Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - SETI@Home Chief Scientist Dan Werthimer Says Sorry, Wrong Number

Episode Date: September 20, 2004

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A SETI False Alarm on Planetary Radio Hi everyone, welcome back to the only travel show that tours the galaxy. I'm Matt Kaplan. If only it had been the real McCoy. Dan Wertheimer, Chief Scientist of the SETI at Home Project, I'm Matt Kaplan. in by something called Boink. Later on, another what's up look at the sky and the newest space trivia contest from Bruce Betts. First up are these headlines from the final frontier. Another amazing announcement regarding the search for extrasolar planets.

A team of European and American astronomers has unveiled the first ever image of what may be a planet circling another star. The teams are now making sure the object really is a giant planet rather than a very small companion star. The effort to recover solar wind samples from the crashed Genesis spacecraft continue in the Utah desert. Scientists and engineers seem more confident every day about their ability to turn what appeared to be a tragic ending into Phoenix-like success. And Burt Rutan's Spaceship One is being readied for another record-breaking flight from the Mojave Desert. This one will be the first of two required to win the Ansari X Prize of $10 million. Get the details of these and many other stories on the web at planetary.org.

I'll be back with Dan Wertheimer of SETI at Home right after this from Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, Is the Moon the only body in the solar system that keeps just one side facing its parent planet? The short answer is no. This condition is called a one-to-one spin orbit resonance, or a synchronous orbit, and it is actually very common in the solar system. a synchronous orbit and it is actually very common in the solar system. The largest moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus are known to be locked into synchronous orbits, and so

are both of Mars' moons. Pluto and its moon Charon are actually locked into mutually synchronous rotation so that not only does the moon Charon keep the same face pointed at Pluto all the time, but Pluto always keeps the same face pointed at Pluto all the time, but Pluto always keeps the same face pointed at Karen. Clearly, synchronous rotation is a very stable condition for a moon to be in. It results from the interaction of the planet's powerful gravity with tidal bulges raised on the moons. The largest moon in the solar system that has a non-synchronous orbit is Saturn's moon Hyperion. This moon is also the largest moon that is significantly non-spherical. The tugging of Saturn's gravity on Hyperion. This moon is also the largest moon that is significantly non-spherical. The tugging of Saturn's gravity on Hyperion's lumps and bumps make it spin and tumble chaotically like a tennis shoe in a clothes dryer. It turns out that synchronous rotation has some

strange and interesting consequences for moons. Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out more. We'll find out more. Dan Wertheimer, welcome back to Planetary Radio. Pleased to be with you, Matt. Let's get something out of the way right up front because I think we can deal with it pretty quickly. And that is this result that you guys got, which apparently got a little more attention than it actually deserved. That's right. I wish we had an interesting signal that we had something to talk about here, but there was a press story about one of our candidates. We've always had signals like this. We've seen candidates like this for the last 30 years, and it's not really anything to get

excited about. The story was blown out of proportion. It's almost certainly noise and interference. There's nothing really unusual about this particular candidate. And so we're not jumping up and down, but we will keep an eye on this particular candidate. And every six months or so, the telescope goes back to roughly the same place in the sky, and we'll see if it repeats. And if it gets interesting, of course, we'll follow up on it. And you're saying this without a gun to your head

put there by the federal government, right? That's right. You know, we're not funded by the government. This is largely funded by the Planetary Society and people around the world who are helping us analyze the data. So it's all private donations from companies and the members of the Planetary Society who are sponsoring this program. Millions of people around the world donating and, more importantly, participating in the project because they've downloaded SETI at Home and it trucks away on their PC when they're not using it for something else. You guys have made history with this.

Well, we were very pleased with all the volunteers that are sponsoring this program by donating their spare computing cycle. So, as you know, the SETI at Home screensaver is now run by 5 million people in 226 countries, and combined, those volunteers have built the world's largest supercomputer. They contribute 1,000 years of computing time every day. It's 70 trillion calculations every second. And so beyond our wildest dreams, it's been able to make the search much more sensitive and more powerful

than anything we could have done without the help of these 5 million volunteers. This was pretty revolutionary technology, and now it seems to be spreading all over the place. You guys have not been sitting on your hands. You have taken note of these other projects and the power that you've unleashed, and I think you've continued to develop because of that. We've developed a new thing for public participation in big science supercomputing projects so that the public will not be able to participate in SETI if they're interested, but there are a number of projects now that we're participating with the Climate Prediction

Global Warming Project at Oxford, a medical research project, a particle physics project, a gravity wave project. And we have a new platform called BOINC, Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, where people can sign up and they can partition how much of their computer, their spare computing cycles should go to SETI, how much should go to drug research, how much should go to global warming, and you can allocate how you want your spare computing cycles to be used. So we're hoping that a number of different science projects will use this. Already there are three science projects using this,

and we think it's a good way to use the spare computing cycles for lots of different science projects, not just SETI. And as I said to your colleague David Anderson, the project director for SETI at Home a while ago, before BOINC came online, it has to take this year's prize for best science acronym. Right. BOINC is this open infrastructure. It's open source code. We're trying to make it easy for scientists who are not computer scientists. They don't have to be experts in distributed computing.

They just have to be expert in their field in climate modeling or physics or whatever, and they can hook together volunteers, and we're trying to make it easy for them. When I was on the website earlier today, and I like to visit now and then, it's pretty fun, especially going to the lighter side of SETI. I like to look at who's written a song lately about SETI at home, or I linked today to the Yeti at home site. But I also took a look at some of the things that you guys, other things that you have in mind for the future.

One of them is called AstroPulse. That's right. We have six different SETI programs at Berkeley, largely funded by the Planetary Society. And the AstroPulse project is taking advantage of the data that we've recorded at the world's largest telescope, at the Arecibo telescope, the 1,000-foot diameter. It holds 10 billion bowls of cornflakes. We've been observing continuously there for seven years now. And to have the world's largest telescope continuously for seven years, and we have this huge amount of data that we've used for SETI. Now we want to go back and analyze

that 50 terabytes of data to look for primordial black holes. These are, to predict by Stephen Hawking, black holes would evaporate. They'd get smaller and smaller, and eventually they'd give off a pulse, which we could detect. But we need a lot of computing power to look for these evaporating black holes. And it turns out that we happen to have these 5 million volunteers, so we're going to ask them if they'll also help us in the search for black holes, the AstroPulse program. We might find some pulsars, we might even find ET, maybe ET's sending us a pulse. What else is in the future for SETI at home? The big project now at Arecibo is to look at many directions in the sky simultaneously. Just a few months ago, Arecibo got this new receiver that the Australians built

that has actually seven receivers. So it actually can look at seven places in the sky at once. For survey work, sky survey work, where we're trying to look at as many places in the sky as we can, cover the whole sky, it's like having seven Arecibos, putting these seven receivers at the focus of the big telescope. It's almost as good as having seven Arecibo telescopes. So we're going to be able to map the sky in a much better way than we've been able to do before using this new multi-beam receiver. And we just tested it out a couple weeks ago. I was at the Arecibo telescope. We were testing out the multi-beam receiver, starting up a little sky survey, not in a major way, but just to test it out to see how well it worked. And it's working beautifully. So we're really

excited about that. It's a five-year program to do a really thorough map of the sky looking for ET. At the same time, scientists are going to be making a map of hydrogen in the galaxy and doing some cosmology experiments. There are actually four different groups that are going to be using the thing simultaneously, and we'll be one of those four groups to search for ET. And we should mention, as we have in the past on this show, that you guys kind of piggyback on that big radio telescope, but there was a time, not too long ago, when you actually had it to yourselves. Everybody wants to use these big telescopes, and most astronomers are lucky if they can get a day or two a year

to do their research on the world's largest radio telescope. It's competitive. And so we developed this technique called commensal or piggyback SETI, where we have our own receiver, and we're always running 24 hours a day. While the astronomers are using the telescope, we're using it at the same time. So we get the world's largest telescope year-round. The disadvantage is that we don't get to point the telescope. Somebody else is pointing the telescope.

But that actually works out okay because we don't know where to look anyway. This piggyback or commensal technique works very well for these sky surveys when you don't know where to look and you're kind of zooming around in the sky, letting the other astronomers point the telescope, works pretty well. But actually when we start the new sky survey, we will actually do a more systematic sort of raster scan of the sky because a lot of people at Arecibo want to do a sky survey. So we're going to be working together now.

Instead of just working in this piggyback fashion and letting other people go along, we'll all work together to map the sky. Well, and you did have this chance where you had, what, a couple of days where you were able to point it where you wanted. And, in fact, you looked at the top candidates that had been dug up in the previous years of the search. And I love there is a sky map on your website of those top candidates that you took another look at. Yeah, that's right. So mostly we use the telescope in this piggyback fashion.

That's the way we're able to get the big telescope year-round. But occasionally we go back, like you say, and follow up on our very best candidates. And to do that, we have to point the telescope, and we need to get dedicated time. So we wrote a proposal, and we went to the telescope, and we looked at 220 of our very best candidates that we'd found over the last 25 years. Unfortunately, none of them panned out in a very big way, but that's not surprising. I think earthlings are just getting in the game. We're just learning how to do this SETI experiment, and we can't do a thorough search,

so we could easily miss these radio signals if they're out there. But I'm optimistic in the long run. I think the capabilities are doubling every year, and so even though we need another factor of a million or a billion in capabilities to go before we have a good chance of doing a thorough search and finding out if ET is out there, that's only 20 or 30 years away if the Moore's Law doubling every year keeps going. Dan Wertheimer is our guest. He is the chief scientist for the SETI at Home Project based in Berkeley, California.

He is the chief scientist for the SETI at Home Project based in Berkeley, California. And when we come back from a break, Dan, I'd like to talk about how you got together not too long ago, a few weeks ago, with a lot of other people who are interested in finding that signal from extraterrestrial intelligence. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in the Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine.

It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, planetarysociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Dan Wertheimer is our guest on Planetary Radio. He is the chief scientist for SETI at Home,

based in Berkeley, California. It may be the best-known of the SETI projects, but it's certainly not the only SETI project. And a unique gathering of other SETI researchers took place just a couple of months ago. Dan, I think you were there. That's right. We had a great meeting at the Harvard Faculty Club. And all the hot shots from SETI came from all around the world. SETI pioneer Frank Drake, the only guy I know that has an equation named after him, the Drake equation.

Kent Cullors, the blind physicist who developed the detection algorithms that a lot of us use in SETI with Project Phoenix. Paul Horowitz directs the Harvard SETI program. Guillermo Lemarchand directs the Argentina SETI program. Bruce Murray and Tom McDonough from the Planetary Society. Woody Sullivan who helped us start the SETI at Home project. So all the brilliant minds were there. And what we talked about was kind of what we've learned from the last 40 years of SETI, where we are, what we can rule out,

and then a little bit about plans for the next generation of what we're planning to do over the next few years, and then kind of long-term strategy for what we want to do in the next 20 years. Was this a fairly unique gathering, as I think I said? Had this kind of a group ever gotten together before? I don't remember such a nice small meeting. It was a very intimate meeting where we could really work and work hard and not a lot of kind of administrative stuff, and there were a lot of good ideas and brilliant discussion. And we brought together one or two people from each of the key projects around the world. So it was the best SETI meeting that I'd been to. You had your colleagues there from the SETI Institute,

which is up there in the Bay Area with you guys. They certainly have done some excellent work, as you guys have. And I wonder if there is any feeling of friendly competition there between your two groups and perhaps with others? There's plenty of search space out there, and the SETI Institute is doing a wonderful search, Project Phoenix. They actually just finished that search, and together now with Berkeley we're building a big telescope, the Allen Telescope.

We do a lot of work together. They steal ideas from us. We steal ideas from them. So there's a lot of collaboration. And it's not so much competition because there are plenty of places to look and plenty of strategies. There's infrared and optical SETI, and they do a targeted search, and we do a sky survey.

And everybody's trying different things. And I'm very pleased that there are these different groups trying different things, because it's naive to think that we know how best to look for ET, and I think the best strategy is a multiple strategy. It occurred to me, though, that if a meteor had hit the faculty club at Harvard during that meeting, that would have been just about the end of the SETI search on this planet anyway. That's right. You know, SETI is a big project in the minds of the public, but there are only a handful of people on the planet that are actually doing the search.

There's not a lot of money for SETI. And perhaps that's as it should be right now because earthlings are just in their infancy. We're just learning how to do this. There was a public event, I guess, attached to this as well, separate from this professional gathering? That's right. So we had a day of this small group of the hotshots brainstorming ideas and planning the strategies. And then the next day was for the public. And there were a couple hundred people, not just from the Boston area, but from all over the world, that came to hear us talk about the different SETI experiments that were going on.

to hear us talk about the different SETI experiments that were going on. In the news lately, there has been some talk about another way to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which I have to admit I'm a little bit cynical about, but I'd like to hear your take on it, and that is not sending messages by electromagnetic waves, but chunks of stuff, actual objects. Right. These engineers worked out that if you want to send a lot of information, perhaps all the genomes of every living thing on the planet or something like that, when you want to send a lot of information and you don't care how long it takes for that information to get there, it's probably better to send it by a rocket ship. You know, if you want to send a lot of stuff, send it by UPS truck or by mail.

Don't send an email. That may be correct. There's a lot of problems with sending stuff by spacecraft. The big problem is, of course, for us, it's almost impossible. You know, our spacecraft only go 25,000 miles an hour. They get to the nearest star in 100,000 years. It's a pretty slow process for us, and it's also very expensive for us, but maybe for an advanced civilization they could do something like that. I think it's impractical for the first kind of contact, you know, when you're trying to

establish, is anybody out there? It's very hard to send these kind of spacecraft around, but maybe after you've made contact and you become part of the galactic community and we get on the galactic internet uh there may be some reason to send spacecraft around with a huge amount of information and that may be cheaper than than sending radio messages you know are we care about sort of congressional time scales we got to do something in four years or ten years but it may be advanced civilizations that they've gone through their technological phase and they're all doing poetry and music and a million years is not much for them. Well, I'm sorry, I like to think of myself as a patient man, but 50 to 100,000 years for a reply is a little bit longer than I want to wait. As we begin to learn more about the Milky Way, this galaxy we live in, and it starts to fill in

some of that famous Drake equation, do you feel better about finding not only life but intelligent life at the far right end of that equation? Yeah, so as we work more toward the right of the equation, as you know, things get more and more uncertain. So we're beginning to learn about, we know about the number of stars. We're beginning to learn about planets going around the stars. And we think that a lot of those planets are going to have the right conditions for life. And then as you go along the Drake equation, then the next thing is like, once you've got a planet with the right sort of chemicals and the right temperature, is life going to get started? We're beginning to learn a little bit about that. And I'm actually pretty optimistic that life is going to get started in a lot of

places. It got started on Earth pretty early. It didn't take long. As soon as the Earth cooled down, the oldest rocks you can find have life. So that leads us to sort of be optimistic that life, with an example of one we really don't know. But I would be very surprised if the galaxy were not teeming with life. My guess is that simple, sort of single-celled creatures are going to be really abundant in our galaxy and other galaxies.

But there's still big questions as you move to the right of the equation that we really don't know about the evolution of intelligence. Once you get these simple single-celled things going, do you get intelligence? Do they develop technology? Is it something that we could communicate with lasers or radio. Those are huge unknowns. I'm fairly confident about life. I'm not so confident that the universe is teeming with intelligent life that we can talk with. Well, Dan, you say that you're still pretty optimistic. You've been at this for a long time.

I would think that anybody who goes into the line of work that you're in would by necessity be a person with a fairly bright outlook. I'm optimistic that earthlings will find these advanced civilizations in the long run, but it might be 50 or 100 or 200 years. It probably won't be me. It'll be my students or my students' students. But it's still a very exciting thing to do. You certainly have accomplished a lot, and we know that there is much more to come just in the process of conducting this search.

And you know that everybody in the Planetary Society and millions of other people around the world wish you continued success. Thanks, Matt. We'll need it. Dan Wertheimer has been our guest on Planetary Radio. He is the chief scientist for the SETI at Home project. You can check them out at the Planetary Society website at planetary.org. I'll be back in just a few moments with Bruce Betts and what's up after this return visit from Emily.

I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. Nearly all of the large moons in the solar system are locked into synchronous rotation so that they keep the same face pointed at the planet at all times. It also means that one hemisphere of the moon, known as the leading hemisphere, is always pointed forward along the orbit, just as a car's windshield always points forward as you drive. Any driver knows that the front windshield gets dirtier faster than the rear window, because the windshield's forward direction makes it run into things

as you drive. In the same way, the leading hemispheres of moons run into things as they orbit their planets. The moons of the giant planets thus show a lot more impact craters on their leading hemispheres than they do on their trailing hemispheres. Saturn's moon Iapetus is the standout case. Its leading hemisphere is coated with a black material that is darker than asphalt, while its trailing hemisphere is bright icy white.

Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time again for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here is Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. And Bruce, we're in a beautiful setting today, outdoors. Why, yes we are, Matt. We've come out to bond with nature here at Eaton Canyon, Altadena, just north of Pasadena.

The Planetary Society has just completed a very beneficial day-long retreat to maximize our effectiveness in the world. It was a great session. I had a good time. And there was a lot of food, too. But we'll stay awake for this, even though it's been a long day with a lot of calories. Bruce, what's up? Well, Matt, speaking of staying awake, if you want to see planets, you need to go out in the pre-dawn sky.

And if you do, you will be very rewarded. Venus is the incredibly bright star-like object off there in the east that you can't miss. Then look for Saturn above Venus, another star-like object, but much dimmer. And if you look far to the lower left of Venus, down towards the horizon, you can catch Mercury, which will look a little brighter than Saturn does. Mercury is going to get tougher as we move later here in September, and it gets lower and lower. Between Mercury and Venus, interestingly, almost in a line is the star Regulus. Something kind of neat is going to happen here. Venus is going to move in the sky relative to Regulus so that they get closer and closer until on October 3rd, they will be 0.3 degrees or less apart in the sky,

just nearly nuzzling. Almost touching, yes. Almost touching, well, except the redness. Give or take a few light years. Yeah, yeah, but as seen by us in the night sky, almost touching. Venus much, much brighter, 150 times brighter roughly than Regulus.

But take out some binoculars if you're out there, and it'll give a really nice view of the two. And then you can watch them after October 3rd gradually separate and get farther away in the sky. Spiffy keen, huh? Yes, it is. On to this week in space history. On September 25th, 1973,

the second Skylab crew returned to Earth after 59 days in space. Any other updates for us before we move on to a little bit of Echo? No, we're going straight to Echo, Matt. Prepare for Echo. Prepare for Echo. Stand by. Stand by.

Random Space Fact! And terminate Echo. If Saturn were hanging out where the Earth is, its rings would extend out approximately to where the Earth is, its rings would extend out approximately to where the Moon is. But they're really, really thin compared to how broad they are. They're only meters to tens of meters to hundreds of meters thick, despite being quite enormous. And I guess we're beginning to understand why that is,

the physical processes that actually keep those rings in good order. Indeed, the Cassini spacecraft is giving us our best ever views of the ring system and seeing all sorts of amazing things. You can find out more if you want at our website, planetary.org. Go to planetary.org slash Saturn for all sorts of good stuff about Saturn and the Cassini mission, the rings, the moons, Saturn's friends, you know, all sorts of stuff, Saturn's favorite music. Speaking of music, actually this has nothing to do with music, but let's go on to our trivia contest, Matt. A couple times ago we asked you about the SNIC meteorites.

This is the Martian meteorites that have come to Earth from Mars on their own, are referred to as SNICs or S-N-Cs. We asked you, what does SNC stand for? How did we do, Matt? We did well. The listeners did well. And here is our winner, randomly chosen. He is a first-time winner.

And I think he's putting us on a little bit. He gave us the pronunciation of his name, William Vuda, William Vuda of Henderson, Nevada. I think it's really William Wood, but he's putting us on. And he said SNC. Now, you're going to have to catch me. I will probably screw this up. No, I actually intentionally am having you pronounce these, so I don't have to.

Shurgatite, knocklight, and chassiny. Chassiny. I'm assuming it's sort of the French pronunciation, which, of course, I'm no good at in French or English, but chassini or chassigny, those are the three types. Please tell us why. I'd be happy to, Matt. They were named after the first three Martian meteorites in terms of when they were discovered.

It took a long time for people to figure out they were from Mars. Chassigny or chassy, or Chesigny, or Chesigny, sure gotty, sure gotty. And Nakhla, I apologize for butchering those, but they are from, respectively, they fell in France, India, and Egypt. And each of them represents a different mineralogic composition. 29 meteorites that were recovered after those and have now been determined to be Martian meteorites have been categorized into those three categories, the SNCs, Shurgatites, Chasithia, and Degne, you know, and the Nocklites. So anyway, that's SNCC meteorites, and they've just been finding all sorts of new Mars meteorites in the last very few years.

Some are new. You want to go on? I just wanted to say, so William Vuda or William Wood, whoever you may be, you'll be getting one of those Planetary Radio t-shirts. Yes, indeed, you will. And if you want to win a Planetary Radio t-shirt, answer the following question. Now, we heard from Dan Wertheimer on today's show, and Dan Wertheimer has a number of SETI projects that he's run over the last few years with the amazing acronym SARENDIP. What does SARENDIP stand for? Send us your answer. Find out how at planetary.org slash radio, and then email us your answer.

Bye, Wynn. Matt? Bruce, this time around, they have until Monday, October 4. Monday, October 4 at noon Pacific time to get those answers in to us. For this round of the trivia contest, get your Planetary Radio t-shirt. Good luck to everyone. I guess that's it, Matt. So everyone go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about horticulture.

Thank you, and good night. I know a good joke with that is the punchline, but I won't tell it right now. That was Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us each week here for What's Up. It's too horticulturalist to walk into a bar. You don't want to know. Okay. Thank you. Good night. Join us again next week for more of Planetary Radio.

We'll see you then.