Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: The policy implications of active SETI

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

Would meeting an extraterrestrial civilization be good or bad for humanity? Astronomer Dr. Jacob Haqq Misra argues that knowing the outcome in advance is fundamentally impossible, which results in a range of policy implications. Should we camouflage Earth's technosignatures or pour money into perhaps the most transformative event in human history? Should we fear the dark or embrace the unknown?  Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2023-spe-policy-implications-of-active-setiSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to this month's Space Policy Edition. I'm Casey Dreyer, the Chief of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society. And I am joined by, and I should say in person, literally, and standing in front of me right now, is the Planetary Society's Director of Government Relations, Jack Curley. Hi, Casey. Good to see you in person. Yeah, I guess I've, to all of our listeners, I have successfully confirmed that Jack is not an advanced AI that has been representing itself to us via computer screen over the past three months working here for the Planetary Society. He is in fact real and has been doing a great job here in

DC. Jack, it's great to be here. Yeah, it's great to be here with you, Casey. It's been a great first few months on the job and really hit the ground running with the budget process in February and now on onward and upward for fiscal year 2024. It's been an exciting time, let's say. To say the least, yeah. In addition to my special co-host this month, I should say that our guest that will be joining me here in just a few minutes on this month's show is Jacob Haak-Misra. He is an astronomer, very interesting thinker and writer on particularly issues of SETI and techno signatures and I was particularly struck by a paper he had written a few years ago that examined the variety of policy

implications based on the fact that the consequences of meeting another extraterrestrial civilization are fundamentally unknowable and that may sound almost trite as a conclusion, but he actually breaks down those three really interesting consequences of this about how we then approach not just SETI, but the concept of active SETI, of basically broadcasting our existence out there in hopes that we catch the attention of another civilization should it exist. And again, this is such a just a fun area of discussion. And Jacob is, again, a very deep thinker on these topics, has written extensively on it, and brings a really solid background of astronomy and physics into this discussion. And it's really

fun to have. I hope you'll stick around for that discussion, which will be here in just a few minutes. But in the meantime, Jack, before you and I jump into something else that is actually very pertinent as we record this, which is the debt ceiling, I think we're supposed to do a plug for the Planetary Society. I think you're right. If Sarah were here, she would, at this point, be making an impassioned pitch for why you should become a member of the Planetary Society, if you're not, which is that the Planetary Society is not just our home organization of Jack and I and the organization

that pays our salaries, but something we just personally believe in to the point where we have dedicated our careers to advocating for you as a member, a potential member, and its ideals of space science, of exploration, of planetary defense, and of course, the search for life, which is the big topic of this month's episode. Jack, you've come into this organization, well, you were a member and still are, and a volunteer. Yes, none of us here at the Society get free membership as staff, but you were a volunteer for many years and now work for us. Membership, what does it mean to you in terms of why it's a valuable thing?

Well, it really is the Planetary Society, really is the preeminent organization that advocates for these things, these values that we hold so dear, the search for life among them, planetary defense, the exploration of not just our solar system, but advancements in astrophysics and astronomy and the engineering marvels that surround us every day that sometimes we can get lost in the day-to-day activities. But we have, as a species, been able to achieve such phenomenal things, I think in large part because there are organizations like the Planetary Society that collectivize sort of our passion for space science and exploration. And to have an organization that is so focused on the membership, on providing value to that membership and listening to and responding to the voices of our members is very powerful and is one of the things that kept me involved for so many years and keeps me engaged and excited to continue to

do this work, even given all the pressures of the political environment that NASA and space exploration in general can find itself in at times, that truly we are advancing our civilization, our species, as a space-faring species. And there's nothing more uplifting than being involved in an organization that firmly believes in the future of humanity, as the Planetary Society does. It's a good optimistic viewpoint. Great point. So, it is.

Yeah. Not often shared by my colleagues in DC. Yeah. So, if you share the fact that you want humanity to continue on and have this wonderful future, please join us at the Planetary Society, planetary.org slash join. If you're already a member, thank you so much. We really do honestly appreciate it. It makes a huge, huge difference.

One more aspect of this, and then we'll move on, which is membership really is the core of our organization financially. We are not dependent on corporate backers. We don't take government funding. It's really just individuals that really literally enable us to exist. And that independence just is a true rare entity here in Washington, D.C. Invaluable. And for every new member that joins, it just amplifies our message tenfold.

We're going tomorrow out to a number of Senate offices. And the first thing we'll be saying when we go into those offices is how many members are in their state, how many constituents they have are Planetary Society members. So that's the plug. Thanks for listening to that part. And but again, it's just it's really, truly important. So thanks for considering it. Now let's move on. Jack, as you and I record this, we just passed a big procedural vote in the House of Representatives. The Senate has yet to come. Actually, the House has yet to vote on it, finally, but we think it's going to pass. And this is a deal to lift the debt ceiling of the United States. It's been relatively uncertain path, I guess, up to this point. Is it worth going into the details of this?

I don't know. The debt limit, I think maybe that to this point. Is it worth going into the details of this? I don't know. The debt limit, I think maybe that's the important part of this, is that the debt limit is separate from the appropriations process. This is money that has already been allocated, that we have a commitment to spend X number of dollars through the regular appropriations. This is money that Congress approved already and directed the federal government to spend through legislation and the appropriations process. This used to be relatively standard because, again, the money

has already been appropriated. The U.S. government's told to spend it. But it's more political and more partisan now. And so there's sometimes a division on if we're going to raise it, which we have to do to maintain the U.S.'s credit, full faith and credit in the United States Treasury, that there's some politicking that happens, let's say. So at this point, it looks like the deal, lifting the debt ceiling or suspending it in this case for the next two years, it's going to freeze this part of U.S. government spending called non-defense discretionary.

It's going to freeze it at 2023 levels, and then it'll grow by 1% the year after that. So basically, not a huge cut that we originally feared, but it really restricts the amount of money that goes to agencies like the space program, like the National Science Foundation, like the Department of Energy, things that tend to intersect with our space priorities. So again, it's not a huge cut. Like we were, I think we're what, 22% is what we're originally looking at.

That was the amount feared was a 22% cut across the board. And now we're at a flat. But what's the problem with this? My dollar doesn't go as far in fiscal year 2024 as it did in fiscal year 2023. Has anyone else noticed that eggs are slightly more expensive right now than they used to be? Well, that's the same thing is true for spacecraft parts for highly skilled engineers uh for management for everything that feeds into the supply chain for spacecraft they've experienced inflation too and nasa's dollars do not go as far as they used to and so keeping the original proposal for

increasing nasa uh next year by 7% basically would have accounted for this inflation. And again, we actually don't know what NASA is going to get yet. So this is, I think, the one rub here, right? So the pie that NASA takes its slice from is going to remain the same size. So NASA could feasibly still get a 7% increase next year, if Congress wants to give it to them. But something else has to then accommodate that difference. And I think that's the problem. The pie is shrinking a little bit. And everything else

that was supposed to grow also can't just grow at that same level. So something has to get cut somewhere or kept the same somewhere. But even if NASA, if they apply that evenly to every single program in the US government, because inflation has happened, NASA's dollars just won't go as far. So assuming this various levels of assumptions here, NASA is, you know, likely seeing maybe a 7% decrease in buying power. Is that a fair way to characterize things? I think that would be because at the end of the day 25 billion dollars in 2024 doesn't get you the same 25 billion dollars that it would have got you in i mean we're seeing this already with veritas being indefinitely delayed uh we're seeing this also then with real cost growth on top of inflation happening with

mars sample return with artis, components of that. We're seeing the squeeze happen to a variety of planetary missions. We're seeing potential delays of Dragonfly and Da Vinci. And of course, basic research for planetary science is really tough already. And this was under the gross scenario that they were going to have to struggle with this. And so the long and short of it is, I think it's fair to say that we don't know exactly yet. So the appropriations process can basically begin now, what we're used to seeing

in terms of the actual congressional thing, now that we know our actual size of the pie. And how it's going to get divided at this point is anyone's guess. I guess, Jack, you've got your work cut out for you over the next few months. Well, it all comes down to, and what you might see in the news, those 302B allocations. Everyone's favorite.

Everyone's favorite. Allocation. You know, four-letter word in government. The 302B allocations is going to determine what is appropriated, or I guess the amount that appropriators will be able to divide between their agencies for the NASA subcommittee. So NASA's wrapped up in the Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee of appropriations, and their allocation's going to determine how much they have to work with, what is the headroom that CJS is going to be able to work with to set the budgets for the Department of Commerce,

Department of Justice, NASA, NSF, NOAA, and all the other related agencies that fall under that umbrella. And so I think the pie is what's about $701 billion next year? Yeah. If this all goes through, that'll be the size for, that'll be divided among 11 different subcommittees of appropriations. 12. Well, the 12th one is Department of Defense.

Right. Which gets the 800 and they don't get a cut. This is just a non-defense one. They get a 3.5% increase. Increase, yeah. So, that was the deal. So, we're looking at 11 different subcommittees splitting that $700 billion and it was originally supposed to be something like 735.

So, again, it doesn't sound huge on the outset, but given inflation, given the fact that other agencies and then politically, NASA very rarely, unfortunately, rises to the top of the attention for a lot of members of Congress. And we've lost some of NASA's biggest champions in the hierarchy who had leadership positions and appropriations. This is going to be a tough year. That doesn't mean things will all go to hell. I mean, because also what NASA could do within it, what they could do, what Congress could do, is rope off certain areas. So they could say Mars sample return

gets exactly the increase it requested. Artemis could get exactly the same increase as requested. But then every other part of NASA may need to absorb the difference. And that'll be right. I mean, but then every other part of NASA may need to absorb the difference. And that'll be right. I mean, so this is the set of decisions that we believe NASA is going to have to face over the next few months.

So again, we don't know anything yet, but we're going to be, in terms of that level of detail, this is what the process has to unfold. But this is why I think we're going to be needing you, if you're listening to this as either a society member or just a space advocate, it's going to be really important to begin communicating these priorities during the next few months now. Because this is when the rubber's going to hit the road and they're going to really be going through this, these tough set of trade offs. And I firmly believe, particularly now, we need to be investing in science and investing in U.S. industry, investing in our STEM workforce in this country. And we do that by going into space. That may not be a surprise

to people. I don't know. I had my doubts. You had your doubts. All right. Yeah. It's like, you know, maybe this is the time to cut, but no. And so this is a really going to be an important year, I think. And a big turning point, because again, I think this is really going to set the rest of the decade, whether the US is going to be able to return to the moon this decade, whether we'll be able to really aggressively pursue sample return, still go to Venus, all these other great, huge opportunities we have, right? Sitting right in front of us. So we will need your help coming up. You will expect emails from us in the next few months asking for opportunities to write

or contact a member of Congress. I should also say the Day of Action. September 17th and 18th. Of this year. Planetary.org slash Day of Action. Registration's open now. And this is a great opportunity to meet directly face-to-face with your member of Congress or their staff and really share your priorities with them. And anecdotally speaking, for the day

of action, it is one of our most successful programs we run here at the Planetary Society. And it's also one of the most impactful. And that is something that I see on a weekly basis, And that is something that I see on a weekly basis, is some member of Congress or their staff mentions meeting with a space advocate from the Planetary Society. We make these lasting impacts. And the last time we did this in person was in 2020. Yeah, right before COVID hit. Right, February 2020. What a time. This September, we have that opportunity again in a critical funding year.

Like you're saying, Casey, we have a lot of exciting missions that need our support right now. Mars Sample Return, Veritas, Artemis, Neo Surveyor, the list goes on and on. Dragonfly, I want to make sure I give them a shout out as well. Now is the time to make our voice heard. As really the only non-commercial, non-profit, independent space advocacy organization out there today, we hold a lot of power in these meetings and these conversations with members of Congress and their staff. So if you're on the fence, I'm telling you, this is your opportunity. If you want to see Mars sample return by the end of this decade, now's the fence. I'm telling you, this is your opportunity. If you want to see Mars sample return by the end of this decade, now's the time. Come to DC with us September 17th, 18th,

planetary.org slash day of action to learn about how to do that. There are ways to participate online if you can't travel or don't have the resources to do so. So we'll be following up with those as well. Jack, I think that about covers it for debt ceiling. We'll be talking about the consequences of this next month for sure. But yeah, let's go to our interview now with Jacob Haak-Misra. Just as a reminder, he's an astronomer, senior research investigator at the Blue Marble Space Institute. He's part of the American Geophysical Union, the International Astronomical Union, very deep thinker on SETI and techn signatures and we are going to be talking here about the policy implications of the fact that we do not know whether meeting an extraterrestrial

intelligence would be good or bad and again really interesting discussion consequences from that so let's listen to this discussion with Jacob right now really looking forward to it Dr. Misra thanks for joining us on this month's Space Policy Edition. Glad you're here. Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me, Casey. One of your many areas of interest that I want to start with today, and I hope we'll touch on a number of them, is the idea of policy implications of active SETI, or METI,

as you call it. And before we get into that paper that I recommend everyone read we'll link to it in the show notes let's define exactly what that means so what's the difference between SETI and active SETI sure yeah to active SETI is sort of contrasted with passive SETI and SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has traditionally been about building radio telescopes, pointing radio telescopes at the sky towards the extrasolar planetary systems, and looking for radio signals that might be from extraterrestrial civilizations. The classic thing we're looking for is a narrow band radio signal that would be unlike anything

else you'd find in any sort of astrophysical, other astrophysical phenomenon. And then SETI has also, early SETI expanded to include lasers, laser pulses as well, that might be directed toward Earth. We can talk a little bit more later about other kinds of SETI you could do, observing exoplanets, atmospheres and things like that. But that's still sort of passive in the sense that it's a signal that's there, and we're just trying to receive information. Whereas active SETI or METI, messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence, is us taking a more proactive experimental approach by actually transmitting a message, again probably radio or maybe optical as a laser, towards systems of interest with the goal of attracting attention of anyone that might be on the other end and maybe eliciting a reply. So that tends to bring about more, let's say,

strong opinions, the active SETI version, the messaging for extraterrestrial intelligence. Let's summarize a few of those. What are some of the general reluctant arguments for for actively looking out and announcing earth's existence to other potential civilizations well we don't really know what the consequences of contact with extraterrestrials would be at all i guess that yeah that's the point of your paper but we'll into that. One of the concerns is that this could be very, very harmful, a very negative thing. You know, the classic, you know, aliens will receive this signal and get upset about it or they didn't know about our presence, perhaps. And then they come and for whatever reason, we go extinct because of, you know, an alien

attack or just we're displaced by them or something like that. So a lot of people are worried that maybe this won't end well for Earth. You thought about this in this paper, kind of the policy implications of radio detectability of Earth. And you did something really interesting. You make this logistical proof that it's a fundamentally unknowable outcome of the consequences of a SETI contact, basically. So let's just walk through that. And then, because the implications are really interesting as a function of that, right? We can't, even assuming they're out there, the value of contact to the civilization you try to quantify.

So tell us why that's unknowable first. And then let's look at the implications for why that is. Well, an extraterrestrial civilization, if they are out there, there is no way for us to predict how another species will respond that we know nothing about until we have actually discovered them. So the only way, if you want to know how a hypothetical civilization would respond to a signal that we send them, the only way to know that is to first know something about them. So if we had spacecraft around their home world and we were studying them and we knew

something about their biology and something about their society, then we could actually make predictions. We could do extraterrestrial sociology kind of thinking. But without any information about that, all we have is life on Earth to go from. We could maybe make some very basic guesses about life elsewhere. Maybe it's carbon-based. Maybe it uses water. Those are pretty good guesses, and we can't even say that that's true for sure. But just because you're a carbon-based water using life form, does that mean you will get upset when a radio message reaches your planet from another one? There's no way to know that. So the only way

you can actually resolve this uncertainty is to know something about them. And so without that, we don't know if this will be harmful to know, if this will be harmful to us, if this will help us, if this will be just sort of irrelevant to us. The idea that, you know, this is going to be all bad is a little bit projecting from our own perspectives of human history to something that is truly unknown. Right. And that's something I want to touch on in a bit, because i think that's a fascinating aspect of seti in particular and and then going even to meti is assumption based upon assumption based upon assumption based on our very as you point out limited understanding

of what life is but i think it's really interesting that the very fact that we can't know, and it's not just that we don't know, it's that you argue that we cannot know until we detect another civilization what the implications to us will be as a human society, actually has implications for the policies that we undertake as a species for this. And in your paper, you outline the three different approaches that fall out of this idea that the consequences are fundamentally unknowable. And I'll just outline the big three, and then I'd like to address them in turn. You call it precautionary malevolence, basically assuming that the outcome is bad. Ass assumed benevolence, kind of the opposite, the more Clarkian idea that they're basically gods and will benefit us as a society from their wisdom and knowledge, or preliminary neutrality that fundamentally contact is so unlikely to occur,

there's no real risk one way or the other, and it should be treated with that kind of, you know, because it's so unlikely, we prioritize it accordingly. I want to start with this malevolence, and we've already kind of touched on this. And this tends to be the assumption granted to the existence of other civilizations by most of Medi's critiques that it will be bad. And something that I find really interesting as a consequence of if that is the case, if that is truly what people believe, you argue that active SETI is already too narrow of a definition in terms of announcing Earth's presence or a human's presence. So talk about that. Why are we already announcing ourselves beyond just the electromagnetic spectrum? And what would we need to do

if we really take this seriously? Right, right, right. Well, so I'll start even with the electromagnetic spectrum. So with METI or active SETI, the concern is about intention. If you point a radio transmitter or a laser to space and you transmit intentionally, is that somehow different than the other radio waves we're putting out into space? We can get into that philosophical question if we want, but from just a technical

perspective, it's just how much energy in radio waves or optical lasers are going out from Earth. It doesn't really matter from the receiver's end what the intention was. And so if you look at Earth, the loudest signals coming from Earth are military radar. And it's pretty hard to get any many, or at least so far, any many attempts have not really been brighter than those military radars. There was one or two messages from the Arecibo telescope that were transmitted out towards a globular cluster. Frank Drake was part of this. And that was approaching the strength of some of the military transmissions. There's also, you know, cell phone towers are pretty weak, but they're

going out there. So it just depends what you're listening for. But really, television and radio transmission towers are still there, even with the era of fiber optic cables. They're increasing in number, both in developing countries, but also in countries like the US, we have digital transmission now of TV signals. All of those things form the background leakage radiation emanating from Earth. And so without doing any active signaling, those are technosignatures that our planet is emitting that could be observable by anyone looking at us. Now there's other things too. So like say we went radio quiet, we go all fiber optic cables and the military no longer needs to use radar to locate objects in space.

We still have pollution in our atmosphere that could be detectable. Things like chlorofluorocarbons, which are part of destroying the ozone layer, those stay in the atmosphere for a long time. And some of these missions that are looking at exoplanet atmospheres to look for biosignatures, these are astrobiological missions to look for life. Well, something like pollution is an atmosphere technosignatures. These are astrobiological missions to look for life. Well, something like pollution is an atmosphere technosignature. It's something life does, but it's life-making technology, which then makes something detectable in the atmosphere. And so there's other forms of

pollution you can think about looking for. There's, you know, you can observe city lights, the high pressure and low pressure sodium lights in particular would have a very discernible spectral signature through a space telescope. You could look for an orbiting debris disk of satellites, whether they're functioning or they're broken dust or things like that. So, you know, those are some examples. There are things that are on Earth now that would give away the presence of technology. would give away the presence of technology. And that's aside from life. There's other biosignatures too, but the technology for sure is something that's evident on Earth

without us needing to send any messages. So in a sense, we're doing a passive-slash-active SETI program already. We're passively actively present by the fact that, as all these other variations you point out, our technology is detectable. Right.

This is why I don't worry so much about the question of intention. Like just in some sense, if you were to intentionally double the detectability of Earth, then I think the intention matters because without doing that, you haven't changed it much. But with all the existing METI projects, you're talking about adding a minuscule amount to this this omnipresent leakage so it doesn't really matter to me if we're doing this intentionally or not we are signaling there is there are detectable techno signatures going out whether we mean to or not and i guess that's the interesting aspect then if if people are truly concerned about the

existential risk which i do see a lot of the fact that we are detectable. And again, they tend to, I think, conceptually limit it to messaging SETI. But to take your argument as accurate, which I do, that really requires then that we do more than just not actively message. If they're truly concerned, then the policy conclusion is that globally we should be trying to mask our presence at every conceivable, detectable way that our technology exists. So somehow masking our atmospheric composition, somehow masking or not using these military radars, suppressing all this type of E&M leakage, this really goes beyond just not actively messaging then if people are truly concerned about this.

If you were truly concerned about that above all else, then yes, you would have to take such extreme positions for sure. I don't think anybody's arguing for that, though. But sort of at that naive level, then yes, that's the implication. Well, I mean, they're not arguing. I think this is then revealing in terms of when you look at people's actual, you know, are people making an active argument based on a broad understanding of the issue? Or is it kind of, I wouldn't say, disengagement is way too strong of a word but just not fully taking their arguments to their natural conclusion if people really assume there's a fundamental existential risk long-term risk to humanity about active messaging they should then

be doing these other things i think that follows personally i don't want to put you into a corner with this because you're much more active in this field than I am. But that's the interesting consequence to me, policy speaking, that they should then be arguing for some... Some degrowth to bring humans back into the

Stone Age in case, or at least to look like we're in the Stone Age, just in case there's some malevolent technological force out there that is looking for us, whether we're actively messaging or not. Well, yeah, that's right. I mean, that is kind of the implication. And so one of the ideas that I work of you know communicative technology on earth and the consequences of those that those benefits outweigh any consequences from potential extraterrestrial contact so like yes we were putting radio

signals out but some of those are for you know early weather warnings that help save lives and so it's better to do that and risk a little bit of exposure and detectability rather than not have a satellite system and have people die whenever there's a storm just in case there's an alien invasion in the future. Right. So that's sort of the tradeoff. But you don't really know that it's a working hypothesis. You can't say that is true. But I think that working hypothesis is what a lot of people operate under. And so under that hypothesis, you say, well, we want our satellite system for early storm warning, and maybe we want the military to do what they need to do to protect us. that's just intended to message extraterrestrials because that is unnecessarily increasing the detectability of earth and even if it's only by a little bit i think just from that point of view any amount is more than you need because it is kind of accepting that like yes our early warning

weather detection system could be the thing that brings an extraterrestrial invasion but the trade-off is worth it i don't think anyone's really saying it like this but i think this is is sort of how how they're thinking is that we do want to keep the technology we have on earth because it's important but we don't want to do extra we don't want to increase our detectability simply for the purpose of signaling extraterrestrials because that would just make it potentially more likely to be seen yeah well this is where i think the the reducto ad absurdium argument is actually quite revealing in that do people really truly honestly hold this opinion versus that they there's something about actively messaging that I think people may just find distasteful or unpleasant or unsettling, that that's what they're reacting to more than the concept itself, let's say, at the end of the day. Before I could talk about this for 20 more minutes, but let's talk about the other two consequences of your fundamental unknowability of engagement with another civilization.

So we talked about this kind of presumed malevolence and the consequences of that. Let's talk about the opposite, the benevolent civilization that's out there. This is where we hit some kind of Sagan-esque or Clarkian engagement with another civilization and they bestow us with great knowledge or benefits to society. bestow us with great knowledge or benefits to society and we take away like there's some good inherent in it what do you believe are the consequences of if we truly believe this is the case what should we be doing as a society if we do presume benevolence out there i mean if you presume that there is a benevolent civilization out there and contact with them would be good and maybe, maybe transformatively good for us,

then we sort of have an obligation to do SETI and METI to find them. And maybe the only obligation, the only limitation would be, you know, cost. Maybe you don't want to put all our money into SETI and METI if we want to, you know, solve things like cancer and climate change and other things on earth. So this is one of those prioritization issues. But then, you know, within the costs that are available, then that would be a priority if we really believed that that contact would be good for us. You can imagine, I mean, when I think about the good, you know, there's everything from just the knowledge that they exist,

which I find, I think would be beneficial to us. We don't know how, if this trajectory that we're on of a populated, energy intensive, technological world where we have nuclear weapons and such, we don't know how long we can make that last. If we find other civilizations that exist and have lasted for these geologic time periods with their technology, that would give us confidence that this is something that can be done and that that trajectory is something that we can maybe find a sustainable landing point in. But you can imagine there's really sort of no limit to the other types of benefits you could imagine that this could bring. Knowledge about how to solve other global problems or just us being in contact now

with what's been called the galactic club. If there are technological species populating the galaxy or the universe, then we join that club and we become something more than just what kind of humans we are now. It's maybe a new stage in evolution. Or we just have someone to communicate with, and we can exchange information. And maybe it's only interesting to physicists and mathematicians, but you would probably learn an awful lot about physics and math, and that would transform our world. Yeah, you have kind of a helpful thought experiment equation that you include in this paper to quantify the magnitude of the benefits or consequences minus the cost of of achieving them and i was reminded we were both

at a workshop the other week and i said i was reminded of this concept of pascal's wager when you start looking at to take again the extremes the infinite good versus infinite bad potential here but if there's an infinite good or very very very high benefit towards a successful engagement with a benevolent civilization pascal's wager is something similar which is that there's you know you might as well believe in a higher power because heaven is so great you might as you know there's no consequence you know if non-existence is this is the opposite go for it you know and then you're really lucked out with your if that's the case and so the these like large infinities or large benefits really start to in my mind pull you, you might as well put something into this effort. Because even a low probability, nearly infinite benefit is ways in its favor to pursue.

And I guess this kind of pulls you in a similar type of compulsion that the opposite Adam Serdium, I was arguing, would be, right? That if there's really some galactic club out there that'll gift us with high technology or insights into fundamental physics or open up new avenues for human flourishing, then really we have not just an opportunity, but an ethical responsibility to put a lot into this and really go for it. Because if we don't then this we're just leaving this on the table you know as a civilization i mean does that ring true with you or would you hesitate on that conclusion i mean if you're going to assume that contact would be benevolent and good for us then yes there is a an obligation i mean you could even imagine if if that's true again that there is an obligation. I mean, you could even imagine, if that's true again, that there are extraterrestrials and that contact would be beneficial for us. You could imagine future generations sort of blaming us maybe for not starting SETI and METI soon enough.

If they discover that there's something out there and some major developments in Earth could have gone very differently if that contact had been established much sooner. I'm not saying that is what I believe, but I think that follows from the assumption that that contact must necessarily be good. Then there is some obligation to do that. Well, I don't even know if it has to be good, just that the fact that it could be. Even to me, the potential I wrote a white paper a few years ago for the planetary science decadal survey just kind of taking a similar again broad stroke similar kind of logical argument for the pursuit of even biosignatures and finding

something in our own solar system of living life, the consequences to our knowledge serve almost as a step function in terms of our understanding of biology. And the potential benefit of that could be so great in terms of insights into medicine, our existence, and life elsewhere, that the vast uncertainty of itself, but when you're talking about an uncertainty of something

so beneficial again i still think you're compelled to pursue it to some reasonable degree so i guess i'm giving away my cards here i'm pretty sympathetic to even the potential for benevolence right is worth the the consequences of a finding a malevolent civilization if and i would say add this as a rub to your equation, there's a cost, there's a negative cost too, or an opposite signed cost of, you know, our own civilization is perfectly capable of self-destruction on its own. So given that fact, if we can mitigate our own self-destructive tendencies,

even by the mere knowledge of another civilization, I think that starts to balance your equation out here a little bit. That it's not just that otherwise we exist in stasis as a human civilization, that we have our own instability itself that may be mitigated by outside existence of another civilization. Does that make sense? Are you tracking with that? I do agree with that, yeah. And you know, I think the one thing I would add is when we think about the passive search for biosignatures or technosignatures, we actually can't assume that that will necessarily be beneficial. As a scientist, now I'm very interested and I'm pretty sure it would benefit science. But what would be the

consequences to others if we were to find that? There's been a lot that's been written about this, but we can't predict, you know, how would the world's religions react if we, you know, found strong evidence of life on another planet. And then if we're talking about evidence of technology, especially if we're talking about receiving a message, the knowledge of there's an exoplanet with pollution in it, but if we take sort of the original SETI position and maybe there's a beacon that's being beamed toward Earth and we receive that and we can decode it kind of like in movie Contact, how do we know that information is not going to be harmful to us?

And that could be anything from information itself that is maybe trying to trick us to destroy ourselves versus just our inability to handle whatever the information is. That potential harm to me doesn't seem actually less likely than aliens flying to our planet to destroy us, which I find very Hollywood-esque. I can't say it won't happen, but the idea of a malevolent remote message seems about as likely as a malevolent invading force. And so in that sense, the active versus passive dimension is also diminished a little bit. It's are we ready for this knowledge or not is sort of the question. Yeah, I guess we shouldn't underestimate our, again, our own self-destructive tendencies here or our own inability you know it our species-centric kind

of problems of integrating new information and and it was interesting i mean i think that there's a difference too between some very far away biosignature detection versus an in-situ biosignature i think so or Or biological detection. Cause I think one, one is a whole new one, one is a whole level of range of information versus a suggestion of information. And I've seen critiques of the fact that,

uh, an exoplanetary biosignature detection is effectively meaningless in the sense that how do you ever resolve it? A hundred percent. Yeah. If we, if we detect, you know, even a really compelling exoplanetary biosignature, there's going to be huge error bars on the signal first.

There will be several decades of debate among the scientific community as to what this means and how do we take follow-up measurements. So for science, it would be very exciting. But for the non-scientific world it may not be this really transformative discovery and it may be you know kind of this neutral effect where it just goes into the textbooks and it's this ongoing process so yeah if we were defining an artifact on the moon that would probably resonate a lot more with more people. Hi, y'all. LeVar Burton here.

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I'm married to a professional scientist and i have my undergraduate degrees in science but that there's always some very irritating a biological path to generate biosignature like signals in in general it seems like this rule let me move on to your to your last of your three conclusions based on this unknowability of of the contact which is this preliminary neutrality. And I think this is functionally what I would characterize as where we stand, if that's a correct way to put this, which is that, and you characterize it as contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence, it's just fundamentally unlikely to occur. So we may as well kind of continue it, but not really put too much resources into it. And we just shouldn't worry too much about it. Is that kind of the accurate way to characterize this one? The neutrality?

that contact would be beneficial. That's what I want to believe. But my reasons for that are just speculative and guesses. And so yeah, what I'm left with is this neutrality option. And so yeah, in that equation, it's the value of medi is equal to the probability times magnitude minus the cost. But for neutral, for the neutrality option, we just assume the probability is basically zero. It's unlikely to occur. So the value of METI is just based on the cost. And so on one hand, that's an argument for not doing it because like, and I would say that's an argument for probably not investing government resources into METI because it's

probably unlikely to succeed. It's just really going to be a cost sink. At best, the benefits are going to be educational for teaching people about SETI astrobiology, things like that. But if you have some philanthropist who decides that that's a good use of their money, well, fine. There's a lot of other projects that the government doesn't do that people may or may not think are important. Jeff Bezos and others are building a giant mountain-sized clock that will tick once every 10,000 years. So do you think that's a good idea or not? I actually think it's kind of cool because it's helping with our long-term thinking. And

METI does the same thing. But I'm glad that my tax dollars aren't going toward the long now clock, you know, that the private thing. So I think it's sort of an argument that it's not somewhere that science should really prioritize and put a lot of resources in, especially when it's public funds. But it's not saying we should prohibit SETI or METI. And if you've got the funds and you want to do it, well, hey, go for it. But don't expect that you're probably going to find it. You know, I'm actually surprised that we haven't seen more wealthy individuals attempt an active SETI message at this point.

I was, I was part of a project in 2012 to do this and it was funded by some, you know, it was a wealthy investor. He was a fashion photographer, actually, in New York City. You know, there's only so much money you throw at it before. He was trying to make it into sort of a revenue generating process where people could, you know, like have a crowdsourced message. And the model we had was

everybody in the world got one free message. And if you wanted more, you would pay to add your message to the stream. And, you know, there was a lot of issues with it. And I think the business model was a little bit difficult to fund the whole thing. So in the end, we only got one transmission out. And again, this is really the problem with many, no many attempt has ever been repeated. And it's just like the wow signal, we found the wow signal once, we never followed up on it again. Even if it was real, we can never know that for sure. And so we want to really send a beacon out, you have to repeat it, you know, even once a month, or once a year, just some amount of time, you have to repeat the same

message. And so, yeah, we never got to that. And then the investor lost interest. What is there to get out of it is a question, but we have this breakthrough initiatives now. They're doing passive SETI. They have talked about the messaging problem. So we'll see where it goes. talked about the messaging problem. So we'll see where it goes. Bold move to want to monetize Active City with a business model. I had never even considered that as a feasible thing. I was thinking about it in terms of like a self-monument. Again, so very wealthy people tend to be relatively interested in themselves and ego-focused. And the idea of that you send a message that could be one day heard and you would be an emissary for earth. Like to me,

that's a very seductive thing as an egocentrist, but the fact that we haven't seen it and also relative, I mean, how much does it really cost at the end of the day, if you're a billionaire to have a repeated signal going out once a year through some existing radio array, it doesn't strike. I mean,

it must be in this millions of dollars, right? Yeah, yeah, right, right. So, I mean, it's relatively modest. So, again, relatively modest. But even that amount of money, you know, there's a whole branch of, you know, scholarship called, you know, effective philanthropy. And so these people who have this much money, they pay attention to the research to know how they can effectively spend their money. And so, I mean, it is interesting, though, that you have, you know, Uri Milner and others that are putting money into Breakthrough Listen to do this massive SETI search. But at the same time, they're interested in the other deliverables

you get out of that. There's other ancillary science that's been published, you know, they discovered fast radio bursts and other things. There's a couple of people that have gotten their PhDs through this process. They've done a lot of other programs. So even if the 10 years end and they find nothing and all they can do is put upper limits on the presence of transmitters, there are other deliverables that came to science. i think with medhi it's a little harder there is some work you can do in terms of developing you know a language that can be encoded for interstellar communication but sort of the ancillary discoveries you know what other astronomy do you uncover i think there's less that you get with many. And I suppose the timescales are so great that an individual is very unlikely to ever benefit their own ego from a discovery.

That's right. I have a paper and then a chapter in my book titled Sovereign Mars. The chapter and the paper are called Deep Altruism. And I look at that exact question, whether it I focus mostly on you know people going to Mars and building a long-term settlement and how could you fund that through an altruistic means but it's the same for many you can't have you know what I call shallow altruism if you're going to do that it can't be for benefiting oneself and you can't really even think of it as benefiting your direct descendant it has to be sort of a greater

sense of this is for the future and what could motivate that. And I think there are actually some of these eccentric billionaires who have that kind of view to an extent, but nobody seems to have applied it to many yet. Yeah. And I mean, I guess also from an ego perspective, aliens aren't going to care who you are. Probably who you are, right? It's all in the human context. And again, you'll be long gone by the time they notice it. All right. So maybe not the most effective ego stroking opportunity here.

Looking through your three positions that one can take on this kind of active SETI thing, I think you're right. I think we're in this preliminary neutrality, but I find that just so unsatisfying at a certain level. And maybe that makes me a bad objective policy person for the purposes of this discussion. But I'm really, again, kind of drawn to the second option of the benevolence and the potential inherent in it. But I want to key you in on, I mean, we kind of danced around are you number three where do you ultimately personally fall in terms of where you would want our position to be given the

unknowability of this i personally fall on number three the neutrality but when i think about you know just what kind of constraints we may be able to put about this, speculative constraints, it leads me toward the second one, benevolence versus malevolence. So, you know, if I think about what would it take if we're going to be destroyed by an alien civilization? I mean, OK, there's the cultural collapse

from receiving information. But if we're really talking about messaging in particular is a unique existential threat, then that is they notice us and then they come and visit us and then there's some sort of catastrophe from that contact. And to me, if you are a civilization that can travel interstellar distances,

you certainly don't need to come to Earth for water. You've figured out if you need water, you've figured out how to provide water on your journey and your food and your energy. So I have a hard time believing it's that they need some resources on our planet or that they need our star or our asteroid belt or something like that. If you can do that journey, you probably have a way to manage your resources over those long timescales. a way to manage your resources over those long time scales. So now if you're that kind of long lived civilization, so any civilization we find is probably not going to be one that just evolved technology and then all of a sudden they receive our message and then they fly out over here. So

they're going to be a long-lived civilization. This is true for most things we see in astronomy. Most phenomenon that you can observe are long-lived. So if you're long-lived, I have to assume that means that they have evolved past their tendencies to self-destruction, because that's just self-evident. If you are around, you haven't destroyed yourself. So if they have nukes, they know how to manage them. So that doesn't mean they wouldn't attack us, but it means they would be different than us. And a lot of the arguments for Medi being risky points to human history and points to the idea that, well, in Western civilizations for the less advanced civilization, either because they were directly attacked, or they were out-competed, or they got smallpox, or any number of outcomes from history. And I think that's not a perfect analogy, because if you're a long-lived civilization that

can travel interstellar distances, it's different. You have a different set of ethical principles that you're operating under if they do decide to attack us it would be for very different reasons than that westerners attacked you know natives in whatever countries they visited i can't prove then that that means that the contact will be beneficial but i can think of more reasons that it's more likely to be beneficial than harmful in that sense. I think the harmful contact would be if they come and they're peaceful and we're just not ready for it at all. And it's more of a cultural collapse. And that's more like it's on us rather than it's on them. And if that's the case, then I'm also worried about SETI, not just METI. If we're not ready for it, then maybe we shouldn't be listening.

Maybe we're not ready for this at all. Right. There's not a huge distinction between the two. But you say something there that I think that I've been turning over in my head quite a bit recently. utility of historical analogy for fundamentally ahistorical events of asceti detection or an active messaging engagement with another civilization i think we have to be so careful and cautious to draw from history because by doing so we take for granted cultural civilizational technological geographical context that probably are really idiosyncratic and unique combinations and otherwise we kind of assert that they're universal and we have as we know i think building up on this hierarchy of universality

i mean we know physics works everywhere the same way geology probably does. Biology, maybe similar. You start getting, but culture, probably not. And we've seen such a variety of cultures on Earth that even no longer exist anymore. As someone who works in the SETI field professionally, how do you approach the use of historical analogy? And would you critique and

say that a lot of people overuse them to a point where they're no longer useful? I think some people do overuse them. I don't think we can actually use much at all from historical patterns of how humans have behaved. Human sociology isn't probably going to tell us much of anything about alien civilization. We can maybe look at physical constraints like physical sustainability. You can't exist above your carrying capacity for an indefinite amount of time. You're limited by the amount of energy coming on your planet from the sun or the host star. There's really basic things like that. Yeah, otherwise I don't think you can really say much. You're in the SETI field, I mean, I'd say one of the very careful and

engaged thinkers in this area, and you publish a lot in it. And I feel like the field itself has been really thriving in the last few years. But it's also a field that, for lack of a better term, maybe engages a lot of maybe dilettantes or people who don't engage as deeply or professionally on this. And that's where I feel these applications of analogy tend to be misused. They're asserted pretty broadly through people who may not have a grounding in the physics or astronomy or things that I mean,

and it's not wrong to do that necessarily, but it maybe doesn't add a lot to the conversation. Is that a fundamental frustration of being a SETI professional or scientist that a lot of people, or a good example of when you're a graphic designer, everyone has an opinion on whether that logo should be what color it should be. And it doesn't matter if you're a professional or not. Is that an ongoing issue with this field that it's so engaging that it invites non-experts to opine? I mean, to some extent, that's OK, to some extent, because, you know, sure, if if my work gets covered in a news article and I read the comment section, everybody's got their armchair explanation for what's going on. But that's OK. You know, those people aren't really filling up the conference halls when I go to a scientific conference. So those events are really scientific professionals talking to each other and the discussion in the journals, peer-reviewed

journals have a check in the sense that there's peer review and editorial oversight to make sure that any ideas getting in the journals are up to date and not kind of rehashing these sort of comment section type arguments. So in that sense, I don't mind. I think that's actually a good sign that people are engaged and interested. But, you know, say two things. So the one thing is I think what we can learn from history, the main thing is what are detectable type of signatures that humans have done? That is a concrete, like we have put pollution in the atmosphere.

We have put satellites up. And then you can think about what could we do based on technology we know about, or at least have theorized. But that's different than human sociology. I do see, this is positive and sort of has some implications too. CETI and technosignatures is inherently interdisciplinary. And so we do get people from non-physical sciences coming to these discussions. And that's important. That's great. You have to have that. You have to have historians and anthropologists and archaeologists and philosophers and everyone else in addition to the astronomy. And I will fully admit that,

you know, I did a postdoc in ethics. So I like to cross-train. I recognize that some of my science colleagues have a harder time engaging with the humanities and social sciences, and so there does need to be more effort to engage scientists in that. But what I do notice also is that some of the social scientists and humanities scholars don't always engage in learning the physical science, and you don't have to be learning the detailed math, just sort of at a qualitative level because you're talking about the difference between a radio transmission versus an optical signal versus seeing the spectra of pollution in exoplanet atmosphere. So if that all just sounds like mumbo jumbo to you, then that's okay because

I'm a scientist and I had to learn those things. But one can learn those things without having to get a science degree. It just takes a little bit of time. And then you can have a more productive conversation. So I think sometimes, even within these SETI meetings, you get a little bit of people talking past each other because someone may apply some ideas from sociology or anthropology. And there are some aspects of that that are valid and some aspects of that that are kind of neglecting the astrophysical realities of context scenario. And so I think that's where we have to do more work is you have to have these interdisciplinary conversations, but you can't overly anthropomorphize them. And sometimes it's the social scientists that are arguing that the scientists

are anthropomorphizing. But at the same time, when you over apply history to an extraterrestrial civilization, you are also that anthropomorphizing. And so it's a very difficult problem. Again, there's very little you can really know. Yeah.

I mean, I feel like perhaps the real value of historical analogy would be in terms of how our civilization would react given a con you know that's where it becomes more relevant versus apply I think there has to be a certain amount of significant humility in understanding

what a different intelligence much less civilization would be given that we have struggle with even acknowledging different types of intelligence on this planet or with other, you know, non-human animals to varying degrees and, or even again,

ignoring various ways in which civilization, we have a presentism bias, right? And we have this idea that what exists to us now is natural and inerrant versus a function of our time. And all of that, I think can play into our, our time. And all of that, I think, can play into our response aspect of this. Now, I guess one thing I had raised the other week that I'd be very curious

to hear your thoughts on, which is speaking of kind of societal engagement with new intelligence, we may be at a cusp of this right now with our own self-devised artificial intelligence do you see any useful analogies there for how our society is going to be engaging with computational artificial intelligence to a potential discovery of a pre-existing extraterrestrial intelligence not really not yet not yet like like a hypothetical you know artificial general intelligence if we were to have it maybe then what we have now i don't even like to call it artificial intelligence you know in science language machine learning yeah you know like it's really you know sort of a random number generator with fancy regression.

It's cool. You know, like the chat GPT thing is neat. And there's a lot of interesting science that can be solved. But it's really having a very large data set and high computational computing power allows you to to find really interesting patterns that can pass a Turing test. So that's interesting. But it's not really, there's no thinking going on behind it. And if you play with some of this technology, you don't have to play with it very long to get blatantly wrong answers. You know, I asked it to write a chat GPT to write a biography of myself, and it awarded me awards I had never won before.

Congratulations. Yeah. So in that sense, I don't think that that technology is really there yet to teach us about how we would communicate with another intelligence. It's a tool, but I don't really consider it intelligent. It's not a thinking machine. But I guess people are acting as if it is. And to me, that's the interesting part. I completely agree with you, by the way. There's no inherent knowledge for that quote-unquote intelligence to bequeath to us because it's just this facsimile of engagement. But the idea is that people consider it intelligent and therefore there's been kind of a freakout, at least among a certain engagement class of individuals. And that to me tells me something.

Even at the hint of a possible non-human intelligence, it creates quite a bit of uncertainty. And doesn't that tell us something about what a future contact situation could be like? Maybe a little bit. But that technology is based on things that humans have written in all of our languages. So when you interact with it, it kind of is a human intelligence. It's human words. And so there's really nothing new or foreign that it's going to tell us. It's really just spitting back our collective words back at us, chopped up and rearranged.

So maybe there's some things that one could do. You could think about setting up some sort of SETI-METI experiment, you know, classrooms in two countries and, you know, someone receives a message and the other one has to decode it. And maybe you could use this technology to help with that to some extent. But I think it's really telling us more about ourselves than about what a foreign intelligence would be like. Given the fact that you fall into this preliminary neutrality perspective on METI, and I'll expand this a bit to SETI as well, do you feel that public institutions in the U.S. and abroad

are spending an appropriate amount of money to support, I'd say even more broadly, Search for Life activities? Or do you feel like there's an underappreciation or underinvestment in those given the vast uncertainty of their outcome? I think there's an underinvestment, but it's growing. You know, NASA for a while was not supporting any kind of technosegniture research. They are now. I'm happy to be funded by them to study these problems.

It's a very small amount of funding compared to other projects that NASA is doing. And so, you know, I've heard my colleagues make the argument, you know, there's a lot of resources, for example, being put into string theory. And testing string theory is, you know, centuries into the future. The implications of that are very hard to fathom what we're going to really be able to do with that now. What could we do if those resources were dedicated to word technosignatures, for example? Now I'm not, I think string theory is also interesting, so I'm not coming hard down on string theory, but just as an example of something esoteric, it does seem like there's a very broad interest in the question of are we alone? Is there life out there? Is there

technology out there that's not ours? If funding priorities were purely determined based on taxpayer interests, you would imagine that maybe there would be more resources dedicated to that. But at the same time, NASA just went through this decadal survey process. The National Academies wrote their recommendation in the decadal report. And the flagship mission is the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which would be launched in the 2040s. So a little ways away. But that would be a mission optimized for characterizing the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. You would probably be able to do some technosignature searches with that.

And so it's very exciting that NASA and the National Academies identify the search for life as one of the key questions to drive the next flagship mission. one of the key questions to drive the next flagship mission. Because I think that does reflect the interest of the taxpayers in what they want to discover. So yeah, of course, I would love to see more. But I think at least the trajectory is going in the right direction. It's interesting you bring that up because it's the Habitable Worlds Observatory is very much couched, though, in a much more, I would say, kind of institutionally acceptable framing of the search for life, which is biosignatures rather than technosignatures. And politically, as you point out, Congress actually changed the law to allow NASA to do technosignature research before. Again, it had been banned for years for doing so. It strikes me actually more of an institutional problem about what's an acceptable scientific inquiry than a political one at this point. And again, you point out string theory, which is

deeply accepted, even though it's something inherently untestable with our current technological levels. Why do you think SETI and technosignature research is considered to be more fringe or unacceptable use of scientific research than these other areas that are perhaps equally as esoteric? And is that even a correct way to characterize it? Well, historically, there has been this characterization due to association with science fiction and elements of cultural ufology. So when you say we're looking for techno signatures, a lot of people, including funding decision makers, may imagine something that they saw in a movie or something really whimsical, rather than understanding that there's a scientific way of approaching the search. It's less of a problem today. The stigma still exists.

One of the points that my colleagues and I like to try to mention is that technosignatures are biosignatures. It's a subset. They're two sides of the same coin. The question is, is there life in the universe? Is there life that we could detect? And if we find a biosignature that's water vapor and methane and ozone, great, you know, we found life. If we find a radio signal or pollution in an exoplanet, we found life. And in some sense, the technosignatures may be less ambiguous than some of the biosignatures. A narrowband radio signal would be far more suspect for technology than oxygen in an exoplanetary atmosphere. I feel like we've been successful to an extent in convincing other astrobiologists that we are on the same team, that technosignatures are just an additional way of expanding the scope of what biosignatures we

are interested in. Once in a while, we'll still get a review from a paper where we've done, you know, good work and showing, you know the detectability of a spectral technosignature. And some reviewer will just push back and say, this is not serious work without really even evaluating the work in and of itself and just against the whole idea of technosignatures. So this exists still. There is some of this institutional resistance to the idea. And yeah, it's from this historical cultural association. Yeah. And you are on a paper that makes an interesting argument. In fact, that technosignatures may actually be more prevalent than biosignatures by the fact that technosignatures can spread themselves more effectively throughout the galaxy than pure biology. Is that a correct way to

summarize? That's right. It could be. Yeah. So we have to look. We don't know. But yeah, one of the purposes of that paper was because some scientists will say like, well, OK, maybe there could be technosignatures, but they're not going to be as common as biosignatures. And because what they're thinking is that, well, it's hard to get life to evolve on a planet. So that's already a difficult step. And it's probably hard for life to evolve technology. So probably you're going to have a lot of planets that are uninhabited and then a few more that have life but no technology. And then there's a very, very small number with technology. And so we should focus on the ones that have life, you know, microorganisms and things like that. But, yeah, the argument we make is, like, even if that is the case, once you get technology on a planet, it can go off world.

And so the technology can spread. It can be the most ubiquitous signal. is like, even if that is the case, once you get technology on a planet, it can go off world. And so the technology can spread and can be the most ubiquitous signal, the most ubiquitous biosignature out there. And then, of course, the technosignatures themselves may be easier to recognize as anomalous due to life rather than some of the biosignatures, which may have a lot of false positives. Yeah, I mean, here in this solar system, the number of planets with a technosignature outnumbers the number of planets with a biosignature. That's right. Very weakly, but still technically true. Yeah, several planets. I mean, you know, we count as Mars,

but, you know, orbiters around other planets and landers. We are out of time, unfortunately, and I have only addressed maybe a third of the questions i had for you so you'll have to come back in the future but for our listeners who are really intrigued by some of the ideas we've talked about today or even some you know you have a new book that we didn't even really discuss on uh how can they find you and maybe also what is this new book that you mentioned briefly earlier that folks can read? Sure.

Yeah. So you can find me on the internet, huckmisra.net, H-A-Q-Q-M-I-S-R-A dot net. And I'm on Twitter at Huck Misra. Yeah, my new book is Sovereign Mars, Transforming Our Values Through Space Settlement. And so, yeah, this is not about SETI or METI. This is one of my other interests is the idea of humans going out into space and establishing permanent settlements on Mars and the moon and asteroids and things like that. And it's really a political science book. It is asking the question, I started with who owns Mars, but really the question I realized

is what does sovereignty mean on Mars and what are effective governance structures that would make sense as we go into space, given the political realities of how we have tried to have shared governance in common spaces on Earth. And so, you know, I look at the Outer Space Treaty, the Law of the Seas, the Antarctic Treaty System for what works and what doesn't work and try to draw some implications for, you know, what kinds of models might we be able to do on Mars? I look forward to reading that, Jacob. That sounds fascinating to me.

And again, we'll have to have you back on to talk about it at some point. But again, I want to thank you for your time. And again, encourage our listeners to check out the papers we talked about. I'll link to them. They're also linked on your page. And there's a whole other host of writing

that you've done. I appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much. It was a lot of fun. That was my conversation with Dr. Jacob Hak-Misra. Really interesting, really appreciated his time doing that. Jack, I wanted to say, if you think we were to meet an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence tomorrow, how do you think we'd do? We'd come out for the better or come out for the worse? I think we'd come out for the better. Personally, I feel like if we have undeniably found not just life out there in the universe,

but intelligent life, I think it would revolutionize our understanding of who we are as a species, where we are in the universe, our place in space. Now, I do wonder if these extraterrestrial beings that we're finding if they have a debt limit you would think they would think they have maybe figured their advanced knowledge they would bequeath us the knowledge to avoid such uh self-defeating issues in the future but yeah perhaps i don't know maybe it's you know what it is convergent evolution maybe that's just a universal aspect of all civilization is

debt ceiling fights every every couple of years good insight there appreciate that i think at the end of the day i mean hell i mean you and i work for the planetary society we're saganists clark arthur c clarky and however you want to describe it at heart meeting that i mean how could we not again i think I just have a strong predisposition, I think, to seeing that this would be a net benefit and that we shouldn't be afraid of the dark at the end of the day. We should seek that out. And the potential benefits, I think, are just so hard to express in terms of our self-identity as a species, setting hope, but also, God, how wonderful would it be to learn so much about something new?

I think that's at the end of the day. And how comforting, too, to know that there are beings elsewhere in the universe handling maybe the same political turmoil, the same economic systems, the same even physiological needs that we as humans have to know that these things we share in common with other beings would be profound. And I think would, like I said, revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos and the evolution of it. And our place within it. And our place within it. All right. Jack, thanks for joining me this month on the Space Policy Edition. Great to be here with you in person in Washington, D.C.

We will be back next month on the first Friday of the month. Thank you for listening. If you like the show, please share the show. Please rate the show. Please tell your friends all about how great the Planetary Society is. If you like learning about space policy, if you like following this type of news and my analysis, you can get my monthly newsletter, The Space Advocate, for free at planetary.org

slash spaceadvocate. And of course, you are encouraged, if you haven't already, to join the Planetary Society at planetary.org slash membership. Thank you again, and Jack, ad astra. Casey, ad astra. thank you again and Jack Ad Astra Casey Ad Astra