Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space, SETI, the Singularity and Shostak

Episode Date: February 7, 2018

Where is everybody? That was the question physicist Enrico Fermi asked when he wondered why we hadn’t yet met ET. What will happen if we do? Will humans lose the will to explore?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Space, SETI, the Singularity, and Shostak, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Astronomer and longtime leader of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Seth Shostak, was just one of my guests a couple of weeks ago at the first ever Space Tech Summit. You'll hear the entire conversation. Love bad impressions? No, I didn't think so. You may want to skip the middle portion of this week's What's Up segment, but Bruce Betts does offer a great impression of the night sky and this week in space history. Did you watch the State of the Union address in the U.S. Capitol?

Up in the gallery was a special guest of Representative Jim Bridenstine, the Republican lawmaker who has been nominated to be the next NASA administrator. Bill Nye the Science Guy, CEO of the Planetary Society, had just spent hours and hours walking the halls of Congress talking space exploration. Bill, welcome back. You know, on this week's, or what I should say, the current Space Policy Edition, we talk with Matt Renninger, who was your compatriot on Capitol Hill a few days ago. Tell us about the day that you guys had. So we went from congressional office to congressional office. We went to six different office buildings. You know, around the U.S. Capitol are office buildings

that run the government, where the senators and congresspeople sit with their staffs. Everybody supports space exploration, Matt. I mean, this is, that's what we talk about when we talk about this. Everyone supports it. And specifically, everyone supports planetary science because everybody wants to know if we're alone in the universe and where we all came from. And the cost of planetary science is quite low compared to pick something, the cost of the International Space Station, the cost of the Department of Agriculture or whatever the heck you want to talk about. But because it was the day of the State of the Union address, which BT dubs, as the kids say, by the way, is required by the U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 3, not the speech, but reporting on the State of the Union is in the Constitution. Everybody was there. All the Congress people and senators were there. So we went to all these offices. And then we met several

people in the tunnels beneath these buildings. You can go like habit trails. You can go from building to building underground. And we met people on this. There's these subways that go from one side, from the House side to the Senate side. And we met people and said, do you want to be in a planetary science? Oh, yes, of course. You know, I was hoping you were going to do this. So we handed out business cards and Matt Renninger, Jason Callahan, our policy analyst and government relations guy, follow up with the staff and everybody agrees to be on a caucus. Now, when you have a caucus in the U.S. Congress, you're able to move bills much more quickly. You're able to get laws passed more quickly.

And specifically, Matt, you're able to get money approved. It was a really very productive day. And it was almost coincidental that everybody was there on one day. And it was because of the speech. People were not back in their districts meeting with their constituents. Before I let you go, how was it sitting up in the gallery looking down on the entire federal government of the United States of America? It's exciting, but everybody, our government here in the United States is so divided or the progressives versus the conservatives are so at odds. It had

a really troubling vibe also, I'll just tell you, as an audience member. People were sitting with their arms folded. Other people were chanting like they were at a hockey game. It was a really, I don't think I've ever seen anything like it. You know, I've watched every state of the union since I was able to vote, I guess. So it's just very, gave you pause. But here's the thing that's built in to the U.S. Constitution is change. Change is built in. Meanwhile, planetary science is being advanced because we've created a planetary science caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives, which is formal and then an informal one in the Senate.

And I'm sure Matt and Jason and Casey will give you an earful about that. You know, somebody once said space brings people together. That's why I was there, Matt. other. That's why I was there, Matt. Though we probably don't agree on a great many things, these congressmen and senators and I agree that planetary science is of great value. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Matt. Bill Nye, he is the CEO of the Planetary Society, which means now and then he heads for Washington, D.C. to represent the interests of the society and all of us who love space exploration. I bet that includes a lot of you out there.

Draper University is the brainchild of venture capitalist Tim Draper. On January 23rd and 24th, it joined with Global Startup Ecosystem and Lightspeed Innovation to host the first-ever Space Tech Summit. Most of the sessions were designed to let the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial and venture capital community know about burgeoning opportunities in space development. I was invited up to the school's San Mateo, California campus to moderate the closing session, a conversation that took a different path, one that leads to the school's San Mateo, California campus to moderate the closing session, a conversation that took a different path, one that leads to the stars. The title, as you just heard, is The Fermi Paradox and the Singularity. What if space is not our future? There are at least three worthy topics in that.

Each of those we could spend two hours on, but we've only got 45 minutes or so to try to save humanity. I have informed all of our very distinguished panelists, three of my favorite people, that I think we should discuss whether our coming robot overlords are going to allow us to take vacations on Mars and Titan. I think that captures everything. Right here is Bill Diamond. He spent decades as a Silicon Valley tech leader before he decided to seek gainful employment as president and CEO of the SETI Institute. That, of course, is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But the Institute does far more than listen for ET.

What other kinds of research are underway, Bill? It's great to be here, and I do want to say that I have in my past had to be involved in my fair share of audit, which is not bad. Most of my life has actually been spent in lasers and photonics and optical networking, so I've been part of the technology that has basically enabled the Internet. That's been cool. Even did lasers in space. That's pretty cool, but nothing is more cool than what I'm doing now, I have to say.

All kudos to the laser and space guys, but the SETI Institute is a special place to be. We are, surprisingly, an organization that I think a lot of people have heard of, but a lot of people may not know actually exists. You've heard us in the movies. We've been referenced in various things like the film Independence Day and Another Earth and things like that. Contact, of course, is close to our historical past, but we are a real institute.

We're actually one of the top 100 subcontractors to NASA doing funded research in areas ranging from astronomy and astrophysics, astrobiology, exoplanet research. We run the data pipeline for the Kepler mission, which has basically told us that planets are everywhere. If you look at all the dots in that image behind us, every one of those is a star, and we now know pretty well, thanks to Kepler, that each one of those has at least one or more planets around it. Pretty exciting, pretty interesting stuff. Planetary exploration is

another one of our fields. We develop, among other things, the X-ray diffraction system that's sitting on the Curiosity rover as we sit here on Mars, being part of the analytical suite of instruments there. We do climate and geoscience, and, of course, we do SETI research using both radio and optical technologies for that purpose. Thanks, Bill. I think most of you probably know the next guy in line, Seth Shostak, is one of the best science communicators this little planet can boast of. He and Molly Bentley host the SETI Institute's outstanding podcast, Big Picture Science.

But Seth is also senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, and he chairs, I think you still do, the International Academy of Astronautics SETI Permanent Committee. Welcome. When did your fascination with little green people begin? How many of you think there are any little green people out there, by the way? Or big. I'm just curious. Got that. But how many of you think? No, probably not. I want to talk to both of you afterward. I was interested, Matt, as a kid, because you afterward. I thought it was a bone.

Okay. No, I was interested, Matt, as a kid, because in my youth, you know, the motion picture had just been invented, and there were a lot of rather cheesy sci-fi films playing down at the local theater in Alexandria, Virginia, and every weekend I would go to see them. And they very

often involved aliens, mostly aliens who were in a bad mood. You know, getting involved with, I studied astronomy in grad school. You don't care about that. But there was one night that I was using some antennas in the deserts of California, actually, in the Owens Valley, and at 3 in the morning, I realized that the equipment that I was using to study galaxies, which was my day job, could also be used to perhaps

prove that we have some cosmic company and maybe discover somebody who is at least as clever as my neighbors in Mountain View. Doug Vakoch. He used to work at the SETI Institute. Do you detect a pattern here? Now he leads the METI Institute, M-E-T-I, which stands for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. He edited and contributed to what is, as far as I know, the authoritative collection of papers about how we might learn to communicate with people who didn't grow up in our neighborhood, you know, who come from up there. That book is Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Doug, welcome. I just want to tell you that when my parents, we used to have a camper van that had a CB radio back when CB was the big thing. And I went out twice and sat in the van calling the aliens to come

down with that five watt transmitter to please come and visit. No response. No response yet, but it was the right idea, and instead of doing it with five watts, we like to do it with a megawatt or two. METI is the flip side of SETI. We're sort of the plan B option here. If plan A that Bill and Seth have laid out doesn't work, if listening for the signals doesn't work,

maybe we need to be transmitting. Our work is asking the question, what happens if every civilization out there is doing exactly what we're doing, which is listening and not transmitting? You had mentioned, Matt, that the name of this session is on the Fermi paradox, and that is a puzzle that the physicist, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, asked back in 1950. He was reflecting on the fact that, you know, if in fact there are aliens who've reached the singularity and they're very advanced, why haven't they come here? And so the paradox was, if they're out there, why haven't they made contact? they made contact. One of the assumptions is those of us who are transmitting messages don't hold out hope of listening. Not the case. So we also do optical SETI in Panama and in Michigan, but our

goal, in the same way that the SETI Institute does radio SETI, which is where SETI began in 1960, but also does optical SETI. We view METI as a third expansion in the same way that 15 years ago we added optical SETI, and now we're adding a more active way of attempting contact. So the Fermi paradox. I mean, the great quote from Fermi, right, was, where is everybody? And I think maybe the most obvious answer is it actually takes a lot of energy to travel between the stars, that everything that you really want to know about another civilization, you can get a lot cheaper and faster by sending radio signals or laser pulses. So maybe that's why we haven't found them. I think there's a sense sometimes that since we have been searching for signals since 1960, we've covered the whole universe and not at all the case. I just heard your colleague, Jill Tarter, tell a bunch of astrobiologists last week that maybe we've

covered 12%. Does that sound right? Doesn't sound right. 12% of what? I mean, 12% of, you know, eight things, maybe. No, the number of star systems that have been looked at carefully. We've only looked at a few thousand star systems. And a few thousand star systems, keep in mind, the Milky Way galaxy has roughly 300 or 400 billion star systems, right? So we looked at a few thousand. And by the way, if the Milky Way is not up to your gusto-grabbing standards for a galaxy, if you don't find your life adequately fulfilled in the Milky Way,

there are two trillion other observable galaxies in the universe, each with a trillion planets. So, you know, there's a lot of real estate. But the Fermi Paradox is just like when, at the beginning of the 16th century, right? You know, Columbus sails across the ocean. And within 30 years, there's Spaniards everywhere up and down the coast of the Americas, right? And that's because the amount of time it would take a sailing vessel to get from Europe to the Americas, a couple of weeks, a couple of months, whatever,

very short compared to the age of the Atlantic Ocean. So essentially, instantaneously, they were everywhere. So what Fermi was saying is, hey, the amount of the Atlantic Ocean. So essentially, instantaneously, they were everywhere. So what Fermi was saying is, hey, the amount of time required to colonize the entire galaxy, and it depends a little bit on how fast your rockets are and things like that, but the amount of time required is maybe 30 million years, maybe 40 million years. That's short compared to the age of the galaxy. So if any society out there had an interest in establishing an empire, like the Romans did and the British did and so forth,

they've had more than enough time to do it. He figured this all out between two bites of a tuna fish sandwich. At lunch. And then said, so where is everybody? Because they should be all over the place. That's the Fermi paradox. It's a great paradox. It's a lot of fun. You can have a lot of fun with it.

I have a counter to that paradox that is not as well informed as Seth's, because I don't have his background. But my own relies on the Drake Equation. Is everybody here familiar with the Drake Equation? The Drake Equation being that model that Frank Drake put together in 1961 at a first-ever meeting of astronomers, including Carl Sagan and others, to discuss the merits of looking for extraterrestrial intelligence, basically looking for the signature that they might make available by detecting their technology.

So if there was somebody out there manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum, as we are doing, maybe we could detect them. Does it make sense to do that? So he started asking about what are the variables we need to consider to see if this makes sense. And he thought about, well, what's the rate of star formation? How many stars have planets? How many of those planets are in the habitable zone of their host star where liquid water can be sustained? How many of those that are in the habitable zone go on to develop life?

How many that develop life go on to develop intelligent life? How many that do that get to a technologically advanced point where they can make their presence known by communicating beyond the confines of their planet? Last but not least, how long do they last? That's the L variable at the very end of the Drake equation. My answer to the Fermi paradox is the L variable. Frank Drake defined that as the length of time that an advanced technological civilization would remain detectable, that they'd be observable before they either go dark, as we are somewhat going dark,

we're doing less broadcasting of information and doing much more through things like the internet, through fibers and cables, or they go away. We've had, what, five mass extinctions on our own planet since biology came along a few billion years ago. Frank actually came up with a number, which we have no scientific basis for at this point, but we're starting through science and... Like with those Kepler nodes. Like with the Kepler nodes. We're starting to fill in the variables of the Drake equation, but he estimated that the amount of time that a civilization has before they go dark from

the onset of technology, let's say, in our case, the invention of the radio 100 years ago, is about 10,000 years. Now, he didn't have a very scientific basis for that number. But 10,000 years would not be enough time to permeate the galaxy or even the local neighborhood. So my own take is, and if you look at kind of where we are in our civilization, just 100 years into our technology phase, we've got a lot of challenges ahead. So my answer to the Fermi paradox and also this question of do we have a place in space, I think in one sense we absolutely do. The last panel was talking about all the amazing uses of space.

I would only caution that I don't think space is a good plan B for civilization because there's not many good places to go within the capabilities of our technology to go and try and recreate life here somewhere else. So anyway, my answer to the Fermi paradox is the L variable. I think Seth probably has something far more clever and insightful. But it's an interesting paradox. I might throw one thing out, because it ties into the second half of the title of this panel. And that is indeed, to have biology colonize the galaxy. I mean, it happens every night on television.

But a lot of things happen every night on television that you shouldn't believe. This was a big shock to me when I learned when I was 43 years old that not everything on TV was true. I didn't know that. It was last year. Anyhow, you know, if you're attending these sessions, it's because you're probably down with the idea that the big thing that we're going to do in this century is invent our successors, right? We've heard about machine learning, machine intelligence, and so forth and so on. Within a hundred or so years of inventing radio, so now we could communicate, right? We invent the H-bomb. Maybe that's not a good thing, but we also invent generalized artificial intelligence. And whereas biology has a hard time colonizing the galaxy, you'll be dead long before you get

anywhere. You say, oh, not a problem. I'll make a generation the galaxy. You'll be dead long before you get anywhere. You say, oh, not a problem. I'll make a generation starship. I'll put 1,000 men and 1,000 women in a spacecraft and send them off to Proxima Centauri. That works in sci-fi. It doesn't work in the real world because, as the anthropologists will tell you, within 50 years, the men are all fighting over the women. After 70 years, everybody's dead.

And even if they're not dead, you put them all to sleep. They wake up, what are we doing here? Who put us here? Yeah, who put us here? What is all of that? So that's not going to work. But once you have artificial intelligence, it can keep repairing itself. So if you're immortal, all trips are the same length, right?

So if the Fermi Paradox means anything, what it means is, and this is what Frank Tipler down in Louisiana has pointed out many years ago, it would be colonized not by soft, squishy little gray guys or your descendants, but by machines. So the Fermi Paradox remains, but it isn't because we're not seeing hairless guys with no sense of humor and no clothes walking in. It's because they don't see any machines anywhere.

Doug, please. I like Bill's formulation of L, so the longevity of a civilization, because what you did is identify there are a lot of reasons that that lifetime can change. And often when we think about how long does a civilization live, when it ends we think of this nuclear cataclysm and it annihilates itself. But as you mentioned, Bill, it could also be because that civilization has gone radio silent.

I Love Lucy is streaming out there making ourselves known right now, but we are becoming more radio silent as we communicate by more focused telecommunications, as we communicate by fiber optics. Someday we will go silent. And so packed in that L is a question of alien motivation. And the usual assumption within SETI is that if a civilization is out there, they have the ability to make contact, they'll use it for our benefit. And so, you know, as we are listening for signals on the Allen Telescope Array that the SETI Institute has in Northern California, at our optical telescope in Panama, we're expecting the extraterrestrials to take the initiative and to transmit. The question that

METI asks is, what if, in fact, they're waiting for us to take the initiative? That, in fact, if we make contact at all, I don't know if they're really going to be this super intelligence because they are artificial intelligence, but I think we can say one thing. They've been at it a lot longer than we have because we have had the technology to communicate at interstellar distances, so radio technology, for less than a century. If that's the norm in our galaxy, whether it's because civilizations annihilate themselves, they turn inward, they're no longer interested in exploring. If that's the norm, what are the chances that our century and the century of an extraterrestrial are going to coincide in the 13 billion year history of our galaxy?

Virtually zero. So the only way this works is if, in fact, the aliens have been around a lot longer. Now, are we really going to see the singularity? Is Kurzweil right that 2045 or so, we're going to have this exponential growth of computing capability and computers will be qualitatively more intelligent than humans? I don't know. But I think in terms of SETI and METI, it really doesn't matter because if we make contact at all, it will be with a civilization that's been around a lot, lot longer than we have. And even if they don't continue that exponential growth, we can assume that they are more advanced than we are.

Doug Vakoch of the METI Institute. Doug, Bill Diamond of the SETI Institute, and Bill's colleague at SETI, Seth Shostak, have much more to share, so stick around. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society. And I wanted to let you know that right now, Congress is debating the future of NASA's budget. The House has proposed to increase NASA's budget and also increase planetary science in 2018. The Senate, however, has proposed to cut both.

You can make your voice heard right now. We've made it easy to learn more if you go to planetary.org slash petition 2017. Thank you. You can share your passion for space exploration by giving someone a gift membership to the Planetary Society. This holiday season or any time of year. Your friend or loved one would join us as we nurture new and exciting science, advocate for space, and educate the world. The gift of space starts at planetary.org forward slash give space. That's planetary.org forward slash give space. That's planetary.org forward slash give space.

Because, come on, it's space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, and I'm sharing with you the panel discussion I led at the first Space Tech Summit on January 24th. My guests were SETI Institute President and CEO Bill Diamond, SETI Institute Senior Astronomer and Science Communicator Seth Shostak, and their former colleague who now directs the METI, or Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, Doug Vakoch. I want to make sure before we go on that we define that other significant term in the title of this talk,

which we've been talking all around, and that is the singularity. We were going to have Will Weissman here from Singularity University. We heard earlier today that he wouldn't be able to join us. I think maybe he got advance warning that the singularity will be achieved tonight at 837, and he's at home packing. Could one of you, two guys or both of you, in 30 words or less, define the singularity? The singularity. Well, not to be confused with the multiplicity.

The singularity is, you know, when you wake up in 2045 one morning, you find that your toaster is talking to your fridge, which is talking to your car. I mean, you know, it's like the movie The Power, if anybody remembers that, when they find out there's another system. You know, you have so much connectivity and so much compute power that the whole thing becomes one number. That's my understanding. And the problem here is Moore's Law, which is exponential, a heavily overused word these days. Exponential. Human intelligence is not exponential. Your connectivity is, well,

current generation practically zero because everybody's looking at their devices, right? You're not any smarter than the kids in the Roman Empire were, right? But of course with this exponential growth in machine intelligence that you can expect, it's a different thing. And of course at one point it just dwarfs all the other intelligence on the planet. What happens after that is, I guess, the realm of sci-fi writers, right? I don't know if you're going to like it or not, but maybe we become their pets, which is okay by me because I get fed regularly. And walked.

I want a wheel. I want my own wheel to run on. Doug, did you have anything to add? The singularity is not a given for a lot of people. I mean, decade after decade, we talk about how computers are going to be thinking smarter than human beings. There are some who are adamant that it's going to happen. It's just a question of how many decades. But the jury is still out.

So I'm not convinced that there will be this day. But again, I think if we're imagining contact with another civilization, maybe that's not the important part. The important part is that they will be more advanced than we are, whether or not it's because of this accelerating change at an exponential level. Let's say that we hear from E.T answers our call. We'll ignore the fact that the conversation is going to take decades or centuries because of that spoiled sport Einstein. We learn that they are as advanced as we think. Maybe it is a machine intelligence. Can you imagine in that scenario something that would then discourage humanity from seeking out its destiny in the solar system and beyond?

Yeah, absolutely. There was a panel discussion years ago over at the University of California, Berkeley. We try not to acknowledge the existence of that place. And there was a coin toss. I had to debate some guy about whether SETI was a good thing or a bad thing. And I guess I lost the coin toss. I had to argue that it was dangerous. It was dangerous. How is it dangerous? Well, you'd be in good company with Elon and there's a business

talking. He's talking about METI. He's talking about broadcasting. Doug is here to destroy humankind. I mean, that's okay. But, by the way... It'll take a while. Yeah, I say that in jest. And I don't believe for a moment that METI is dangerous,

in case it comes down to that. But, sure, there's a danger here. It's not because you picked up the signal. If you tune in Ron Owens in your car tomorrow morning, well, you can't anymore. But if you were to try you tune in Ron Owens in your car tomorrow morning, well, you can't anymore. But if you were to try and tune in Ron Owens, you know, he's not going to suddenly jump into the passenger seat of your car and start molesting you because he doesn't know you tuned him in, right? There's no danger in SETI. It's completely passive. Now, you can argue there might be danger

in Métier, you know, that, oh, there's some civilization down there. Let's go vaporize their planet. I mean, you know, if you're really of the upbeat variety of person who thinks that's possible just add us to the klingon empire actually yeah the danger is indeed if you picked up a signal the first thing everybody would be asking is i mean aside from astronomical questions like how far away are they and is there a planet there and all that stuff. That you could, by the way, find out very quickly. But they would ask, what are they saying? Is there a message? And they're not going to send an empty signal into space.

They will have a message. There will be some modulation. And if you can figure that out, and that's a really big if, but if you can figure it out, then you're getting information from a society that is enormously more advanced than ours is. We've just heard that argument from these other folks here. So that's like giving a Neanderthal the keys to the Library of Congress. Is that going to be good for them or bad for them? It might ruin their Neanderthal lifestyle. Would it really?

And that echoes. You're thinking like a Nobel laureate. I'm imagining George Walsh. For the first time. One of the discussions in the 1970s was what happens if we make contact and George Wald, very eminent biologist said it would be devastating for our self image because we would feel so inferior in comparison to the extraterrestrials. Now I would give

Dr. Wald the fact that if we do make contact, again, because they're likely more advanced than we are, that they might be more intelligent, maybe they would be more peaceable. I think what that argument misses, though, is that somehow it will challenge our distinctiveness. And I think actually the opposite would happen, that the more we learn about another civilization, the more we realize

that there is, no matter how much more powerful or intelligent nailing civilization might be, they'll never be more human. And so I think that's actually the biggest impact. If we can get that modulation, if we can detect it, extract the information and understand it,

in essence it holds a mirror up to ourselves, and I think that is the greatest benefit of having another way of understanding it. Doug, suppose you were an alchemist in 1000 A.D., right? And I could somehow go back to you and I'd say, hey, I can see you're trying to turn lead into gold here. Here's a high school chemistry textbook from 2017. You might want to read this. Is that going to improve your life?

It's going to ruin your career. Well, I think that's a great example because the common characterization of alchemy is, yes, it's a precursor to chemistry. And yeah, part of it was changing these crude materials into gold. But there's also a deeper philosophical transformation of the person. So I think that if we encounter another civilization, the biggest challenge is we're not going to be able to even

directly incorporate their mindset or their priorities into our own. That's going to be the big surprise. Well, I think, in fact, encounter is perhaps not... Yes, yes. It's kind of a misnomer. We're not likely to encounter face-to-face, which makes it all the more... Or in real time. Yeah, which I think makes it all the more difficult.

I think there's a natural buffer that we have simply in trying to comprehend. You know, we hope that they're going to start out with a catchy string of prime numbers. That would be the ideal. But maybe it isn't quite that simple, and so it could take decades even to decode a message if we get one. One thing I think it's useful to kind of level set people's thinking about here. You know, we started talking about how much have

we looked at, you know, 12% sets at 12% of what and with what? I mean, have we haven't looked at much of anything in the context of the numbers Seth was talking about, nor have we explored them across the entire radio frequencies available to us. We don't have the time or the capability to do that. So, you know, at what frequency and at what location and so on. So I think the other thing that's important to point out and why I think METI is actually important is SETI endeavors are requiring somebody else to be doing METI or they're not going to work. We don't have the sensitivity in any instrument on Earth at present, whether it's Arecibo or Green Bank or the Allen Telescope Array, to detect the kind of emissions that we have here on planet Earth. Unless somebody is directing,

either accidentally in our direction or on purpose in our direction, a very powerful and intense signal, we can't pick up the equivalent of I Love Lucy from a distant planet with the equipment we have today. It's not to say we won't get there. But there's people who say, well, why haven't we heard anything? Well, maybe because nobody's talking to us, but that doesn't mean they're not out there broadcasting.

We just can't hear them. So it's important to keep steady endeavors in that context. Jill Tarter also likes to say that what we've done so far would be the equivalent of going to the ocean with a measuring cup, putting that measuring cup in the water, holding it up and saying, well, there's no whales in there. There must not be any whales. I mean, we've done the equivalent of dipping the measuring cup in the water, holding it up and saying, well, there's no whales in there. There must not be any whales. I mean, we've done the equivalent of dipping the measuring cup in the ocean. That's about where we are so far. So there's good news for that is from an employment point of view, there's a lot of work yet to

be done. I got to be fair to Jill Tarter. I probably misheard her. And maybe she said 12% within 100 light years or something like that. That would make much more sense. Doug? You know, Bill, you make a great point about really need to look at what a particular search is doing. So I think there's often, it's tied into this sense of exponential growth and numbers and big data being everything.

And so we're impressed with how many stars have been searched. But you have to then step back and say, how well have they been examined? And what happens if you find something that looks good? So one of the distinctive features of the SETI Institute search with the Allen Telescope Array is you don't just look at one spot on the radio dial. A lot of searches have looked actually at the frequency. You might expect there to be no transmissions, which is the frequency that hydrogen emits radiation on. Astronomers use that to map the structure of the galaxy, but maybe that's the last place you'd want to transmit. The Allen Telescope Array actually looks at 9 billion channels from 1 to 10 gigahertz, and then when

you're sifting through that much data, you're always going to find false alarms but you can do an immediate follow-up on it you know there are other programs out there that sift through a lot of data but maybe it's a restricted range of frequencies or maybe if you get something good it's because you've analyzed it now a few weeks later you go back but that's really too late to do the kind of follow-up so so it's just my bid for saying not all SETI programs are created equal. I think there are a lot of ways to do SETI, and they complement one another. So again, the optical SETI we're doing in Panama has, as one of its virtues,

a really high false alarm rate. We've gotten one false alarm in the last several years. And so when we go through about 4,000 stars, we have a lot of confidence that there wasn't anything, there's not a lot to get caught up on in something that looks good for a moment but then doesn't pan out. Lasers, radio frequencies, 9 billion radio frequencies. What if everybody who's anybody in the galaxy says, oh, radio, we use neutrinos. I mean, should we be looking, is there a way to look gravity waves beyond what we're doing with the electromagnetic spectrum?

Yeah, I think I get e-mails twice a week suggesting neutrinos, gravity waves, or hyperspace communication, which I think is what they use in Star Trek. Subspace. Oh, subspace communication. Oh, hyperspace and Star Wars. No wonder I didn't get it right. Because I always write back and I say, look,

have you written a textbook on subspace communication so that we can actually build the equipment? And they say, no, that's for you to do. But neutrinos are a little more serious. Neutrinos do have an advantage that you don't have to point your antenna anywhere. If the

neutrino transmitters are down on the other side of the Earth, you know, 100 light years away the other way, it's okay. Neutrinos go right through the Earth. It's going right through your body right now. You suffer through this, right? So it has the advantage. You don't have to worry about where you're going to aim. But it has a disadvantage that neutrinos are very energetic, right?

They're very high frequency. So they're very costly in terms of how much energy does it take to make one neutrino? And I worked at it. It was like the energy of a.45 caliber bullet or something like that. And if you're going to make trillions of these things, that's a lot of energy. The other thing about neutrinos is not only do you have to make a lot of them and it's expensive but they're very hard to detect. The University of Wisconsin has a neutrino detector down in Antarctica, right? It's called Ice Cube. He's also a rapper.

And that thing is, I think it's a kilometer on a side, right? It's a really big hunk of ice and they got all these detectors in there. And they detect one in, I think it's like 10 million neutrinos. So neutrinos are really a hard way to go, and they don't go any faster than radio waves. And if you're talking about gravity waves, you know the gravity wave. Oh, you ought to be you guys using radio.

That's old school. Gravity waves, do you know how difficult it is to make a gravity wave? I mean, you can take a couple of black holes and slam them into one another. We're working on that. Yeah, a pretty good gravity wave. But try doing that in your backyard. The neighbors will complain. So with technology that will fit on this stage, you can build a radio transmitter or a laser that transmit bits just as fast as these other schemes.

In fact, a lot faster than with gravity waves. It's hard to modulate those things. Why go the difficult route? Given Seth's, I would say, very reasonable cautions about communicating by gravitational waves or neutrinos, lest you think that there's no progress in SETI. It's not the case, because let's go back to that first SETI search in 1960. Frank Drake said, you know, radio is very natural.

It travels at the speed of light. There's a natural quiet zone with minimal galactic background. So that's the way to go. And for decades, that was the way to go. What people often forget is that shortly after Frank's first search in 1960, Charles Townes, who got the Nobel Prize for inventing the laser, said, well, you know, we could also communicate with laser signals. And for decades, his colleagues laughed and said, that's ridiculous. There's no way a civilization can generate the kind of energy that you need for that. It was only in the late 90s, as our own laser

technologies improved, that we could open ourselves to that decades-old proposal of optical setting. And now all of us are just sort of throwing that around as yet another way we might make contact. So I think you do see a change, but the key issue is it has to be a way of detection that we can plausibly do ourselves and have the technology. So it doesn't matter if, in theory, something might be good. If you can't actually do it in practice, you don't have a search approach. I just got to add a quick rejoiner because, after all, lasers produce light. Radio transmitters produce radio, but radio and light are the same thing.

And they're not the same as neutrinos or gravity waves. I think it's an interesting point about laser study as well and the merits behind it. We have not too far from us here the most powerful laser in the world at Lawrence Livermore Lab. If you couple that with some of the big telescope mirrors we have operating on our planet and you shine the laser out into space, that laser signal would be 10,000 times brighter than the sun. So it's possible. You can see that. Like Doug, we're also embarking on an all-sky, all-the-time optical SETI project called Laser

SETI at the Institute. I think the other question, the way to put that question in terms of, well, what other modalities might we consider is what are the methods even within things like the radio spectrum? We do make certain assumptions about how the radio spectrum might be used to communicate, such as a narrow band carrier frequency that's being modulated in some way to carry information. But what if the information is being transmitted over a wide band? For most purposes, we would not be able to detect that. We don't have detectors, or we're not looking for signals based on wideband information. But we have a new collaboration at

the Institute with IBM. IBM was fascinated by the fact that we have a system, the Allen Telescope Array, that generates about 54 terabytes of data every day of a rather unique and interesting multi-dimensional data set. They said well gee we'd like to use your data to help train our machine learning algorithms and in exchange for that we'll give you access to those machine learning tools. We process the the Allen telescope data in real time using a fast Fourier transform which will basically tell us there's a narrow carrier frequency. That's really interesting,

but if there's something more subtle or complex going on, we won't detect it. Now, thanks to IBM, we have the opportunity to, for example, stack up a million or 100 million images, if you will, of a plot of the spectrum, part of the spectrum that we're looking at. If there's a pattern there, now we have the ability to see it. So we are deploying new tool sets and we are bringing new sets of eyes to bear on the problem. And so to Doug's point, you know, the technology is expanding,

we're changing what we're looking for, how we're looking for it, et cetera. So these are interesting developments. Isn't this great stuff? I could do this all day, but we're standing between you folks and dinner. But there is one other place I want to go. Considering what the bulk of conversations over the last, at least today, have been about here, venture capital, opportunities in space, do you see places, opportunities for intersection between what you guys do, specifically SETI or METI, and the private sector or other nonprofits who have entirely different missions? We certainly do. One of the things, I mean, you've heard a lot about AI and machine learning over the last couple of days. And you've heard a lot about the application of those to real applied technology problems. What you don't hear a a lot about the application of those to real applied

technology problems. What you don't hear a lot about is the application of AI and machine learning to basic research. But we've undertaken a project that came out of the office of the chief technologist at NASA headquarters to start looking at opportunities to bring AI and machine learning to bear on basic research questions of interest to NASA. So we launched a couple of years ago, launched I guess being the operative word, a project called the Frontier Development Lab, which is a partnership between NASA and the SETI Institute and private industry, where we bring together young PhDs in machine learning and

AI and put them together in teams with their counterparts in science domains relevant to certain questions we want to look at. They have to do with space weather, you know, forecasting the behavior of the sun, with planetary protection, characterizing near-Earth objects, with a space resource, looking at images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and using AI to do feature recognition. And we brought in the private sector to partner, both to provide technology, funding, expertise, et cetera. Partners in this project have included Intel, NVIDIA, Autodesk, Lockheed Martin,

smaller organizations like KX Solutions, even the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, who have, as many people here may know, quite an initiative in space investment. who have, as many people here may know, quite an initiative in space investment. So this is certainly a place where we see the intersection of the private sector, and certainly we can take advantage of our location as a research institute here in Silicon Valley by working with these companies in these domains. And for them, it's a great opportunity to explore new ways of deploying their machine learning algorithms and getting some interesting science done.

So that's been a great program. We've also undertaken a significant effort at the Institute to do much more around the protection of intellectual property development. For scientists, it isn't necessarily a priority, but as we look for more sustainable ways to fund the research we do over a long period of time, developing a strong IP portfolio becomes important, and we're working hard on that. Doug, do you see opportunities? Yeah.

In fact, a good example would be METI's first transmission project. So when we launched our organization in 2015, we laid out a strategic plan of what we wanted to accomplish by 2018. And at the top of the list was to initiate transmissions to nearby star. The formal name of our organization is Medi International. Half of our trustees are from outside the U.S. We have an advisory council with people from 16 countries. So we've been focusing on international collaborations. So we were actually approached by a Spanish music festival called Sonar that was getting ready to celebrate its 25th anniversary. They wanted to transmit music into space,

but they wanted to do it in a scientifically credible manner. So we had been working on the sorts of messages that we put in, a scientific mathematical tutorial. They also solicited a research organization, Catalonia Institute of Space Sciences, to identify the target. And so in October 2017, we transmitted a series of messages to a nearby star, a Leutten star a little over 12 light years away.

That's an example of a collaboration that at the outset you might not think would have happened because our primary goal in sending the message and listening for reply is to determine whether there is life out there. But the commonality for that partnership is focusing on another aspect of the project, which is the importance of communication. So for us, it's communication in a scientific context, for them, an artistic context. The point I would keep in mind is as we do look for those partnerships between the nonprofit and the for-profit, to keep in mind that there are a lot of ways that we can define our projects that allow those to happen,

and it may not be the most obvious ways. Can I just add something quickly, Matt? In a way, it already is private, right? Because the SETI experiment at the SETI Institute, and in fact, elsewhere in the United States, and it's mostly a United States initiative, by the way, is all privately funded. It's not your tax dollars at work. Unfortunately, it was once upon a time. Yeah, that was killed in 1993 by a Nevada senator, in fact.

But it was a NASA project when I started up. But it's all privately funded. So in that sense. But, you know, we've heard a lot from some of the other speakers, or maybe we haven't because I haven't been here that long, but talking about is this project going to give a good ROI or not? And that puts me in mind of a comment made by Bob Zubrin. Anybody into Mars probably knows about Bob Zubrin.

Years ago, he asked me at some conference, he said, so Shostak, how much does it cost to run a SETI experiment? I said, yeah, you know, ours can run it cost to run a SETI experiment? I said, yeah, you know, ours can run pretty well on a couple of million dollars a year. I know Bill might want to contest that number, but, you know, a couple of million dollars a year. And he said, okay, do you think you could find them in a hundred years, you know, cost of a couple of hundred million dollars? I said, sure. And then he said, so what would be the value of the information you might receive from the Klingons if you actually did pick up a signal?

What would that be worth to, I don't know, Hewlett Packard or Alphabet or some other company? And I said, I have no idea, Bob, but maybe billions. And he said, okay, sell stock. There you go. Of what use is a newborn child? We are out of time. Thank you, guys. There you go. Of what use is a newborn child? There you go. We are out of time. Thank you, guys.

It was even more fun than I expected it to be. And thank you to Draper University for giving us the opportunity to have this conversation. I will say with the previous panel notwithstanding, we are not advocates of samurai sword fighting with alien species. I want to see Seth in samurai armor fighting off E.T. Thanks, guys. And thank you very much for sticking around. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Twice, two weeks in a row, sitting across from you in the Planetary Society studio.

It's some kind of very minor record. It's magical. That's what it is, Matt. It's magical. Someday it'll be a random space fact. Twice in 2018. It's a blue random space fact. Speaking of blue random space facts, did you see the lunar eclipse?

No. It was overcast. I was actually up and I peeked out and it was cloudy and I went back to sleep. So I missed out. Did you see it? I did indeed. It was quite lovely. Took some pictures. It was quite lovely. Oh. Took some pictures.

It was good stuff. If you missed it, there's another one in July, though not visible from where we are in North America. And then there's another one about a year from now in mid-January of next year that is visible from here. Was it a blood moon? Did you get that red stuff? It was reddish. It was definitely reddish. It was not blue. There was no reddish. It was not blue.

There was no actual blood as far as I could tell. And there was no snow involved since it was also a snow moon. But there was a total eclipse. Snow moon? That's a new moon, isn't it? There was snow moon. Now, I lost what street cred I had. So I'll have to earn it back over the next few astronomical events.

What else is going on up there? I'm usually not up in the pre-dawn, as you may be aware, and I was for the eclipse. And, dang, those planets I keep telling people to go see are really cool-looking. Jupiter, it's still really, really bright, and it's up in the east a couple hours before dawn. And then you've got, if you come to its lower left, you get reddish Mars, and it is passing in the neighborhood of reddish Antares, the star in Scorpius. Antares is actually a little bit brighter right now. And then Mars is moving closer and closer down to Saturn,

which is farther to the lower left and kind of yellowish. All right, we move on to this week in space history. It was 2001 that a spacecraft designed as an orbiter was successfully set down on an asteroid near Shoemaker landed on the asteroid Eros and survived its landing. Shall I just go into it? Yeah, why not? And then we'll explain. Okay. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a random space fact. Is that Cary Grant or Clark Gable? I'm telling you.

My kids have the talent in impersonations. Clearly, I don't. But hopefully, people get some amusement out. I actually, for a long time, I try to do one person and I accidentally do another person. I just can never do the person I'm actually trying to do. So why am I doing this? Because Mel Powell, our longtime listener, sent us all these great movie quotes adapted for RSF, Random Space Fact. Here's the one I want to do this week. Go ahead. Make my random space fact. I think it was Phil Silvers, wasn't it?

Was that Phil Silvers or Clint Eastwood? It was Bob Denver. That's who it was, Bob Denver. All right, Mr. DeMille. Mr. DeMille. All right, Mr. DeMille. I'm ready for my random space fact. The best Gloria Swanson anyone has ever done.

No question about it. My mama always said life was like a box of random space facts. You never know what you're going to get. And, of course, I have been and ever shall be your random space fact. All right. If we want to live long and prosper, you better go ahead and just give the fact. Luke, I am your random space fact. Now you're improvising. It's no worse than when I tried to read off a script. All right. On to the actual random space fact. I am so happy about this one.

First, the normal part, and then the special part. In its first 14 years, of which we've just passed the anniversary of roving on Mars, the Opportunity rover traveled farther than any other rover on another world, about 45 kilometers. But on average, how fast did it travel, if you take its distance divided by its time? About 37 centimeters per hour.

Or about 10% or less of a snail's pace. The speed of a snail. Which turns out, the speed of a snail varies quite a lot in the literature. You looked this up? There's a range, huh? Oh, there's such a range, yes, and disagreement. But I think it just varies, like people or rovers, different speeds. But less than 10% of a snail's pace opportunity on Mars.

But not to take away from how impressive its journey has been. That's a great random space fact, whether you like Mars rovers or snails. Yeah, I'm sure we'll hear from snail fans talking about speeds. Shall we move on to the trivia contest? Yeah, it's time. In the trivia contest, we asked you, what are the names of Neptune's five principal rings? How'd we do? of Neptune's five principal rings.

How'd we do? For the usual prize package nowadays of a Planetary Society t-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net account, more about those in a moment, Random.org came up with Jonathan Zuber, a first-time winner in Stanford, California. Yay. first-time winner in Stanford, California. He said the name of Neptune's five main rings are Gaul, Le Verrier, La Salle, Ergo, and Adams. That is correct. And what is the significance of those names? They were all early Neptune astronomers, early observers of Neptune. Including what the guy who predicted it where to find it, right? what the guy who predicted it, where to find it, right? And the guy who found it.

Yeah. And people who studied it and found other moons. And yeah, it's a whole gang. Congratulations, Jonathan. You're our winner this week. He added, hello, Matt. I listen to your show every week. Wanted to thank you for all the work that you and the rest of the Planetary Society

do to help bring the solar system closer to Earth. It's a nice way to put it. It is. Of course, we got more. David Kaplan, West Simsbury in Connecticut, he says, Larry Moe, Curly, Groucho, and Harper were not considered. On the other hand, Todd Yampole said that the best reason for a returning to the outer planets, to Neptune specifically, is so that the discovery can be made of the Betts and Kaplan rings. Oh, yeah.

And finally, from our poet laureate, the great Dave Fairchild, there are five rings of Neptune, and La Verrier is one. Add the cell atoms, Ergo and Gaul, now we're done. And yet, I'm reminded by these circles, cold and dark, of Tolkien and his tales of the rings and dark red arcs. Get it? Arcs, orcs. Oh, Neptune, arcs of the rings, orcs, lord of the rings. Okay, I see where that is. I see.

Okay. We move on. And I felt it was once again time for Where in the Solar System? Where in the solar system will you find Dingle Sinus? See, that just tickled me too. I thought it might tickle you. Dingle sinus. It's been recently named, by the way.

D-I-N-G-L-E, dingle sinus. What planetary body will you find that on? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I am so sorry to Dr. Dingle, who clearly this is named after. Whoever that may be, we'll have to look it up. Dingle sinus. You have until the 14th, that'd be Wednesday, February 14th, Valentine's Day, to get us this answer by 8 a.m. that morning, so we won't interfere with the rest of your celebration of that day. If you have it right and are chosen by random.org, you will receive a Planetary Society t-shirt straight from Chop Shop where there's a Planetary Society store.

ChopShopStore.com is where you'll find it, all of our merch. And 200-point iTelescope.net account. It's worth a couple hundred bucks American. You can use that to steer their telescopes that they've got all over this planet to look at all over the universe. By the way, it was named after a location, not a person, but I don't know who the location was named after. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about if you talk to an artificial plant,

will it keep it not growing? Thank you, and good night. I like to play music for my artificial plants. Synthesizer music. It's artificial. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its Earthling and other members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme,

which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Please give us a rating in iTunes, maybe even a review. What do you say? Clear skies, everyone.