Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Leading the Search: Bill Diamond of the SETI Institute

Episode Date: November 29, 2016

The SETI Institute is about much more than the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. President and CEO Bill Diamond of the Institute explains.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The leader of the SETI Institute, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. You may think that searching for E.T. is all they do at the SETI Institute. President and CEO Bill Diamond will be here to set you straight. Emily Lontoala is off this week. We're going to take a rocket road trip while she's gone, and Bruce Batts will take us to Venus for this week's What's Up Trivia contest that offers yet another special prize. We begin with the Planetary Society CEO, Bill Nye. Bill, we head for Mars this week. A couple of stories not terribly

related. I don't know, maybe you'll see a relationship. Beginning with the announcement made by the European Space Agency that they think they know what went wrong with the Schiaparelli lander. Yeah, the missing second in the software, second of time. It reminds me, second of time. It reminds me, Matt, just so much. I was there in 1999 when Mars Polar Lander became Mars Polar Crasher or Impactor. When the landing gear deployed, the software was written so that it interpreted as though the spacecraft had landed on the surface of Mars, but it had not. And it just went hurtling in and became Mars Polar Crasher. And this Schiaparelli thing sounds really similar, not the same, but just where there was some piece of software, some bit that was not properly bitten, and it came back to bite you.

Get it? Huh? A little hilarious computer gag there. Very clever. Very clever. Yeah. So I just remind everybody how difficult it is to land on Mars. When people say, we're going to go to Mars and set up a colony with giant domes and raise our own potatoes, it's just not so simple. And to extend that, in today's LA Times, as we speak on November 28th, a piece, an op-ed, Mars is Just a Dream by Charles Woolforth and Amanda Hedrick. She's a planetary scientist who's been heard on this show talking about biology, our own human biology, being the biggest challenge to getting to Mars and then staying there for any length of time. I guess that is the biggest challenge. And a couple things, if anybody wants to take the time to read this op-ed, it's okay as far as it goes. There are people who absolutely dispute each of these points.

Some people's eyesight is affected in zero-g, other people's is not. Getting the transit time down is very difficult, but not impossible. And as I've always asked everybody in this business, why don't we have a spacecraft that spins for crying out loud? And you don't have some of these gravity problems. It doesn't have to be fully 1G. It could be 0.4Gs or some number like that. We could even experiment with it. That said, I do agree that you almost certainly do not want to colonize Mars. That is, it's just too weird. You'd be living under a dome your whole life. If you want to try it, go to Antarctica and see what you think. Yeah. And as I've said, not just under a dome, but a dome covered by probably a couple of meters of Mars dirt. To say nothing of the fact that there's nothing to breathe. Always an issue

for me. Anyway, Matt, this is cool. But just a big lesson here is Mars is hard. And if we're going to do it, it's going to be better and cheaper to do it with international cooperation. And the main thing I just tell everybody is you've got to set a date. If you don't set a date, things just don't get revved up. Let's see what happens with this new administration. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Matt. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. We last talked with

Jason Davis in late September. The Planetary Society's digital editor had just completed the rocket road trip with Director of Space Policy Casey Dreyer and the Society's videographer, Merck Boyan. Now you can relive that trek with the guys in a new series of videos. They are posted at planetary.org slash horizon goal, which is also where you can read Jason's series of terrific articles about how the U.S. got to where it is with human spaceflight. As a special treat, and a bit of a tease, here's the audio from the first of the rocket road trip videos. Way down south in the United States, NASA's human spaceflight centers are in the midst of a once-in-a-generation transformation. From Florida to Texas, five NASA facilities have designed, built, and flown rockets for more than half

a century. Since the space shuttles retired in 2011, NASA has now been working on a new rocket called the Space Launch System and a crew capsule called Orion. They are part of a plan to send humans beyond low Earth orbit for the first time since 1972. To see how these rockets and spacecraft are coming along, the Planetary Society went on a road trip. Now you're invited to join me, Jason Davis, and Casey Dreyer, our Director of Space Policy, as we embark on a 10-day, 450-mile journey throughout the South. So, fuel up and prepare to launch,

because we're heading out on a rocket road trip. We began our trip at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Every astronaut to launch from American soil began their journey here. In NASA's Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout building, we caught up with the Orion capsule that will go on a test flight in 2018. We're gonna go see the actual flight hardware

for the first flight of Orion on top of a Space Launch System rocket. It's still not much more than a pressure vessel at this point, but in two years, it will go on a three-week shakedown cruise around the moon to make sure it's ready to carry astronauts. Our timing couldn't have been better. While we were at Kennedy Space Center we were able to watch the launch of OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft headed to an asteroid to collect a sample and bring it back to Earth.

Our expedition is just beginning. In part two of our series, we're heading straight to Alabama to check in on the space launch system. Stay tuned for more from our rocket road trip. That's Planetary Society digital editor Jason Davis, with the audio from the opening chapter in the new five-part Rocket Road Trip video series. Again, you can take the entire trip at planetary.org slash horizon goal. And we've got that link on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. Happy birthday, SETI Institute.

You were born 32 years ago this month. More than 130 scientists and other staff are led by the Institute's president and CEO, Bill Diamond. Bill spent several successful decades as a Silicon Valley tech executive before moving to the nonprofit Institute in 2015. He joined me for a conversation in mid-October. We sat at my table in the exhibit hall for the 2016 meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. Bill Diamond, it's a pleasure to get you on Planetary Radio, rest you away from big-picture science, the competition up there, that show done by my friend Seth out of your place. Hell of a radio show, too. It's a fun radio show, and we're delighted to be able to host a program like that.

And greetings from Seth as well. Thank you very much. Oh, absolutely. But, yeah, I mean, I think it's one of the value propositions of the Institute that is not all that well known broadly in terms of people making the connection between big picture science and the Institute. But from my point of view, it's one of the more important parts of our value proposition, what we do in terms of our mission statement,

which is not only to do the research we do in astrobiology, astronomy, and SETI work, but also to share that with the world. However, big picture science takes a broader look because it's really a general science show. Absolutely. And I think Seth's feeling from the very beginning was, let's make this an all-encompassing science show and really bring science to a level that is fun and engaging and informative, all at the same time, which I think he and Molly and Gary and the crew do reasonably well.

So it's fun to see them in action. They do better than reasonably well. It's a terrific show. It's a good show. And it is a general science show, as you've said. I hope that people at the Planetary Society feel the same way about Planetary Radio as you just described the sense of what big picture science is to the SETI Institute. Now, of course, I know you folks best, or your people best,

because they're regular guests of this program talking about the amazing work that they're doing. There is so much tremendous science underway at the Institute. Yeah, the Institute is interesting because although its name would suggest that most of our work is really on radio SETI or even optical SETI, which is another endeavor we're heavily involved in, it doesn't tell the full story of the Institute by any means. So essentially, we like to think of ourselves as kind of doing an astrobiology roadmap as laid out in the Drake equation. So we have actually six research thrusts at the Institute. We have astronomy and astrophysics.

We have astrobiology. We have climate and geoscience. We have exoplanets. We have planetary exploration. And we have SETI. So our scientists are divided into those six buckets. And in some cases, a scientist may assign him or herself to more than one. But broadly, we set up these both to define and categorize the breadth of research that our scientists do,

but also to help facilitate collaboration amongst and between the researchers, but also make clear the kind of work we do to the public at large and how, in fact, it goes far beyond the SETI aspect. I wish I was a little bit closer to where you guys are headquartered up in Silicon Valley because I get those announcements of the lectures that are regularly provided by the scientists at the Institute. Yes, SETI Talks. I sure wish that I could attend some of those. Of course, you can by YouTube. That's true. We do record them all, and we have probably around 400 hour-long lectures on YouTube. It's our YouTube channel, which is SETI Talks. And you'll see all of the lectures

there. You can search for them by speaker or by category. And they really are a marvelous cross-section of topics. But in the case of SETI Talks versus big picture science, they are pretty much specific to our fields of study with the addition of things that are outside our purview, such as aeronautics and propulsion technologies, things of that sort. Yeah, well, and these are fields that the audience for this show also, it's near and dear to their hearts, too. Yes, absolutely.

You've got a booth right behind a curtain that's just a few feet behind you here. Yes, we try to stay behind a curtain at all times. You know the line, pay no attention. Exactly. There is a flyer that I picked up there yesterday. It was a recruiting poster, essentially. You're trying to pick up new scientists. We absolutely are, yeah. Well, we have a wonderful team of researchers, a little over 70 scientists in the Institute overall.

Again, kind of their fields of study are multidisciplinary across those six topics that I mentioned earlier. study are multidisciplinary across those six topics that I mentioned earlier. In fact, one of the things I think is most interesting about the Institute is how, in reality, we're in pursuit of one basic question, which is, are we alone? And yet we're approaching that from the perspective of a multidisciplinary science. I like to make the analogy of putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and each of our scientists is responsible for one or more pieces of that jigsaw puzzle and we hope in the end to put together a picture which tells us about life in the universe and whether or not we're alone. But we are looking to add to our research base, not only in the fields of study that are

I mentioned earlier, but we're starting to think more broadly about the kind of research we do, particularly in terms of things that cross that boundary between astrobiology, which seems to end sort of at microbes, and SETI, which is not only sentient beings, but technological sentient beings. What about all of the biology that is in between those extremes? And SETI is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, But in reality, it's the search for extraterrestrial technology. So the question is, can we define or establish biosignatures that might belie the presence of intelligent life

before they even get to things like technology? So we're looking into broader types of science, even neuroscience, and getting, you know, bringing other talents into the Institute. Even how once we get some signal from ET, how do we figure out how to talk to each other? Sure, sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a whole another branch. Absolutely. And I think of the legacy of scientists. You're a Maritime, among the most famous of whom are Frank Drake, of course. Sure. The Drake Equation comes up on this show all the time.

Jill Charter, who was just on, well, we were, when I met you the first time last spring in Death Valley. Yes. And Jill was on that little panel that I had the pleasure of moderating. Right, right. And they still come around, don't they? Well, indeed. And in fact, what's interesting is next year, 2017, is the 20th anniversary of Contact.

And as you may or may not be aware, the character portrayed by Jodie Foster was based on Jill Tarter. Sure. And her life, and particularly her early days at Arecibo doing SETI work. So we're hoping to have some fun with those combined events. But Jill is still very active. We're hoping to have some fun with those combined events, but Jill is still very active. And what's interesting to me is how many young women in particular, astronomers and scientists I meet in this field, who say they were inspired to go into this direction because of the movie Contact.

It's really quite remarkable. Yeah, and if they get to hear Jill speak, they'll be inspired by the source material as well. I absolutely agree, yeah. That's SETI Institute President and CEO Bill Diamond. We'll talk about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence when we return. This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month.

We've already gone behind the scenes at JPL, partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system. You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect. When you do, you'll be among the first to see each new show. I hope you'll join us. Hi, I'm Kate. And I'm Whitney.

We've been building a youth education program here at the Planetary Society. We want to get space science in all classrooms to engage young people around the world in science learning. But Kate, are you a science teacher? No. Are you? Nope. We're going to need help. We want to involve teachers and education experts from the beginning to make sure that what we produce is useful in your classroom.

As a first step, we're building the STEAM Team. That's science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. So teachers, to learn more about how you can help guide this effort, check out planetary.org slash STEAM Team. That's planetary.org slash STEAM Team. And help us spread the word. Thanks. Bye. Bye.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. My guest is SETI Institute President and CEO Bill Diamond. Speaking of SETI, Alan Ray going strong. What's happening? Yes. So the ATA up in Hat Creek, first of all, for your listeners, you know, it is on a site where we encourage people to come and visit. It's open to the public during the daylight hours, and you can come and get a tour and see the dishes and see the control room and get an experience of what it's like. I'll take you up on that. You should. We'd love to have you up there. We also try to put on events up there where we combine things like visiting the ATA

with, for example, the Perseids, and then do some sky watching with telescopes, optical telescopes that we'll set up there as well, because it's very dark, it's in a very isolated part of the state, beautiful area, and it's actually between Lassen Volcano National Park to the south and Shasta to the north, so it's sort of on a high plateau around 4,000 feet, radio quiet, pretty dark, lovely place. high plateau around 4,000 feet, radio quiet, pretty dark, lovely place. So we are in the process at the moment of upgrading the feeds on the Allen Telescope Array. So we're putting in what I consider a second-generation feed.

It's cryogenically cooled, which gives us better signal-to-noise ratio and sensitivity. So we are upgrading all of the dishes. We're about, I'd say, 25% of the way through that process at the moment. And it's also increasing the frequency response out to about 15 gigahertz. So it gives us a broader part of the spectrum to explore in our SETI endeavors as well as improving the performance of the system. And we're looking at this point to fund the development of new back-end technology to increase the performance of the digital back-ends and actually be able to simultaneously monitor more than the current three points of the sky

we can look at simultaneously now. But there's a wonderful website that John Richards, who's the operator of the telescope for us, has put together. It's setiquest.info. And if you go to that website, you're able to, particularly during the observing time, see what we're observing. There's a star field that you can zoom in and zoom out and look at what we're observing now and have done in the past or read about our work on the Red Dwarf Survey.

We're currently doing a 20,000-star Red Dwarf Survey. I've currently doing a 20,000 star Red Dwarf Survey. I've read about that. Very exciting. So that's fun. And, you know, the other thing that's interesting and fun about owning and operating our own instrument, which frankly, it's the world's only purpose-built SETI device, you know, that's what it was designed and built for. Whereas other, you know, radio telescopes, their primary function is astronomy, radio astronomy, and they do some serving of study endeavors. As a result of owning that asset, we can do what we want when we want. So when something interesting comes along, like Tabby's star, we're able to point the array at Tabby's star and see if there's something interesting.

This is the one that was getting some headlines recently because it was doing some odd things? Well, it has this incredible light curve where the light of the star is dimming by more than 20%, which is extraordinarily large and still remains unexplained by any natural phenomena. It's not clear that there's any unnatural phenomena either, but it remains a mystery, and it continues to get a lot of attention. So that's rather fun to take a closer look at that. We're also collaborating with IBM with the Allen Telescope Array, and what we're doing there is leveraging new machine learning technology that IBM has developed.

It's called the Spark Platform. Oh, I was going to say Watson. Yeah, no, it's Apache Spark, it's called the Spark platform. Oh, I was going to say Watson. Yeah, no, it's Apache Spark, it's called. It's machine learning algorithms, and they are interested in the capabilities of the ATA in terms of generating massive data sets. So the data sets become like a jungle gym, if you will, to exercise the algorithms. But in turn, they're giving us a new set of tools where we're able to do much more advanced processing or analytics on the data. We normally process data in real time. Data from the ATA goes through a fast Fourier transform looking for a narrowband signal that would suggest some unnatural radio transmission. Something that somebody could write wow next.

Right, exactly. But with the IBM collaboration, we're actually able to look at the data with a much more powerful set of tools and see if, you know, is there structure and content in what we would otherwise deem to be noise. We're able to do things like look at a planet when it's in front of its host star and then wait until it occults and look again. And if there's a signal difference in, for example, in neither case is there any obvious narrow band, but is there a signal difference in looking at the overall wide spectrum, which might indicate that there's the kind of leakage that the Earth emits from our radio and television and airport transmissions into space.

It's giving us a whole new set of tools, both for performing observations and also for analyzing the data after. I like to say to the guys, you know, for all we know, we already have a signal, we just haven't had the tools to find it. Hidden there in the data. Hidden in the data. Maybe now this gives us a new opportunity. I've certainly asked people in your shop and elsewhere this question before, but it's worth repeating.

If that day comes, plans are in place, right? Yes. Well, I would say that the plans aren't laid out in detail. The first plan and most important plan is the verification stage. So if we saw something that we thought was interesting and we checked it ourselves, that's one of the advantages of real time. I mean, if it was in fact a narrow band signal that popped up real time, we'd be able to alert other observatories and ask them to look at the same spot to see if we could eliminate the possibility that this is a local RFI.

Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, step one is verify. I would say that if we got at a different location to look at the same part of the sky and see what we saw, and we could rule out, you know, local interference, military or commercial satellites, etc., etc., then I think it would be a transformative moment in the history of mankind. I'll say. Because I think for that brief moment of making that message known publicly, I think the world would stand still for at least a few minutes and people would get a whole new perspective on humanity and our place in the universe.

It would be something to be in my shoes when that happens. Yes. I live in hope. I'll settle for just being one of the people who hears about it and gets to help report it. I live in hope. I'll settle for just being one of the people who hears about it and gets to help report it. I agree. And I hope it happens in time for the two of us to enjoy

and celebrate. Wouldn't that be great? Well, if it does, then we'll celebrate together for sure. Good. Thank you. I will hold you to that. You bet. Enjoy DPS. I know you're only here for today. I am, yeah. We have a lot of researchers here giving talks, doing poster sessions. Planetary science is a big part of what we do. We have more than a dozen folks on the Kepler team and also on the K2 team.

But of course we have planetary scientists working on New Horizons as well as Kepler and Cassini, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. A lot of planetary activity at the Institute. So it's fun to be here and support the scientists from the Institute that are here doing their work and, you know, meet folks and get a chance to talk to you and maybe do some recruiting as well. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. You gave that ATA website. Yes.

General SETI Institute website. Yes. Thank you for that. The general website is SETI.org. So S-E-T-I.org, pretty easy. Okay, and we'll put it up on the show page as well. All right, well, thank you so much. Good to talk to you again, Bill. Great to talk to you.

All right, Matt. SETI Institute President and CEO Bill Diamond, with me at last month's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Pasadena, California. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Batts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, and he, once again, is going to tell us what's up in the night sky, and we've got yet another special prize for this week's space trivia contest. Welcome back. You can get us underway.

All right, I shall do that. Check out Venus in the evening sky dominating over in the west after sunset, and on December 3rd, that's Saturday, in the evening, there'll be a beautiful crescent moon next to bright Venus. So check that out. In the pre-dawn east, you can check out Jupiter getting higher and higher as the days and weeks go by. We move on to this week in space history. Hard to believe it, but it was 20 years ago that Mars Pathfinder launched on its way to Mars to land and then have a little rover, Sojourner, rove around. More and more each week, you make me feel old.

That's really my goal. I'm probably not alone. Random Space Fact. So Venus, Venus was both the first planet beyond Earth visited by a spacecraft, the U.S. Mariner 2 in 1962, and the first planet to be successfully landed upon by the Soviet Venera 7 in 1970. Great accomplishments. So I asked you, on what date will be the next full moon that is closer, just a little bit, than the one that occurred November 14th of 2016? How'd we do, Matt? Remarkably uniform set of answers here from many people. John Harrison in Lakewood, Ohio, submitted November 25th, 2034,

almost exactly 18 years from now. Is he correct? That is correct. Although there will be plenty of full moons that are really not that, not distinguishable how close they get. But that's the next time it's truly closer to Earth. I had to disappoint a few friends who said, have you heard about this huge moon that we're going to have?

I said, no, no, no. You need to listen to what's up. Before we move on, I will mention that John Harrison won a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. iTelescope is that worldwide nonprofit network of telescopes that you can control remotely and snap images of anything you want to in the universe. All right, now, Nathan Hunter, Portland, Oregon. He uses a couple of terms. I should have checked these with you.

The next proxigy-syzygy that will be closer than the one we just had will be on November 25th, 2034. One week before, astronaut Mark Watney will be stranded on Mars on Sol 18 of the Ares 3 mission. Maybe we should tell Mark Watney ahead of time. Yeah, why don't we warn him? Nah, you don't want to mess with the timeline. If you learn anything from Star Trek, that's a bad idea. What about this Proxigy-Syzygy? Does that sound right? Oddly, it's Proxigy I'm not familiar with.

It's Full Moon Paragy-Syzygy I am familiar with. Syzygy is a fabulous word with lots of Zs and Ys. And basically is when three astronomical objects roughly line up. And so that's what's happening with Sun, Earth, and Moon during a full moon. They are approximately in a line. And I assume Proxigy is some takeoff on being close. Perigee is closest point to the Earth in an orbit. I'll buy that.

Ilya Schwartz, he says the closest one this century will be December 6th, 2052. But to get closer than 356,400 kilometers, you'll have to wait till January 1st, 2257. Happy New Year! Yeah, really. Chris Utzig reminds us that the supermoon gets its light Happy New Year! Maybe, maybe just a little bit, but maybe not. Finally, I like this a lot from Brenda Brackett in Carbondale, Illinois, where I might be next year. I sure hope so for the big total solar eclipse in August of 2017.

You're trying to get listeners to invite you, aren't you? Yes, I've already had a couple do that, as a matter of fact. November 25th, 2034 is my son's 50th birthday. Hope I can be with him that day. We hope so, too, Brenda. And maybe we'll throw a big party. Indeed. We're ready to go on.

Oh, okay. How many Soviet Venera spacecraft successfully landed on Venus? This was one that's a little tricky, and I'll accept things that are close because the trick is in how you define successfully. But let's get it within one or two of what everyone agrees upon and include the Vega landers, which were based on the Venera landers.

Too much? No, no, I like it. I think that's about right. But I think it's an interesting answer just in the basic number, the conceptual number. How do people enter? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. And you have until Tuesday, December 6th at 8 a.m. Pacific to get us the answer for this week's question.

And remember I said, special prize. We're going to give away, once again, Extronaut, the game of solar system exploration, which just won the Good Housekeeping Award for one of the best board games of the year, Best Toy Award winner for 2016, and was a Kickstarter staff pick. Big deal, designed, of course, by our friend Dante Loretto, who you're working with a little bit. Yes, he's the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx sample return mission that's on its way out to the asteroid Bennu, named in a Planetary Society contest, working with University of Arizona and Dante. And he's designed a fun game that actually injects more realism, including mission

cancellations and such fun things into the game than you get in most space games. So if you want to have the experience of creating and flying, if you get the money, to your own robotic space mission, this is the one. Extranaut, by the way, you can find it on Amazon. We'll put the link up on this week's show page as well. And thank you, Dante, for this donation of this prize. And I think that wraps it up. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky,

and think about pen caps and how you keep track of them. I gave up on pen caps, I think, in middle school, which is why all my pens do this. Touché. He's Bruce Betts. No, actually, I think it's a Bic. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and is made possible by its terrestrial members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.