Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Special Coverage of SETIcon

Episode Date: August 23, 2010

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SETI CON, THIS WEEK ON PLANETARY RADIO Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It was the first major public conference dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We'll take you there for a sampling of the outstanding speakers and events. You'll hear SETI researcher Jill Tarter, SETI pioneer Frank Drake, and astronomer, writer, and radio host Seth Shostak, among others. Bill Nye called in from his vacation to honor the SETI Institute's

conference and speculate about the future of this ongoing search. And Bruce Betts will drop by to deliver another What's Up Guide to the Night Sky. As always, we'll get underway with the Planetary Society Science and Technology Coordinator and Editor of its blog, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, let's start today with an image that certainly made me think of that famous pale blue dot that Carl Sagan referred to. Yeah, it's interesting that it reminds people of the pale blue dot image because the photo that Messenger took of Earth and Moon against a backdrop of stars is taken from the opposite end of the solar system. It's taken from very close to the sun. And so you see this double dot, the double planet of the solar system. It's taken from very close to the sun. And so you see this double

dot, the double planet of the earth and moon lit fully by the sun because Messenger is much closer to the sun than earth is. It's a wonderful image and certainly more than a dot. I mean, you can very easily make out the earth and its moon and it looks a little bit fuzzy around the earth. And I assume that's the stuff that's keeping us alive at the moment. No, actually, I think that's probably because the Earth is so bright that it's just overexposed in Messenger's camera detector. I mean, Earth with its white clouds is a very brilliant target, and Messenger was taking these photos as a part of a search for very faint asteroids called vulcanoids that are theorized to lie between the Earth and sun, but which nobody has ever discovered. So Earth looks fuzzy because it's just so bright. Well, that explains why that fuzz extended out much further than the atmosphere does.

So speaking of pale blue and other colored dots, let's talk about another piece that you featured in the last week. This one is about color, wonderful worlds of color, if you will. That's right. This one was actually a guest post written by Jason Perry, who works on the Cassini mission by day, but he's been absolutely obsessed with Jupiter's moon Io since he was a high schooler. And he recently has been working on trying to make photos of Io that look a little bit more like the human eye would see them. The problem is that Io is very strongly colored, and the data that we get back from spacecraft doesn't always have the right color information to represent things as the human eye would actually see it. In particular, Galileo had a red filter and a green filter on its camera, but the third filter that you'd want, the blue filter, there was no such thing on the Galileo camera.

They had a violet filter, and I.O. is very dark in the violet wavelength. So when you combine red, green, and violet images, you get an Io that looks strongly yellow, which is the color that we're used to seeing. And when Jason recalculated the images to try to synthesize a nice blue filter, it becomes much more subtle, which I think is quite interesting. And quite beautiful, nevertheless. Yes, definitely. And I think it'll look nicer in montages of other moons and planets in the solar system

to have these nicely recolored views of Io to work with. All right, Emily, there's much more to see in last week's and every week's entries in the blog, the Planetary Society blog, which you can find at planetary.org. Thanks once again for joining us. Thanks for having me, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We're going to move on now to Bill Nye. He's still on the road, so he had to phone in his commentary, but it makes a nice introduction to our primary topic of the day. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, soon to be Executive

Director of the Planetary Society. And last week, I'm very excited to say that some like-minded individuals who are involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence had a big conference. And it was very exciting. There were a thousand people there, all living the dream or imagining, finding an answer to the question, are we alone? Now, you know, the Planetary Society has been very involved in this from the beginning with our Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home program, where people from all over use their home computers in background mode to make a giant supercomputer out of computers distributed all over the world. The thing is, the Search for Extr extraterrestrial intelligence used radio astronomy at first,

and we tuned it so that we would avoid radio waves being absorbed by water vapor in a planet's atmosphere that we imagined would have water vapor. Well, now we're using optical means. We're looking for light signals, visible signals from distant stars or planets or galaxies or planetary systems. But it may be that we're not even asking the right question. It may be that the aliens are trying to communicate with us by some means we haven't discovered yet.

We just keep using the means that we come up with as humans or as the centuries go by. But is that such a bad thing? If you don't go looking, you'll probably never find anything. And how extraordinary would it be, given the billions and billions of stars in billions and billions of galaxies, how extraordinary would it be if we are alone?

That just seems, it seems incredible, doesn't it? But it may be. We'll never know unless we look. Congratulations, SETI Institute. Who knows what you'll find? Let's change the world. I've got to fly.

Bill Nye, the planetary guy. This is the first ever annual SETIcon, as they say. And we're delighted to have you be pioneering it with us. That was astronomer and SETI Institute Vice Chair Andrew Fracknoy getting the program started on Saturday, August 14. It was really much more than a public conference about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but SETI was a good place to start. I flew up to Northern California to cover the first full day of SETICon. What you'll hear on today's show is just a sample of the terrific lineup of speakers and presentations the SETI Institute had assembled.

Among them was author, astronomer, and host of Are We Alone, Seth Shostak. Seth has been a senior astronomer at the Institute for many years. Actually, I'm the only one. I always thought that it had to do with my age, Matt. Senior astronomer, but indeed, I'm the only senior astronomer. There are senior scientists. Matt, I've gone to a lot of cons. You know, the science fiction fantasy cons, they're always a lot of fun.

You know, you see people dressed up. You get to live in the 23rd century, even though probably I won't live in the 23rd century. So that's a lot of fun. You see people dressed up. You get to live in the 23rd century, even though probably I won't live in the 23rd century. So that's a lot of fun. But here's a con with, if you will, a different leitmotif, a different flavor, in which science is the predominant theme. And I think that that's a good thing to do

because science and science fiction are always intermingling, butting heads, or helping one another, or one's predicting the other. Who's ahead? Science or science fiction? These are perennial interests. Not to mention the fact that science fiction gets a lot of kids interested in science. And you have great representation, both sides of that coin. We do, actually. We have some really heavy-duty scientists here, obviously people from the SETI Institute. But we also have, for example, Sean Carroll, the cosmologist from Caltech. Mike Brown,

also from Caltech, the guy who demoted Pluto, if you will. I don't know if that's the way he wants it inscribed on his tombstone. But, you know, so we have very good scientists. But we also have the guy who played Tuvok in Star Trek. That's Tim Russ. We have sci-fi writers. We have Robert Sawyer, right, from Canada here. Robin Asimov, the daughter of Isaac Asimov.

We have Mary Roach, who has a new book out about packing for Mars. It was on our show just last week, as a matter of fact. Is that right? Yeah. Well, she's going to be here, and she's just the most delightful person, so interesting to talk to. Obviously an exciting day to look forward to, and not just today. This is really a three-day event. How was the celebration last night, Friday evening?

Yeah, well, Friday was for our team SETI members. So these are people who are, you know, part of our membership organization. So we had a special panel discussion with SETI Institute scientists, and they were grilling us like a cheese sandwich, Matt, with, you know, questions about how are you going to improve SETI and what are the prospects of this, that, and the other. And then afterward, there was an event involving Mickey Hart, drummer for the Grateful Dead. A fantastic presentation there.

And then after that, rock band with Phil Plait and others, you know, well, doing rock band. Bad astronomer makes bad music? I don't know that he'd appreciate you calling it bad. I thought he was pretty good. He's on the drums. He was on the drums. You're on the very first panel in the main ballroom here, and that starts in a couple of minutes. I better let you go.

It does, and I must depart, but a pleasure to talk to you about it. You too. Thank you, Seth. Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute. Let's go back to moderator Andrew Fracknoy for his introduction of SETI Con's guest of honor. On my right, needing no introduction, but I give him one anyway, is Dr. Frank Drake, our godfather, the man...

applause The man who began the science of SETI roughly 50 years ago with the first project to search for extraterrestrial radio signals from possible alien civilizations. He is also the author of the Drake Equation, which many of you know from your studies of astronomy. He has been perhaps the most active person converting the science of SETI from a realm

of speculation to a realm of science. Dr. Drake, it's an honor. You're being celebrated this evening, 50 years. It's a real privilege. I'm honored, and it's very exciting. A lot of talk today about where SETI is, where it's going. Can you talk to me for a moment about where it came from, the other people at the beginning that we should be grateful to for this effort. The idea of SETI actually goes back into the 19th century. Nikola Tesla proposed searching for signals and indeed did so. Some other people in Europe did that.

Guglielmo Marconi searched for signals. All of these were at wavelengths which don't penetrate the Earth's atmosphere, so they could not have worked, but they didn't know that. Finally, the project was resurrected and put on a firm scientific basis in the late 1950s, particularly by Philip Morris and Giuseppe Cacconi and myself. You must be pleased to see where we are, 50 years after your first effort, Project Osma.

Yes, it's just wonderful to come to meetings like this and see that the group of people who support and do SETI have grown from the very few, less than 10 back in 1960, up to today, hundreds of people. Last thing, how does it feel to see the variables, at least on the left side of the Drake equation, being filled in? Well, it's wonderful because in the beginning we had to guess them all. They were educated guesses, to be sure. They turned out not to be far wrong. Nowadays we have firm data to

support the values and so we have really now a much more defensible answer from the equation to guide us in our searches. RAY SUAREZ. Congratulations on 25 years of the Institute, 50 years of the search and your 80th birthday. DR. FRANK DRAKE. Thank you very much. RAY SUAREZ. SETI pioneer and former president of the SETI Institute, Frank Drake. We'll continue our special coverage

of SETIcon after a break. Stay tuned for Isaac Asimov's daughter and SETI scientist, Jill Charter. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the

Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets, and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members

can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. The first ever SETIcon ran from August 13 to 15 in Northern California. You're hearing just a few of the wonderful presenters who mixed with nearly 1,000 attendees. The conference was designed as a crossroads of science and science fiction,

so there were nearly as many writers, artists, actors, and producers as scientists. Robin Asimov didn't really fit any of these categories, but her father encompassed several. Robin Asimov didn't really fit any of these categories, but her father encompassed several. Isaac Asimov remains a revered figure, not just for his outstanding science fiction, but for his writing that popularized science fact. Your father probably went back and forth between the worlds of science fact and science fiction better than anyone else ever has.

Did you get a sense of that from him, that he was so well-grounded in science fact with all of the books he wrote there that are not in the least fictional? I did. I did because that's how he behaved in life. He was a very rational, pragmatic man who had this enormous creative mind. But those two always were married together. And just the way that he led his life, I saw that that's what he did. And it was what appealed to people. And it made his science fiction that much more special because it was plausible and believable.

Daughter of Isaac Asimov, Robin Asimov. One of the most entertaining SETIcon presentations was probably also the most mysterious. Dark Energy co-discoverer Alex Filipenko delighted his audience. I asked him why an event like the conference was important to him and other scientists. Such an event is important because public outreach is a very important part of what we do. First of all, people deserve to know what kind of advances are being made. It gives them pleasure to learn about these things. Also, some of their taxpayer dollars are being spent on this kind of research. And so we really should tell them what it is we're up to.

And finally, we'd like to have a more literate society, a more scientifically literate society, and we'd like to inspire more kids to go into science and technology. And one way of doing that is by bringing astronomy to the general public. Most of those kids won't become professional astronomers, but they will have been hooked on science by all these interesting, far-out new things we're learning in astronomy. UC Berkeley astronomer Alex Filippenko. No one at SETIcon was busier than Jill Tarter. we're learning in astronomy. UC Berkeley astronomer Alex Filipenko.

No one at SETI Con was busier than Jill Tarter. I didn't ask her if she is tired of being introduced as the inspiration for Carl Sagan's main character in the novel and movie Contact. Nevertheless, it's true. Jill co-founded the SETI Institute 25 years ago and leads the search from which it takes its name. You are much in demand. SETI is something that people are very eager to learn about, to talk about,

apparently less eager to fund than we would like. But, yes, and I'm really glad about that because I need the world to help do the job better. And you've got maybe 1,000 people here who are apparently true believers. Well, it's interesting that they're here. SETI Con, this is our first year. We had no idea whether anybody would walk in the door or if everybody that walked in the door would be in space alien costumes. Good crowd, and I'm enjoying it. And enthusiastic and smart, too. You had to spend a good piece of the day with a subset of the folks here talking about a new and very interesting venture from the Institute.

Yeah, that was a wonderful opportunity. We were able to use this venue to bring in leaders of successful previous open source and crowdsourcing projects, people who know a lot about community management, because we're reinventing ourselves, right, for the last 25 years at the SETI Institute. We've done our own job, and I think we've done it well, but we've done it in splendid isolation in the cathedral. And we had to because we had to build our own equipment in order to do the signal processing in real time. And if you're relying on special purpose built hardware, you really can't invite anybody else to come in and help

you do your job. But right now, we're at a transition. We have our own telescope with the Allen Telescope Array. We have finally commercial commodity servers are fast enough to do the processing that we need. We don't even have to build any accelerators. So we're moving on to that commodity platform, and now it's only software. So now we can ask for help. We can say, look, we've done this. We're going to publish the signal detection code that we've done as an open source code, let anybody look at it, change it, maybe make

it more efficient, but then say, oh, you know, you're looking for narrow band signals. Yeah, frequency compression has been our hallmark. But there's this whole other range of signals that has a time bandwidth characteristic that's somewhere between unity, which is what we've used as the hallmark for technology, and infinite, which is essentially what astrophysics is, these complex signals that we currently don't have any sensitivity to. First of all, do any of them travel through the interstellar medium well? That's a whole study that we're trying to start. For those kinds of signals that are complex

but do get through the interstellar medium without a lot of distortion and dispersion, how we find them what's a good algorithm and how can we get that algorithm to work fast enough so we can actually put it on the telescope and it's another client right so we got a narrow band client and we got a complex client and and that's a place where what we're really trying to do is take advantage of all the clever people out there that don't work for the SETI Institute but are interested in SETI and would like to contribute something new. What kind of reception did you get? The folks that I was talking to today, they're going to be committing some resources in some of their time. They were no longer in the trenches.

The ones that I was talking to are not code developers or code monkeys. But they're going to go out and find people that do want to do this, do want to. The real problem is that that has not been our culture. And we have to transition and leave the cathedral, go into the bazaar, and make good use of all that energy and creativity.

People are out there. I think they're really willing to help. We have to be better at defining how they can help us, and right now we're in the stage where we're asking the world actually to help us craft the vehicles that other people can operate with us on. You're never going to lose your enthusiasm for this, are you? Oh, no. No, I actually have the best job in the world.

It's incredibly challenging and frustrating at times. But, gosh, I get to wake up and try and figure out how to do better tomorrow, wake up and try and figure out how to do better tomorrow, a job of answering questions that humans have asked forever. Are we alone? Maybe this scientific exploration can give us an answer if we do our job well enough. And someday there's just that chance. Wow.

Someday it may happen. And even if it doesn't, I think SETI is the kind of activity that can change the world. We can get, if we can get people involved, if we can get people thinking about what we're doing, internalizing what it really means, that we're a piece of stardust. We're all made out of stardust. We're intimately connected to this cosmos. And that everyone on Earth is absolutely all the same when compared to what we're looking for out

there. Maybe we can change the world for the better by trivializing the differences among humans. I'm going to stop before you put me in tears. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to talk with you, Jill. Thanks for the opportunity. Astronomer and SETI Institute co-founder Jill Charter at the first ever SETICon. We're not done. Bruce Betts, who joins us every week for What's Up. And we're done. Thank you very much.

No, that's usually how I close the show. All right, everybody, go out there and look out for the night. Shh, don't say that yet. We're just going to confuse everyone. Welcome. Welcome. Oh, hey, it's good to be here. And please, I look forward to you telling us about the night sky, but also about your

television show, which unfortunately happened last week. Is it going to be on again? Tell us what's going on. Well, I guess I probably should not claim it as my television show, although that's a nice thought. No, it's History Channel's The Universe. And just in the last couple of weeks, they've been debuting, airing an episode on Mars called Mars, The New Evidence. And I'm one of the people that is interviewed for said Mars new evidence. And Jim Bell, the president of the society is in there. Yeah. So a lot of Jim, a lot of me, big fun.

History channel does rerun the universe. You can also buy it through iTunes or pick it up on DVD. You don't get residuals, do you? No. Should I? Dang it. I need an agent. Sucker.

And there'll be another one, so I mentioned it ahead of time. I don't know when it will air, but also one on asteroids. They took me to a rock quarry and chained me to a machine. Cool. We talked about that one. Yes. So that should air in the next few weeks, too. Okay.

Look up in the night sky. Planets doing a little dance over in the uh west after sunset look for super bright venus above it and to the right you will see mars looking reddish and farther to the right saturn uh mars been just in the next uh several days kind of moving on past a very close appearance in the sky next to venus and we also have jupiter coming up on the other side of the sky in the east early in the evening up gloriously bright later in the evening over in the east or moving to the south and also for those of you want to pull out a telescope or some finely held binoculars binoc did you say? If only they had really nice binoculars, then they would be able to find Uranus three degrees from Jupiter. Same general neck of the sky.

And if you want to do that, pull out some finder charts or other things on the web. But it is up there and out there. And even Neptune's popping up later in the evening and is observable as well. Binoculars. You got awfully excited about that. I wonder why. I will again. Okay.

On to this week in space history. It was a week for flybys. Voyager 2 flew past Saturn in 1981. Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989. And Voyager 2, no, Galileo flew past the asteroid Ida. Still got asteroids on the brain after last week's NASA workshop. And we will possibly come back to Neptune. In fact, that's a good idea, don't you think?

Everything comes full circle on this show. Wow. On to random space fact. Very mellow. I like it, though. I like it. Neptune. It is made basically very close to one orbit since it was discovered.

It was discovered in 1849. It's basically made one orbit, 146-year period. Weirdness. On to trivia contest. your period. Weirdness. On to trivia contest. We asked you, what are the three parts of a typical coronal mass ejection? Noting that not every CME has all of these parts, but a typical one. What are the three parts? How'd we do, Matt? I still like my nomination of the id, the ego, and the superego, but apparently that does not agree with most acceptable astronomical sources. I should have been clearer. Visible parts. Three visible parts.

We also had Torsten Zimmer who said that just for popular purposes, they should be named Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Does that make the sun Unca Scrooge? Yeah, that's rich. Does that make the sun Unca Scrooge? Yeah, that's rich. No, you know what? Here's our winner. And it took him three and a half years to come up as the winner in the contest.

That's since his last big win. But, boy, he does have a big win this time. It's Georgi Petrov. He's out of New York City, NYC, NYNY. And he said, and a lot of people got it from Wikipedia, and he was one of them, a cavity of low electron density, a dense core, and a bright leading edge. Indeed. What do you win, man? Gheorghe is going to get a Celestron Skymaster 25 by 70 set of binoculars. And it is more of a kit because these are really powerful.

25 power. You really need to put them on a tripod. And guess what? They come with a tripod mount. He's going to enjoy these. And I sure hope he's going to get them and look for Uranus out there next to Venus, you said, I think? Jupiter. Jupiter.

You know, one planet. Can't tell one from another. I don't know. Find a bright planet. Look around it. Look for something blue. Congratulations, Georgie. And we are going to have another contest to tell you about right now.

Here's your question. How many distinct rings is Uranus currently known to have? Uranus, how many rings? And obviously, they could discover more, but as of now, how many rings does Uranus have? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter and compete to win a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

This time around, you've gone until June 30th. That's Monday, June 30th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us your answer. Okay. All right, everybody. Now can I say that? Please. Go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about cardboard.

Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He comes to us each week with his corrugated sense of humor for What's Up. Did he say June? That's August 30th, of course. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant

from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies. Thank you.