Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Paul Davies, Author of The Eerie Silence""

Episode Date: April 26, 2010

Paul Davies, Author of The Eerie Silence""Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Eerie Silence, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Are we alone? And if we're not, are we missing the evidence that E.T. is out there? These are just a couple of the questions that are brilliantly considered in Paul Davies' new book, The Eerie Silence. Paul is my guest on today's show. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy's commentary, will look at the disagreement between

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin over NASA's new plans for space exploration. Later today in our What's Up segment, Bruce Betts and I will sing along as we present a song about Planetary Radio Live. You may still have time to reserve your seat for the April 30 show in Pasadena, California, by going to brownpapertickets.com. It's time for our regular conversation with Emily Lakdawalla, the Planetary Society's blogger and science and technology coordinator. Emily, first up this week, you have a nifty tour that celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. That's right. It's hard to believe it's been 20 years since Hubble was launched, and of course it's been producing spectacular photos of places across the galaxy

and across the universe since then. But I decided that since pretty much every other blogger was writing about Hubble, that I would focus on the planets that Hubble has seen. So I showed photos of every single planet in the solar system that Hubble has photographed, which is everything but Mercury and a few other things as well. Yeah, and one beyond our solar system. Yes. Let's go on to something that you made a prediction about, I think, just last week. And that is more proof that the best light show in the solar system is always on the sun. Absolutely. The first images that came back from the Solar Dynamics Observatory are just astounding.

And the main thing that SDO is contributing, besides a high-resolution camera, is the fact that they take pictures every 20 seconds. So you can see these storms and explosions on the sun evolve so quickly and just travel across the surface of the sun and these amazing twisting eruptions of solar plasma. It's pretty cool. These coronal ejections, I mean, I guess they still are called prominences. Absolutely spectacular. I mean, Jim Cameron could not equal these, I think, with even his budgets. They are. I put two videos in the blog, and so you should definitely go check them out. Absolutely.

All right, last thing we'll talk about today, Little Hayabusa, almost home. That's right. It's the little spacecraft that could. It's really amazing that it's made it back to Earth. And, of course, what they're trying to do is to return a sample of the asteroid. They don't even know if they have a sample inside their sample return capsule. But hopefully everything will go well over the next few weeks. People are watching very closely. The spacecraft is approaching Earth from Gemini, right between Castor and Pollux, and it's coming down. It's going to land in the Woomera Prohibited Area in southern Australia.

And I'm just going to be paying an awful lot of attention to this mission over the coming weeks. It's an amazing story. It's really brought quite emotional reactions from people in Japan to the challenge of making the spacecraft survive and getting it home safely. All right. We'll leave it there, Emily. And we will see you in a few days.

Actually, by the time some people hear this, it may have already happened. But they get to hear you at Planetary Live on our next installment of Planetary Radio. I'm looking forward to it, Matt. Emily Lackawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. She joins us every week here to review the Planetary Society blog. I'll be right back with Paul Davies. Here's Bill. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, vice president of Planetary Society. And this week, people are still talking about President Obama's speech, in which he said the United States is going to, for the most part, abandon

the constellation program, the Ares I and Ares V rocket to go out, send people back to the moon, The Ares I and Ares V rocket to go out, send people back to the moon, you're going to abandon that and instead go to new places, like the Lagrange points where the orbital speed and gravity are in balance, beyond that to asteroids, and eventually to Mars and the moons of Mars. Now, this is a big speech. Canceling the Constellation Program, or most of the Constellation program, is a political big thing because people have jobs in these states where these rocket parts were built. Furthermore, Neil Armstrong,

the very first guy to walk on the moon, along with a couple other significant people, were very, very critical of this, saying it's a bad idea. The United States would be squandering its lead in space, giving it up to other space organizations and other governments. Then Buzz Aldrin, second guy to walk on the moon, Buzz Aldrin likes the new program, as do I, because we go to new exciting places, places worthy of NASA, places worthy of inspiring people, places we've never been before. I, a guy walking down the street, I've held a moon rock at the National Air and Space Museum. I mean, the moon is a fabulous place, but we spent a lot of time there. We've already learned a lot about it.

This excitement that the president's speech created gets you involved. What do you think? Should we go back to the moon, spending billions of dollars? By the way, not getting there much before 2028, even though we already been there back in 1969. Or are you on the other camp? You're excited about the future. You want to go to these new places. You want to spend tax dollars to send people out where they can do exploration of new worlds. Which side of it are you on? You think we're squandering the lead or the United States taking the reins to be leaders in a new direction, in a new exciting place? Well, there's plenty to think about. I will see you up there, out there, beyond low Earth orbit. I got to fly fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy.

Paul Davies is fascinated by the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The Arizona State University cosmologist, physicist, and astrobiologist has captured some of his deep thoughts about SETI in The Eerie Silence, his very thought-provoking and very entertaining new book. I wish there was time to present our entire conversation as part of today's show. You can hear what you've missed at planetary.org slash radio. The book presents an affectionate critique of current SETI efforts that trace their origins to pioneering work begun a half century ago. And while Paul has his doubts about the chance that another wow signal will someday reveal a

civilization circling another star, he is part of a project that is preparing for that discovery. I chair something called the SETI Post-Detection Task Group, which is an assortment of scientists and media people, And we have a couple of lawyers and a theologian. And it's our job to deliberate on what should happen if ET calls on my watch. Now, obviously, this is a bit of a long shot, but it pays to be prepared. Because of course, the impact on society could be stupendous. If we were to get a message, literally a message from an extraterrestrial civilization, I think all bets are off. Much more likely is that we will simply get very strong evidence that we are not alone in the universe, which would over time, I think, drastically change the way that we see ourselves and our place in nature.

So it would be like Copernicus's discovery that Earth is going around the sun or Darwin's theory of evolution. It would have a very, very profound effect. And you speculate in very interesting ways on what the social implications might be when that happens. But let's get to talking about SETI. What have we been doing wrong for 50 years, beginning with Frank Drake almost exactly 50 years ago? I think what the SETI people have been doing is fine, and I hope they go on doing it and doing it better. But what I would like to do is greatly widen the dial to a particular frequency and picking up a continuous signal on that frequency. But it's not obvious to me, in fact, I think it's very unlikely, that ET would be beaming narrowband signals at us at this time. And for the simple reason that if we ask how far away is this civilization likely to be, well, you can go and ask an optimist like Frank Drake,

who started this whole SETI game 50 years ago. I dedicate the book to him. He's a hero of mine. I think it's wonderful. He's still in the game 50 years on. Yes. And say, Frank, how many civilizations do you think are out there? And he says, well, I think about 10,000.

Of course, it's just a guess. But if you take his figure and ask how far away is the nearest civilization likely to be, we get a number of several hundred light years. Say, take 1,000 light years as a round figure. The problem here is that a hypothetical alien 1,000 light years away sees Earth not as it is today, but as it was 1,000 thousand years ago nothing can travel faster than light and a thousand years ago there were no radio telescopes so if this seti enthusiast on this other world goes to a funding agency asking for money to beam messages at earth on the basis that he can see that there is some sort of intelligent activity here like the great wall of china and the

pyramids i know what the answer would be. It would be, well, you come back in a few millennia when you know they're on the air. We think it's a good project, but there's no point in sending messages at this particular time. And of course, they won't know we're on the air until our first radio messages reach them, traveling out at the speed of light, leaking into space. Even these words will be leaking out into space and going off to this distant civilization where they will probably listen to what I'm saying now and comment, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. So it'll be about another 900 years when, in principle, this civilization could detect our first feeble radio messages. Then they might start broadcasting to us.

But there are other things we could look for. There could be radio beacons, for example, out there in space. So this is another strategy that the SETI people could do. At the moment, they tend to point a telescope at a particular star, tune in for half an hour or so, and then move on to the next one. So they're looking specifically for these narrowband messages that are being continuously broadcast. But a beacon, you know, a bit like a lighthouse, it's just something that goes bleep in the night. They pick up pulses from time to time. But of course, they come and they go. It's not possible to then check without continuously observing a given source in the sky for a very long duration. So I think alongside looking for narrow band signals, we should have a system of dedicated

radio telescopes that are continually looking toward the center of the galaxy, where most of the oldest stars are found and potentially the oldest and richest civilizations that might have made beacons and just see over a few years whether something repeats, like a lighthouse beam would flash and then flash again and flash again. So they could be navigation beacons, but you speculate about other reasons that these other civilizations might have these beacons beaming out across the galaxy. Yes, I don't think you need navigation beacons in the galaxy, but what you might well have

are monuments to long-vanished civilizations, portals to Encyclopedia Galactica. We might even think of works of art, aesthetic symbols, or just being friendly. So all sorts of reasons why beacons might be made. We can't speculate on that. There may be reasons that don't speculate on that there may be reasons that don't even occur to humans alien reasons but nevertheless what we're looking for is any general footprint of technology out there in the galaxy because merely to say that such and such a process or objects or system could not have a natural origin already tells us that we're not alone in the universe.

And that's what we're looking for. So my feeling is let's forget messages. I think that's a pretty unlikely scenario. And let's just look for footprints of technology. More to come from Paul Davies, author of The Eerie Silence. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Planetary Radio. first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other

exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio.

The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Cosmologist Paul Davies says we may be missing the evidence of life and intelligence elsewhere in the universe. And he has some suggestions for where and how to look in his new book, The Eerie Silence. I recommend it very highly, as does NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay. You can hear my entire conversation with Paul at planetary.org slash radio, including his insistence that we need to think beyond our own technological and other limitations. Part of the problem here is putting ourselves in the position of a technological

community that might have been around not just for thousands of years, but millions, tens of millions, or who knows, even hundreds of millions of years. It's almost impossible for us to guess, first of all, their motivations, but secondly, what fancy gadgetry they might be using. And this is where you have to make a distinction between a deliberate attempt, say, by aliens to communicate with each other, which may take place using a technology that we couldn't even guess at, and then chances are we're not going to spot it or deliberately making an attempt to attract the attention of the new kids on the

block like us so you sort of assume that if they really know we exist and want to say hello that they would adapt their technology to what they to our level of development what they think that would be nevertheless even if they're communicating with each other, we may still spot something fishy. That is to say, we may not figure, oh, this is the technology they'll use. Let's go look for that. We may just notice something that looks weird, some anomaly, something that's there that shouldn't be or something that's missing that should be there. And that's a pointer to something going on, some sort of alien technology at work, even if we can't guess what it is or what its motive is. When we're thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence,

it pays to be as broad as we possibly can, to drop all of the anthropocentric assumptions, because after all, there may be many, many things that are special about human beings and human society and human science. Even during my career, I've seen how the priorities of the SETI program have shifted according to our own political agenda, would you believe? So back in the 60s, there was a lot of feeling that was a Cold War, a lot of feeling we'd blow ourselves up within a few decades. So surely E.T. would do the same. Now that that agenda has shifted a bit, people are more

concerned about environmental issues. And so the mood seems to be, well, surely ET would have good green credentials and they wouldn't be squandering resources. Little green men, so to speak. Yes, absolutely right. Very well put. And some of your most fascinating speculation in the book that we won't have time to get into is what sort of shape that intelligence might take. But we are presupposing that there is intelligence out there for us to find. That, of course, is still very much in question, as is even the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. The existence of life elsewhere in the universe. This is a really important point because when I got interested in this subject way back in the 60s, that's how old I am, people thought this was crazy. One might as well have professed a belief in theories rather than extraterrestrial beings.

The mood was that there's no life beyond Earth and certainly no intelligent life. Now the pendulum has swung the other way. I think a bit too far the other way. There's too much credulity now given to the possibility that the universe is teeming with intelligent life. It might be, I hope it is, but we don't assume that the origin of life is a very likely event. How can we test that? Well, there's one way that occurred to me a few years ago. No planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself. So if life does start readily in Earth-like conditions, surely it should have started many times right over here on our home planet. Well, how do we know it didn't? Has anybody actually looked? Well, remarkably enough,

no, not until recently. The point about this is that we notice the big things, the elephants and the oak trees, almost all species on Earth are microbial. And we've only just scratched the surface of the microbial realm. You can't tell by looking what a microbe is made of. You've got to delve into its innards. So what I'm suggesting is that if life had started many times on Earth, that the descendants of these other genesis events that would belong to a completely separate tree of life could still be around today, intermingled among the microbial life that we spotted and we know and love. Microbiologists have their techniques customized to life that we know. So if you go looking for A, you will, of course,

find A. You won't find B. We want B. We want what Chris McKay at NASA Ames calls life 2.0. We're life 1.0. You're talking to an example of it now. We want life 2.0. And so tracking down life, but not as we know it here on Earth is a challenge. But fortunately, some of my colleagues are rising to that challenge. And the search is on to see if there is a genuine alien form of life here on Earth that would tell us that life has happened more than once. If it's happened twice, say twice on Earth, two out of two on one planet is pretty good going. We could be sure that it would be all around the universe. going, we could be sure that it would be all around the universe. But in our present state of ignorance, we cannot be sure that life on Earth is just a unique freak. It may be that it's happened only once and we're it. Why would it be, and this was one of the most sobering

thoughts in the book, why would it be such bad news for us if we discover a galaxy full of life, Discover a galaxy full of life, but no other intelligence. Yes. One of the alarming things would be if the first step on the road to intelligent life was easy and then the subsequent steps, which involve everything through formation of multicellular life, then the emergence of intelligence, then technological society, that if what we find is that all those early steps are easy, but then the hard step is for technological society to sustain itself for long enough to be on the air and talk to us. I think if the galaxy is littered with the corpses of long dead civilizations, then that's probably what lies in store for us. So there's an argument that philosophers call the great filter, which is that if the sky is quiet, and this is the eerie silence, if there is only a silence out there,

but yet nevertheless the steps leading up to the emergence of extraterrestrial civilizations are easy. Then it does show they simply can't sustain themselves. Now, I hope that's not the case. I hope that if the silence is because there's nobody out there transmitting, that it's because the first step, the emergence of life, is very hard. So life will be exceedingly rare or even unique. That's the reason for the silence. Because I hope the silence will be broken. I hope we are going to detect, if not a message,

then at least some signs of alien activity. So the book is one that is predicated on hope, but points out if it really is silent, then that could be bad news for humanity. Thank you so much for joining us today. May we get another wow signal in our lifetimes. I really hope during my lifetime, yes. Paul Davies is the internationally acclaimed physicist and cosmologist, I think is how he mostly wants to be known, although he dabbles in many, many other fields. He's at Arizona State University, where he runs the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, which also surfaces in the book. Very significantly, he's the recipient of the 1995 Templeton Prize. That is for his work on science and religion,

the author of more than 20 books, and I assume the most recent of them is The Eerie Silence. Now available from Houghton Mifflin and bookstores everywhere, and I'm sure online, and if E.T. is downloading from the internet, I hope he's perusing it right now. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, for what is probably the last time at the Planetary Society headquarters on Catalina in Pasadena. This is What's Up with Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Farewell old building. Hello, Bruce. Hello. Yes, we're moving.

Yeah, by the time, well, next time we do this, we'll be Planetary Radio Live, which we'll get back to in a moment. But then after that, we'll be at the brand new, spanking new, well, it's an old building, but it's beautiful. The new headquarters on what street is that? Grand or something? Grand, South Grand, also in Pasadena, on the west side of Pasadena, in a somewhat less old building, moving out of our 1903 building, primarily because the maintenance costs were just too high. And that'll happen in the next couple weeks.

Very nice place. So what's up? Oh, wait, I'll tell you what's up. Oh, please do. Are you ready for this? This is the song that my jet pilot brother wrote about Planetary Radio Live. Here goes. To Planetary Radio on April 30th we'll go

to watch them tape their cosmic show live. A free gift to you and me from Bill, Bruce, Matt, and Emily as Planetary Radio goes live. For Celestial Witty Banter, just too good to miss, listen to the announcement that's coming after this. To Planetary Radio on April 30th. We'll go to watch them tape their cosmic show live.

Not bad, huh? That's impressive. Very nice. He's a multi-talented guy. He is indeed. That's cool. And as he says, you want to come, if you can, to Planetary Radio Live.

We still have seats, free seats. You just have to go to Brown Paper Tickets and put in Planetary Radio. You'll go right to our event on the evening of Friday, April 30th.

We would love to see you there with Bill Nye and Jeff Rakiki of SpaceX and Jim Burke, formerly of JPL, a real planetary explorer, extraordinaire, pioneer, and Bruce and Emily. Road trip. Yeah, I think it is going to be fun.

Now tell us what's up in the sky. When people come that evening, they'll be able to look over the west shortly after sunset and see Venus looking extremely bright, like a bright star-like object. And we got Mars looking reddish high in the southwest, continuing to dim. And Saturn is high in the southeast. So we got three planets across the sky. Connect the dots. See the planetary ecliptic.

Put them all in a line. It'll be lovely. In the pre-dawn, which is not, we're not scheduled to go to the pre-dawn with Planetary Radio Live, are we? I don't think so. All right. Depends on how it's going, you know. All right.

Well, if people stay around or wake up there in the parking lot and then look over in the east, they'll see Jupiter looking like a bright star-like object. Let's go on to this week in space history. Let's talk about people for whom parts of the outer solar system was named. That's right, 110 years ago, Jan Oort was born. Oort, Oort, Oort, Oort. For which the Oort cloud was named. And in 1949, Gerhard Kuiper, as in Kuiper Belt, discovered Nereid, moon of

Neptune. We move on to Random Space Fact. Is that it? Random Space Fact. All right. Well, if you get a guitar, you can compete with my brother on American Idol. Well, I can't. That's why I'm so intimidated. He's going on American Idol?

That's great. Is he going to perform that song? In his dreams. Oh, okay. The sun. It's a star. But one interesting thing about the sun, it is a nearly perfect sphere. Like, really, really close to perfect sphere. It's not a perfect sphere. It's a perfect sphere.

And its polar diameter varies from its equatorial diameter by less than 10 kilometers. You're joking. I am not joking. Why? As fast as that is spinning, why isn't it an oblate spheroid? Did you like that? Because it's all powerful. I have no idea, and I didn't have time to look it up.

That's still fascinating, though. On to the trivia contest. We asked you how old was Yuri Gagarin when he took his fateful space flight? How old was he, Matt? He was 27 years old. A mere lad. He did that, of course, back in 1961. April 12th, 1961. By sheer coincidence, that's also when some people celebrate Yuri's night. Now, young as he was, he wasn't as young as the second man to orbit the Earth. And that was German Titov, who was only 25 years old.

I tell you, it's totally unfair. That you weren't born a Soviet at that time? All right, let's return to Earth and then back out to the Saturnian system. I had so much fun with our ring mnemonics that we announced last week that I've got a ring question for you. Specifically, Saturn's fascinating moon, Enceladus, feeds what ring of Saturn?

Use your ring mnemonic. Well, you'll need more than that because you have to pick out which letter ring is fed primarily by Enceladus. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. You have until May 3rd. Squeaky chair there, huh?

May 3rd at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That's Monday, May 3rd, 2 p.m. Pacific time. Don't do that. Sorry. It's a different chair than usual. It's marked for elimination. Don't worry. It will be punished.

I got you a present, by the way. You did? Yeah, I did. I got you some Lysol sanitizing wipes. Thank you so much. I was going to tell you that I was at JPL. Yeah, where's my present? This store was closed. I had to leave before the store opened. I'm starting to expect when Dad goes away, he brings me a present.

Instead, I got you this nice bottle of Lysol sanitizing wipes. Oh, that is awesome. I'm going to bathe now. Say goodnight, Bruce. Goodnight, Bruce. Thank you. Everybody, everybody, everybody out there, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about what you would use a sanitizing wipe for right now.

Thank you, and goodnight. Maybe the ring around the bathtub. He's the Lord of the Rings, Bruce Betts. He joins me every week here for What's Up. We'll take you to Planetary Radio Live next time. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena and made possible in part by a grant

from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up. Thank you.