Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Death Valley Conversation About Life, The Universe and Everything With Tyler Nordgren and Jill Tarter

Episode Date: April 26, 2016

Beautiful Death Valley National Park was the setting for a fascinating conversation with famed SETI researcher Jill Tarter and celebrated astronomer, artist and photographer Tyler Nordgren.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jill Tartar and Tyler Nordgren, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with a conversation in a place called Death Valley about life across the universe. Astronomer, engineer and SETI pioneer Jill Tartar will join astronomer, artist and night photographer Transcription by CastingWords Emily Lakdawalla is the Planetary Society's senior editor. She just wrote about the Mars Science Laboratory rover's latest accomplishment. Emily, yeah, I know we talked about Curiosity just last week, but it's not every day that the rover drills a new hole. That's right. There's only been 10 of them since the rover landed,

and this is the 10th at a site called Lubango on the western edge of the Knocklift Plateau on Mars. Why this spot? Well, they're just about to drive off of the top of this plateau that's made of a rock unit called the Stimson Unit, which they've been driving across for a while. And this is really their last chance to sample it. And as they've driven across the Stimson, they've seen these places where the rock has fractured. And there's these light-toned zones around the fractures that maybe they were altered by fluids going through the rock. Maybe the fluids leached out some material or maybe the fluids seeped into the rock and deposited some new elements.

And those are the kinds of questions, what exactly is happening around these fractures that the Curiosity team is trying to test by drilling into a site in one of these halos around a fracture. And then pretty soon they're going to drill into a location in one of these halos around a fracture. And then pretty soon, they're going to drill into a location outside a fracture, and then they'll be able to compare the two to each other. Now, am I right that Curiosity can only do so many of these holes, or at least can only analyze the material from so many of them? The limitation is really more time and complexity than anything else. Curiosity's drill, of course, couldn't drill an unlimited number of rocks on Mars, but the rocks seem to be pretty soft, the drill showing no signs of wear and tear. The Kemen can continue analyzing with x-ray diffraction as many samples

as you need. The SAM instrument has a limited number of sample cups and a limited amount of helium to move air around inside the instrument. So that's got a more limited timeline. But still, Curiosity could easily do double as many drill holes, probably triple, without much of a problem. So that's really not the limitation. The limitation is just how hard it is to get to these sites and to do all the work that Curiosity needs to do to analyze them. You've included your compilation of all 10 of these holes, these

portraits of holes in Mars. Anything that we can learn from this? There seems to be a good deal of variety to my non-geologist eyes. There is quite a bit of variety, but most of the holes you get to the conclusion that is actually one of the more interesting conclusions from Curiosity, which is that Mars is red on the outside and gray on the inside. conclusions from Curiosity, which is that Mars is red on the outside and gray on the inside. I bet we're going to learn a lot more. In fact, we already have learned a lot more than that, right, Emily? That's for sure.

She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist. And over at Sky and Telescope magazine, she's a contributing editor. That's Emily Lakdawalla. I'll talk to you again next week. See you then, Matt. Next, we go to Death Valley for a visit with Jill Charter and Tyler Nordgren. On April 8th, I made the long drive to the vast wonderland known as Death Valley National Park. The United States National Park System is celebrating 100 years of preservation and sharing of unparalleled natural wonder and historic heritage. The rangers in Death Valley have no shortage of spectacular beauty to share, but they decided to look skyward in what they called a celestial centennial.

but they decided to look skyward in what they called a celestial centennial. There were three days of great events and activities. I was there to host a conversation with two amazing scientists. Our session in the park's big auditorium began with a welcome from someone we hear all the time on this show. Greetings, Bill Nye here of the Planetary Society. At the Planetary Society, we want citizens everywhere to know the cosmos and our place within it. Now this is the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, so for a hundred years the Park Service has been preserving our natural wonders so that we can go to the parks and wonder. Wonders would drive so much of science. And as astronomer Tyler Nordgren likes to say,

half the park is after dark. So when you're in our national parks, please look up at the night sky and see all those stars and wonder. Because we want everyone in the world to know the cosmos and our place in space. Thank you. Back to you, Matt. Bill's greeting was followed by a full hour of wonderful conversation

with Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute and astronomer, artist, and nature photographer Tyler Nordgren. You'll get to hear it all in this online version of the show, including Tyler's short presentation of images and the audience Q&A that closed the session. I hope you'll let me know if you enjoy listening to it as much as I hope you will. Please write to me at planetaryradio at planetary.org. Our discussion came right after Jill and Tyler's solo presentations to the hundreds of visitors

who had joined us in the Death Valley Visitor Center at Furnace Creek. Who could not feel a sense of wonder and awe after hearing Tyler Nordgren and Jill Charter speak and viewing the spectacular, awe-inspiring images that they just shared with us. I want to get them up here on the stage at Death Valley National Park, where we're in the auditorium at the visitor center as their guests. First, Jill Charter. Jill Charter has held the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI research at the SETI Institute for nearly 20 years. She served as project scientist for NASA's SETI program, at least until the short-sighted termination of its funding by Congress. But that only made her even more deeply involved in the search for intelligence across our

universe and the encouragement of intelligence or even perhaps wisdom here at home, in part through the development of science curricula for young people. She's on the management board for the Allen Telescope Array. It's that amazing collection of dishes some of you heard her talking about just a few minutes ago that searches the skies from Northern California. She was given the Achievement Award from Women in Aerospace, the Ted Prize, and two public service medals from NASA. And in 2005, Jill was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization

at Wonderfest, the biannual San Francisco Bay Area Festival of Science. She's a frequent public speaker, as you've now experienced, and a past guest of Planetary Radio. And I suppose I have to mention the movie Contact. Don't get me wrong, it's one of my favorites, but I don't know if you're tired of hearing about that film. All publicity is good publicity. I'm glad you feel that way.

Ladies and gentlemen, Jill Charter. Our next guest, Tyler Nordgren, is a full professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Redlands here in California. Like Jill, my boss, the science guy, and Carl Sagan, he put in time at Cornell University, which awarded him his PhD. He relies on the great observatories around the world to gather the data for his peer-reviewed articles on subjects ranging from dark matter and galaxies to those wonderful variable stars that helped us understand

our universe even figure out how big it is. He and Bill Nye were on the team that designed the Mars dial sundials on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers along with the third Mars dial that's on the Great Curiosity rover that's now climbing the red planets Mount Sharp. He's worked with the US National Park Service for over 10 years to promote astronomy education in US National Parks where the public still has a chance to see a natural landscape that includes the true glory of the night sky. And if you were here for his presentation, you saw a sampling of his gorgeous award-winning

night sky photography or photographs. His 2010 book, this one, Stars Above, Earth Below, is a huge hit at the Planetary Society. The science guy, well, you heard him quote Tyler in that little video greeting that he had for us here today. He's a gigantic fan of the book. And, you know, full disclosure, the Planetary Society did help to get it published. Yes, they did. Please welcome Tyler Nordgren. So you've already heard a lot about the science that they do. And I think you probably noticed that woven into all of that, you could hear the passion couldn't you and something beyond the simple rational appreciation of the data that these two

people work with and have made available to the rest of us there's so much more to it and that's really most of the theme that I hope we can talk about during our short time here at Death Valley. Before we do that, though, Jill, how goes the search? Well, the search goes on. We use the Allen Telescope Array every day. We have recently, because of the results of Kepler, that essentially every star has a planet, we have, just last week, changed our modality of observing.

We had been observing all the exoplanet systems that were known. But now we've started observing 20,000 red dwarf stars, which are much closer to us. Many of them haven't been observed or planets haven't been found, but statistically we know they should be there and so we've changed and we're looking at our closest neighbors. And I heard Seth Shostak talking about that at the CONTACT conference just last weekend. These are very common stars, right? There are lots of opportunities. What's the current thinking about the

Goldilocks zone, the habitability zone around these small dim stars? Well, actually SETI researchers for a very long time didn't bother looking at red dwarfs. Here's the problem. These are small dim stars. If you want to have a planet close enough to that star to be warm, so that you could have liquid water on the surface and that's something yes it's a bias it's a anthropomorphism perhaps but we think liquid water is necessary for life if you want to have a planet close enough to be warm enough to have liquid water on its surface if it had an

atmosphere then what's going to happen is the planet gets tidally locked to the star. So it gets in the same configuration as we have with our moon, where one face of the planet faces the moon, I'm sorry, the star all the time. Therefore, we thought back then, oh, well, gee, you'll boil off any atmosphere on the front side, you'll freeze it out on the back side. That's not going to be really good for life. You know, it turns out that you have to think a little more deeply. And indeed, we now think that winds and perhaps oceans could circulate the heat from the sun's

side around to the back side. There might be a zone that is temperate and good for life. But then there's all this controversy about these stars flare a lot when they're young. Maybe the atmosphere gets blown away. We don't know. But they are closer to us. They allow observers of all flavors to study them better than more distant objects. And so they're kind of the

bandwagon that everyone's jumping on. From those who are interested in looking for microbes to my team that's interested in finding mathematicians. Don't they also have extraordinarily long lives? I mean, they're going to be around a long time. That's quite true. There has never been a red dwarf star that has been born, that has died in the history of the galaxy. They're all still alive.

They live more than 10 billion years. Which leads me to something that your colleague, Seth Shostak, talked about and tells a lot of people about nowadays. And this has been known for years. It's been speculated that we're less than babies, we humans, if there is an advanced civilization out there, one that got over that technology hump and didn't wipe themselves out that you talked about, they're likely to be far, far ahead of us and they may not look much like us. In fact, they might be machines.

We may be looking and listening for the wrong thing. What do you think? First of all, yes, truth in advertising, we may be looking and listening for the wrong thing. What do you think? First of all, yes, truth in advertising, we may be looking and listening for the wrong thing. It may be that we should be looking for Zeta Rays. But I don't know what a Zeta Ray is. Right?

So, you're stuck with the technology you have. And we have the technology of the 21st century. And our technology just failed. We just had a blackout. Good thing you've got a battery on here. Appropriate. That was really well timed. How'd you do that, Jill?

All right, we'll see if we can get the projector back in a second. Sorry. So you're stuck with what you know and what you have, and you try and do the best job you can. So we have the tools of the astronomers of the 21st century, or we're building tools that are somewhat related hopefully that's looking for the right thing and even if as Seth is fond of saying

the intelligence on a distant planet is post biological doesn't mean that they can't build radio transmitters and they might reach back to their primitive technologies, their old technologies, instruments that are in museums for ancient technology as transmitters to attract the attention of the emerging technologies, the young kids on the block, which is what we are. that prevents them from using that old technology to try and talk to us backward folks there is of course that group of people smart people who worry

that we it's okay to listen don't talk don't send any messages out because then the Klingons will know where to find us if the Klingons are within a hundred light-years they know where to find us anyway uh that's about how long we have been leaking electromagnetic radiation of one form or another starting with our early radio broadcasts that horse is out of the barn the discussion in the community today is whether or not we should be deliberately transmitting with more power in order to attract attention. I mean, as some people argue, if everybody listens and nobody transmits,

it's not going to work real well. On the other hand, you've just pointed out that any technology out there is going to be older than ours. It can't be younger and have us detect it. We are kind of the minimum in this game. You might argue that for the young emerging technology, you do the easy thing first, which is listen, put the onus on the older technology to do the harder job of transmitting. And then when we grow up, we have a responsibility to transmit as well. There are all shades of this argument. What I'm looking for is a tool so that we can have

a meaningful global discussion. We've had meetings on this topic for decades. And the people in the room, white, Anglo-Saxon,axon male mostly there are so many cultures and traditions that have never had a voice at the table that I would really like to take this this conversation globally if any of you know of good tools I'm beginning to study something called liquid freedom coming out of Germany, a very democratic process that claims to be able to hold a global conversation and not get spammed and not get dominated by the loudest voice. any other tool that people know of. Because let's get this discussion underway and decide. It's one of the kinds of existential questions that we're dealing with in other areas. Things that are hard to answer could have good or bad consequences, but let's have a conversation.

Lest anyone think that the SETI Institute is only listening and it conducts a lot of terrific research including astrobiological research but it also is devoted to trying to figure out how do we talk to aliens who don't share anything with us including our DNA. Tyler this is not precisely your field you largely deal with that stuff that makes up most of the universe that none of us can see and or for that matter figure out what it is so far. But do you find this topic of SETI and the possibility of life elsewhere, does that

generate the same kind of sense of awe in you? Oh, absolutely. This is one of the things that as a kid, as a boy, I looked up at the sky and wondered what was out there. Were there any other civilizations around any of those stars looking back at me? And the fact that in my day job, I'm a professor at a small liberal arts college. We were just having a class on this just last week, and the discussion in that room about should we listen, should we broadcast,

what will it be like if we ever hear from somebody else, that is the thing that captures generation after generation of their passion and interest. But not politicians. Maybe they'll come around someday. Exactly. But you cannot be a living, thinking, breathing person and not be fascinated.

Hence, maybe that is why it leaves out politicians. Maybe when the generation that grew up on movies like Contact and Bill Nye the Science Guy, maybe when they get into positions of power in Congress, maybe things will change. I had the great pleasure of going to the White House last October as part of the White House Astronomy Night. And there, standing on the south lawn, President Barack Obama came out and talked about the wonders of astronomy to inspire the generations.

And he talked about this young boy in Brooklyn who grew up and wanted to learn about the stars. And he became Carl Sagan. And what Carl Sagan did to inspire the next generation. And I fully admit, I was of that generation. I was a child when Cosmos came out. And I bought a book with my allowance, read along each week, and I teach out of that book today. And so the cycle of inspiration continues.

Let's get into some more of your work. And it starts maybe with this next book. So for those that may not be familiar, and I'm part of a task force of astronomers trying to get the word out, in 2017 there's going to be a total solar eclipse that's going to cross the United States. It'll be the first time totality has been visible from the U.S. since 1979. I was a nine-year-old boy when that happened, living up in Portland, Oregon, where the path of totality, the shadow of the moon crossed the world.

And because of the local TV and news broadcasts, I thought for sure that if I accidentally looked at the sun while it was eclipsed, my eyes would burn out. And so I hid inside with the curtains drawn and watched on TV. And not a year has gone by I haven't felt cheated out of something awe-inspiring. So we are getting the word out that in 2017, August 21st to Monday, the moon's shadow will cross the entire U.S.

and every single man, woman, and child in the United States will get to see at least a partial eclipse. And for those 9 million people living within this diagonal band from Oregon to South Carolina, they will get to see the sun turn black, the sky grow dark, the temperature drop, the brightest stars come out, and this ghostly corona stretch around the sun. And it truly is awe-inspiring. And might be worth a trip into the path of totality, which unfortunately doesn't cross

very many big cities or even big towns. People are going to want to move. People are going to want to travel. Half of St. Louis, half of Kansas City, all of Nashville will be in the shadow. Jackson, Wyoming. So there's a lot of beautiful, beautiful places

people can go to. And if you make the effort, go out, see the sun, and then stay for the night because solar eclipses happen at new moon and so that night the stars will come out so go for the Sun stay for the stars so you obviously got past that that bad eclipse experience I did and I was I was a Boy Scout up in Oregon and so we went out to the Cascade Mountains, and I got to see a sky full of stars. And then being of that generation, when Cosmos came on TV,

and Carl Sagan talked about how essentially being a scientist was the most human thing that one could do, that it was the intersection of art and philosophy and history, and wondering about our place in the universe, I couldn't think of anything more worthwhile to do with my time. Jill, you're nodding in agreement. Yeah. Like Tyler, when I was young, six, eight is what I remember, I got to go with my dad and walk along the beaches of Minnesota Key, which is on the west side of Florida.

The key was jungle, it was had my aunt and uncle and maybe a couple of other crazy people living on it. It was such dark skies walking along the ocean there and I remember looking up and wondering whether on the planet, on one of those stars, there was a young creature walking along an ocean with its parent looking back at me. Exactly the same experience. And so I have always felt that possibility.

On the other hand, I went to Cornell and got an engineering degree. Sort of forgot about the sky for a long time. You know about Ithacation. You don't see it in Ithaca very much. and got an engineering degree. Sort of forgot about the sky for a long time. You know, well, Ithacation, you don't see it in Ithaca very much, right? It's pretty cloudy. The sky is pretty bad. And then I decided when I got my engineering degree,

because I wasn't going to wimp out, I was going to do it, that, sorry, but if engineers were as boring as my professors, I wanted to find something more interesting to do, and I realized I had a fabulous education in problem solving. So I got the privilege of sticking around Cornell a couple more years, looking for interesting problems to solve.

I got to take a course in star formation from Ed Saulpeter, which is, it is just such a privilege, and I thought, oh, man. Ed was my graduate advisor. Oh, aren't you lucky. Yeah, it is just such a privilege. And I thought, oh, man. Ed was my graduate advisor. Oh, aren't you lucky. Yeah, this is it. And so then I went to graduate school at Berkeley

studying astrophysics. I was a graduate student for a very long time. My first semester at Berkeley, I had an assistantship, and my job, I got to learn how to program a PDP-8 slash S. Okay, that's an old computer, folks, right? It's the first time we ever had a computer on our desktop and there was no language. You had to program at Noctil. You had to set all the ones and zeros. You probably have the power of less than a digital watch nowadays. Oh, absolutely.

and zeros. You probably have the power of less than a digital watch nowadays. Oh, absolutely. 64K of memory. Wow. Never mind. I learned how to program that and then was a graduate student for so long that it became a piece of obsolete equipment.

So when Professor Stuart Boyer, who was an X-ray astronomer, got a very clever idea about how to use the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, at that time an 85-foot telescope, and how to piggyback to do SETI observations while the astronomers were taking data for their own purposes. Great idea. Very clever. He had no money, so he began asking for donations and somebody gave him this computer and then he came to my door and said you used to program this

didn't you yeah he handed me the Cyclops report all right that was an engineering design study done at NASA Ames with Barney Oliver from HP Labs as one of the co-directors. I read that report cover to cover and it was pretty dense. But I learned something there. I learned that after millennia of asking the priests, the philosophers, whoever we thought was smart. What should we believe about life beyond Earth? I realized that I was in the right time at the right place with new tools that would allow scientists and engineers to try and answer these questions observationally. Forget about belief systems.

Let's just go try and find out what is. So that's what hooked me. And one of the things that's just amazing about this generation is, as you spoke earlier about planets around other stars, this is the generation where we are finding these planets, and however far into the future it is that our interstellar spaceships ever finally make those trips, the places that they will go will probably be the places that were found in this generation. This is an amazing time to be doing this.

I'm glad you brought that up. I'm going to shift gears. I was going to continue with the sense of awe. But do you both feel fortunate to be living and working in the professions that you're in right now absolutely I just wish I were 50 years younger because I want to see what happens in the next 50 years it is going to be awesome in 2004 Craig Venter and Daniel Cohen wrote a paper in which they made the following claim. They said that the 20th century

had been the century of physics, but the 21st century was going to be the century of biology. I think they weren't bold enough. I think the 21st century is going to be the century of biology on Earth and beyond. I think this is the century in which we're going to begin to answer that question about life beyond the Earth. I think this is the century in which we're going to begin to answer that question about life beyond the earth. I think that's awesome. Tyler, I've stolen the phrase from my

colleague Emily Lakdawalla, who calls this the golden age of exploration. Absolutely. And when you think about, well, just this last summer, we finally got images of the surface of Pluto. well just this last summer we finally got images of the surface of Pluto and who could have imagined what a beautiful crazy confusing place that would turn out to be. And Alan Stern imagined it. No one else. It reminds me back when we first started exploring other moons and I'm thinking the moons of Jupiter the idea that we had of moons was that they would look something like our own moon, kind of a gray, lifeless, cratered world. There was this moon of Jupiter, Io, that we knew was kind of reddish, so maybe it was sort of a reddish cratered world.

But then we got there, and we saw that there were more beautiful, amazing, and confounding than we've ever believed. And now Europa, where we're about to send another spacecraft here in the next decade, possibly an ocean world. And I, for one, and I will say this, this is not backed up by any science, but I swear there's probably something

swimming around. I think there's fish. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that. But there is going to be something absolutely beyond our ability. Well, actually, something beyond our wildest dreams is we to be something absolutely beyond our ability. Well, actually, something beyond our wildest dreams is we will be found in this solar system. Maybe if not our lifetimes, the next. Well, certainly, the record not only in exploration of the universe,

but of all science is a record of constant surprise. Yeah. is a record of constant surprise. Yeah. Back in the 1980s, there was a fantastic book written by Martin Harwood called Cosmic Discoveries. And he made a really interesting argument. He said, you know, in astronomy, every time we've built a new instrument that

opens up a new part of observational phase space he said we go to the funders and we say this new instrument is going to answer all these questions and it's going to be fabulous and yeah when we build it it usually does answer those questions but there's a huge tradition that the most important thing that new telescope does is find something that nobody expected. When I was doing my graduate work, I was a radio astronomer. My first telescope was Arecibo. But my PhD thesis then wound up mostly being done with a very large ray out in New Mexico.

So an array of radio telescopes all connected together. That's the one that you sat on in the desert with headphones, right? That's the one. Well, as it turned out, when I was doing those observations for my thesis, I didn't actually have to go out there. You could do it remotely. But they encouraged you to call in afterwards to find out how they went. And when I did, they said, oh, they were great.

We had this film crew out here filming while we were doing your observations. Oh, really? Turned out it was contact. So they were not listening to Vega. They were listening to my two little galaxies off in the middle of the Pegasus. But when I went from there, I went to work with the U.S. Naval Observatory where we were building

an optical interferometer. A collection of optical telescopes strung together. And one of the things that we were able to do was actually look at another star, Cepheid Vari variable, and actually watch it get bigger and smaller, something that had never been seen before. And I'll say that's the most exciting time in my entire life as a scientist, where each morning you'd go and wonder, I wonder what new thing I can point this new telescope at tonight. And we actually have begun a project

looking at old data from that kind of star, Cepheid variables, which have been collected for over a century by amateur astronomers, among others. And we're trying to see if a crazy idea by John Leonard and a few other people might actually be happening. It's called star tickling. Right?

So you have a Cepheid variable. And as you've just said, the star gets bigger and brighter, expands, and then it collapses, gets smaller. Then it does it again. Very regular period if you're an advanced technology and can build an orbiting neutrino factory and put it in orbit around the Cepheid variable that happens to be near you then you can do something which is amazing you can create a Morse code that can be seen across the galaxy and to the nearest clusters of galaxies

because these cepheids are so bright so you let the star expand it contracts and it's thinking about expanding again but you zap it with enough energy to make it expand prematurely now you've made a short period that That's your dot. The regular period is your dash. So information is slow in transmitting, you know, a bit every few days or weeks, but it outshines huge distances in all directions. It's a wonderful beacon. Communicating across the galaxies. That's right. So we're looking at variable star data. Wonderful.

Gosh, there's just so much. Do you want to sit around for maybe three hours? Because that'll scratch the surface of what I'd like to talk about with these folks. The world of gravitational astronomy has just opened up in the last few months. Tyler, is that an exciting new option outside of the electromagnetic spectrum that you and Jill have been dealing with up until now, other than neutrinos?

I mean, absolutely. As Jill said, every time you look at the sky with a new technology and a new wavelength, new instrument, you'll see new things that you never expected before. And this is the ultimate expression of that. I have a former student at the University of Wisconsin who's part of the group, part of the collaboration. And when he sent me an email saying, oh, be on the lookout for some news later this week. I can't tell you what it is, but you're going to be interested in it.

And to see that and realize that after all the effort that had gone into searching, here was some discovery that, boy, by all the evidence they had, this really does seem to work. And who can imagine where they're going to go with this? Actually, the journal. The Study Institute imagined. So the journal Nature nature for the past

few years has the last page of that scholarly journal is a science fiction story and one of these science fiction stories on the back page and I hope I'm right I think it was by Greg Benford

but bottom line is that the message was buried in the gravitational waves. And that was what I was about to ask you about. Those extremely advanced, unimaginably advanced aliens using neutrinos or gravity waves or God knows what to communicate with us. But we're dealing with what we have the technology for, right? Electromagnetic waves, light, and so on. Yeah, I've already confessed that I don't know how to find zeta rays, but they might be

gravitational waves or they might be something else. Come on, let's stick around long enough to get smart enough to invent that technology. Back to the sense of awe. If I start with the assumption that it is at least in large part what drove both of you to do what you do, how did it evolve as you spent all those years as a grad student, Jill, and Tyler as you worked your way up the scale to full professor in academia? What happened? What changed? For me, one of the places that awe really came into my professional full professor in academia. What happened? What changed? For me, one of the places that awe really came into my professional experience was I did travel to

observatories. I went out to Australia for two months in 1995, worked at Parks and the Compact Array in Siding Spring. In fact, I was out at Parks just after you were there. I saw a sign for Project Phoenix on the door to the observatory. You told me you just missed each other by days. I believe it was, yeah. And they had a sign that said, Parks Cafeteria, fried phoenix with tartar sauce on the door. I don't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but I thought I'd let you know.

I saw the sun. Okay. But to be out at these observatories, and most of these observatories are in out-of-the-way locations, and so when the sun would set and night would come on, and you would see the stars,

it was something that kept me grounded, so to speak. I knew I was looking at binary galaxies. I knew what the coordinates were in the sky. But I made the effort to go out and look at the celestial sphere and find out what constellation they were in. So while I was taking my data, I could step up, look in the sky, and see exactly where my galaxies were, somewhere millions of light years away.

And that was a connection that I consciously made the effort to not let slip away, so that someday when I could tell people about what I was finding, I could also say, and here, you can see it for yourself. Look right there. Radio astronomy can be done 24 hours a day. Before we built our own observatory at Hat Creek in Northern California, we had a campaign

mode. So we'd always use at least two telescopes that were widely separated. And we'd go for three or four or six weeks, several times a year, to use these telescopes. Because I always wanted people to work a little harder than they might want to have done on their own. I always took the midnight to 8 a.m. shift, which is a more difficult shift, right? Because I figured, hey, look, if I can do that, you can work a little harder. And we had a great team. And there was this every night, walking to the telescope at at 1130, looking up at the sky.

It was just always so special because we're in isolated places. We don't want your light pollution. We don't want radio pollution from humans. So we're in dark places. And every night I got to walk to work looking at that sky. It's just so special. And you really do feel connected. So does that sense of awe still drive what you do, Jill?

Yes. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to get up out of bed the next day and go fight with someone over funding. That's the only bad part of this. fight with someone over funding. That's the only bad part of this. But yes, I got hooked thinking about trying to answer questions by exploring rather than believing. And I've stayed hooked. And it's actually, it's a privilege. To be a scientist, to have that be your path in the way you make a living by posing questions and then trying to answer them and if you're lucky coming up with an answer that no one else has yet figured out it's it's sleuthing it's puzzle-solving it's

spectacular more people should think about science as a career. When I was in graduate school, we'd take a break, go out for lunch, and as we were all done and getting ready to go back to work, we'd look around at one another and say, time to push back the frontiers of human knowledge.

And we'd go back to work. And we would joke about it, but that's what we were doing. That's what we had the privilege, the opportunity to do. And who knows what discovery we might make that day. And if tomorrow is the day we discover life elsewhere, what a great day that's going to be. So you never know.

How are we doing as a society in this country at communicating, learning to share that sense of awe, particularly with young people, but with adults as well? Because I know this is something both of you care deeply about. Jill? Well, I'm sorry to say that in our school systems, I don't think we're doing a very good job at sharing the excitement and the possibilities of science. It is often still presented as a long list of facts that you have to memorize. And we don't emphasize that it's the unknown that is so important, not what we already know. And so we don't pass along... Why not? Absolutely. Got some applause there. not what we already know and so we don't pass along why not so we very

we do not frequently tell our students hey this is fun hey this is important yeah it's hard work but wow what a ride and you can do it too and then of course we do miserably in a society that is driven by political decisions that ridicule science if not run away in fear from it. When we have faith-based science in this country, we're not doing the right thing.

So most of my students and most of the folks that I give talks to when I'm out at national parks, they come from cities. And where I am in the outskirts of Los Angeles, think about that question that you used to ask as a child. How many stars are there in the sky? Well, where I live, I know the answer. It's 12. And so when there's only 12 stars in the sky, and one of those is probably an airplane on its way to LAX, there's no reason to ever look up, because there's nothing there in the sky to see.

And if you don't ever look up, and don't ever see anything worth wondering about, you're never going to ask any questions that you long to find an answer to. And so science dies. And so science dies. And so that's one of the reasons why I try to encourage people to get out to parks, get out to places where they can still see the universe. And when you see that star-filled sky with the Milky Way arching overhead, you can't help but ask, what is it?

And when you first ask a question, then you cannot help but ask more. I answered your question dealing with formal education, and you've touched on informal education, what you learn outside of the classroom. So fortunately, students today have access to incredible sources of information and excitement on the Internet. I think that we need to take advantage of those informal opportunities to educate.

At the SETI Institute, we think a lot about this, and I'm really proud of Edna DeVore, who runs our education and public outreach. She's just gotten a large grant from NASA to develop, with the Girl Scouts of America a whole series of badges for the Girl Scouts on STEM sciences. And so that's a really exciting opportunity to reach a lot of young girls, not in the formal classroom setting, but in an informal environment.

Not in the formal classroom setting, but in an informal environment. Jill, before we go to the artists sitting between the two of us, let's put the A in STEM as people are nowadays and turn it into STEAM. What's the role of art in generating what you're looking for people to feel about science? Well, we take that really seriously, too, at the SETI Institute. We actually have an artist-in-residence program. It's been going now for about five years. Charlie Lindsay from New York, multimedia artist and musician,

was the first person that I collaborated with. And Charlie has helped me try and tell this story about the benefits of marrying the two kinds of disciplines. Our artists actually work with, we have 80 PhD scientists at the SETI Institute working on all aspects of life in the universe. The artists work with the scientists and try and visualize or present a dramatic piece or a piece of dance. We have a choreographer in the audience who's worked with us, Nina Wiseman. We try and help the scientists see their own work in a broader perspective. Maybe have a thought that they wouldn't otherwise have had

as they're trying to work with this artist to bring something new into being. So we think it has a lot of potential. We like doing it. Tyler, you're not the only scientist, astronomer, planetary scientist I know, who is also an artist. There does seem to be some crossover there. There certainly is for you. Right. I was a product of a liberal arts education. I grew up loving art and

loving science and astronomy and looking for ways to combine them. One of my, well, I grew up with Carl Sagan's Cosmos. If you open the book or watch this TV series, it is gorgeous. The artwork open the book or watch this TV series, it is gorgeous. The artwork, the painting, the diagrams that are in there. The universe is a visual experience. So to marry it with art, I think, is absolutely natural. And so artists like John Lomberg that worked with Carl were deep, profound influences on me as a child growing up.

And it's been a pleasure working with John on the Mars dials since then, sort of a dream come true of working with one's idols. And so to be able to use artwork with the National Parks, with the Planetary Society, and now with NASA scientists, helping them visualize and create a sense of awe about future exploration is really a true joy. We're nearing the end of our time. Share some of this other work that you've done, which I know has inspired many, has inspired me, and I'm going to hand the clicker to you. Okay, let's see what we have here. So one of the things coming up is the solar eclipse,

as I mentioned, and if you go back to the 1930s, there was the WPA art program to get people to go out and, say, see America. And so one of the things that we're doing now, working with NASA and astronomers across the country, is to get people to understand what's about to happen and to not just sit by passively, but go see totality, visit that path of the moon's shadow.

And one of the things that's come out as a result of this is I've actually just partnered up with Pendleton Woolen Mills. We're coming out with a blanket this summer. Isn't that gorgeous? And so it's totality over Grand Tetons. And so these are ways outside of science museums to get people to understand that something is happening, and it's something that's not just a scientific experience,

but a truly awe-inspiring experience. And then, of course, we are in the golden age of space exploration right now. And so when we think about the places here on Earth the national parks are preserving, well, there are equally grand, if not more spectacular places elsewhere in the solar system that we're just learning about today that maybe someday will become their own planetary parks.

I'm such a fan of these posters and I want everybody to notice, especially the rangers in the back, that someday you'll be working for the Department of the Exterior, perhaps on Enceladus. Exactly. So these are ways of raising awareness and interest amongst the public in what we are discovering, and to connect them with specific places here on Earth that you can see for yourself. Could you have campfires on Enceladus?

Is there enough oxygen for? There are some artistic licenses that have been taken. Very dangerous on Titan. Oh, yeah. And so, of course, to take those terrestrial analogs is the reason why we're all here at Mars Fest in Death Valley. The thing that really started this all was the See the Milky Way campaign

that we started about eight years ago to get people, it was mirrored off of the See America campaign, but it's the See the Milky Way campaign to go out and see the beauty the parks are preserving overhead at night. And what started out with just one park back in 2008, I've now done I think about 50 of these for parks all over the country. And I get requests from park rangers for parks. Unfortunately, I haven't even had a chance to go visit. And so I'm scanning the interwebs,

looking for pictures and trying to get out there and see them so I can draw them for myself. And that is another wonderful quote. Did you come up with that? The sky begins at your feet. I got that from a park ranger out in Chaco Culture National Historical Park, where people have been looking at the sky for thousands of years. But the one tagline that we have used that I came up with was, half the park is after dark. And that was something not only to help educate the public, but also to help educate park rangers and superintendents about. Because when I first began this back in 2007, there was a superintendent at one park who said,

what does the sky have to do with my park? Well, the sky begins at your feet, and half of your park is after dark. And so the sky is an intimate part of wherever you happen to be. Let's go on. I think you've got some of your nighttime images from the parks here. Oh, we've got a couple more.

There you go. Yeah. So, Natural Bridges. National Bridges National Monument in southern Utah. The first international dark sky park. And I had the pleasure of standing there beneath one of the bridges. And as the crescent moon set, and that's what's lighting up the left side of the photo there. As the moon set and it became darker, the brightest thing in my field of view was the

center of our Milky Way. This is Double Arch in Arches National Park, where again the moon, just as it's setting, is what's lighting up the rocks. But you can see me standing in one of the windows there, because I realized I needed something to give you a sense of scale. And after all, really that's the thing that gives everything that we do a sense of scale. Is it how it relates to us and our place in the universe and where we are here on this planet and in the planet and the growing family of planets throughout the universe.

We're not doing them justice on this screen, of course, if you want to see them in all their glory. Go to tylernordgren.com or maybe consider buying the book, Stars Above, Earth Below. And we will go out to the audience here. I'm hoping we have time for three or four questions. Yes, so my question is, you've been working with the new Chinese telescope,

radio telescope. That's one question. And the second is, are we really prepared for ET? Do we have a protocol? Are you aware of any protocol relating to first contact? That's a great question. So let me see if I got your first question, which I think has to do with the Chinese telescope. So that's the FAST telescope, which is being built in a limestone karst formation in southeastern China.

It will be larger than Arecibo. It will be 500 meters in diameter rather than 300. It isn't yet working. It's supposed to be on the air next year. And yes, some SETI will get done there, and that's going to be great. Then your second question was about a post-detection protocol, or at least that's going to be great. Then your second question was about a post detection protocol or at least that's what we call it. Yes, even from a political level.

Well, we had a SETI project within NASA, you betcha, there was a post detection protocol. And it worried about things like which AA is going to tell the funding committees in Congress and which who's going to tell the the president if that sort of thing and then there was a lot of scientific you have to do this this and that once it became no longer a federally funded program the protocols really do revolve around getting your science right make sure that you're not going to cry wolf.

See if you can get an independent confirmation. Tell the world and make sure that to the best of your ability, you get everybody involved, anyone who had anything to do with it, so they all get to share in the credit. And we made these protocols under the assumption that we would be in control that we would be the ones deciding when information was going to be made public from a different perspective ET is here for example how

do you what protocol is there well first all, you have to prove to me that they're here, which means that you have to give me some... It's probably true, but it's hypothetical. No, I wouldn't say it's probably true. I assume it's hypothetical. Okay, in terms of what happens after you have verified and announced the detection, the SETI Institute and another a number of other observatories

who do SETI work have signed a very informal document that says that we will not transmit a reply until there is some sort of global consensus about whether we should who will speak for Earth, and what will they say. Now, that's the very high level. What's going to happen is that anybody can get their hands on a transmitter, is going to do so, and they're going to say whatever the heck they want to say, because there's no way to stop it. But in terms of policy, we've way to stop it. But in terms of policy, we've said we want a global consensus before we do something here. And it's kind of hard to get that consensus. I've already talked to you about the discussion I'd like to get going. So yeah, I think it's going to be a wild west, actually, if this happens.

I want to just share a pet peeve. I don't remember the name of the show, and if I did, I wouldn't mention it because I'm so angry with these people still. But a few years back, there was a big spate of Aliens Among Us TV shows, and in one of them, Carl Sagan was part of the conspiracy to hide the fact that we were talking to the aliens,

those people, those producers, should go to a very special kind of hell. It's reserved for TV producers, which they're probably going to anyway. Okay, do we have another question? I know there was one over here on this side. Thanks, Alexander. Hang on, wait until the mic gets there. And what's your name, sir? My name is Vaughn.

My question is, have you ever had a sense that you're running out of time with respect to say especially in the context of search for intelligent life here on earth and I'm thinking in the context of Jared diamonds various theories or various concepts of how we consume our resources or how our civilization just collapses. I'm not sure if everybody could hear that, but we're talking about the time limit. Is there a time limit for the human species? I'm certainly old enough to know that I'm running out of time. And there are astronomers, Martin Harwit, not Martin Harwit.

Paul Horvitz. No. Oh. The astronomer royal. Oh, oh. Martin Rees. Martin Rees, thank you, thank you. I'm really running out of brain is what I'm running out of. Martin Rees has written a book that says this is our last century, perhaps, all the ways

things could go bad. I take the point of view that if we don't do anything about it, yeah it's gonna go bad, but in fact there are things we can do and if I can use SETI as a vehicle to get thinking to get people thinking less personally, less nationally, to think of themselves as earthlings, that's really what I want to do is spread this meme of we're all earthlings. And if we begin to think like that, then maybe we can make progress on some of these challenges, fix some of the problems that we've created.

And that's one of the things that I love about looking up at the stars at night, is people say, well, don't they make you feel small and insignificant? And well, it makes me feel grand and alive because we are the stars made sentient. And to be able to say that in all that vast darkness, at the very least, we are here and we are alive and we're able to comprehend it, I think it puts our problems into perspective.

And when I'm out there with students, they come away with a sense of, yeah, those other problems are relatively small against the grand sweep of the universe. And so it's one reason why I encourage folks, kids especially, to get out under a star-filled sky. Another question from the audience. We'll see if we can squeeze a couple in here. What is your name?

Hello. My name is Beth, and this is my little brother, Will. Hi, Bill. We are both super space nerds. He's gone to space camp, and I've taken astronomy class, taught kids night hikes for over a year. What else can we do to pique the interest of our peers and younger students? Thank you for what you're doing.

Keep it up. Tyler, you want to take that first? A couple things. What you're doing right now is perfect. Astronomy is one of the great sciences in that we have both the professionals and the amateur community. Amateur chemists, I don't know what they would be, but amateur astronomers, the opportunities to go out and look through a telescope and see something grand, to

learn more about it, and then decide, oh I want to research, I want to learn more about that thing I just saw through the eyepiece. Back in my day, the mid 1970s, I sent letters off to NASA asking what do I need to do in order to be an astronaut when I grow up? And I followed that when they wrote back and astronaut became astronomer. But now thanks to the internet, there's all sorts of information out there about exactly what you need to do if you want to be an astronomer to get into college and what to do in college and then beyond. But again, you don't have to do that in order to support science,

to support a culture that supports science, and to help be a part of a larger movement forward to make the human race better and give us more time to find ET. I was an amateur chemist. It's a very unhealthy hobby. Take up astronomy. Your mother really liked that, right? So again, it's fantastic what you're doing. And astronomy really is a gateway drug, right?

It just opens people's minds to all kinds of scientific possibilities. So one thing, again, we're talking about the informal space and the fact that you're out here able to interact with with I assume people of all ages is spectacular But it's also I'd look into citizen science. That's something new and it's it's wonderful You can if you have a passion about almost anything There's probably an online program that will allow you to do real science, to move things forward. If it's counting craters on the moon, it could be SETI at home, it can be rotating little bits of papyrus fragment to put it back together and interpret it. It can be transcribing logs from old ships

that used to go up and down the coast of Europe and South Africa to recreate the climate from the daily observations that are made. You can fold proteins for cancer research. Zoo universe, you can classify galaxies. Right. So there's all of this opportunity for people with a passion who actually want their work to be rewarded by helping scientists. That's out there.

It's this informal space. It offers us so much. One more question. Do we have anybody else in the audience with a question for Tyler Nordgren or Jill Charter what are we doing with our video orientated younger generation with their Xbox is there anything out there that we can see through the Xbox actually one of the things that I do have a bit of a love hate relationship with is with iPhones and iPads, there's all these wonderful planetarium softwares out there where you can go outside,

hold it up as a window to the sky and see exactly what you're looking at. You can see what galaxies or nebulae might be out there. And so amongst my students, they love it because it's an opportunity to find out what's there. The part of me that likes, wants them to actually see it with their own naked eyes hates it because they're shining the light straight into their eyeballs. And so they're ruining their night vision and they'll never actually see it with their real eyes. But it is a gateway. It is a window. And so if you see it on the window, then hopefully we can stimulate the interest to go see it for yourself. And there's certainly no lack of games and simulations

that allow you to figure out what you need to take on a spacecraft and how you're going to colonize a planet and just many variations on that theme. Some of the science in some of the games is better than others. So I think there's lots of opportunity. Jill, where should people look online or elsewhere

to follow what you're up to and the SETI Institute? We have a very simple website named SETI.org and there is a lot of information there about the full spectrum of the research that's done at the SETI Institute and there's also an opportunity to push a button that says donate so we would very much appreciate

your support but the information is there we try very hard to allow the public to interact with us and know what we're doing because we love what we're doing we want to tell you Tyler already mentioned Tyler Nordgren calm what else should we know about what you're up to I guess gearing up for that which is going to be here before we know it, for one thing. Well, NASA's putting up a website pretty soon to be a clearinghouse for information for the 2017 total eclipse. I believe it's eclipse2017.nasa.gov. I'll put out a notice for the Planetary Society, planetary.org.

A fantastic website. Thank you for that. This has been everything I hoped it would be, except longer. But I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have. Please help me thank these two wonderful human beings and scientists,

Bill Carver and Tali Horgan. We're grateful to all the terrific people at Death Valley National Park and to the National Park Service for making this show possible. Bruce Batts is here for this week's edition of What's Up. I had hoped to join him in person to record this one, but I was just too sick. And I'm getting there. I'm getting better. Thank you for asking before we recorded. You're welcome. Yeah, Matt's had it rough.

I got healthy quite rapidly, but Matt's been taken out of action. I just love feeling sorry for myself and being supported in that. Make me feel better with what's up. Well, just to try to make you feel better, Matt, because you've been sick, I've arranged for Mercury Transit. Oh, you're so kind. On May 9th, Mercury transits in front of the sun, passes between the sun and the earth. It will, over several hours, appear as a small dot moving across the sun. The best way to observe this is with a telescope with proper safety filters.

Don't stare at the sun without proper safety filters. But you're going to need some type of telescopic nodule, or you can use things like pinholes to project an image of the sun onto paper or the ground. I know there are places that will be covering this online with solar telescopes, so you can check it out. For us on West Coast, North America, it will rise already in transit. The sun will. The last Mercury transit, Matt, was in 2006. The next one in 2019, they're erratic. You get 11 or 12 per year. Per year, not per year. Wouldn't that be cool? Per century. I'm going with century. Wouldn't be nearly as cool if it was per year.

Oh, there you go. Probably impossible to see just with your eyes and solar filters, much less without them, in which case you'll burn your eyes out. So don't do that. Good advice, as always. Jupiter super bright in the south, Mars and Saturn coming up in the east later on in the evening. But Mercury transit is the focus. On to this week in space history.

Hard to believe it was 26 years ago this week that the Hubble Space Telescope was deployed. Oh, good Lord. 1990. So it went out of service like it had to be 10, 12, 15 years ago, right? Nothing could last that long. It's true. It's true. Yeah, no, no, they're still using it, Matt.

And it got various upgrades over the years. It's still doing that mediocre kind of work that it does. That was sarcasm. On to Random Space Fact. Lovely. On June 3rd, 2014, the Curiosity rover on the planet Mars observed the planet Mercury transiting the sun, Mars observed the planet Mercury transiting the sun, marking the first time ever a planetary transit had been observed from any planet other than Earth. I forgot about that. I remember now seeing the images of that.

Doing astronomy from Mars, it's a good time to be alive. It is indeed. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. We asked you, what moon has a massive equatorial ridge running three quarters of the way around the moon? How'd we do, Matt? So many people not only got this right, but said they knew it off the top of their head, as if they carry a walnut around on their head. I'm not sure what that means. I'm not feeling well. This is the walnut moon, Iapetus, right?

Yes, indeed. Iapetus, moon of Saturn, has a belly band, a walnut ridge. And we're going to come back to that belly band, that midriff bulge that Iapetus has. David Fisher, who was chosen by Random.org, I believe a first-time winner, who got it right. He says, sure enough, Iapetus. He lives in Craigmoor, which is in Australia, a little bit north of Adelaide. He is, for his trouble, going to be receiving a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a 200-point iTelescope astronomy account,

and a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, which seems to be a very coveted item right now. Speaking of the walnut, Daniel Kazard is warning away all those giant space squirrels. Leave that moon alone. Giant space squirrels. I hope you would like that. Next on the Sci-Fi Channel. They would, wouldn't they?

David Dearden, he's in Mapleton, Utah. He talked about the ridge and said, if you really want to see it at its best, watch that amazing film, that awe-inspiring, fabulous short film by Eric Wernquist called Wanderers, which I had to go back and look it up. It's on Vimeo. It is absolutely spectacular. And it shows humans living on the ridge on Iapetus. You really have to see it. That's like the least of what it has to show off.

Katie Fritchard, she mentioned that it was first discovered look the least of what it has to show off katie fritchard she mentioned that it was uh first discovered the moon that is by cassini and fun fact the ridge was found in 2004 by the cassini mission so a nice coincidence there but i also wanted to mention katie because of her special greeting to louisa and britney woot, go space. I'm guessing there's a relationship there somewhere. Probably. Dave Fairchild is on his game. You ready for his latest poem for us? I am indeed.

When speaking of Iapetus, this fact I will divulge, it has a ridge around it, an unsightly muffin bulge. When Phoebe said, you're gaining weight, the moon would just deny it. Like many midlife astrofans, he should go on a diet. Thank you, Dave. I find the bulge attractive. Me too. I think it's kind of cute.

Back to transits of Mercury. When was the first recorded observation of a transit of Mercury across the sun? And by whom? Who made the observation? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I like that. You'll need to get us this response by Tuesday, May 3rd at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And having just listened to Tyler Nordgren on the program, that wonderful astronomer and artist. How would you like to win three, count them, three of his terrific posters? Because we've got a bunch to give away. So that's what the

winner's going to get this time, in addition to an itelescope.net account, of course, that 200-point account on that worldwide network of telescopes operated on a non-profit basis out of Australia, where our winner was from this week. So not bad, not bad at all.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about horses. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. He ponies up every week here on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its wide-eyed members. Josh Doyle created our theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan.

Clear skies.