Extraterrestrial Mashup

Search for ET on this StarTalk mashup – featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, David Grinspoon, Seth Shostak, Michael Ian Black, Chuck Nice, Jill Tarter, David Brin, Allen Saakyan, and Doug Vakoch – as we explore where to look and debate whether to send signals ourselves. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/extraterrestrial-mashup/

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hi, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and you're listening to a special mashup edition. You'll hear a mishmash of some of our favorite moments around a specific topic using a range of expert guests and co-hosts. This week, we're talking about the search for extraterrestrials.

• 0:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk at the American Museum of Natural History, and we're talking about the scientific search for alien intelligence, featuring my interview with SETI co-founder Jill Tarter. Let's check it out. How much of the galaxy have we actually searched for life? Because every time I'm out in the street, someone says, "We've looked and we haven't found any. Are we alone?" And I'm trying to find a way to tell them we're not likely alone, but they know we've been looking for a while. So how do you deal with this?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  So I try and tell people about all the different ways you might have to look to get it right. All the different frequencies, be at the right time, looking at the right place.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All this has to come together.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Right. Now, that big volume that you need to search through, let's set that equal to the volume of the Earth's oceans.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  All that water. So how much have we sampled in the last 50 years?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  One 12-ounce glass.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  It's not a lot. And so if you were looking for fish in the ocean, are there any fish in the Earth's ocean? Here's a glass. I'm gonna scoop up a glass, and I'm gonna look at it. And there aren't any fish in there. Can you claim that there are no fish in the ocean?

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you'd be stupid to do so.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Short-sighted.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Sure. Stupid.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're sticking with stupid.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you were right in the first place.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm a, I can't say stupid. You're short-sighted. You'd be, you'd be inexcusably egocentric.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  That's right. And so, it's the fact that the, it's hard to comprehend how big the search is. So you can't understand how little we've done. However, exponentials will save us. Because our ability to search.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The growth of technology.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Computing.

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exponential growth of storage, retrieval of information.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  All that stuff. It gets faster and better all the time. And all the good stuff's at the end, right? It's really getting fast.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so next we might get a garbage pail of water.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Swimming pool.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Swimming pool of water. And then some minnows.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, could be.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  And then a lake. And then, very soon, an ocean.

• 2:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tonight, we're talking about listening to the skies for a chance to make contact with an alien civilization. And I got one of the world's experts on it, Seth Shostak, friend and colleague. Seth.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My comedic co-host tonight, Michael Ian Black, welcome.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 3:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And right now, it's time for Cosmic Queries.

• 3:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love Cosmic Queries. These are questions called from the internet, and they're all about sort of the search for life in the universe. So, let's do it.

• 3:31Michael Ian Black?

  David Hamilton, Mayagaz, Puerto Rico. Would it be more likely that any intelligent signal we detect is simply an echo of life now long gone? How could we tell the difference? And if we couldn't, can we still claim we aren't alone?

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Seth.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, look, people ask that. You pick up a signal, it took, you know, who knows how many years to get here? Maybe they're gone. Well, maybe they are gone. But you know what? The time it takes for a signal to get here might be tens, hundreds, thousands of years. You know, the US Post Office might give me a letter from my aunt tomorrow. And maybe my aunt has died since she sent that letter. It's possible. But the lifetime of ants is pretty long compared to the functioning of the postal service. So the chances are she's still around. I think that if we pick up a signal, yeah, maybe it's a hundred-year-old signal. But I'd like to think that they haven't self-destructed in the last century.

• 4:21Michael Ian Black?

  But I think it's a good question because ultimately, does it matter? I mean, we're receiving this signal. That answers a fundamental question.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think this is an important point because we've talked about the fact that maybe there's different kinds of intelligence and maybe we'll never understand the signal. I think that's pretty likely, actually. But it doesn't matter because what you've learned is that what's happened on this planet has happened in many other places.

• 4:44Michael Ian Black?

  Good, next. Denny North, New Orleans, Louisiana. Could we send entangled particles to an extraterrestrial intelligence to communicate with them in real time? Seth?

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Well, you could send the particles. But the facts are that, you know, quantum entanglement, very appealing, but it doesn't allow faster-than-light communication, despite what many people think. Physics doesn't allow you to send information faster than the speed of light, unless Al Einstein is wrong and he's never been shown to be wrong. Sorry.

• 5:15Michael Ian Black?

  Right.

• 5:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, even when he was wrong, he was right.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:20Michael Ian Black?

  Well, you're talking about the cosmological constant.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, exactly.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, yeah, the cosmological constant, he put it in his equations, which would represent some kind of negative gravity in the universe. And it turned out it wasn't necessary to be in his equation for the universe to expand, which he discovered a few years later after Hubble discovered an expanding universe. He said it was the biggest mistake, biggest blunder of his life. And then we would find the cosmological constant in the actual universe. It's called dark energy. And so I've concluded that Einstein's biggest blunder was saying that that was his biggest blunder. Yeah, so even when he was wrong, he was right. That's how you know you're badass.

• 6:03Michael Ian Black?

  Good, next. James Coltes, Bentonville, Arkansas. If SETI discovered extraterrestrial intelligence, how long would it take to share the discovery to the public and what is the process involved with making it public?

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would say a billionth of a second.

• 6:19Michael Ian Black?

  Do you tell the president first? Does the president get to know first?

• 6:23Speaker 02

  No. Look, we don't have a call list. You know, start with this, will you? I mean, we have had false alarms. In 1997, we had a false alarm that, for most of the day, looked like the real deal. And I kept waiting for the Pentagon to call, the White House to call, somebody to call. The only people that called were the New York Times. And the facts are that they were calling within hours of us finding the signal.

• 6:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so this notion that the government is somehow in control, and no, this is not the case. The government is not that high functioning.

• 6:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got one? That was it?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  That was it.

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got the questions? Excellent.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Our special guest tonight, all the way here from California, which is even beyond New Jersey, Dr. Doug Vakoch. Doug, come on out.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Doug is the president and founder of METI International. It's M-E-T-I, and that's messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. So we're not going to just talk about looking for the aliens. We're going to talk about how you might communicate with them and maybe what you would say if you did. Doug, thanks. Thanks for coming. Great to be here. All right. All right, first off, how many of you people out there think there is life in space? Not the kind of pond scum you may find at home, but intelligent life?

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By applause. So the people who are listening, how many of you believe in that sort of thing?

• 7:47Michael Ian Black?

  Wow. Pretty good.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  On radio, nobody can hear you raise your hand unless you have arthritis. And how many of you think, no, they're not out there?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  All right, get that guy out of here. All right.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Let's start with a panel here. What do we know about life in space? What have we found so far? Doug, what have we found so far?

• 8:10Speaker 04

  Well, we've found a lot of static so far, and that's what we've been looking for. So SETI scientists, scientists involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, look for radio signals, unlike the kind of radio that galaxies and stars make. We haven't found those yet, but I think the big news is, over the last 20 years, there've been a lot of things we have found. So, just over 20 years ago, we knew of no stars that have planets. Now we go out and look at the night sky, and virtually all of those stars have planets. Maybe one out of five of those has planets at just the right distance that it could support life with liquid water.

• 8:53Speaker 04

  We didn't know about that when SETI began, and we know that life can survive in incredibly diverse environments here on Earth, from the Arctic tundra of the north, to acid-hot springs, to the core of nuclear reactors.

• 9:11Chuck Nice?

  To even Camden, New Jersey.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, even Camden, New Jersey. So if life can survive there, it's a very good chance it's out there. Now we just need to find it.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  All right, so what you're saying is, there's a lot of real estate, but we haven't seen any condos?

• 9:29Speaker 04

  No condos. Now, there was actually a suggestion that there could be not just a condo, but an entire city in orbit. This was a star that actually, you looked at the SETI Institute, and we looked at Medhi International, and it was a star that the Kepler mission. This is a NASA mission to look for planets around other stars. And they look at that by seeing the dimming as the planet goes. So if you're the Kepler spacecraft, you're observing a star, I'm a star, and every time a planet goes between us, there's a little dimming. And if this is a planet the size of Jupiter or Saturn, one of the big ones in our solar system, the dimming would be less than 1%. There's something strange about this one star.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  Up to 20% dimming, and one of the explanations was, maybe it's an alien megastructure. So Seth, at the SETI Institute, used the Allan Telescope Array to say, "Well, if they're engineers there, maybe they're sending us radio signals. We used an optical observatory in Panama to see if they're sending brief laser pulses. No sign of that." And so, our expectation is, we're going to find a natural explanation. Nature is freakier than we can imagine, and in a lot of cases, these turned out to be false alarms. So, so far, unfortunately, no sign of ET's technology.

• 10:48Chuck Nice?

  Seth, before you go any further, can I ask what may be a silly question, since this is what you do? Is it necessary to point and listen in different directions? And if so, how do you know where to point and listen?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's actually, that's a good question, for which there's no terrifically good answer. The facts are, we don't know where the aliens are hanging out. I mean, you know, I never got a text message, "Hey, where they're going on? Love to get in touch." And we're over here. So, you can say, "Well, all right, the way to beat that rap is just to look at the entire sky." The trouble with that is, if you do that, you're spending most of your time looking in the wrong directions, right? You might liken it to finding life in the desert. You can look at the whole desert, but it might be more effective to just look at the oasis. Yeah. So, we try and do that. We look at nearby stars that Good analogy. might have planets, you know, that are the kind of stars and planets that might

• 11:42Speaker 02

  have life. Okay, so, that's SETI. But Doug here has another idea. Why wait for them to call, or why hang around, hoping to pick up their call? Why don't we try and take the initiative and get in touch? And that's Maddy. Tell them about Maddy.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  Well, SETI has always assumed that any alien that has the ability to transmit is also going to be motivated, and that they're just altruistically beaming messages here for our benefit. And we hope that's true, at least of some civilizations. So, that's why even at our organization, Maddy, we're still listening. We're looking for laser pulses. We're hopeful that that continues. But we also want to explore another option. And that is that they're not taking the initiative. That maybe in fact, life is out there much more widely spread than we had imagined. There was an Italian physicist called Enrico Fermi, who in 1950 said, "Well, if there's all this life out there, where are they?"

• 12:43Speaker 04

  Called the Fermi paradox. And one of the answers to the Fermi paradox is, maybe in fact, they are observing us, but that's it. They want to hear from us before they respond. So it's a little bit like, say you go to the zoo, and you're observing a bunch of zebras. And it's all very well and good, you're seeing them talk to one another. But what happens? One of those zebras turns toward you, looks to you in the eye, and starts pounding out a series of prime numbers. That establishes a very different relationship with that creature. It may just evoke a response. You're not gonna say, "Oh, they're just chatting with one another, they wanna talk to us." So that's what we're testing with MEDI, testing the zoo hypothesis to see whether even nearby stars might be inhabited.

• 13:26Chuck Nice?

  Now, in the zoo hypothesis, am I smoking anything, how shall I say, other than tobacco?

• 13:32Speaker 04

  You don't need to be smoking anything other than tobacco. You just gotta be willing to do the experiment. And you know, it's something that's unusual for a lot of astronomers, because astronomers are very good scientists, but it's a passive science. You just wait for the information to come in. That's what you have to do if you're trying to study a distant galaxy. It's a different mindset to say, "Wait, we can actually be more active. We can send out a message, and then get a reply back."

• 13:59Chuck Nice?

  Alright, so I hate to be silly here, because I know this is a serious conversation. But, I believe there was an episode of Star Trek where we kinda did that. And then we got something called the Borg. I'm not sure if anybody here is a Star Trek fan. But, you know, they weren't nice people!

• 14:18Speaker 04

  And the Borg out there, and you know, there are other people who share your views. Stephen Hawking has said, you know, if you get a signal, do not transmit, or the aliens might come here. I've got bad news for both you and Stephen Hawking.

• 14:32Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Which, by the way, I'm gonna write this down in my diary now.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  That you got compared with Stephen Hawking.

• 14:38Chuck Nice?

  Put me in a category with Stephen Hawking.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  You and Stephen Hawking are overlooking one critical point.

• 14:43Chuck Nice?

  What's that?

• 14:44Speaker 04

  Well, if the Borg want us, it's too late. Because they have already picked up I Love Lucy, they've picked up our radio signals. If you can travel, if you can build one of those huge Borg cubes, then picking up our radio signals is no big deal. I mean, Seth, you've run the numbers. If you look at how much our radio telescopes have grown, and then just continue that, 200, 300 years, we would be able to pick up our own level of leakage radiation, out to 500 light-years. So, the bad news is, it's too late. The good news is, it looks like there's not a big worry, because not only have our radio and TV signals been going out a long time, we have been giving evidence that we have

• 15:26Speaker 04

  life on Earth for 2.5 billion years, since the plankton started creating oxygen in the atmosphere. So if there are any really paranoid aliens who want to wipe out the competition, they have plenty of time to get here. And if they are on their way, I say, let's be proactive and say, we're much more interesting in interstellar conversation than being annihilated.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Look, I think we ought to come back to this, because this is a hot-button issue, whether it's a good idea to broadcast into space. But I'm still back with that zebra at the zoo that, you know, blinking prime numbers in my direction. I mean, my reaction to that would be, you and I are going on the road, because any zebra that could do that, I mean, what else can he do? Right? So, but, I think that the point is, you're assuming something about their psychology if you say, look, all we have to do is send them, you know, some interesting tweets or whatever, and then they will do something in return that will justify that effort. Now, you're trained in psychology, so...

• 16:24Speaker 04

  Absolutely. You have to assume their motivations. But that's what SETI scientists have been doing all along. We have been assuming that they are going to do the heavy lifting, that they are going to be transmitting for our benefit. And again, I hope that's true for some of the aliens. But not all aliens may have the same motivation. And even this idea of being altruistic, we know from looking at altruism on Earth that one form of altruism is called reciprocal altruism. You do something for me and I do something for you. The trick is, someone's got to make the first move. And it may be that they look at us and say, "Wait, we're supposed to go out of our way? We've been doing this for thousands or millions of years. We've been through this.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Not a big added advantage to contact you. You're the ones who have the most benefit, so you should take the initiative." You know, sometimes we talk about interstellar communication as joining the galactic club. What I find so irritating, no one ever talks about paying our dues or even submitting an application. But that's what it is to send a signal saying, "We want to make contact." Maybe it's what we need to make contact.

• 17:33Chuck Nice?

  An application. Yeah, I like it. Let's hope it's not a restricted club. There you go.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like the Groucho Marx comment about not wanting to... I think that is, it's a sense of an inferiority complex. What do we have to say that a civilization a million years more advanced than we could want to hear? But I don't think we're the most intelligent or the most wise civilization. I'll put my money on us being the civilization in the entire galaxy that has the best balance between joy and sorrow. I don't think anywhere but the current time right now in our civilization can make us more unique. I think what we offer, you know, we want to always put our best foot forward, show off how powerful and strong we are. We're not on a galactic scale. The thing that we most have to offer

• 18:21Speaker 04

  is just saying, "Here is who we are as humans." And it might just help a civilization that has been around so long that the idea of annihilating itself, they can't even conceive of. The idea of being mortal is beyond their capacity. So I think that's where we really have something to offer, of showing them who we are as human beings.

• 18:40Chuck Nice?

  Human beings, the C students of the galaxy.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  But you had to start somewhere. This is a reminder of kindergarten.

• 19:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. Here's more of this week's mashup.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  All right, we're back at StarTalk All-Stars with Chuck Nice, Alan Sakian, and Doug Vakoch. I'm your host Seth Shostak. I'm an astronomer at the SETI Institute in the lovely Bay Area on the other coast. And our job is to try and look for life in space. Doug is interested in communicating with life in space. Let me ask you this, Doug. If you're going to broadcast into space, and I take it that's what METI is all about, right? You know, what about the message? Are you just going to send an empty tone just to say, hey, there's something here on Earth? Are you going to actually give them a message, pictures, something?

• 19:53Speaker 04

  We're going to be sending a message. So our organization began in 2015. We laid out our plans, what we plan to accomplish by the end of 2018. So by the end of 2018, we'll be transmitting powerful intentional signals to nearby stars. And we're taking an approach that's somewhat different from the past. First of all, we're focusing on nearby stars. There have been a few symbolic transmissions in the past that we'll actually get to in a minute, I think. But the key issue is, in the past, we've often transmitted to very distant stars. We're focusing on nearby stars. And we're also going to send them repeatedly, over and over again.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  That helps to actually let the SETI scientists on other worlds know whether we are encountering. So what we see now... We know that there are plenty of stars out there that have planets. A recent discovery is the Trappist star, Trappist 1, forty light years from Earth. It has at least seven planets and three of them are lying in the habitable zone. The zone called the Goldilocks zones, not too hot, not too cold, just right for liquid water. So there are a lot of planets. So this is the kind of star, but there are ones that are even nearer than that so that you could get a response back within a lifetime.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Okay, these are not stars, that's, those are all planets? The star is on the left for scale. Now, Trappist 1 system, forty light years away, that's not much. de Blasio probably has that on his Honda, right? So you could send a message to this group of planets, and by the way, you may note that all these planets in the Trappist 1 system, the ones we know about, we know about seven, they're, they're, they're shown in this slide, which are particularly vivid on radio, you'll notice they're all about the same size as the Earth, that's very unusual. You think in our solar system, you've got Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, kind of the same size, but then you have Jupiter, Saturn, you know, they're very different size. Okay, these are all about the same, three of them are at the right distance where maybe

• 21:54Speaker 02

  you could have some biology, maybe you have liquid oceans, atmospheres, that kind of thing. So maybe this isn't just a place where there's an inhabited planet, maybe this is a whole inhabited ecosystem. Now, here's the question then, if you, if you're broadcasting to some system like this, it's forty light years away, right? You're gonna run out of money before you get your reply, right?

• 22:15Speaker 04

  Well, there's a common misconception that you need to transmit continuously in order to, for this to make any sense. What happens if they're SETI scientists or doing what we do? We look at a star for a few minutes, nothing's transmitting, we move on to the next one, and we've lost it because we only transmitted once. So that mirrors the idea, as you talked about at the beginning, Seth, if we think of aliens as being like ourselves. What we don't take into account is just a little bit more advanced than we are with our SETI search, and they can be looking at us all the time. So in fact, the SETI Institute is now in the process of building an optical SETI observatory that will look everywhere

• 22:56Speaker 04

  in the sky all the time. So even if that signal comes by just once, it's enough to ping them. And so you have now an economically viable way of you go to one star, you ping it, you move on to the next star, you ping it, but you don't have to be transmitting all the time. You do, though, need to have one thing that we are in very short supply of here now, and that's patience. Because Trappist 1, you send a signal, and we can get a reply back. If they don't take too long and take it to their equivalent of the United Nations to get consensus, we get a reply back by the end of this century. So it's going to take 80 years to get a reply back. And there are other stars that are closer, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, a little over four light-years away, so it would take

• 23:38Speaker 04

  eight years to get a round trip. But I think the biggest opposition to SETI from within the SETI community is not that it's a danger to the aliens coming here, but it's just, do we have the capacity as a civilization to take on that kind of a long-term task? The reality is, you know, the early days of SETI have reflected that we are an adolescent civilization. We did the easy thing. We looked in a way that could give us results to benefit us now. What a better way of characterizing an adolescent than us and now. What we're proposing is that as we move into the next half-century, we expand that to think about what we can do for others, other civilizations and future generations of humans, and a project

• 24:23Speaker 04

  that takes a lot longer than we're comfortable with, decades or centuries.

• 24:37David Grinspoon?

  And today's co-host is comedian Chuck Nice.

• 24:40Chuck Nice?

  Hey David.

• 24:41David Grinspoon?

  How's it going Chuck?

• 24:41Chuck Nice?

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

• 24:43David 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.

• 24:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 24:51David 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?

• 25:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:01David 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...

• 25:08Chuck Nice?

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

• 25:10David Grinspoon?

  The bad guys over.

• 25:11Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. You know, you're just kinda putting it out there, you know? Just, it's kinda like, I dunno, cosmic Tinder.

• 25:18David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:19Chuck Nice?

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

• 25:22David Grinspoon?

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

• 25:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 25:31David 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.

• 25:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 25:45David Grinspoon?

  And, right now, we've got David Brin on the line with us. Award-winning science fiction author.

• 25:51Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 25:51David 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.

• 26:09Speaker 07

  Great to be with you guys. Couple of real brainiacs in StarTalk headquarters. Beam me up.

• 26:17David Grinspoon?

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

• 26:27Speaker 07

  Well, in the 60s, 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.

• 26:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Speaker 07

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

• 26:41Chuck Nice?

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

• 26:48David Grinspoon?

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

• 27:00Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 27:00David Grinspoon?

  What do you got Chuck?

• 27:01Chuck Nice?

  This is Bastian Meyer from Old Greenwich, Connecticut. As opposed to New Greenwich. This is what he says. Let's say we received a 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?

• 27:33David Grinspoon?

  What do you think David about that? Where would it have the biggest impact?

• 27:36Speaker 07

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

• 28:13David Grinspoon?

  Based on that.

• 28:14Speaker 07

  The notion of plurality of worlds. And the Catholic Church has, in the last 20 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 Consomennano. 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, shall we say, very...

• 28:57Speaker 07

  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, 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.

• 29:36Speaker 07

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

• 29:46Chuck Nice?

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

• 29:51David 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 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.

• 30:33David Grinspoon?

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

• 31:02Chuck Nice?

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

• 31:08David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, or at least a common other.

• 31:10Chuck Nice?

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

• 31:22David Grinspoon?

  Absolutely. I mean, I think it, it, 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.

• 31:36Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm. Okay. That's fascinating stuff. I love it.

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. Here's more of this week's mashup.

• 32:11David Grinspoon?

  Welcome back to StarTalk All-Stars. I'm David Grin spoon, and I'm here with Chuck Nice. Yes. And our guest, David Brin. And we're talking about communicating with aliens and, uh, 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, uh, now, and, 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, what are we worried about?" So, it's an interesting debate.

• 32:55David Grinspoon?

  I, uh, my, my own opinion is that we should, as David says, at least have some kind of a global 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. has to say, ah, the hell with it. Let's just see what happens.

• 33:21Chuck Nice?

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

• 33:27David 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, OK, 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 OK to broadcast?

• 33:51Speaker 07

  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,

• 34:35Speaker 07

  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.

• 34:49Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 34:49Speaker 07

  That's the thing. Just 20 years ago, we knew of no planets outside our solar system. Now we know of almost 10,000.

• 34:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:58David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Speaker 07

  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.

• 35:12Chuck Nice?

  I'll tell you why.

• 35:13David Grinspoon?

  That seems eminently sensible.

• 35:14Chuck 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.

• 35:27David Grinspoon?

  Oh, you're so bold. Chuck, wow. The, 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. 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.

• 35:58Chuck 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.

• 36:17David Grinspoon?

  Can I write the songs?

• 36:18Chuck Nice?

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

• 36:21David Grinspoon?

  Excellent.

• 36:22Chuck Nice?

  This is Nate Carlson from Ottawa, Canada. And this is what he says, "With 100 billion galaxies full of stars, there is 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?"

• 36:51David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, it'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 Caccone 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 a thousand light years, it's going to take more than a thousand years.

• 37:37David Grinspoon?

  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?

• 38:07Speaker 07

  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 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? And then they build up their civilization

• 38:50Speaker 07

  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.

• 38:58David Grinspoon?

  It's nothing.

• 38:59Speaker 07

  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.

• 39:11David Grinspoon?

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

• 39:14Speaker 07

  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.

• 39:56Speaker 07

  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-

• 40:12David Grinspoon?

  And then they'd probably change the channel.

• 40:14Speaker 07

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

• 40:43Chuck Nice?

  So now, 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, you know?

• 40:53David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, I mean, the thing is, you can put it that way, and it's easy to make fun of, because there's so much questionable science fiction 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 Brent has written about this, and he's actually persuaded me, that 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, "Okay, well then..."

• 41:38David Grinspoon?

  On what basis do we decide that it's okay to risk the future of Earth's biosphere?

• 41:45Chuck Nice?

  I got you.

• 41:46David Grinspoon?

  So, it's a big risk.

• 41:48Speaker 07

  It turns out that there are mature ways to do this.

• 41:55Speaker 07

  Twenty years ago, the genetic engineering and genetic research communities in biology held 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 NASA has a planetary protection office, whose job it is to make sure that the space probes we land on other worlds have been sterilized as best we can, but not in a way that makes

• 42:37Speaker 07

  it so that we can't explore, 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.

• 42:55Chuck Nice?

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

• 43:04Speaker 07

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

• 43:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Speaker 07

  They're this big.

• 43:09Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. You know what I'm saying?

• 43:11David Grinspoon?

  We don't want to mess with that.

• 43:12Chuck Nice?

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

• 43:20David Grinspoon?

  We're talking about safe SETI here.

• 43:22Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 43:23David Grinspoon?

  Remember to practice safe SETI, folks.

• 43:25Chuck 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?

• 43:41David Grinspoon?

  Oh, yeah. Good question. And the answer is yes.

• 43:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh, really?

• 43:44David Grinspoon?

  There is a protocol.

• 43:48David Grinspoon?

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

• 43:58Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 43:59David 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 get a message, then the idea is first you confirm it.

• 44:15Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:15David Grinspoon?

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

• 44:21Chuck Nice?

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

• 44:28David Grinspoon?

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

• 44:54Chuck 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."

• 45:03David 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.

• 45:23Chuck Nice?

  So let's move on.

• 45:24David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, how about another question?

• 45:26Chuck Nice?

  Let's jump into another, and this is from Shelley Sock. Shelley Sock, @shelleysock 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?"

• 45:47David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, good question, Shelley. What would we most want to know about them and what would we most want them to know about us? 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 somehow, and yet use it to survive, not to do yourself in? You could easily see we could do one or the other.

• 46:30David Grinspoon?

  I'm thinking somebody we hear from has learned how to use technology in a mature way.

• 46:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:36David 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?

• 46:43Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 46:44David Grinspoon?

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

• 46:49Speaker 07

  Well, I would ask, 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? You know, this...

• 47:03David Grinspoon?

  What took you so long?

• 47:04Chuck Nice?

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

• 47:07Speaker 07

  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 all the hard-working, 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 advanced to this level ourselves.

• 47:50Speaker 07

  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.

• 47:58Chuck Nice?

  I like the way you think. That's really good stuff.

• 48:00David 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 6,000 years. So the plot thickens.

• 48:07Chuck Nice?

  The very beginning of the Earth itself, 6,000 years.

• 48:12David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, right.

• 48:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to a special mashup edition of StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, and as always, I bid you keep looking up.