people who spends his time wondering how we should be communicating with aliens on other planets, so I think that's a pretty cool job.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12Carolyn Porco?

  He's the chief scientist at SETI@Home. It's a program at Berkeley to involve the public in the search for aliens. He's published lots of papers in this topic. He's a radio astronomy instrumentation geek. And this is a cool thing about Dan: He was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and he's the only one who did not get filthy rich. Oh. Sorry about that, Dan. But I'm gonna guess, I'm gonna guess you are much happier.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  I'm a happy guy.

• 1:46Carolyn Porco?

  You're a happy guy.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  I've got a really cool job.

• 1:48Carolyn Porco?

  Right, you got a really cool job. So, here's the thing, we're gonna talk about SETI, and first, I just want you to confirm something for me. I'm under the impression that the most sensitive SETI searches we have conducted to date would not have detected signals coming from our nearest neighbor star, that's only 4.25 light years away, unless those beings had an energy consumption that's something like 10,000 times the energy that humans consume on our planet today. Am I right about that?

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it depends on what another civilization might be doing. We don't know what they might be doing. Are they sending off something like television or radio? Are they sending off something like our radar signals that leave the Earth that are much more powerful? They might have something like our Arecibo transmitter, which is incredibly powerful that you can hear almost to the other side of the galaxy. But if they just have something like television, these omnidirectional transmitters, that's going to be very hard for us to detect. And we're just beginning to learn how we might detect those kind of very weak signals like television signals.

• 2:58Chuck Nice?

  Something tells me that if they are a civilization who has television, they're not smart enough to try and contact us. Judging from our television, I'm just saying. If you look at what's on our television, you know...

• 3:13Carolyn Porco?

  Alien couch potatoes.

• 3:15Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Alien couch potatoes are not coming to find us.

• 3:19Carolyn Porco?

  I know. That's... That might be like the evolutionary dead end for a lot of civilizations out there.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Our early television shows like I Love Lucy and Ed Sullivan left the Earth about 70 years ago and have gone past about 10,000 stars. And the nearby stars have seen The Simpsons.

• 3:37Carolyn Porco?

  I see. I don't know if I feel good about that. But anyway, let me... So I want... What I want you to tell us is what Breakthrough Listen will do. I mean, there are things that you guys have on your website, site, and your announcements. You're going to cover 10 times more of the sky, 50 times greater sensitivity, five times more of the radio spectrum. I mean, it sounds like you're making gigantic advances. So give us a sense of how good this is going to get.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Okay. Well, I'll tell you about Breakthrough Listen, but let me just back up a little bit to just explain the kind of search that SETI scientists do. So one of the ideas in SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is that Earthlings send off radio and television. And maybe other civilizations, if they're out there, maybe they have something like radio or television or radar or navigational beacons or something that we could detect. Maybe if we're very lucky, maybe another civilization might send us a deliberate signal, which would be quite spectacular. That would be... Sent anti-cryptographically, probably. They want to get in touch and make it easy for us to decipher the message with lots of pictures and language lessons. They might send us their

• 4:50Speaker 02

  whole library of Congress, all their music, poetry, literature. They might tell us how to get on the galactic internet and tell us how to talk to the other million civilizations they've been talking to. So we could learn a lot.

• 5:00Carolyn Porco?

  Well, let me, let me just parse that. So the first, the first type of signals, it's we eavesdropping on them. And the second is a deliberate beacon where they are trying to get in touch with us, kind of like we have done in the past.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Earthlings have sent a few messages deliberately, which is quite controversial, but most of the stuff that Earthlings transmit is not deliberate. It's our television radar, that FM radio. You should be careful what you say when you're on Star Talk, because if it's being broadcast, it'll go out, traveling at the speed of light. So you can't withdraw that kind of communication.

• 5:35Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, so nothing that wouldn't pass the NAS?

• 5:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I gotta tell you, that just killed my entire career here. I'm totally finished now. I've got nothing to say anymore.

• 5:46Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, so now tell us what, now tell us what Breakthrough Listen is going to do for us.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so we want to find out the answer to this question. Are we alone? Is anybody out there? And SETI is the search for technology, looking for laser signals or radio signals. But the problem is, in SETI, we don't know, there's a huge number of unknowns. What frequency will they be transmitting on? Where should we point our telescope? Or should we point it to a star, a galaxy? There's trillions of stars we could look at. We don't know what kind of signal type it is. There's a huge number of unknowns. And we cannot do a thorough search. We can't look at every place in the sky, at every channel, for all the signal types. But luckily, we are limited in the search by computing power. And the more computing power we have... The more, the better job we can do. And right now, we're just getting in the game.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  We're just learning how we might get in touch with these other civilizations if they're out there. But the good news is that because we're limited by computing power, that is growing exponentially with Moore's Law. Computers are getting better and better. So we can do a more thorough searches. Every year, the capabilities are almost doubling. We used to listen to one frequency, one channel at a time. Now we're listening to 100 billion channels at a time.

• 6:57Carolyn Porco?

  Wow.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  And so this breakthrough listen project that you've been asking about is a new leap forward in capabilities in terms of frequency coverage and sky coverage and signal types. It's about 100 times better than anything that we've ever done before.

• 7:10Carolyn Porco?

  Okay. And, and isn't it true, will it still be true, though, that the aliens we'll be communicating with or listening to will have to be significantly more advanced than we are? Is that something that we could deduce from a signal that we receive that they must be more advanced than we are? Or is that no longer going to be true? We could hear beings with the same capabilities that we have. Which is it?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  I think that the likeliness of detecting a civilization that's just discovered radio that, like we have, we just learned about radio and ways we could communicate with other civilizations 100 years ago. That's a blink of an eye in our history. So the chance that we'd find one that's just entered this kind of communication phase is very small. If we ever find ET, it's likely that that civilization will be 100 million years or a billion years ahead of us. We cannot find them in SETI if they are more primitive than we are. If they're still trees, or bacteria, or amoeba.

• 8:13Carolyn Porco?

  Right.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  We, we cannot find them. Although that's, as you know, Carolyn, because you're an expert at this, that's, there are other technologies which might be able to detect primitive life. And maybe we could talk about that. But in SETI, we're looking for technology. And so the easiest kind of civilizations to detect will be the ones that are more advanced than we are. Not the emerging primitive ones like you and me.

• 8:32Carolyn Porco?

  Okay. We're primitive. Yeah, all right. Okay, so we have some questions.

• 8:36Chuck Nice?

  Well, yes, this is what we're doing. Today is cosmic queries, all about SETI. And uh, we have questions from all over the internet, wherever we live, whether it is uh, Facebook or Twitter, or um, even Patreon, which is a place to support StarTalk. If you are uh, so inclined and uh, one of the benefits that you receive by supporting StarTalk is we read your questions uh, before anyone else's, uh, because we are like that. Um, so let's start things off with a Patreon question from Gabriel Thelen. Gabriel says, "Hi from Australia," or should I say, "G'day."

• 9:19Chuck Nice?

  He says, "Uh, based on your experience in the uh, Saturnian system, what do you think about the chances of habitable, or mostly habitable, moon for humans developing around an exoplanet? Also, what are the challenges in detecting such a moons in nearby, such a moon or moons in nearby star systems such as Alpha Centauri?" Here's a young man from Australia who's put no thought into his question whatsoever.

• 9:54Carolyn Porco?

  Well, well, but he's eager, he's interested, so we love him anyway.

• 9:58Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we do.

• 9:59Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, so um, but I have to think, the first one was, would we, I think he's saying-

• 10:05Chuck Nice?

  Well, he's talking about uh, you know, when you look at the moons around Saturn and uh, I'm not sure if it's Enceladus that is mostly water, and you know, maybe it has the greatest potential for life. So, you know, judging from that, I believe what he's asking is, "What are the chances of us finding a habitable moon around an exoplanet? Not just Saturn, but an exoplanet." So, you know, uh, considering that, I mean, what is the likelihood that that would happen?

• 10:35Carolyn Porco?

  Well, okay, so now we're not talking about um, intelligent beings, we're talking about microbes, because that's kind of what we're thinking about on Enceladus, is we might have microbes. Chances are excellent. There's nothing in particular about Enceladus uh, or any of the other moons in our solar system that we think might have microbial life. Uh, there's nothing special, as far as we know. It's just all the materials that we believe are cosmically distributed. So, the chances that there are moons that have interior uh, hidden oceans that might have organisms in them, I think is very high. So.

• 11:11Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool.

• 11:12Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Chuck Nice?

  So, so the.

• 11:13Carolyn Porco?

  Whether, whether intelligent life gets started is a big thing because intelligent life needs lots of resources on the earth. We have metals that are available to us and, and minerals right under the surface, you know, at the surface of Enceladus is just ice. The ocean is underneath, so.

• 11:31Chuck Nice?

  So, yeah, so it, a lot more involved to actually get intelligent life, you know, so that, you know, and some would still argue that hasn't happened on earth yet, so.

• 11:44Chuck Nice?

  And the second one was, the second, uh, question he wanted to know was, what are the challenges in detecting in a nearby, detecting that kind of life in a nearby star system such as Alpha Centauri?

• 11:57Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, so Dan, you're the detector guy, uh, you know, I know that in the exoplanet community, they have gotten, because I've seen a paper on this, they have gotten to the stage where they're wondering if there are moons equivalent to moons like Enceladus around other, uh, around other planets around other stars and how they might detect them. Do you have any insight into this?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  So, people have started looking for moons going around other planets, uh, and I think that's gonna happen in the next maybe decade or so. We're gonna be, have instruments and capabilities to find out whether there are moons, uh, going around exoplanets, going around other stars. And it, uh, as Carolyn mentioned, there are probably gonna be, uh, lots, lots more moons than there are planets and some of those moons even, well, two of the moons in our own solar system have liquid water on them. So, um, so that means there's gonna be a lot of places for microbial life. I, I suspect the universe is teeming with microbial life. Uh, intelligent life is less rare, but there are. Uh, you know, 200 billion stars, a trillion planets in the Milky Way galaxy and 100 billion galaxies.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  So it would be surprising if we're alone.

• 13:09Carolyn Porco?

  You mean, you mean it's more rare. Intelligent life is probably more rare. Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  I think, I think we're gonna find microbial life everywhere. It would surprise me if we even find it in our own solar system.

• 13:18Carolyn Porco?

  There, there's microbial life in our guts, right? There's more microbes in our guts than there are, whatever, stars in the galaxy or in the cosmos. There's a lot of, okay.

• 13:28Chuck Nice?

  Mine are, mine are actually, uh, having a bit of an uprising right now.

• 13:31Carolyn Porco?

  Oh dear. Okay. Well, maybe we ought to get to the next question in a hurry.

• 13:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. Uh, this question comes from, uh, Anthony Edward Stark, uh, coming to us from Twitter. Um, and, and I have to say, let me preface his question by saying, this is something that so many people, uh, I believe, uh, that want to know and, and believe that this is the case. Here's what Anthony asked. Do you think we humans might be some alien species brought to Earth from some other planet? If yes, how? Now, of course, that is the Prometheus model, uh, where we've been, human life was seeded on Earth. Okay, so we were seeded here.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Maybe not deliberately though. Maybe it started on Mars and came, you know, there's lots of rocks flying around the solar system. That, that, that theory is called panspermia. So if life got started, for instance, on Mars, a big rock might-

• 14:31Chuck Nice?

  Say that again now. That's, the theory is what now? There, Dan?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Panspermia, that, that life might get started on another planet or a moon.

• 14:40Chuck Nice?

  I'm just letting you know, Dan, if you, if you notice, I did not make a joke there. Uh, uh, you should be very proud of me.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  There's plenty of opportunities.

• 14:47Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I just, I let that go, Dan.

• 14:49Carolyn Porco?

  Enormous restraint.

• 14:50Chuck Nice?

  I let it go. Did you see the restraint?

• 14:52Carolyn Porco?

  Yes.

• 14:52Chuck Nice?

  Panspermia. Let's, let's hear more about panspermia.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  So, so suppose life got started on Mars. Uh, we know that big rocks smash into Mars occasionally, uh, and, and, and then rocks go flying all over the place, Martian rocks, and some of them have come to Earth. You can go to Antarctica and find these rocks. If you find a black rock on the snow, then you see, you can find out that it's got Martian atmosphere in it. So we have rocks from Mars here on Earth that have, um, and maybe- Life got started on Mars or some other place and came here and that's how life got started on Earth. We really don't know where it came from. It might have gotten started on Earth, probably most likely it did get started on Earth, but we don't know. But if we do find life in our own solar system, a really interesting thing will be, is it a completely different

• 15:37Speaker 02

  kind of life? Does it use different chemicals, different chemistry, maybe a different kind of DNA, different amino acids? If that's, if that happens, if we find a different kind of life with a different chemistry, that means that life got two completely independent starts in our own solar system.

• 15:54Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  The universe is teeming with life.

• 15:57Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that, I mean, that's, just the prospect of that is mind blowing, because it means that throughout the entire galaxies, you could have like an unlimited disparate amount of life.

• 16:11Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, if-

• 16:12Chuck Nice?

  And life forms.

• 16:13Carolyn Porco?

  Dan is absolutely correct. If we ever find that a second genesis took place in our solar system-

• 16:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:19Carolyn Porco?

  It means the spell's been broken, right?

• 16:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Carolyn Porco?

  And it means that life is no longer a bug, but a feature of the universe in which we live. And that's, that's why, you know, we're so passionate about wanting to find out the, the answer to this.

• 16:33Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 16:34Carolyn Porco?

  But, but anyway-

• 16:35Speaker 02

  That's exciting stuff.

• 16:36Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, I will, I will say of course that the chances, what Dan was talking about is that you could have an impact on a body like Mars or the Earth and have rocks from it go flying through the solar system and maybe even end up in the outer solar system on a moon like Europa or Enceladus.

• 16:53Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 16:54Carolyn Porco?

  But the further out you go, the less the chances are actually for that to happen. So it's why some of us really think that in our solar system, Enceladus is probably the best chance for us actually being to ask, ask the question whether or not life has gotten started a second time-

• 17:12Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 17:13Carolyn Porco?

  -in our solar system. And it could be, the answer also could be that the chemistry, the biochemistry is the same. Maybe that's the best biochemistry that the universe has been able to come up with.

• 17:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fi- I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?

• 17:30Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, anyway, we-

• 17:31Chuck Nice?

  It works.

• 17:32Carolyn Porco?

  We have to take a short break now, but when we come back, more of your cosmic queries when StarTalk returns.

• 17:39Carolyn Porco?

  Hello and welcome back to StarTalk Radio All-Stars Edition. I'm your All-Star host, Carolyn Porco, and joining me in the studio is co-host Chuck Nice. That's correct. And special guest Dan Wertheimer of UC Berkeley.

• 17:54Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 17:55Carolyn Porco?

  Nice of you to be here, Chuck.

• 17:58Chuck Nice?

  It's good to be here because we are doing cosmic queries, and we have questions from all over the Internet, and they all want to know about SETI.

• 18:07Carolyn Porco?

  Well, everybody wants to know about SETI.

• 18:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and I think we have two of the best people in the world to talk about SETI.

• 18:13Carolyn Porco?

  Yes.

• 18:14Chuck Nice?

  Right here, and so these questions are going to be pretty easy for you and pretty fascinating for everybody else. Let's jump back in with Anthony Edward Stark, who gave us a great question, so he's got a second one here that I want to follow up with. And he says, "Do you think that there might be a chance of extraterrestrial life on any other planet or satellites in our own solar system? And can it be possible for us to actually converse with them in the near future?" So he's just talking about right here in our eight little planets, and then maybe out to the Kuiper Belt, surrounding our little star.

• 18:59Chuck Nice?

  Is there intelligent life? Do we know for a fact that there is or is not intelligent life in our own solar system?

• 19:07Carolyn Porco?

  Well...

• 19:08Chuck Nice?

  Do we know definitively?

• 19:09Carolyn Porco?

  Put aside the question as to whether or not there's any intelligent life on the Earth, I would say that no, we have seen nary a piece of evidence of intelligent life. That's not what we're looking for in our planetary exploration program. Dan, do you want to weigh in on this?

• 19:24Speaker 02

  It seems very unlikely that there could be intelligent life in our own solar system. However, there could be microbial life, and the best places are Enceladus. Carolyn is an expert on Enceladus. Maybe Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Possibly there was microbial life on Mars. There still could be, but these moons of Jupiter and the moons of Saturn are better places, I think, than Mars.

• 19:52Chuck Nice?

  And could we also have microbial life in stasis on some of these comets that were inside of the ice that's frozen on one of these comets? Could that be...

• 20:02Carolyn Porco?

  I think that's part of our mental picture, that you could have organisms... That go into a state, a dormant state.

• 20:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Carolyn Porco?

  They can stay there for a very, very long time. So, um, you know, that, that's not out of the question.

• 20:15Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 20:16Carolyn Porco?

  And it's, it's part of the, the, the, the, uh, spectrum of possibilities.

• 20:22Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 20:22Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 20:22Chuck Nice?

  Okay, cool. Hey, that, that, that was actually a very good question. And, you know, and I think I know where he's coming from because here's the thing. Me as a sci-fi fan, what you fantasize about is a very advanced civilization who is hiding in our own solar system in a cloaked device on a planet nearby, using that planet as a base of operations to observe Earth. But they don't want to let us know that they're there because, uh, they would be violating some type of moral code by interfering with, with our natural development.

• 21:04Carolyn Porco?

  You, you sleep well at night?

• 21:05Chuck Nice?

  (laughing).

• 21:06Carolyn Porco?

  And I, you fantasize about this and you can sleep at night? Dan, what, what are you, what were you gonna say?

• 21:11Chuck Nice?

  (laughing).

• 21:13Speaker 02

  I think you're watching too much Star Trek. You know about the Prime Directive.

• 21:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:17Carolyn Porco?

  I, I actually, you know, I was, I was a consultant on Star Trek 2009.

• 21:22Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 21:23Carolyn Porco?

  And the, um, the director, J.J. Abrams, uh, he, he invited me to just be a consultant. I thought I was gonna be a consultant on the planetary scenes or something. And the first question he posed to me was, um, he says, you know, we have a problem. We have this, the Enterprise, the starship Enterprise, coming back into the solar system to destroy the Earth, uh, to save the Earth, excuse me, from the, the, the bad guys. And we have to figure out where to hide it. And I said, well, you should hide it in the atmosphere of Titan and then have it rise up submarine style out of the haze so that... You know, that would make a great scene and so on. And I'm, I thought I was being tested. Uh, and it turns out they liked it so much, they used it in the movie.

• 22:08Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, yeah, of course, they got it wrong because they thought that you could, they, they thought that you could, you could hide, uh, its electromagnetic signals, uh, in the magnetic field of the rings and the Saturn's rings does, don't have a magnetic field.

• 22:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:22Carolyn Porco?

  But anyway, it was the thought that count.

• 22:24Chuck Nice?

  That is awesome.

• 22:26Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, I thought so. I thought so. I thought maybe you saw that Star Trek and that's why you're having these nightmares.

• 22:31Chuck Nice?

  Well, no, even though I did see that Star Trek, yes, but you know, I have these, uh, you know, I'm, I'm not a stable person. Might as well go ahead and let you know.

• 22:41Carolyn Porco?

  All right. Well, it's okay. You know, we all have our quirks.

• 22:44Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. All right. Let us, uh, let us move on to, oh my God. All right. This is, um, you know, sometimes our listeners, they ask questions, we don't, we don't tell them what they can and cannot ask. You know, sometimes I read them and sometimes I don't, but I gotta read this just because, you know, when I have two people like yourselves in the room, uh, I'm always interested to see what kind of response I'll receive to a question like this one from James Haney. And James says, if, if Trump should win the election.

• 23:23Carolyn Porco?

  No.

• 23:24Chuck Nice?

  What effect do you feel he will have on space exploration and STEM programs? And since Donald Trump has made his way into every single fiber of the zeitgeist, I figure what the hell, I might as well put him in the cosmic queries.

• 23:44Carolyn Porco?

  Well, okay. So I wasn't prepared for this.

• 23:46Chuck Nice?

  I know, I know.

• 23:47Carolyn Porco?

  To be perfectly honest with you. So, um, what effect would he have on space exploration? I think if he thought that we could with our robotic explorers go and bomb the hell out of Mars. He might like it. He might like it. It might actually do wonders for our budgets, but, um, actually no, Dan, do you want to take a chance? I don't want to, I don't want to be the only one here.

• 24:13Chuck Nice?

  Sometimes our listeners throw us for a loop and so I'm, I'm interested, Dan. What do you say there?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Uh, he's a scary guy. He's so poorly informed, you know, he doesn't know anything about science. He's denying climate change. So I think, you know, he's gonna probably cut the budgets for science and space explorations.

• 24:34Chuck Nice?

  That's bad news.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  So it's a scary thought.

• 24:36Chuck Nice?

  That is a scary thought.

• 24:36Carolyn Porco?

  Maybe he's an implanted alien. Did anyone ever consider this?

• 24:40Chuck Nice?

  No one has ever considered that. And you know what? That's a consideration. However, I do believe that if you guys were to come together, and I'm talking about all of you in your community, and so everyone who's searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, everyone who is searching for extraterrestrial life, if you were to come to Donald Trump as president and say to him, "We have found a planet of Trumps," you would get all the funding you needed.

• 25:07Carolyn Porco?

  Well, if we could tell him how to put his name on it.

• 25:09Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah. "We've found a planet of Trumps, and you're gonna be able to put your name on it. Believe me, you'll get all the money you need."

• 25:15Carolyn Porco?

  We probably would. Probably would.

• 25:17Chuck Nice?

  All right. That was fun. So let us move on.

• 25:26Chuck Nice?

  This is from Tony Segner. And Tony would like to know, "What, if anything, do we expect to find as far as extraterrestrial life if and when we do find it? My impression is that the consensus is we'll find some sort of bacteria or microorganism, but pretty much nothing else." So, I mean, that's a, that's a little bit of a pessimistic view on your life's work from Tony. He's saying that, yeah, microbial, we'll find, but anything else, not gonna happen.

• 26:01Carolyn Porco?

  Well, I think, okay, so he's basically saying that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is gonna turn up a null result despite all our efforts to improve our sensitivity, to improve our signal processing. So that gets into, that kinda takes us to the Drake equation. What are the chances that we have intelligent civilizations out there who have reached a state where they can communicate and in fact are doing... Cross galaxy communications. So Dan, I think you-

• 26:32Chuck Nice?

  So can you talk more about the Drake equation? Cause I uh, don't know it to be honest.

• 26:36Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, well this is-

• 26:37Chuck Nice?

  I would like to know what that is.

• 26:39Carolyn Porco?

  Dan is an expert on these things.

• 26:40Chuck Nice?

  Dan, can you tell us about the Drake equation?

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Frank Drake formulated this way that you could calculate how many intelligent communicating civilizations there are in the galaxy. And what you do is you multiply all these numbers together, like how many planets there are and how many of those planets are good and how many of those planets have the right temperature and the right chemicals. And then, uh, if you have a good planet, we call it a Goldilocks planet, how many, how many, how often does life get started on that thing? And then, if life gets started, how often does it evolve intelligence? And then the last factor in the Drake equation is, once you get an intelligent creature, how long do they live? Do they blow themselves up with their biochemical weapons? Or do they live together for billions of years? You know, our sun is five billion years old, it's kind of middle age, it's gonna be around

• 27:28Speaker 02

  another couple billion years. Some stars are 10 billion years old.

• 27:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  So there could be very advanced civilizations out there, billions of years ahead of us. So, we, the problem with the Drake equation is that we don't really know what any of those factors are. We're just beginning to learn what's out there in our universe. We, we know a little bit about, the first part of the Drake equation, about planets, and maybe a little bit about how many of those planets are good planets. We think there are trillion planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

• 27:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  That's more planets than there are stars. We think maybe 5% of those are pretty good planets, places that might have the right conditions for life. Lots of places for life. But after that, how often does life get started? How often does it get intelligent? We really just don't know. And so-

• 28:08Chuck Nice?

  And then-

• 28:08Speaker 02

  We gotta go out and look.

• 28:09Chuck Nice?

  Isn't, isn't it also, you know, you have to take into, alright, just think of it this way, uh, before the ubiquity of, of human beings across the globe. Um, let's just say we were, you know, like the black plague happened when we were all in one little landmass. We might have been wiped out. We might have been life and then all been wiped out.

• 28:32Carolyn Porco?

  That's right. It might have happened many times.

• 28:34Chuck Nice?

  And so, right. So this is something that could, there could be life and intelligent life that somehow ends up through some natural disaster being just wiped off of that particular planet.

• 28:46Carolyn Porco?

  Um, that's right. It resets the clock and maybe evolution starts all over again. That's, uh, that's a factor. That's why Frank Drake did it the way he did it, right? He, he separated it out into these various factors so we could take one at a time. And isn't there, Dan, there's a factor near the end of that equation that, that tries to describe the duration, the lifetime of a civilization?

• 29:11Speaker 02

  And I think that's kind of up to us. It's up to our civilization to figure out how long we're gonna live. We're getting into this kind of dangerous bottleneck where we have weapons that we really aren't prepared to deal with, biological, chemical, nuclear weapons, and it's getting easier to kill a billion people. Um, and so there are probably going to be two kinds of civilizations. There are the ones that wipe themselves out and the ones that have learned to live together in, uh, in peace and get through that kind of bottleneck where they have these dangerous weapons and they kind of figure out how to do it. So a lot of people think that SETI is the archaeology of the future. Phil Morrison said it was the archaeology of future. So if we get in touch with a civilization that's gone through that difficult period

• 29:56Speaker 02

  and figured out how to survive through that, we could learn a lot. We could learn what's in our future. So I think the answer to Tony's question about, uh, are we gonna find intelligent life? We really don't know, but I think it's profound either way. If we find out the universe is teeming with intelligent life, get on the galactic internet, we can learn about our future and how civilizations survive through that difficult time. Um, it's also profound the other way. If we learn that it, that we are the only intelligent creatures in this vast universe, that's incredibly profound as well. That means we better take incredibly good care of the precious life here on earth.

• 30:33Chuck Nice?

  So true.

• 30:34Carolyn Porco?

  We're here, I agree.

• 30:35Chuck Nice?

  All good stuff, wow. Well, Tony, that was a, that was actually a great question, we certainly appreciate it. And even though you're quite the pessimist, um, we don't, we don't side with you, Tony. We are optimistic about the future and about life, Tony, so there. No, I'm joking. Um, wow, let's move on. Um, this is Demi Clinton, and, um, Demi is kind of a follow-up to what Tony was saying. And Demi is very concerned about just individual planets. And she says, "What different categories of data are used to determine a planet's probability for supporting life as we would recognize it? And what about life we may not be able to recognize?"

• 31:20Chuck Nice?

  So is it possible, basically, to have a planetary, um, housing for life that is so unlike us that we would not recognize it?

• 31:34Carolyn Porco?

  Well, this falls more in terms, in the category of the kind of life we are going in search of within the solar system.

• 31:43Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 31:44Carolyn Porco?

  And it's true, there could be a biochemistry, uh, or morphology that we, looks completely alien to us.

• 31:52Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:53Carolyn Porco?

  Um, and it's hard, when you, you know, in space exploration, uh, where the rubber meets the road is when you have to put an instrument or a suite of instruments on a spacecraft and send them very far away. You're not bringing that thing back into the shop to change it if you, you know, you designed it incorrectly. You gotta design it, you have to have specific questions that it's gonna ask.

• 32:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:17Carolyn Porco?

  And then, actually, you also have to, if you're wise enough, you design it so that you might find something surprising. You, you know, a lot of science is serendipitous. So, um, so anyway, that's, that's more a question of what we do here in the solar system. As far as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, I know that there are people within the exoplanet community who think that, uh, the detection of a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence will be the only way we will be 100% certain that we will have found, uh, life, because it might be hard to detect.

• 32:54Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty much the answer is, uh, we know what we know.

• 33:00Carolyn Porco?

  But we might not know what we don't know.

• 33:03Chuck Nice?

  We might not know what we don't know. So, there you have it. I think that's excellent.

• 33:08Carolyn Porco?

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

• 33:29Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, Carolyn.

• 33:31Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, and my special guest is Dan Wertheimer of UC Berkeley, who is the principal investigator for the new Breakthrough Listen Project, which is a new era in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Welcome, Dan.

• 33:46Chuck Nice?

  Thanks, Carolyn. Fantastic.

• 33:48Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, so I saw on Twitter some questions that I would like to bring up. Okay, I don't remember who asked this, but this was a really good question I saw. And that is, and this is for Dan, has there been any discussion, ala what Carl Sagan put in contact, about a protocol that the United States, together with the world, because this certainly would be a worldly, a global response, that a protocol for how we would deal with and how we might even think about responding to a signal from an obvious extraterrestrial intelligence?

• 34:30Carolyn Porco?

  And I know a signal going back, you know, if it took 12,000 years to get to us, you know, we're not going to have a lengthy conversation, but still, that will be a signature day in the history of humanity to receive such a thing. And, you know, at some point, we have to grapple with the issue of how we would respond. So, take it away, Dan. What have you guys in your community, if anything, thought or said about this?

• 35:01Speaker 02

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

• 35:45Speaker 02

  or some Earth kind of technology, make sure it's way out there. We still won't know if it's another civilization probably at that point, but we will know it's very interesting. And so what the protocol says is that, at that point, you make all the information, everything you know about that signal, public. You say, you make an announcement, "We found a really interesting signal. These are the coordinates in the sky, this is the frequency we saw that," everything you know about the signal. You probably say at that point, "We don't know what it is. It might be some other civilization, but it might be some new astrophysics phenomena." When pulsars were discovered by Jocelyn Bell, they called them LGM1, LGM2, Little Green Men, Little Green Men 2. They didn't know what they were, they turned out not to be Little Green Men.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Little Green Men. They turned out to be pulsars. But it could be some discovery like that, you find new phenomena out in space that not extraterrestrial. Anyway, I think at that point, everybody will start to look at it from... And also, we can't only track it for a little while from our telescope, so other telescopes in other countries will be looking at it, try to figure out what it is. Is there information content? Can we decode the message? If it's sent deliberately, maybe it'll be easy to decode. If it's accidentally... Coming our way like television comes off the earth. It's gonna be very hard, probably impossible, to figure out what the content of the message is. We'll know that there's another civilization out there that's transmitting something, but we probably won't be able to figure out what the content is. Still interesting, though.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Then, the next part of your question is, well, if you find a signal like that, that you think is from another civilization, what do you do after that? And, and there have been a lot of conferences and books written about the potential kind of scenarios. And one of the questions that you alluded to in your question is, who should speak for Earth? Should we respond? And I think that's a question for all Earthlings. SETI is a project, an international project for all of humanity, and maybe even all the species on the planet. And so, I think whether or not Earthlings should reply, and whether or not, how, what we should, what we should send back, or whether, and what the content of a possible transmission back, probably depends a lot on what we receive.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  But it should be a question not just for me and other SETI scientists. That should be a question for people from all over the world, and all kinds of disciplines, and all of humanity.

• 38:12Carolyn Porco?

  Um, okay.

• 38:13Chuck Nice?

  Pretty cool, man.

• 38:14Carolyn Porco?

  That is, I like, I like that idea.

• 38:16Chuck Nice?

  I just think the irony of what you just said is, I could see a world war breaking out over who should speak for Earth.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  And the problem is that it's pretty easy to transmit a signal. Anybody can operate a transmitter or a laser. And so I'd imagine, one scenario is, there'll be a hundred thousand replies. Uh, you know, it's gonna be hard to control. And maybe that's a good, that's, maybe that's a good way to reply, is that they learn about all the different cultures and all the different craziness on this planet, all at once.

• 38:48Carolyn Porco?

  Well, this, this brings up a topic that Dan, you and I have discussed in private. Um, and with, you know, around a dinner table. And I know the conversation got quite heated, but I'm gonna bring it up here. Uh, there are two camps about this sending of messages, okay? And, uh, there's the camp that feels it's, and you know, Frank Drake and Carl Sagan did this. Frank Drake did it with the Aracibo message in 1974. He broadcast a simple... Seventeen hundred bit message. Actually, it was to test the Aracibo. But he aimed it at a globular cluster and they broadcast. And then, of course, Carl headed up the famous Pioneer Plaque and the Voyager records.

• 39:30Carolyn Porco?

  It was all an attempt to say something about ourselves to the galaxy, like a long-distance, hopeful call to our galactic cousins.

• 39:42Chuck Nice?

  Reach out and touch someone.

• 39:43Carolyn Porco?

  Reach out and touch someone, exactly. And I, you know, I was a great fan of Carl. He invited me to be the character consultant on the movie Contact. We had conversations about these things. And I initiated, just a few years ago, my own message to the Milky Way, that I was going to redo the Aracibo message. I have an illustrious board of advisors. I've got people like Frank Drake on it. And Steve Soder, who was, you know, part of Cosmos One and Cosmos Two. And just other, Rick Armstrong, the son of Neil Armstrong. Lots of people feel that it's a wonderful, even Steve Pinker, who's a famous linguist at Harvard, is part of my advisory board. And we were going to construct a message.

• 40:28Carolyn Porco?

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

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Right, so as you pointed out, it's very controversial. There are informal polls indicate that about ninety-nine percent of astronomers think that it's a bad idea to transmit. Now, we're not talking about if we receive a message, should we transmit, but just should we take the first action of transmitting messages. Now, of course, Earthlings, as you know, transmit all the time, there's radio and television, but you're talking about deliberate, pointed, powerful transmissions. And most people think that's a bad idea, that it's a, that we're an emerging, kind of primitive civilization, we should listen at first and see what's out there before we deliberately transmit messages.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Maybe in a thousand years or so, after we learn a little bit more about the universe, then we could think about transmitting. But most people think it's a dangerous, or potentially dangerous, thing to do.

• 42:04Carolyn Porco?

  Why, why? Why is it dangerous? Why is it dangerous?

• 42:08Speaker 02

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

• 42:53Speaker 02

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

• 43:38Speaker 02

  years to get there, and then ten years to get back, and then they listen. Nobody's done any kind of science. It's so far been just sort of publicity. Most people think that it's a bad idea because of the potential dangers. Stephen Hawking is one of the people that's...

• 43:53Chuck Nice?

  And that's because, you know, I'm a Star Trek fan, and so probably one of the most famous Star Trek episodes is The Borg. And The Borg had no idea that Earthlings or Terrans existed. But then they got a message, basically, that said, "Hey, these guys are..." And then they were like, "We will not stop until you are all destroyed."

• 44:18Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, but I'm on the other side of this, you see. I'm thinking, I mean, I don't know, can I say this on radio? You all sound like you're members of the National Rifle Association. You know? I mean, there's no reason to be that paranoid. First of all, there's an argument, it's not new with me, and I'm sorry, I meant to come prepared with the guy who wrote this. There's actually a paper on this. But there's an argument to be made that if a civilization were that aggressive, they probably would have destroyed themselves long before they ever got here. And also, the time scales, the time scales are so long. And right now,

• 45:00Carolyn Porco?

  like you said, we're pretty, I mean, sure, Aracibo could get reasonably far, and I was planning to use Aracibo, but I just think it's over-the-top paranoid.

• 45:14Chuck Nice?

  I think that you're right, and here's why. For this reason and this reason alone...

• 45:21Chuck Nice?

  To find out that you are not alone. I think you would be so happy to go and say hi to somebody. You know, just because when you look at the vastness of the universe. And then you see, oh, my God, there's some people over there. Like, that would be so exciting. That I don't believe, like, let me go and conquer them would be the thing that would pop into your mind. Especially if you're advanced enough to actually make your way there and get to them.

• 45:48Carolyn Porco?

  Dan.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  I think that that's, I think you're probably both right that that's. It's unlikely that advanced civilizations are gonna be dangerous to us. But the problem is, we really, it's a very difficult thing to say, yeah, absolutely. We know that for sure. There are no dangerous civilizations out there that conquer the galaxy. So we just don't know. So I think you need some kind of a Silomar process. The Academy of Sciences from all over the world should get together and assess the dangers. And it shouldn't be up to a single individual to put Earth at risk. But after you get, go through that process and try to assess the risks and the possible benefits. Then, then I, you know, if they say it's okay, there are no risks, then I'm all for it.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Or if the risks are minor, but right now, we just don't know.

• 46:35Carolyn Porco?

  I wish that this kind of care that you are hoping to see with regard to this issue had been applied to things like the use of fossil fuels and all the, you know, the technologies that have really come back to harm our environment.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, but just because other people have made mistakes with technology doesn't mean that we should do that, too. I think.

• 46:55Carolyn Porco?

  But, but Dan, the chances, the chance, it's such a low, low probability. It's like, maybe high risk, low probability. It's one of those falls in that category.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  I just don't think you should put Earth at risk, even if with a low probability. It, I think, you know, maybe there's a 1% chance that you could wipe out all of civilization. Are you willing to take that risk?

• 47:16Carolyn Porco?

  Whoa, wait, it's way, way lower than 1%.

• 47:19Chuck Nice?

  Listen, life might be better under the alien overlords. I mean, honestly, they.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  There could be potential benefits.

• 47:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, they're very advanced. I mean, they could cure our diseases, world hunger. I mean, so what?

• 47:32Carolyn Porco?

  Maybe they, maybe they rechip us in the head.

• 47:34Chuck Nice?

  They, right, we don't, right.

• 47:36Carolyn Porco?

  Get rid of our aggression.

• 47:37Chuck Nice?

  We're a collective conscious now, you know, we're able to, we're able to do so much, accomplish so much more.

• 47:42Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, wait a minute. Okay, we have to wind down now, Dan and Chuck. Thank you for helping us out here today.

• 47:49Chuck Nice?

  Such a pleasure. It's a lot of fun.

• 47:52Carolyn Porco?

  Thanks, Dan. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio All-Stars Edition. I've been your All-Star host, Carolyn Porco. Until next time.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  This is StarTalk.