Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Ann Druyan and the Breakthrough SETI Initiatives

Episode Date: August 4, 2015

The Breakthrough Initiatives will pump $100 million into the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the next 10 years, vastly expanding humanity’s quest to learn if it has company in the universe. Among the leaders of this brave new project is Cosmos creator Ann Druyan. Join us for a special, extended conversation with Ann.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello again, podcast buddies. It's Matt, thanking you yet again for listening to the show. I hope no one minds that I have devoted so much of today's episode to Ann Druyan, or that we'll keep talking SETI next week. I think the Breakthrough Listen and Message projects are huge, and I didn't want any part of our audience, including the radio listeners, to miss a word from Ann. Trust me, great non-SETI stuff is coming. Now I've got a favor to ask. We want to make Planetary Radio available on iHeartRadio.

To do that, you first have to post the show to Spreaker. Have you seen it? Spreaker is a great community. It's a great way to get your weekly PlanRad fix. We're doing okay there after only about a week and a half, but they like you to have at least 100 followers before they'll consider you for iHeartRadio. That's in spite of the tens of thousands of you who are out there listening right now. So if you're looking for an attractive, convenient way to hear us, please consider Spreaker. Just go to Spreaker.com, search for Planetary Radio,

and click the gray Follow button. And if you're perfectly happy with iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever, maybe our website, great. You can still follow us on Spreaker. All done. Here's the show. Andruyan and the $100 million breakthrough initiatives this week on Planetary Radio. million dollar breakthrough initiatives 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. It has been too long since we've talked about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We're going to make up for that omission today and next week as we explore the extraordinary new breakthrough initiatives. Emily Lachdwal is on vacation and Bill Nye has graciously allowed us to forego his segment so that we can bring you a complete conversation with one of my all-time favorite guests.

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner wanted the very best people to lead his just-announced breakthrough listen and breakthrough Message efforts. I can't think of a better choice than the co-founder and CEO of Cosmos Studios, Ann Druyan. Ann served as creative director for the Voyager Interstellar Message and coded on the famous golden records that are aboard Voyagers 1 and 2 as they head for the stars. She was an executive producer and one of the primary creative forces

behind last year's Cosmos, A Spacetime Odyssey, the beautiful and inspiring series hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Of course, this new series stood on the shoulders of the original Cosmos, led by Anne's late husband, Carl Sagan. That's where I began my phone conversation with Anne a few days ago. Before we get into the Breakthrough Initiatives, I want to tell you how wonderful it was to enjoy Cosmos, a space-time odyssey, with my wife, my daughters, and knowing that there were many, many other human beings around the world

who were at that time sharing your sense of wonder and awe. It felt like a community. Thank you, Matt. First of all, let me say that I always enjoy our conversations, and I'm delighted to be talking with you. And thanks for the really kind props on Cosmos. Yeah, 180 countries. It was the largest rollout in television history. I guess I was terribly afraid when I was working on it that people would see it and say, that's not Cosmos, I know Cosmos. But the fact that I didn't hear that and instead received such a warm and really overwhelming reception is a constant source of gratification to me.

I'm glad to hear that, and I apologize for springing that effusive compliment on you. I didn't warn you I would do that, but I just... Anytime you want to do that, you feel free. I'm ready. All right, so the breakthrough initiatives. I am as excited about this as I was about Cosmos. How did you become involved with this extremely exciting project? Seven months ago. Well, actually, I first heard of Yuri Milner almost a year ago,

and that was because he was kind enough to invite me to be a part of the Breakthrough Cries, which he gives annually for mostly for the medical sciences. He hadn't really been involved with SETI, and he contacted me a few months ago, and I went to visit him. He made this proposal and asked me if I would like to be a co-chair. He made this proposal and asked me if I would like to be a co-chair. When I heard what he intended to do, as you all know, even though the fields of astrobiology, the search for life, and for habitable planets is booming,

really steady funding has been much too hard to come by. For the last 10 years or so, there really hasn't been any kind of source of nourishment for all the people who want to scientifically pursue this question. And when he said that he wanted to give $100 million to the Saturday community, and the way in which he wanted to give this money, this support, which was with complete openness and with a desire to really jumpstart the entire SETI effort, I was just overwhelmed.

And of course I said yes. It's an honor to be associated with the likes of Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, with the likes of Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, who's the astronomer royal, but who is really also a brilliant scientist who's made so many contributions and is such a great person, and Frank Drake, with whom I had the honor to collaborate on the Voyager record nearly 40 years ago. So this was just a dream come true. It's sad to me that an endeavor as worthwhile and as fascinating as the question of extraterrestrial intelligence really depends on the kindness of strangers at this moment in the 21st century. It seems

to me it's more properly the work of governments to support this kind of research. But how lucky we are that Yuri Belner, who is not only an entrepreneur, but also a particle physicist with such a deep and abiding respect for science, has decided to use his enormous resources in the service of something as wondrous as the search.

What do you think motivates him in this case? No hidden agenda? No hidden agenda. He told me as a very young boy with already with an interest in science. He read Carl Sagan's book with I.S. Shofsky, Intelligent Life in the Universe, as a young boy in Russia, and that was the thing that motivated him. That was the turning point for him.

He grew up in the former Soviet Union, literally at the dawn of the space age, so he was kind of already primed to be interested in these subjects. But he said that it was Carl and Joseph Schlossky's work that really, really ignited his interest. And that interest has lasted to this day. Why am I not surprised? Someone I know that you have a lot of respect for,

Dan Wertheimer of SETI at Home at UC Berkeley, and also Karen O'Neill of the Green Bank Telescope Facility. They're going to be major beneficiaries, or really I should say their work will be among the major beneficiaries of this project. heard from them, they are thrilled. They are blown away by the fact that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is going to be advanced this way. Do you have anything to say about people like this, like Dan and others, who are going to be carrying this work forward? Well, as you know, and as you said, I am a huge fan of Dan's. You know, I think SETI at Home is really my ideal of the democratization of scientific research made possible by broadly, widely distributed computing power. Dan's imagination and his innovation is something that, you know, it's long overdue that he's getting the kind of support that he so richly deserves.

And as for Green Bank, while I don't know Karen personally, you know, it's my impression that this support is going to keep Green Bank alive. You know, again, it's a source of great heartache to me that institutions like the Green Bank Telescope are starved for funding by government and that breeds new life into a completely compelling avenue of scientific research. Let me ask you about something that I know you've given thought to, as have folks like Frank Drake and many others. What's the worst-case scenario here? What if we don't find ET in the 10 years over which this initiative will be operating? That in itself is valuable information, because after all, we are going to be looking in a search that is, what, some 10 times greater than all the searching that's been done since Frank Drake kicked this whole line of inquiry off some 50 years ago.

I guess it's 50 times more sensitive than all the previous programs dedicated to study research. If that's the case, then knowing that there's nothing to be found indicates one of two things. One is that intelligent life in the universe is precious, and perhaps somewhat rare. Because what we can't say now, but we will be able to say ten years from now, is that we've looked at the million closest stars to Earth and scanned the center of our galaxy and the entire galactic plane. And beyond the Milky Way,

we'll be listening for messages from the hundred closest galaxies. Now, that's the beginning of something approaching a comprehensive search. It's still a tiny part of the universe, and our knowledge of the universe at this moment in time is still very new, newly acquired. We've only been at this in any kind of scientific way of examining the universe for fewer than 400 years.

That's not a very large amount of time. of examining the universe for fewer than 400 years. That's not a very large amount of time. So if we don't find anything, then we can say with some confidence that what we have here is relatively precious and therefore even more worth protecting than it was for all the reasons we ourselves knew locally. That's one thing. The second thing is that maybe there's other ways to listen that our technology has yet to uncover.

Maybe we should be looking in other ways. We won't know that until we complete this search and probably other searches as well. But still, it's food for thought. There's no wrong answer in science. There's no downside. As long as you get to do the research, you get to make the search. Whatever you find out, that's the beauty of science, is that it's not a predetermined exercise in futility.

It's instead a willingness to find whatever is there or not there. There's no conceivable result that would make this enterprise less than worthwhile. Ann Druyan, one of the leaders of the Breakthrough SETI initiatives. Our conversation will continue in a minute here on Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merck Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos,

which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merck. Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute.

Planetary TV is not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Merc? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV. Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right?

Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series, too. And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is. And hilarious. See? Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new Random Space Fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetarysociety.

You can subscribe to join our growing community and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now? Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, hoping you were enjoying my conversation with Ann Druyan as much as I did. Ann was just named one of the very distinguished leaders of the new Breakthrough Listen and Message initiatives that will expand the search for extraterrestrial intelligence far beyond what has been accomplished so far. Ann and I mentioned SETI at home's Dan Wertheimer and Karen O'Neill of the Green Bank Telescope facility.

You'll hear how the Breakthrough initiatives will change their lives on next week's show. Of course, SETI is not just about finding ET. I also like to think about what an effort like this says about us as a species, and that leads me to a statement from your friend, your colleague in the Breakthrough Initiatives, Stephen Hawking, who wrote this lovely tribute to the project and why he is a part of it, and I won't read the whole thing, but we'll provide a link to it. I do love his closing line, though. We are alive. We are intelligent.

We must know. I love that, too. So to the point. That's what I call lapidary prose. Not a wasted word. You could carve it in stone. It's absolutely perfect as is. And yes, I second that emotion.

So in all the very justified excitement that has been generated by Breakthrough Listen, I think the other initiative in this effort may not have received the attention that it deserves. Can you tell us about the Breakthrough message, which you have also written very eloquently about? Yes. Well, one of the reasons I think that Breakthrough Listen is getting the lion's share of the attention is because, of course, it's a much larger initiative. Breakthrough Message is just a fraction of this larger initiative, and I'm thrilled to be co-chairing this with Frank Drake. And the idea

is to conceptualize a challenge to the people of the world. Absolutely anyone can enter. There will be a million dollars in prizes for the winners. And that is to challenge people of the world to think about and to present to us what it is they wish to share visually about being alive on Earth. Just as with the Voyager interstellar message, which was intended for two audiences, the extraterrestrials of any time in the next thousand million years, as well as our fellow Earthlings, to think about what it is to be alive here. I maintain that you cannot conceptualize a message to the beings of another world without seeing our world anew.

And I really feel like that is what is called for. Because if we were to look at the Earth with an extraterrestrial perspective, something that Carl and others, including Voltaire, tried to encourage us to do. You begin to see the place for the first time. There is some controversy about whether or not it makes sense to send a message. I know Stephen Hawking has expressed on various occasions, including at our press conference,

his sense that he doesn't know anything about the extraterrestrials, but he knows something about the humans. And in his view, every time the humans interact, a highly technological component of human society interacts with the people of another part of the world who don't have those technological advantages, the results are devastating and disastrous for those who don't have the high technology. I submit that as tragic as our history is,

that a big part of it was not so much a difference in technological expertise, but the microbes that the Europeans were carrying into the new world that were so devastating. And the outcome might well have been different if that was not the case. I also think that we can all agree on one thing, and that is we've only had anything approaching high technology for about a minute of our history, very briefly. It's obvious that any space-faring civilization would likely be much more sophisticated in that way, and

that's the anxiety about telling the extraterrestrials where we are and actually the sending of a message. So in my view, the idea that a much more sophisticated technological civilization would remain as stunted politically and emotionally as we are is unlikely. But I have such respect for Stephen Hawking, and anyone who doesn't would be kind of an idiot. So our view at the breakthrough message is that we won't send anything until we mount a global debate on this question. And we are very interested in...

We don't have a preconceived notion of what the outcome will be, but we're interested in having the discussion, but also in framing the message, even if we just send it to ourselves about who we are. And I think that every time

we engage in the exercise of thinking together about a deep question. The Internet has given us the capability to do that. Every gesture like that is a baby step towards a greater maturity as a civilization. That recognition that we have a global civilization of which we're all a part. That in itself is what we need. So I'm thrilled to be part of this with Frank Drake. I've enlisted the involvement of an artist for whom I have a great

deal of respect, Dario Robledo of Houston, Texas, other leaders in culture and science to begin framing the question so that we can present it to the world and get that very valuable feedback that we require. So this is just getting underway, both ends of the initiative, but the breakthrough message, I know you're in the planning stages, as you've just said. I imagine people should keep an eye on that Breakthrough Initiatives website, and they can look for the details as they emerge. Exactly.

Just one other major question. Have you thought about what you'll do to celebrate, if a celebration is in order, when we first learn that we're not alone? That's a great question. I haven't given that much thought. Even though I have no belief whatsoever in an afterlife, and I know it's a one-way

conversation, I have many of those one-way conversations in my heart and my mind with Carl. And I guess the first thing I would do would probably in my heart

communicate something of it to Carl my wish that he could have lived to know this and my sense of how much he did to bring us to this point I think it would be a kind of silent

heart communication with him. That's what I would do. And then I would gather my children and hug them very tight. That is so lovely. You know what it makes me think of? I heard Neil Tyson say that whenever you speak, he has the urge to sit on the floor at your feet and listen. I just want to know, can I have the spot next to him? Hey, listen, let's sit shoulder to shoulder

and continue this conversation at the earliest possible opportunity. Oh, I would love that. So much fun talking with you, and I can't wait for the next time. Thank you, Anne, very much. I sure look forward to that. We have, well, it hardly is necessary to say, been talking with Anne Druyan. She is the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning writer and producer who served as the creative director for the Voyager Interstellar Mission, 40 years along now on its mission to the stars.

She is the co-founder and CEO of Cosmos Studios, which is where we found her today. She is also the executive producer of last year's magnificent Cosmos, A Spacetime Odyssey. Bruce Betts and What's Up are next. Bruce Batts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, among other things, and he has returned to bring us a look at what's up in the night sky. Welcome back. Thank you. I know, it's early on a Sunday morning. Don't worry, all will be well once you tell us what's happening.

The Perseid meteor shower, Matt, it's very exciting. It peaks on August 12th and 13th. This is the night of the 12th, 13th. Traditionally the second best meteor shower of the year on a normal year after the Geminids, but what's particularly exciting this year is it happens pretty much at new moon. Therefore you don't have moon in the sky and moonlight competing with finding meteors. So you should, from a dark side, should be able to see 60 to 100 meteors per hour. All right. I'm going to try and give it a shot this year. Also, you can catch Saturn near Scorpius in the southern sky in the evening.

We move on to this week in space history. In 2012, Curiosity landed on Mars three Earth years ago. Hard to believe. It certainly is. And in 2011, the Juno spacecraft was launched, still flying on its way to Jupiter. We'll get there in July of this coming year, 2016. Yeah, we'll be celebrating, I'm sure. I'm sure. Which leads us to our Jovian... RUN ON SPACE FACT! Juno is the first mission to Jupiter,

or anywhere in the outer solar system, to use solar panels for power instead of radioisotope thermoelectric generators that were used by everything else out there. In order to accomplish this, each panel, three of them, is 2.7 meters by 8.9 meters long, the biggest on any NASA deep space probe. This thing is just huge wings. It's amazing. It is indeed. All right, on to the trivia contest. We asked you, as of now, what is the unofficial feature name being given by the New Horizons team to the dark feature that some initially called the whale? How'd we do, Matt?

Quite well. People were into this, perhaps because of the science fiction and fantasy element that it brought out. H. Waters says, though let's be honest, Sharon got the better dark region unofficial name with Mordor. True. True enough. So here is, I do believe, our winner this week, Jeff Sellers. I think a first-time winner. Tulsa, Oklahoma. The feature formerly called the whale is now Cthulhu, or Cthulhu, or there are various ways to pronounce it. In fact, H.P. Lovecraft, the guy who first wrote about the monster and the call of Cthulhu in a 1928 copy of Weird Tales, he said that humans really can't pronounce Cthulhu's name. So that is correct, I believe?

That is indeed correct, the deity from H.P. Lovecraft. Who's quite horrible. He's said to be a combination of an octopus, a human, and a dragon. And a few hundred feet tall while you're at it. And I highly recommend that people check out, there's a Dr. Seuss version of the story of Cthulhu. You can find it on knowyourmeme.com. It's very entertaining.

It looks like it could have been done by Dr. Seuss, although it wasn't. I was going to say, is that one of the newly released from the archive of Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss? Yeah, understandably, it was kept in a trunk because it's a little dark. We also, from Alex Roop and Robert Jacobson, they sent us the unpronounceable incantation that apparently goes with Cthulhu in his house at Yogoth.

Dead Cthulhu waits, dreaming. On Pluto, apparently. Yes, apparently so. We had a few people who said that. That must be where his lair is. Jeff Sellers, we are going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt, and you're going to get a 200-point itelescope.net account for remote use of those worldwide telescopes,

and take some images, send them to us. It's worth a couple hundred dollars, I think. We had a whole bunch of people like Nathan Hunter who said they helped with this because they voted for Cthulhu as part of the Our Pluto campaign. Something else that I found on that meme website, but was tipped off to it by Jeff Sosby in Sacramento, California. He said this should give a big boost to Cthulhu's run for president in 2016. Campaign slogan, why choose the lesser evil? Nice. All right, back to the Apollo program.

What is the only Apollo lunar module whose ascent stage still probably survives in space. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest, get us your entry. One of those that I know. That is such a good feeling. We're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt if you win, but we also have for you a beautiful New Horizons print from Chop Shop. Our friend Thomas Romer, the amazing graphic artist who has done all of these beautiful posters, some of them in cooperation with us. There's a Light Sail poster, too. But he's just come out with both the New Horizons and the Rosetta prints, and he's offered them to the winner of this week's contest.

So, yeah, it's going to be very cool. It can be checked out at chopshopstore.com. And speaking of New Horizons, you've got something people can take a look at. Indeed. Shortly before New Horizons got to Pluto, we opened the New Horizons Digital Time Capsule, a Planetary Society project in collaboration with the New Horizons Project, where people submitted images, and we selected 50 images and captions of things they thought would change

between launch, 2006, and getting to Pluto, 2015. We opened it. You can check out my blog on the Planetary Society website. Great fun. Thank you, sir. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there. Look up the night sky, and think about your favorite kind of Milky Way. Thank you, and good night.

Don't make me choose. For me, it's a toss-up between the beautiful center of our gorgeous galaxy or dark chocolate. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. The contest deadline is Tuesday, August 11th at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. More SETI next week with Dan Wertheimer and Karen O'Neill. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its ever-vigilant and questing members.

Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.