Calling ET, with Dr. FunkySpoon – StarTalk All-Stars

Astrobiologist David Grinspoon and his guest, Hugo Award-winning sci-fi author and scientist David Brin weigh the pros and cons of attempting to contact extraterrestrials. Plus, Chuck Nice asks the pair Cosmic Queries about what we’ll do if aliens find us.

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

• 0:00Chuck Nice?

  This is StarTalk.

• 0:08David Grinspoon?

  Hi, I'm David Grin spoon and this is StarTalk All-Stars. I'll be your All-Star host today. And today's co-host is comedian Chuck Nice.

• 0:18Chuck Nice?

  Hey, David.

• 0:18David Grinspoon?

  How's it going Chuck?

• 0:19Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man, it's good. Good to see you again.

• 0:21David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, this is great. Really fun to be with you again. And today's topic, we're going to be talking about communicating with extraterrestrials.

• 0:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:28David Grinspoon?

  And not only that, there's a controversial sub-topic, which is the question, should we be just listening like we've been doing for maybe 50 years?

• 0:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 0:39David Grinspoon?

  Or should we actually be sending our own messages? Some people think that's the way to go. Other people think that it's stupid because we're...

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Well, we don't know who we're talking to, do we?

• 0:47David Grinspoon?

  Inviting the bad guys over.

• 0:48Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. You know, you're just kind of putting it out there, you know? It's kind of like, I don't know, cosmic Tinder.

• 0:56David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:57Chuck Nice?

  Where you don't get to swipe right or left, you're just putting it out there.

• 1:00David Grinspoon?

  Exactly. We can't necessarily choose who we're going to be dating on the interstellar scene here.

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:09David Grinspoon?

  So, yeah, there's a reason to maybe for caution, maybe not. Some people think it's silly. So, we'll get into that. But today, we're going to be fielding your fan questions. We're going to be doing something that we call cosmic queries.

• 1:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:23David Grinspoon?

  And also to help us get into this subject is a really knowledgeable and enjoyable scientist and science fiction author, David Brin, award-winning science fiction author.

• 1:38Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:38David Grinspoon?

  And also a published scientist who's done peer-reviewed studies of communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence and somebody who's been very involved in the discussion and the recent debate about messaging to aliens. We're very glad to have you with us. Welcome, David Brin.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Great to be with you guys. A couple of real brainiacs there that in StarTalk headquarters. Beam me up.

• 2:07David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I see you're in a room with a lot of books. You didn't write all of those, did you, David?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  No, I did not.

• 2:12Chuck Nice?

  Just the left-hand side of the room, right? That's all.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Well, as you can see behind me, there is an illustration of Jim, beautiful Jim Burns cover of one of my novels called Sundiver.

• 2:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  So aliens are us. Always, always been fascinated with the alien. Um, I've always felt as a human being that I was immersed in a, uh, almost a galactic federation. Humans are so diverse and so weird at times.

• 2:38David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, well, I, I know a lot of people have felt like they've been abducted by being so captivated, reading your books. But you, you haven't personally ever been abducted, have you, David?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Um, well, in the sixties, there was a lot of ambiguity about, you know, whether or not you had, I was abducted as an excuse for what you did on Friday night.

• 2:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  But, uh, but I hear they're still using those excuses in your generation, Chuck.

• 3:04Chuck Nice?

  Yes, as a matter of fact, they are. And I say there's nothing wrong with mind expansion. Drugs? No. Mind expansion? Yes.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Woo.

• 3:14David Grinspoon?

  And that's, that's, that's one of the reasons we need science fiction. So, um, speaking of mind expansion, maybe we should move into some of our cosmic queries and, and see what, see what the readers want, want to hear from us.

• 3:25Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 3:25David Grinspoon?

  What do you got, Chuck?

• 3:26Chuck Nice?

  So what we have is questions from all across the internet on all the different and varied platforms where we are contained as StarTalk. And, um, I am actually going to jump into, uh, something from our Patreon, uh, listeners. Patreon is a, a platform where you can support StarTalk financially. And what it will do is, uh, get us to read your questions, no questions asked. Uh, so this is Kimberly Henry Carr, and she's coming to us from Patreon. She's a Patreon patron and, uh, she lives in Beaverton, Oregon. She says this. What more have we found out about the new ninth planet?

• 4:06Chuck Nice?

  Could this be the home of the fiery balls of light we've seen since ancient Egyptian times?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Wow, wow, wow. Well, David knows easily as much about this as I do. He's very with it on the latest news in astronomy. Phil Plait is another place, The Bad Astronomer. I follow all this stuff, even though my PhD is in planetary astronomy and in that part of the solar system, which is where the comets come from. Yes. But as a working scientist, I'm a little more hands-off when it comes to Planet X. I'm just as enthralled as everyone else is. And how cool it would be if we had a ninth planet again.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  But as far as fireballs and things like that are concerned, well, you know, science has done a pretty good job of coming up with explanations for most of those things. The few that aren't meteoroids passing through the atmosphere, I mean meteors passing through the atmosphere. They were meteoroids when they were drifting through space and they become meteorites when they hit the ground. The few that aren't meteors are probably phenomena like ball lightning or the ceramic effect, the psycho-ceramic effect in which people are crackpots.

• 5:29Chuck Nice?

  Oh, cool, cool.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:32Chuck Nice?

  Psycho-ceramic.

• 5:33David Grinspoon?

  Exactly. I mean, with regard to this Planet X, it's important to remember it hasn't been observed, but it's been inferred from some observations of the orbits of other objects. That seem to have a pattern suggesting there may be something pulling on.

• 5:48Chuck Nice?

  So now, so what you're doing is you're saying that the inference is from a gravitational observance, not an actual body, an object body that we've seen?

• 6:01David Grinspoon?

  That's right. We haven't actually observed it in a telescope. We've observed a possible disturbance, a pattern of disturbance in the orbits of other objects. So now people are predicting where it's going to be and looking for it. And if we find it, it'll be really exciting. Certainly, there are more objects. out there in the Kuiper belt than than we know about and we're just beginning to explore that realm.

• 6:20Chuck Nice?

  So now, what would what would Planet X be if we were actually to identify it? Now, some people say Pluto is a dwarf planet. Some people say it's not. Uh, you know, what what will we most likely classify Planet X to be? If there is indeed a Planet X?

• 6:37David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, well, that's a great question. It depends on, you know, by this definition that's been a little bit controversial that the International Astronomical Union adapted. It would depend on if it's cleared its zone, whatever that means, there's, you know, but but

• 6:52Chuck Nice?

  I'm in the zone, the danger zone.

• 6:54David Grinspoon?

  Exactly. If there's nothing orbiting nearby, if it hasn't scooted everything out of its path, then it might be considered by that definition a planet. If there's other stuff nearby, it might be considered a dwarf planet. But either way, if it's sizable and it's pulled itself into a round shape, which it would have to be that sizable to have the observed effects, then it would be some kind of a planet.

• 7:16Chuck Nice?

  Wow. All right.

• 7:18David Grinspoon?

  And and as David Brin said, that this idea that it's responsible for, you know, things we're seeing in our atmosphere, um, that's not something I'm really that excited about. There's no reason to think that it would be any more than, as David said, that, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on in the atmosphere, some of it we don't understand. Is it related to Planet X? There's no reason to think so.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Well, let me speak up for the some of the science fictional implications. Because, um, look, uh, if if there, the more we find out about the Kuiper belt and the Oort Cloud, and by the way, I set a novel out in the Oort Cloud called Heart of the Comet that I did with Gregory Benford, um, that's the that's the vast majority of the volume of the solar system out there where it's very cold. But we've discovered from the New Horizons mission, which I cited in an article a while ago in which I pointed out that the year 2015 was by far the best year for human exploration of space ever. Far, far more spectacular than the Apollo era.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  And we're rising up out of this planet and doing incredible competent things, even as the people of the United States are in this awful stupid funk of depression and undeserved self-loathing. Absolutely ridiculous that we should be losing our confidence just at the time when we're proving ourselves to be so utterly and spectacularly competent. But if you look at it from a science fictional point of view, that realm out there, starting in the asteroid belt, but even more so out there in the Kuiper Belt, that realm is first off more dynamic than we had thought because the New Horizons probe showed us that Pluto and Charon, its twin moon,

• 9:11Speaker 02

  are dynamic, that things are happening. The surface is being resurfaced. There's something vaguely like plate tectonics and volcanoes happening even that far out in cold. But the other aspect is that this is the realm where if we were visited by alien robots, this is where the robots would have their breeding ground, where they would make copies of themselves. Because they could make their copies out there and have their own little robotic civilization out there without interfering in the hot little nursery worlds closer to the sun like the Earth. So as we explore outward, through the asteroid belt especially,

• 9:53Speaker 02

  but also the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, that's when we're going to have one of many contact scenarios. And I talk about this in my novel, Earth: I'm No Existence, where the possibility is that we would then actually bump into...

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Um, a very ancient civilization of robotic emissaries. And we may be sending robotic emissaries like this ourselves within a hundred years.

• 10:23David Grinspoon?

  Wow, so, uh, yeah, the, the idea of fighting, finding breeding alien robots munching on Kuiper belt objects out there, uh, is kind of enticing, wouldn't you say Chuck?

• 10:35Chuck Nice?

  Oh, without a doubt, uh, just finding them, even if they're not munching on Kuiper belt objects is still enticing.

• 10:39David Grinspoon?

  As long as they're breeding.

• 10:40Chuck Nice?

  As long as they're breeding, that's the part.

• 10:41David Grinspoon?

  And as long-

• 10:42Chuck Nice?

  You had me at breeding, that's what I'm saying.

• 10:46David Grinspoon?

  All right, do we have another, uh, audience question?

• 10:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, absolutely, let's, uh, let's move on to Sebastian Meyer from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, mm-hmm, as opposed to New Greenwich, uh, this is what he says. Let's say we receive the response from extraterrestrials to one of the messages we have beamed out into the cosmos over the years, such as the hello from Earth message. In your opinion, back here on Earth, where in society or in our daily lives, do you think the knowledge that we no longer are the only known life in the universe, would this have the biggest impact, school, religion, business, what?

• 11:23David Grinspoon?

  So the question isn't would it have an impact, or what kind of an impact would it have, but more specifically, where would it have the biggest?

• 11:30Chuck Nice?

  The biggest impact.

• 11:31David Grinspoon?

  If we learned about-

• 11:33Chuck Nice?

  That we were not alone.

• 11:34David Grinspoon?

  Equivocally, if we got knowledge of company out there. What do you think, David, about that? Where would it have the biggest impact?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Well, um, you know, if you look back at the science fiction of the 50s or 40s, uh, it was assumed that the biggest impact would be on religion and that, that, that, um, people would go all, and get all upset and all of that. Well, that's very clearly not true anymore. Uh, the world's, uh, um, several of the world's biggest religions, um, uh, Buddhism and Hinduism were all, always compatible with, uh, a plurality of worlds. Judaism, it turns out, the, uh, in the Talmud, um, there's always been discussion of plurality of worlds. Mormonism is based-

• 12:17Chuck Nice?

  Based on that.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  The notion of plurality of worlds.

• 12:20Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  And the Catholic Church has- Has in the last twenty years done a very, very substantial and impressive backpedaling on this issue and is now fully prepared under the tutelage of the Vatican astronomer Guy Consomniano. So, you know, there are some religions that would find it difficult and some of American fundamentalists have declared, and for no reason that makes any theological sense, that the Earth has to be 6,000 years old and there must be no other life form, but even these,

• 13:01Speaker 02

  shall we say, very emotionally invested conservative religious types have been hedging their bets. There was one, there was one I saw recently saying that there's no way you'll find real aliens out there, and we're not counting little scummy bats of bacteria you'll probably find out there. Which means they've already accepted the notion that there's probably life. They've merely drawn their line in the Drake equation at sapient intelligent life. Well, it's a legitimate position to take if you analyze the Drake equation and all the possibilities for why we seem to be alone.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Probably, in my opinion, one of the top ranked potential explanations is that intelligence is more difficult than we thought.

• 13:53Chuck Nice?

  And, and, and believe it or not, we're still having some difficulty with intelligence as we speak.

• 13:58David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I, I, I often wonder if, if there is intelligent life on Earth, not even just saying that as, as a joke, although it is a funny thing to say, but that if, if really, really intelligent extraterrestrials would look at Earth and regard it as a planet with intelligent life, is an interesting question to me. I like to think that one of the biggest effects that such a discovery would have would be on international.

• 14:25David Grinspoon?

  Diplomacy and even inter-ethnic relationships that it seems as though human beings when faced with an outside threat or even the knowledge of an outsider tend to pull together. And I think that faced with the clear evidence that there is somebody else out there that's not at all like us, that we would realize that we are all really like one another. And I, maybe it's just my wishful thinking or my upbringing, but I do tend to think that it really could have a catalytic effect on the way human beings get along on Earth. And that in turn could help us evolve into some kind of an intelligent species that

• 15:08David Grinspoon?

  might be worth talking to from the aliens' point of view.

• 15:11Chuck Nice?

  So we would all get together because now there's, I hate to say it, a common enemy.

• 15:16David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, or at least a common other.

• 15:19Chuck Nice?

  Right, right, exactly. But you know, that's the way human beings do it. Like, you know, we're, we come together because, you know, the, you know, it's like the friend of my friend is my friend, you know, that whole thing, so.

• 15:34David Grinspoon?

  Absolutely. I mean, I think it wouldn't, you couldn't help but feel like our differences between, differences with one another were somewhat diminished by the thought that there's somebody out there really different that we are now interacting with in some way.

• 15:48Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm, okay. That's fascinating stuff. I love it. Well, let's move on. We have, um, this is a bit more of a technical question. This is Camden Margolis from Facebook wants to know, how can we make our planet more detectable using radio waves? Now, you know, you said that there was a controversy as to whether we should, but is there a way that we can actually do, do this to make it even more detectable?

• 16:17David Grinspoon?

  Absolutely. The question of whether we should is, is one that David and I have discussed a lot. But David, just how, if you decided you wanted to, how would, and by the way, only have about a minute here, but how would you make our planet really detectable if you decided it was a good idea?

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Well, bring back the Cold War. The Earth was at its maximum detectability during the 1980s. We were very noisy, and then we replaced those huge television broadcast antennas with cable and undersea cables, and the huge gigantic World War III preventing radars went away. So we're a lot quieter now, but even at its max in the 1980s, if you actually do the calculations, I Love Lucy dissipates into noise within half a light year. You would need an antenna the size of the moon aimed at the Earth to be able to detect our diffuse radio signals.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Now, there's an exception, and that's coherent laser-like radio beams. And there are about a dozen antennas on this planet that can transmit those. They're called planetary radars, like Aracibo and Goldstone, and Evpatoria and Crimea. And these are the ones that the really serious Meti people want to use. And fortunately, some of us have been able to stop them, not because we're so totally paranoid, but because we want discussions of the pros and cons before you change a fundamental parameter of this planet without an environmental impact statement.

• 17:55David Grinspoon?

  Right. If we're going to be speaking for all of Earth and making ourselves visible in the cosmos, there's an argument that we really ought to have a conversation about this and involve the people of the planet. We're going to have to take a break now, and we'll have more StarTalk All-Stars when we come back. This is StarTalk All-Stars, and so what do we have? Chuck Nice, we're doing reader questions here, and who's got a question for us?

• 18:23Chuck Nice?

  We've got more cosmic queries taken from all over the Internet, and some good questions so far. Let me backtrack here, get one that I passed over. This is Nate Carlson from Ottawa, Canada. And this is what he says, "With 100 billion galaxies full of stars, there's probably other life out there." Well, thanks a lot Nate, I'm glad you chimed in on that. "But how close together do we need to be to notice each other? If we assume aliens have radio telescopes with similar sensitivity to ours, how far from Earth could they be and actually discern any of our radio signals? So, how close would our neighbors have to be that we scream out of our window and they hear us?"

• 19:02David Grinspoon?

  That's a good question, and that is one of the few questions, perhaps, in this whole field of SETI, that we can actually answer quantitatively. There's so much that's subjective and subject to opinion and interpretation, but that's a calculation, and it goes back to in 1959, when the first ever serious SETI paper was published by Giuseppe Ciconi and Philip Morrison in Nature magazine, and they calculated that with Earth's most powerful radio telescope, you could communicate clear across the galaxy with another radio telescope of the same power. The problem is, of course, that that's going to take a long, long time. You know, if you're going more than 1,000 light-years, it's going to take more than

• 19:46David Grinspoon?

  1,000 years. So there's a time element as well. We have the equipment, and presumably they would have the equipment, to communicate over a long distance, but the farther away you get, then you get into these crazy situations where it might take longer than your civilization has been around to have a conversation. David Brin, do you have any comments on this relationship between distance and power, and how close the aliens need to be to have a reasonable interaction?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Well, there are two really important aspects to this. One is, for about 30, 40 years, we used the classic Drake equation, which said, "All right, life evolves in these little places around the galaxy, and that's all we have to calculate." But then it was pointed out that interstellar travel is not impossible, certainly not with robots that might copy themselves. And probably colonization of some kind or another is possible, in which case, you're not, you're talking about more like spreading zones. And how long would it take for such a spreading zone if you had starships that just traveled 10% of the speed of light and made planted colonies?

• 21:00Speaker 02

  And then they build up their civilization and then spread out and planted more colonies? It turns out you could fill the galaxy within 60 million years, which is an eye blink.

• 21:09David Grinspoon?

  It's nothing.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the question of where is everybody and why aren't we seeing them is made vastly worse if you allow any kind of interstellar travel.

• 21:22David Grinspoon?

  Right, because then if they started anywhere, they should already be everywhere.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  That's right, and so one of the things I talk about in my novel Existence is how when we get out to the asteroid belt or the Kuiper Belt, we may find an entire civilization or perhaps they fought of various types of space probes that were sent by previous cultures. And we'll probably be sending such self-replicating probes. But the other half of the question is, you know, how likely is it that at any of these spacing intervals, we're going to likely be able to detect others? And those calculations have been done and it turns out we're at a borderline.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  The Earth itself would only be detectable to very super-advanced aliens with huge antennas that they aim deliberately at us for a year. And then they might pick up "I love Lucy." So, right now-

• 22:23David Grinspoon?

  And then they'd probably change the channel.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  That's right. The barn door excuse for Meti is, "It's too late, they already know about us." But it turns out that is simply and scientifically wrong. The people who want to use these planetary radars to send focused beams out into space going "yoo-hoo," they intend to change-

• 22:48Speaker 02

  The current situation by yelling very, very loudly and very focusedly.

• 22:54Chuck Nice?

  So now the the fear of that would be that we attract the Borg. Is that basically it? And before you know it, we're all serving overlords that come here and.

• 23:03David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I mean, the thing is, you you can put it that way, and it's it's easy to make fun of because there are there's so much questionable science fiction about about aliens coming to invade us. And a lot of people think it's even it's a silly thing to worry about. But David Brenner has written about this, and he's he's actually persuaded me that if you if you use the precautionary principle, you have to ask, well, can we prove that it's not a threat? And are we certain that it's not? And are there some logical explanations for what we observe that might be consistent with dangerous aliens? And then if you admit that you can't prove that it's not some existential threat, then you have to say, OK, well, then,

• 23:48David Grinspoon?

  what on what basis do we decide that it's OK to risk the future of Earth's biosphere? I got you. So.

• 23:57Chuck Nice?

  It's a big risk.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  It turns out that that there are mature ways to do this. Twenty years ago, the genetic engineering and genetic research communities in biology hold a moratorium on genetic research and had a meeting at Asilomar, California, and came out with better practices, best practices that'll let us have our cake and eat it too, let us have advances in genetic research while taking some very, very solid and mature precautions. And the NASA has a planetary protection office, whose job it is to make sure that the space probes we land on other worlds.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Have been sterilized as best we can. But not in a way that makes it so that we can't explore. But but just as best we can. And of course, these precautions are done 10 times, 100 times as strongly. If we're going to be returning stuff, you know, to earth that might infect the earth. So there are mature ways of doing this.

• 25:05Chuck Nice?

  Well, from what you say, though, the the the it only takes one space herpes. That's all it takes is one space herpes to ruin everything, David.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  And those space herpes, you know, the viruses, the herpes?

• 25:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  They're this big.

• 25:18Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. You know what I'm saying?

• 25:21David Grinspoon?

  We don't want to mess with that.

• 25:22Chuck Nice?

  And nobody wants to put a salve on the sore that shows up from that space herpes. That's all I'm saying.

• 25:30David Grinspoon?

  We're talking we're talking about safe SETI here.

• 25:32Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 25:33David Grinspoon?

  Remember to practice safe SETI, folks.

• 25:35Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know what? I want to switch gears here since you guys brought up dangerous aliens. It it it actually brought to mind a little game I want to play with the both of you. And it's called From the Brain of Bryn or the Dump of Trump? So since we're talking about dangerous aliens, I figure what a perfect way to work Donald Trump into this conversation. Because David Brin is known for making some pretty brainy quotes and turning a very cool phrase. And Donald Trump is known for saying stuff. So. So this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to read a quote. And Dr. David Grin spoon, I want you to tell me, was it from actually the brain of Bryn?

• 26:20Chuck Nice?

  Or was it from the dump of Trump? And then David Brin, I want you to confirm whether or not you actually said this. Is that cool?

• 26:28David Grinspoon?

  I'm game.

• 26:29Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go.

• 26:30David Grinspoon?

  Let's give it a try.

• 26:31Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Actually, let's see if the you know what? And I'm expecting a 100% success rate from you, Dr. Funky Spoon.

• 26:40David Grinspoon?

  I know. If I if I can't tell David Brin from Donald Trump, then I don't know. I might need to get my PhD revoked.

• 26:46Chuck Nice?

  OK, I'm gonna hold it. All right, now we got stakes in the game. We are playing for Dr. Funky Spoon's PhD.

• 26:54David Grinspoon?

  What did I just say?

• 26:55Chuck Nice?

  If you lose this game, you are no longer Dr. David Grinspoon.

• 26:59David Grinspoon?

  I don't want to have to go back to grad school, please.

• 27:02Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Here's the first quote. Self-righteous people can talk themselves into forgetting that they are a part of civilization. They can feed on that culture bringing it down. It's happened many times in the past. It could happen to us again. Is that from the brain of Bryn or the dump of Trump? Dr. Funky Spoon.

• 27:22David Grinspoon?

  That strikes me as a very reasoned and intelligent analysis. And I'm going to go with the brain of Bryn for that one.

• 27:32Chuck Nice?

  Okay, David Brin, did you indeed say that?

• 27:36David Grinspoon?

  He's giving us the thumbs up.

• 27:38Chuck Nice?

  Thumbs up through the camera, so that is a yes. And what was the context of that, David? What were you actually talking about when you were talking about self-righteous people? Very quickly, just so we-

• 27:47Speaker 02

  We're all drug fiends to one degree or another. We get addicted to wholesome things like our children, like our skill and our professions and-

• 27:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, science fiction.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  And, and science fiction. And unfortunately, when we can't find wholesome things to be addicted to, we go for drugs or alcohol or gambling.

• 28:08Chuck Nice?

  Now, let's leave me out of this, David.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  The easiest drug in the world to satisfy your addictive cravings is self-righteous rage.

• 28:17Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  And, and if you can return to a self-righteous snit-

• 28:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Um, regularly at intervals, and we all know people like that. And we all know that we ourselves are capable of that.

• 28:31Chuck Nice?

  Well, it feels good.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:33Chuck Nice?

  It feels good to be self-righteous. I gotta be honest.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  It's the biggest addiction of all. I am so right.

• 28:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:40David Grinspoon?

  And everyone else is so wrong.

• 28:41Chuck Nice?

  All right, all right, let's continue with our game. For the brain of Bryn or the dump of Trump, posing a question to Dr. Funky Spoon to figure out if he can figure out who said this. Who said this? I have never seen a thin person drinking diet coke.

• 28:59David Grinspoon?

  I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.

• 29:02Chuck Nice?

  Was that from the brain of Bryn or the dump of Trump?

• 29:05David Grinspoon?

  I am going to go with the dump of Trump on that one.

• 29:09Chuck Nice?

  David, did you ever, did you ever go on record as saying, uh, I have never seen a thin person? Uh, no, he's giving us the thumbs down.

• 29:17David Grinspoon?

  Wow, I'm pretty good at this.

• 29:18Chuck Nice?

  Yes, and you are good at this. All right, so far you are batting 1,000, but guess what? There is no room for error because if you screw up, we are taking your PhD.

• 29:28David Grinspoon?

  No.

• 29:29Chuck Nice?

  Oh, this game is exciting. All right, who said this? Okay, such a simple statement, so this might be a little confusing. I find humans tremendously interesting.

• 29:40David Grinspoon?

  Whoa.

• 29:40Chuck Nice?

  Hmm, hmm, the brain of Bryn or the dump of Trump?

• 29:45David Grinspoon?

  Wow.

• 29:47David Grinspoon?

  Oh, this is almost a trick question.

• 29:49Chuck Nice?

  Almost.

• 29:50David Grinspoon?

  Anybody could say that.

• 29:54David Grinspoon?

  I'm going to guess that you're throwing me a curve ball here, and I'm going to go with the dump of Trump.

• 30:03Chuck Nice?

  Now, I'm just letting you know, your PhD is on the line here.

• 30:09Chuck Nice?

  So I don't want to influence your answer in any way, shape, or form. Are you sure you want to go with that?

• 30:18David Grinspoon?

  I am going to change my vote.

• 30:27David Grinspoon?

  And I'm gonna say David Brin said that.

• 30:31Chuck Nice?

  David Brin, did you indeed say, "I find humans tremendously interesting"?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Yes, sure, yeah.

• 30:39David Grinspoon?

  Wow, I am so good. I'm just following my instincts here.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  You'll notice, you'll notice it's said as if by an outsider.

• 30:50Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  I have been accused of, which I have accused of being, in one of my novels, I even lay in clues in one of the, in, on one of the pages that, uh, that I'm, uh, actually the front man for an alien.

• 31:07David Grinspoon?

  Ah, see, so in fact, you and I could be practicing, uh, communication with extraterrestrial intelligence right now.

• 31:12Chuck Nice?

  Right now and not even know it.

• 31:13David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 31:14Chuck Nice?

  I believe we just got a, an exclusive here, people. I believe we just found out who David Brin really is.

• 31:19David Grinspoon?

  He really is.

• 31:20Chuck Nice?

  Okay?

• 31:23Chuck Nice?

  Alright, let's do one more, one more. From the brain of Bren or the dump of Trump, okay?

• 31:31Chuck Nice?

  Let me see. I'm gonna give you the toughest one there is, Dr. Funky Spoon. And by the way, I call him that because his Twitter handle is @DrFunkySpoon.

• 31:39David Grinspoon?

  Thank you.

• 31:40Chuck Nice?

  For those of you who are wondering, it's not like I just made up some crazy nickname for Dr. Grin Spoon. Okay, here we go. This is the toughest one. If I were running The View, I would fire Rosie O'Donnell. I mean, I'd look her right in her fat, ugly face and I'd say, "Rosie, you're fired." Who said that? David Brin or Donald Trump?

• 32:03David Grinspoon?

  Well, you know, I've known David Brin for a few years now. And I've heard him say a lot of different kinds of things, but I'm gonna say that is probably from the dump of Trump.

• 32:14Chuck Nice?

  So David Brin, I'm asking you, did you indeed look Donald, I mean Rosie O'Donnell in her fat, ugly face and say, "You're fired"?

• 32:25Chuck Nice?

  I confess.

• 32:29David Grinspoon?

  Wow, you fooled me on that one.

• 32:31Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's hilarious.

• 32:36Chuck Nice?

  She's never going to speak to me again. Or for the first time. Nah, that's very cool. Alright, that's our game, that's our game. That was good stuff, guys. That was a fun little departure. And let's get back to our cosmic queries and some very serious questions about signs of life in the universe and calling ET.

• 32:54David Grinspoon?

  What do we got, Chuck?

• 32:55Chuck Nice?

  Here we go.

• 32:58Chuck Nice?

  This is from Jeff Carlisle. He comes to us from Facebook and he wants to know this. Does NASA or SETI have a set of guidelines for what to do in the event of extraterrestrial contact? How do we respond? Does the public find out? How much information can we share? Are they already here? What's going on?

• 33:14David Grinspoon?

  Oh yeah, good question, and the answer is yes.

• 33:17Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 33:17David Grinspoon?

  There is a protocol. The SETI community agreed on a protocol that was widely ratified for what to do if a message is received.

• 33:31Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 33:32David Grinspoon?

  And it's been much harder to get the SETI community to agree on the next question, which is what to do if somebody from Earth wants to send a message. We've talked about that a little bit, but if we just-

• 33:43Chuck Nice?

  So now can we get a message?

• 33:45David Grinspoon?

  Then the idea is first you confirm it.

• 33:48Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 33:49David Grinspoon?

  Talk to another observatory first to make sure they see it too. So you rule out a false alarm.

• 33:54Chuck Nice?

  So it cannot be an anomaly. It has to be a confirmed communication.

• 34:00David Grinspoon?

  Yes.

• 34:00Chuck Nice?

  A reception of communication.

• 34:01David Grinspoon?

  So you don't alert the media when you're still not sure.

• 34:04Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 34:05David Grinspoon?

  But once you're sure, and you become sure by alerting other observatories, so they can check it out too, so it's not just some local thing you're observing. And then once you're sure, the protocol is you alert the political leaders, the media. There's a list, there's a protocol. I can't tell you the exact order, but it's the opposite of secrecy. It's like total transparency once we're sure.

• 34:27Chuck Nice?

  But what we do know is Twitter is not the first to find out. Like you don't just tweet out, "Man, they're here, they contacted us."

• 34:36David Grinspoon?

  Well, it's an interesting question, because when these protocols were devised, it was pre-Twitter. But certainly, the person sitting there at the telescope receiver, if they're being responsible, is not going to tweet out, "Wow, I think I see an alien." But once the news, it's decided that yes, this is good, we can release it. I'm sure social media will play a huge role in that.

• 34:56Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 34:57David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. David, do you have anything to add to the protocol for SETI contact?

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was on the committee that drafted it. And one of the bits that I was most proud of was the portion of the protocol that says, "And you will leave to the original discoverer the right and honor of making the announcement." The protocol already makes it very clear that it's, nobody's going to be keeping this thing secret. But by leaving it to the discoverer to- Choose the time and place for a public announcement. This sets in a little bit of a pause. This sets in a little bit of a delay, a phase factor, so that it won't go out on Twitter. So that humanity has at least that, you know, one day or so, or two days in which a sage

• 35:42Speaker 02

  scientist, leader of a team somewhere, can take a deep breath and think about what to say and what to do. Um, that, I think that even the, I'm the author of the Transparent Society, and yet I think that a one-day or two-day delay, you know, for a little bit of pause and consideration may be wise. You don't know what the circumstances will be.

• 36:05Chuck Nice?

  Let's just hope it's not my teenage daughter, because it will go like this. I got some big news. Guess what it is?

• 36:11David Grinspoon?

  We need to take a pause now, but we'll continue with our Q and A and wrap this up in a little while. Thank you. Welcome back to StarTalk All-Stars. I'm David Grin spoon, and I'm here with Chuck Nice.

• 36:26Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 36:27David Grinspoon?

  And our guest, David Brin. And we're talking about communicating with aliens and including the controversial question of whether we should be revealing ourselves to the cosmos, or whether we should be a little bit cautious, not knowing what may be out there. There have been some famous voices out there. You may have heard Dr. Stephen Hawking has famously said that aliens could come and do us harm. David Brin has been cautious, and he's told us a little bit about that now, and maybe we'll hear a little bit more. There are other people who say, oh, damn the torpedoes, let's just send messages and see what's out there. What are we worried about? So it's an interesting debate. I, my own opinion is that we should, as David says, at least have some kind of a global

• 37:11David Grinspoon?

  conversation about it before we just decide that we're going to speak for all of Earth and reveal ourselves for all of time. Maybe we can't know for sure what the dangers are, but we, it's probably worth at least having some kind of a consultation and not being so arrogant as to say, ah, the hell with it, let's just see what happens.

• 37:31Chuck Nice?

  Man, when you're playing cosmic poker, you don't want to show your hand. You know, at least until the proper time presents itself.

• 37:37David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I mean, it is. It is kind of a puzzle. I'd be interested to know what David Brin thinks of this. But when do you know when it's enough? When are we really ready to say, okay, we know enough to start talking? But at least we could attempt to have some kind of a global buy in. David, do you have a quick thought on when it will be okay to broadcast?

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Well, it's not so much a particular sum of knowledge that is my criterion, but the rate at which we're learning. We are like a four year old who wakes up in a jungle that's quiet, maybe too quiet to use the cliche. And what do you do under those circumstances? Well, you try to learn as much as you can quietly, because there are some conceivable dangers, I think Stephen Hawking exaggerated. But it would be good if we were to pay attention to the fact that across the last several thousand years, every time a technologically advanced civilization or species encountered a less advanced civilization or species,

• 38:45Speaker 02

  the less advanced one suffered very, very badly, and that's 100% of the time. Given that, perhaps we should have a little bit of a conversation before running through the jungle going you-hoo, especially since we're learning so fast. That's the thing. Just 20 years ago, we knew of no planets outside our solar system. Now we know of almost 10,000.

• 39:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  So at this rate of learning, why not listen and learn? So that our children will have the option, with all that added information, of deciding for themselves whether they want to shout you-hoo.

• 39:22David Grinspoon?

  That seems eminently sensible.

• 39:24Chuck Nice?

  It does, and that's why you don't do it. Because recklessness is far more exciting, David. Let's just get it out there. Show the whole universe, like, you know, when you say reveal, forget reveal. Let's flash the universe. We're here.

• 39:37David Grinspoon?

  Oh, you're so bold, Chuck.

• 39:40David Grinspoon?

  You know, this also happens to be coming up at a time when we are faced With a range of global issues that require us to try to have some sort of global decision making or global consultative process. I'm talking about global warming and other issues. It wouldn't hurt for us to learn how to at least attempt to make some sort of a global decision about things.

• 40:01Chuck Nice?

  A consensus, right.

• 40:02David Grinspoon?

  You're never going to reach a perfect consensus with every villager of every place on earth, but you can at least make an honest attempt.

• 40:08Chuck Nice?

  Yes, absolutely. And by the way, David, you are a science fiction writer, and I just want to say that I'm about to submit a treatment for Disney's Cosmic Jungle book, which I think is brilliant you just came up with.

• 40:22David Grinspoon?

  Can I write the songs?

• 40:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man, let me tell you something. There's room for everybody on this train.

• 40:31David Grinspoon?

  Excellent.

• 40:32Chuck Nice?

  So let's move on.

• 40:33David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, how about another question?

• 40:35Chuck Nice?

  Let's jump into another, and this is from Shelley Sock. Shelley Sock, at Shelley Sock on Twitter. She said, "What would you most want to know about the aliens and for them to know about us?" So in the game of getting to know you, whether the two most important things that you think should be in that exchange?

• 40:56David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, good question, Shelley. What would we most want to know about them and what will we most want them to know about us?

• 41:03Chuck Nice?

  How about you personally, and of course, David Brin too, personally?

• 41:08David Grinspoon?

  So my personal, if I could ask them one thing, it would be, "How did you do it? How did you survive with a technological civilization?" Because I'm assuming, and there's good math behind this, that anybody we hear from has had a technological civilization for quite some time. They're not brand-new babies like us. And therefore, they've solved this riddle that we're struggling with now. How do you have this exponentially increasing more and more powerful technology and yet not somehow, and yet use it to survive, not to do yourself in? You could easily see we could do one or the other. I'm thinking somebody we hear from has learned how to use technology in a mature way.

• 41:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:49David Grinspoon?

  Learned how to handle this global civilization puzzle. So if I could ask them one thing, it'd be like, "Hey, you got any tips for us? How do we do this?"

• 41:56Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 41:57David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. David Brin, what would you most like to know about them?

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Well, I would ask, um, I would, I'm a little bit persnickety. I would ask, why do we have to ask you for that help? Why weren't you helping us all along? What took you so long?

• 42:18Chuck Nice?

  Where the hell were you? What took you so long?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Never been a believer in ancient aliens. The whole notion that we deprecate ourselves is a good thing. We flagellate ourselves about how we aren't living up to our hopes and dreams. But to be honest, as animals go, we're actually pretty damn nice. And we've tried very, very hard. And I look across the last six, eight thousand years, because I've been around the whole time, and at all the hardworking, desperately eager, well-meaning people who piled rocks on rocks on rocks to make pyramids in appeals to some kinds of godlike beings to come and help us. And to be honest, we advance to this level ourselves.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  And in my opinion, that's a point of pride. It's a fantastic accomplishment. And I'm not going to let aliens claim credit for it.

• 43:12Chuck Nice?

  I like the way you think. That is really good stuff.

• 43:14David Grinspoon?

  We're learning a lot about David Brenner, by the way. Not only does he find humans really interesting, but he's been here for at least six thousand years. So the plot thickens.

• 43:21Chuck Nice?

  The very beginning of the earth itself, six thousand years.

• 43:24David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, right.

• 43:26Chuck Nice?

  You know what? On that note, let me, let me just, I want to do something with you guys, because, you know, in reading both of your materials, one thing, and seeing you both talk, you know, deliver your talks, what I find that you both have in common as a thread is this tremendous amount of positivity. And your look and outlook perspective on life here on earth and the universe itself is extremely positive. And right now, we live in probably one of the most negative times that I can remember. You know, I'm not that old, but still, I can't, it's so palpable, the negativity that we're experiencing,

• 44:10Chuck Nice?

  primarily through the media. So I want, I wanted to do something with you guys, a little something called the Genius Pep Talk. Okay? Now, you guys are the geniuses. And so what I'd like you to do is to, you know, in a very succinct fashion, Tell us, tell the world, all of us listening, why it's gonna be okay? Well, it's, it's gonna be okay, but why is it gonna be okay?

• 44:37David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, now let's, could we cue the Bob Marley, "Don't Worry About A Thing"? Every little thing's gonna be alright.

• 44:42Chuck Nice?

  There you go, right.

• 44:43David Grinspoon?

  But without, without singing it, and I'm very interested to hear, hear David's answer to this, and I, a lot of my thinking has been influenced over the years by, by, by reading what he has to say about such matters. But I would say that you're right, people are focused on the negative, on the obstacles we face. We do face some serious obstacles, I mean, you know, climate change, say no more, and population, and you know, there are, there are a lot of scary aspects to our existence right now. On the other hand, I think a lot of that negativity comes from thinking very small and being obsessed with the, with what's going on right now and what, what's the prospects are for the next few years.

• 45:26David Grinspoon?

  But if you take the longer view, the 5,000 year, the 10,000 year, the million year view, and you look at the progress of the human race, and, and David alluded to this, we are a problem-solving species. We have faced bigger obstacles than we're facing now. The human race has almost gone extinct before, and we survived by reinventing ourselves and finding new ways to cooperate together. If you look at our long-term, I'm talking million-year history now, that's who we are. We're the problem-solving inventive species. And I think that we're just faced with another set of challenges now, and that we'll look back at this time, a few centuries from now and go, wow, they really thought they were stuck with that silly energy system

• 46:06David Grinspoon?

  that was messing up their atmosphere before they invented the, and then now everything's fine. We were inventive, and people are, people are recognizing collectively, globally, that we're in the situation we're in now, and I think that recognition will breed solutions. And I, even if the next century is troubling, and it may well be, I predict that the next millennium is going to be a really bright one for the human species.

• 46:32Chuck Nice?

  Fantastic, well done. I'm gonna sum up what you said by Dr. David Grin spoon says, "Human beings, like Madonna's career, we're always reinventing ourselves." So.

• 46:45David Grinspoon?

  There you go. David Brin, tell us why the future is not nearly as bad as some people like to say it is.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

• 46:58David Grinspoon?

  See, he's singing too.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  All right. The thing is that I agree with everything that David said, but the problem is, human beings get into traps. And one of the traps that we've seen for the last 6,000 years has been feudal pyramids of power that become hyper-conservative and then constrain and repress our creativity and our innovation. The great historian Arnold Toynbee said, "Those civilizations that thrive are those that invest in their rambunctious creative minorities." And we've created a civilization that's good at that. It's the only diamond-shaped human civilization in which a well-off middle class is unafraid

• 47:40Speaker 02

  of the rich and outnumbers the poor. And that's ours. And it's an experiment. It's a revolution. And we did look at it a revolution. And there are those in our society right now that are trying to destroy our confidence and hammer us back into the feudal pyramid that's the traditional human modality. And if that happens, I think that they will squash our creativity enough that we could be in very serious trouble. And I think that's one of the reasons why there's been a lot of propaganda, not just on the right, but also on the far left, that has been gloom and doom and anti-science, when in fact, we're a scientific people. We're a brave people. We're a competent and explorational

• 48:25Speaker 02

  people. And 2015 was the best year for exploration in the history of our species. So it's not just humanity that has to be resilient and innovative, but this particular culture.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Has to regain its confidence, its belief that we are the bold scientific revolutionaries who can change everything.

• 48:47David Grinspoon?

  I think we get the gist of what you're saying about humanity here and that you feel as though we're actually full of promise and we really appreciate your perspective here. Would love to hear more about it. But we have to wrap up now. Thank you all so much for joining us today. This has been StarTalk All-Stars. I'm David Grin spoon on Twitter at Dr Funky Spoon. My co-host Chuck Nice on Twitter at Chuck Nice Comic. And our guest today has been David Brin on Twitter at David Brin. Until next time, this is StarTalk All-Stars.