Stuff You Should Know - METI: Existential Threat? Probably Yes

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

We've wanted to contact extraterrestrials for as long as we've suspected they're out there. But as we get better and locating potentially inhabited planets, beaming messages their way is suddenly posing a threat. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Amber Ruffin, and I'm her gorgeous sister, Lacey Lamar, and in fact Lacey is not that gorgeous. Amber, get on with it. Okay everybody, we have exciting news to share. We're teaming up with Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network to bring you our brand new podcast called The Amber and Lacey Lacey & Amber Show. We did it. We sold a bunch of books, we conquered late night, and now we'll play fun quizzes and games with friends and take you along for the ride. Listen to the Amber and Lacey Lacey & Amber Show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jay Shetty, and on my podcast On Purpose, I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet. Oprah, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Hart, Lewis Hamilton, and many, many more.

On this podcast, you get to hear the raw, real life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used, the books they read, and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we're just doing what we can together, modeling through the both of us. And this is Stuff You Should Know.

Wow. Quite a setup. I wanted to make sure the bar was really low. Well, hold on a second. Before we get going, we don't often plug shows, but there's a new one on our network called Intercosmos. Oh, yes. That we wanted to plug. That sounds super awesome.

Have you ever heard of David Eagleman? He's a neuroscientist. It seems like he might have come up before, but he's from Stanford. He's a bestselling author and he explores these insightful questions about modern brain science, how it intersects our lives. It's just kind of write up Stuff You Should Know's alley. Definitely. And I think the listeners would really dig checking it out. So go check it out. What's it called again?

It's called Intercosmos. It's awesome. Very nice. I'm excited about this one. I think this may button up our sort of talking to aliens suite. I think you're absolutely right. Because we've done one on SETI. Yes.

Which is called the search for extraterrestrial jerk intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. Go listen to that episode. It's great. It's listening out for stuff out in the great beyond. We did the golden records. Did the golden records.

What were those? Those were Carl Sagan's love child where he basically put snippets of world music, pictures of people from around the world. I think there was like greetings on there. And also then there were plaques. There was engravings of like human anatomy, which is controversial. And I think our location in the universe too. Okay. Here's where we are.

And this is a penis. Exactly. Check it out. So now we're moving on to probably the culmination, which is something called METI. Oh wait. We did one more too. Yeah. No, we did.

Okay. You didn't want to talk about that? Well, what was it? I can't remember. I'll tell you Chuck that there is a great name for it. And I will share that with you directly. But I just want to talk about what a great name it was. I named it myself.

Yeah. And it was just an all around good name. It was kind of along these lines a little bit, right? Man. Oh, I got it. How alien contact might work. Isn't that a great name? That's great.

So that was, okay. That came before and then now this one. And you're right. It's all buttoned up. We'll never talk about it again. Right. But like I said, now we're going to talk about METI, which also goes by Active SETI and that's messaging to extra, you know, ETs, intelligence.

I'm not going to try and say that word ever again on the show. Oh. Always give it up and you always snicker. It's cute. But let's get into it. So Chuck, you said that Active SETI, METI, they're one and the same. The whole purpose of them is to not just sit around and listen passively for, you know, alien transmissions.

That's what we've been doing forever. This is something entirely different. It's proactive where we're now figuring out how to shout out into the universe and send those transmissions that we're hoping to find from alien civilizations ourselves out there for other alien civilizations to find. Yeah. And it turns out it's a pretty controversial thing. I mean, when you first hear this idea, you're like, if you're like me, you're like, oh,

cool. Great idea. Let's start sending messages out. Right. But a lot of people are saying, oh, no, no, let's slow our roll here. Right. And we'll get into all the pros and cons toward the end. But there is an idea that capital G, capital S, the great silence is proof to some people

that, hey, there is no one out here. We would have heard something by now, the time that it would take to colonize the Milky Way. You know, like it would have happened by this point and we would, there should be alien life everywhere if it was going to happen. Yeah. I saw someone say that it should be as obvious to us as the full moon is, like the universe should be.

Pretty obvious. Cheeming with alien life. And yet it's not. That's the basis of the Fermi paradox. And so it's also been called the great silence. It's just weird. It doesn't make sense. And so a lot of people say, well, that just means we're alone in the universe.

Other people, there's a SETI researcher, a legendary SETI researcher named Jill Tarder. She said that concluding that life, that the universe is lifeless based on the small amount of searching we've done is akin to dipping a glass of water in the ocean and declaring the ocean lifeless after that search. Which is kind of the opposite. Like some people are saying, it would have happened by now. And she's saying, how do you know? We've been listening for, you know, how long, like 60 something years.

And she was like, that's nothing. So the idea of METI comes along and some people say that, you know, we may as well because we've been inadvertently bouncing, you know, since the advent of satellites for communication and television and stuff like that, we've been sending signals out there inadvertently for years anyway. So why not just put a little purpose behind it or as our boss and founder of stuff you should know, Connell Byrne would say, make it intentional. Nice.

Connell always says that, I love that. His ears are burning right now. It's a good way to run a business with intention. Sure. As opposed to being reactive. Right, exactly. So he'd be a METI supporter, it sounds like. We should ask him sometime.

So there's a thing, that whole idea that you were talking about, that we've been basically broadcasting our presence inadvertently anyway, it's called the barn door argument. Like we already left the barn door open, you can't put the cow back in, something like that. That cow's already seen the city. Exactly. Yeah. Can't take it back to the farm.

Exactly. A mixing metaphors. No, but I think it works very well. And we'll get into that a little more, but the answer from a lot of people to that is that's actually not true. You can kind of disassemble it and we'll do that later. But the idea is that if we switch over to purposeful transmissions, directed transmissions, what would Connell say?

Intentional. Intentional transmissions, that's a whole new ball of wax. And because we don't know what's out there, we can't say that what's out there wouldn't come harm us if we caught its attention. So because we don't know enough to say either way yet, we should not do that. Yeah. Or at the very least, and again, this is a preamble to what we're going to dig into more later, but at the very least, let's slow our roll here and take our time and not let

Doritos do it. Right. Yeah. Which happened. A lot more sense in a minute. But yeah, there's something in risk management called the cautionary principle. And it's basically saying if an activity or an action could cause tremendous harm and you don't know enough about it to say that it won't, either do more research and figure

out ways to make it safer or don't do it at all. And that's the argument. That's a good principle. Yeah. That's what a lot of people use to argue against many. We don't know enough right now. We're not saying don't do it. It's a cool, worthy pursuit.

Just don't do it the way that you guys are suggesting right now, which is completely off the cuff and basically a group of rogue people are trying to do it solo for the whole world. Well, I think that's a nice segue, speaking of good and bad ideas, to go back in time to the fact, to the idea that this isn't a new idea. We've been thinking about this as humans for a long, long time, dating back to the early 19th century. There was a German mathematician named, and these weren't crackpots.

These were pretty respected people in their fields, Carl Friedrich Gauss. He said, here's what we should do. Why don't we cut down a bunch of the Siberian forests? Why don't we plant wheat fields, kind of like crop circles, but in the shape of big, right triangles to just let people, or people, let these ETs see it, if they can see it. At least they'll know that we understand the Pythagorean theorem. Plus we'll get a bunch of free wheat out of it. Wheat, not weed.

I said wheat. Oh, okay. They said wheat. I can't see Carl Friedrich Gauss calling it weed. That'd be funny though, if they just planted a huge marijuana field here, like you might as well kill two birds here. That initiative might have happened back then. So then a few decades later, an Austrian astronomer named Joseph von Littrow said, how about this?

You like wacky ideas? Why don't we dig big, 20-mile-wide trenches that are in different geometric shapes and fill them with kerosene and set them on fire? You don't have anything but smoke inhalation to show for it after that stunt, at least with Gauss' idea you had wheat, or weed, depending on what you grew. But these were sort of the early ideas of how we could potentially send a message, obviously before the advent of radio telescopes. Yes, and they were dumb, dumb ideas, but it does show that we were thinking about this.

We want to contact other civilizations that may be out there. There were, I'm sure, other proposals that didn't quite make the historical cut, but if we flash forward to November of 1962, we come to probably what you could call the first METI broadcast, it was Soviet astronomers at a radar station in the Crimea. I think it's one that's still there today called Eveptoria, a 70-millimeter telescope. A 70-millimeter wouldn't be very powerful. No, it's a little baby scope. But back in 1962, they broadcast in Morse code a three-word message to a star that was about

2,000 light years away, and the message said, world, you could also interpret that word as peace, Lenin, they're being very sycophant, USSR, they're being jingoistic. About 10 years later, Americans in Soviet's got together, or at least the scientists did. And they said, all right, let's at least get together and start to brainstorm how we might go about this. And they invited Frank Drake of the famous Drake equation, and Carl Sagan, famous for being Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson wanted to go, but they said you're only 13 years old or so.

Once you just concentrate on getting a date, maybe. Just keep at it, buddy, just staying school, kid. But I want to go. And then James Elliott was an astronomer that was there, and he had the idea, sort of another two birds one stone, he said, we can get rid of all of our nuclear warheads in the world if we just take them to the far side of the moon and blow them up, and that'll be detectable from 190 light years away, and everyone was like, yeah, not a great idea. Yeah, you killed two birds with one stone, but you also lose the moon and the bargain.

So no, it wasn't a very good idea at all. But I think at that, no, that happened before, I was going to say at that meeting, Frank Drake came up with the Drake equation, which is basically a formula to figure out the chances of other intelligent life out there in the universe. I think that was more like 1960 or something like that. This is well into the 70s. So Drake was already legendary, at least as legendary as Sagan. And those two actually teamed up in 1974, and they got together, and I guess you could

call this probably the first, at least, Western or American media transmission, it's called the Arecibo message. Yeah, and that was a little more, and you'll see as the case with a couple of these early attempts, it was less like, hey, I really think this is going to reach somebody, and a little more like, hey, look how powerful our toys are these days. And that was the case here with a radio telescope, the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. And they just kind of wanted to show it off. So they aimed at it, the M13 cluster, about 300,000 stars, 25,000 light years away this

time. Right. And considering the Soviet, when 12 years earlier, it was 2,000 light years away, this is really getting out there at this point. Right. And the message they beamed was, USA, actually, the message they beamed was pretty remarkable, especially for its time. So they...

They used binary code, ones and zeros, right? And they represented ones and zeros. Same thing as light and dark, the presence of something, the absence of something. Just two sides to one coin. They chose that pretty ingeniously because you can make a really good case that math, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, all these are human constructs to understand math, but they're not necessarily a universal language. You can make a pretty good case that binary is a universal language.

That there is, at base, such a thing as something and not something everywhere in the universe. And that's what they used to transmit this message. And still today, it's pretty much agreed upon. If you're going to craft yourself a MIDI message, you're probably going to want to use binary because it's probably the language of the universe. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of a really interesting thing. And I think we talked about that a lot in that third episode that you had to search for.

How alien contact might work? Yeah. Can we even wrap our brains around the fact that they may not even understand what our three dimensions are, much less what language is or whatever you know. And I mean, we also kind of tangentially got into that in the Nuclear Semiotics episode, too. Oh, yeah, that's right. The other humans 10,000 years in the future is virtually impossible.

We're talking about entirely different types of beings conceivably. So it's a lot to kind of take into consideration when you're crafting one of those messages. Yeah, for sure. So Sagan goes on, if we're kind of going on a timeline here in 77, to launch those golden records that we have a really good episode on. You should check that out. But again, this was another thing where it wasn't showing off, but it was kind of a publicity thing because the Voyager one is really slow, only goes about 38,000 miles an hour.

And Sagan was even like, this is not going to get very far out there. No, but it was, I think what Sagan was doing at the time, I don't remember. I'm sure we covered it in the Golden Records episode, and we did an episode on Sagan, too, that he was probably just trying to inspire humans to start thinking beyond Earth. Because there was just virtually no chance whatsoever that any civilization was going to encounter this one tiny slow moving space probe. It's possible that they could have noticed it and were tracking it, but the chances are very low.

So I think he was trying to get people talking about this kind of thing, and that's still a bit of the spirit of Medi today, to get people talking about how to contact other people, what we want to say. And in doing that, we kind of examine our own values, like we strip away all the, no, that's not really as important as this, like what's the basic things that make us humans that we would want to express to some non-human intelligence is about ourselves to get across who we are? Yeah, totally.

So maybe before we take a break, we'll zip through these last attempts, because there are a handful of other ones sort of leading up to where we are today. There was another Russian, this was a radio engineer, a big Medi guy named Alexander Zaitsev. He initiated four broadcasts, one in 99, 2001, 2003, and 2008 using a Ukrainian radio telescope. And as with the others, you know, some photos, some music, something called the Interstellar Rosetta Stone, which is another attempt, like here's our math and physics and chemistry and biology here on earth, and maybe you can understand this. NASA did another publicity stunt one when they beamed the Beatles song across the universe

toward Polaris in 2008. I can't remember if they were criticized for that or not. There was also, you mentioned Doritos. Doritos held a contest in the UK to come up with a 30-second ad that got across humanity, and the winning entry was a bunch of chips that escaped from a bag and sacrificed one of their own to the god of salsa, and Doritos was like, yeah, nailed it. That's exactly all of humanity. We do that all the time.

And they transmitted that 30-second commercial over and over for six hours at a star called 47 Ursae Majoris, which is 49 light years away or 45 light years away. Can you imagine getting six hours of the same Doritos commercial over and over again and not being like, I'm going to invade that place. This is just too annoying. Then should we even mention this last guy? Yeah. All right.

Why not? There's an artist named Joe Davis who has made a couple of interstellar transmissions. One was called Poetica Vaginal. And he recorded the vaginal contractions of ballet dancers and broadcasts those into outer space in 1985. And then I'm curious what he did between 85 and 2009, if that's what he did in 85. But finally in 2009, he did it again, except this time, he was like, let me just send out the genetic code for a plant enzyme that's essential for photosynthesis.

That makes a little more sense. So that's basically where we are today. There's been a handful of basically solo attempts of people who have friends that work at radar telescope arrays who beamed messages for one reason or another, usually artistic or commercial. Yeah. Speaking of commercial. Yeah. Look at that.

I just stepped all over it too. We'll be right back. Hey, everybody, I'm Amber Ruffin and I'm her beautiful sister, Lacey Lamar. Fun fact about Lacey, she's not as beautiful as I am. You guys, we have a brand new podcast on Will Ferrell's big money players network called the Amber and Lacey Lacey and Amber show. We are New York Times bestselling authors and we've written two books on everyday racism that make you gasp and laugh at the same time.

We done did it. We sold a bunch of books. We were on late night with Seth Meyers and the Amber Ruffin show and now we only have one frontier to conquer. That's podcast. Podcast, baby. This quiz show is going to be fun. We're going to have celebrities.

We're going to quiz them about things that they are experts at and we'll see who wins and who loses. You got to watch us. Oh, no. You have to listen to us. I mean, you can still watch us, but you got to listen. But like, if you're watching us, you have to tell us. You can't just be watching us.

Listen to the Amber and Lacey Lacey and Amber show on Will Ferrell's big money players network on the I Heart Radio Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jay Shetty. And on my podcast on purpose, I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet, Oprah. Everything that has happened to you can also be a strength builder for you if you allow it. Kobe Bryant.

The results don't really matter. It's the figuring out that matters. Kevin Hart. It's not about us as a generation at this point. It's about us trying our best to create change. Lewis Hamilton. That's for me been taking that moment for yourself each day, being kind to yourself. Because I think for a long time, I wasn't kind to myself and many, many more.

If you're attached to knowing you don't have a capacity to learn on this podcast, you get to hear the raw real life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used, the books they read and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon. Ever wonder if the ancient gods are personally messing with your life?

If you have, you have something in common with the humans of ancient Greek myth. And you'll probably love the podcast, Let's Talk About Myths Baby, except the gods were definitely messing with those humans. From the monster fueled wanderings of Odysseus to literally anyone who encountered Theseus, there was no question that the ancient people understood bad luck, bad people, and most importantly, fickle gods. When life gets to be too much, there's no better way to ignore the future than to take comfort in the past.

I am Liv Albert and every week I cover stories from ancient Greece and Rome in the podcast, Let's Talk About Myths Baby. I'm here to unpack violent plot twists that will make you squirm and ironic turns of fate that may make you laugh out loud on your commute. Listen to Let's Talk About Myths Baby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so we are back. We are catching up to the future.

And we're going to start with a man named Douglas Vakoch. Vakoch? I think it's Vakoch. Vakoch, V-A-K-O-C-H. He's a SETI guy and he was there for about 16 years where he worked his way up to the director of interstellar message composition, which is exactly where you want to be if you want to send messages out. And he kept saying like, SETI, come on, let's do this, let's get on it, let's send messages

out and they just folded their arms and shook their head no. And he said, fine, I'm going to leave and I'm going to go start my own little group called METI and that's where METI was born. Yeah, and SETI also refused to go the opposite way in outright ban messaging extraterrestrials. And so there were some high level critics of METI who departed SETI. So SETI was just shedding people left and right for a little while over this topic. And it actually goes to show you like in scientific circles, especially astronomy circles, it's a big deal.

It's a really heated discussion. People will start screaming at each other over this. Oh, really? Yeah. There's a lot of pettiness and back-sabbing and S-talking. It's strange. Science fight. Science fight.

Yeah. And I'm not saying it's strange that it's controversial. I'm saying the way that the scientists carry out the debate in arguments is strange. Right. They don't thumb wrestle like in the old days. Right. Or what is it? Yeah.

One, two, three, four. Yeah. We always call it thumb wrestling though. This whole thumb war thing is just, that's what the kids are doing these days. I think it's just, you say thumb war with the rhyme, but I think you still call it thumb wrestling. That was my experience. And that's typically the correct one.

All right. Very important work we're doing here. The thumb wrestling thing. So Medi has won, they have actually tried this one time in 2017. They did a one short series of transmissions. They also used the ones in zeros technique because you said it was best. It is. And they said Josh said it was best.

So let's go with that. Right. And again, it included some basic numbers. It included some basic math, a little bit of trigonometry, like, hey, here's how electromagnetic waves work. Here's a little bit of music that might suit your fancy. And here's a clock that's just going to count how long it's been traveling. I could not for the life of me figure out how they would have done that.

I saw, yeah, I saw that there was another one called the beacon in the galaxy, which we'll talk about later. It has a timestamp saying when, or it proposes a timestamp saying when the message was sent. But I don't understand a countdown clock. It doesn't make any sense. I don't think it's a countdown. I think it's just a counting clock. Either way, how would you do that with binary ones and zeros?

Oh, I don't know. I just kind of figured the clock was separate. I really don't understand. I looked all over for it. I did find that Autechre had a little 10-second snippet aboard one of those transmissions. It was pretty good. Who? Autechre, they're German, Austrian, maybe British, Scottish, I don't remember.

But anyway, they're like an electronic duo that's been around for a long time. It's really, really good and kind of weird. Do they wear helmets so you can't see their faces? No, nothing like that. They dress kind of norm core and they're just a couple of normal guys, but their music is really, it can be really like atonal and hard to listen to. And then at other times, it's like the coolest music you've ever heard in your life. So if you go listen to Autechre after this and the first thing you hear, you're like,

what is this? I don't like this at all. Go on to the next track and see what you see. Okay. I have to check that out. So that one message that they sent in 2017 was blasted out to an exoplanet and we'll get to sort of the thinking these days is to send them toward exoplanets and we'll get more into that in a sec, but it's called GJ273B and that's about 12 light years from Earth.

And if someone there gets it or something there gets it, we would get a message back potentially in 2042. So that was the only one that Mehdi sent so far, like the Mehdi Institute, right? There's the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is working on one that I mentioned, the beacon in the galaxy. And it kind of follows in the footsteps of messages going all the way back to the Arecibo message where it's saying like, hey, this is math and this is science and check it out. But it also is kind of departing from other messages and that they're basically saying,

here's where we are, come visit us if you want or get in touch. And that kind of thing makes some people a little nervous, especially Chuck because we've gotten so much better at finding exoplanets, potentially habitable planets outside of our solar system that now we can kind of direct messages much more purposefully than we could in the past. And so the chance of an extraterrestrial intelligence, if there is one out there, actually receiving this has increased tremendously if we do start sending messages directed toward exoplanets. Yeah.

And they've narrowed it down to about 20 exoplanets right now out of the roughly 5,300 that we have confirmed exist that are in what's called the Goldilocks zone, which I know we've talked about more than once. And that's the area where they think that like Goldilocks, it's not too warm, it's not too cold. There's probably surface water and an atmosphere. You may be near a sun-like star. All of this to say more easily, you're probably a lot like Earth and therefore have a greater

chance of having life. So let's shoot something your way. Right. So a lot of people are saying like, no, this is not a good idea. It wasn't a good idea before, apparently right after the Arecibo message went out, Frank Drake was immediately criticized for doing that, that it was very reckless. This is 1974 that he did that. Every time somebody sends just a transmission out for fun or kicks or as a Doritos commercial

or even like as a serious METI message, it gets condemned widely by people who are saying, you should not be doing this. You're speaking for the entire world. Who told you you could do that? Yeah. And finally, as we already talked about, this is a potentially very dangerous thing. It's an existential risk, like it's possible that if you caught the attention of another civilization and they came to see us, by definition, if they can come to see us or in any way interact

with us physically, they're just so much more advanced than us that it does risk completely wiping us out. Yeah. And I guess we're at the point where we can talk about criticisms and then what people respond to the criticisms and then the pros and cons. There are three major criticisms. We're going to save the big daddy for the end. But the first couple are, kind of like we mentioned earlier, SETI's been around for

about 60 years and they haven't been super well funded over that time. So they haven't even reached the potential of what SETI could be yet. There's a Russian billionaire named Yuri Milner who has said, I'll give you guys $100 million over a 10-year period and by the end of that period, it's called the Breakthrough Listen Initiative. We should be able to scan 10 times more sky than we can now using telescopes that are about 50 times more sensitive. Hey, get this.

I saw, this is real quick, Chuck, I saw that the sensitivity is so much that they would be able to detect 100-watt laser, same as about a 100-watt light bulb, five light-years away. Wow. That's how much they're stepping up SETI all of a sudden thanks to Yuri Milner. That's so thought you were going to say something about like an alien fart. That's essentially that. Okay.

All right. Let's not mince words here. That's one and the same. I thought that's where you're headed. So yeah, that's one of the big arguments is SETI is in his infancy. Let's just slow our roll here and just keep listening. Right. And that doesn't mean also, Chuck, that we can't start talking about crafting messages.

Sure. We just should not start shouting out until the void. Yes. The next one is that, I kind of touched on it, but Mehdi is considered unauthorized diplomacy and that's John Gertz who is a former chair of SETI and a big critic of Mehdi. He basically called it that, unauthorized diplomacy. And if you think back to how Alien Contact might work episode, didn't even have to look it up that time.

There was something that we talked about called the Declaration of Principles for Activities following the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence. And it basically guides scientists in how to respond if we ever do receive an alien message and the guidance is don't respond. It's not up to you. We need to form a global consensus before we ever say anything. And so Mehdi critics are saying, if we have that as a guideline, as a guardrail, after we receive a message, shouldn't that count like doubly in crafting a message and sending

it out initially like as a first message? And yeah, Mehdi proponents his shut up. Well, they kind of do, but Gertz is serious about it and he's so serious, he's like there should be international laws drawn up around this and it should all be regulated. And if you do something like this Doritos or Craigslist, we didn't even mention Craigslist send a message out. You should be prosecuted in the hay, get the International Court of Justice. And I think in the 2000s, there were a couple of dozen scientists that all got on board

signed a position statement against Mehdi and basically said that, you know, everyone's got to get together and agree on this. You can't just, if we can't just answer an email, then you shouldn't send the email to begin with. Sure. It's a great point. It's a great, great analogy there. Thanks.

Should we take a break? Oh yeah, let's take a break. I forgot we hadn't taken our second one. All right. Let's take a break and we'll talk about what Mehdi says right after this. Hey everybody, I'm Amber Ruffin and I'm her beautiful sister, Lacey Lamar. Fun fact about Lacey, she's not as beautiful as I am. You guys, we have a brand new podcast on Will Ferrell's big money players network called

The Amber and Lacey Lacey and Amber Show. We are New York Times bestselling authors and we've written two books on everyday racism that make you gasp and laugh at the same time. We done did it. We sold a bunch of books. We were on Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Amber Ruffin Show and now we only have one frontier to conquer. That's podcast.

Podcast, baby. This quiz show is going to be fun. We're going to have celebrities. We're going to quiz them about things that they are experts at and we'll see who wins. And who loses. You got to watch us. Oh, no. You have to listen to us.

I mean, you can still watch us, but you got to listen. But like, if you're watching us, you have to tell us. You can't just be watching us. Listen to the Amber and Lacey Lacey and Amber Show on Will Ferrell's big money players network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jay Shetty and on my podcast On Purpose, I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet, Oprah. Something that has happened to you can also be a strength builder for you if you allow

it. Kobe Bryant. The results don't really matter. It's the figuring out that matters. Kevin Hart. It's not about us as a generation at this point. It's about us trying our best to create change. Lewis Hamilton.

That's, for me, been taking that moment for yourself each day, being kind to yourself because I think for a long time I wasn't kind to myself. And many, many more. If you're attached to knowing, you don't have a capacity to learn. On this podcast, you get to hear the raw real life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used, the books they read, and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon. Ever wonder if the ancient gods are personally messing with your life? If you have, you have something in common with the humans of ancient Greek myth. And you'll probably love the podcast, Let's Talk About Myths Baby, except the gods were definitely messing with those humans. From the monster-fueled wanderings of Odysseus to literally anyone who encountered Theseus, there was no question that the ancient people understood bad luck, bad people, and most

importantly, fickle gods. When life gets to be too much, there's no better way to ignore the future than to take comfort in the past. I am Liv Albert and every week I cover stories from ancient Greece and Rome in the podcast Let's Talk About Myths Baby. I'm here to unpack violent plot twists that will make you squirm and ironic turns of fate that may make you laugh out loud on your commute. Listen to Let's Talk About Myths Baby on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Okay, so Mehdi says, all right, we hear you. I will even grant you that there is a slight risk to this, a vanishingly small risk. But we have some counterarguments to all of your BS. Number one is we feel that ETIs out there, other intelligent civilizations, are actually waiting for us to signal them that if there are extraterrestrial intelligences out there, maybe they're all being quiet and this explains the great silence because there's some sort of agreement among intergalactic civilizations not to disturb up-and-coming ones before they

say that they're ready to be contacted and they said, what we want to do is send that message that we're ready. Yeah. And some people saying we are ready, some people saying, no, we're not ready. We're not close to ready. And also, like, if we're working on the primus, don't say primus, the primus that it's a danger, then like no one's ever going to say anything to anybody. And then if it turns out there wasn't a danger, then we've just, what have we been doing this

whole time? Yeah. And we're all going to live and die as civilizations without ever being in touch with one another. And what kind of a tragedy would that be? That'd be a pretty big tragedy. Another one is what we talked about earlier, that we've already made our presence known, right? Yeah.

And we've been blasting out television through space for, since 1951, with I Love Lucy. That message, I Love Lucy, is 72 light years away from Earth by now. And we've been, like, if we can send the real housewife shows into outer space, then surely we should be a little more intentional and send out something else that actually shows our intelligence. Andy Cohen just said, hey, well, you are right, you're not wrong. Watch what happens. So I said that people can really kind of easily disassemble this argument, and it is really,

especially coming from astronomers and astrophysicists, this is a really glib argument. This is an argument that's crafted to fool dummies like you and me. If you really dig into it, those radio and TV transmissions are so degraded when they escape out into space that you just couldn't pick them up. You'd have to be in our backyard to pick up any of that and be listening for it and know where it came from. If you weren't in our backyard, the further away you are, the less chance you have of picking up, not just like a I Love Lucy transmission, but all of Earth's electromagnetic signature

that we're leaking out into space at all times, you have such a small chance of picking Earth up that it's actually mind boggling. John Gertz just gave an example of an alien space telescope that was 550 astronomical units away that's 0.8% the distance of a light year. So it's actually relatively very close that this telescope would have to be positioned so that eventually it was going to get Earth right in its crosshairs. And when it finally did, it would have a three to four second opportunity to pick Earth up every 13,000 years.

So the idea that we're just shouting out into the universe that we're here just from being and broadcasting and emitting electromagneticism, I gotta rephrase that. You did it. I don't think that's a word though. Sure. But it's not a valid argument. Although wouldn't that be funny if aliens finally came down and they just met all of us and they all went, Lucy, just called everything Lucy.

That's like, oh, what was it? I think it was, there was some, I wanna say Futurama where there was like an alien race that had picked up Ally McBeal and they wanted to know what happened and they showed up like trying to find what happened at the end, it was pretty good. That's funny. They would be very surprised to learn that she married Han Solo. Well, they, yeah, they would, it's still surprising, but they took it as a real thing that they were watching something real and not like a show.

All right. So now we get into that final criticism that we had kind of hung on to. We've alluded to it a little bit, but that is the existential risk that you talked about where what if they like kill us all because of this and it's, you know, it's called the dark forest theory, which is basically like, hey, the universe may be full of intelligent life and all these, you know, ancient advanced civilizations and they are all still surviving because they know when you go into the forest, you keep your mouth shut and you don't go in there shouting around and that's the dark forest theory, like you survive by being quiet.

Right. And so they're saying what Mehdi's proposing to do is walk into the forest and shout as loud as we can to get the attention of anyone we can. And again, you take it back to this idea that Mehdi proponents will be like, look, if it's, if this civilization is as old as we suspect, it has to be altruistic to have survived and not blown itself up. We talked a lot about that in the alien contact episode. That's not necessarily true.

Like it's possible that even probable that they're, they developed altruism for their own society, which is how they were to survive. That doesn't necessarily mean it's extended to other societies. They might have figured out a long time ago that most societies that are up and coming need to be wiped out because they're going to screw things up for the universe. So they take it upon themselves to wipe us out. Right. It's kind of interesting though.

When I, I feel like whenever we talk about this stuff, there are two camps. One is, hey, maybe they will wipe us all out. So there's a danger so we shouldn't try. And then another camp says, well, why do we assume that they will wipe us out? What if they're friendly and they have the solutions to cancer and global warming and climate change? And I never hear anyone saying, well, what if they're both kind of like planet earth? Right.

Like earth is, is everything. It's people that would welcome you or people that would spit in your face and start a fist fight. Like who knows? Why does it have to be one or the other? Right. It's like Topeka and Kansas city. So that's a really great point though.

And I actually have seen some people say like, you know, also there's been plenty of examples of even contact that wasn't meant to be violent, having horrible catastrophic consequences just here on earth. Right. And the other thing is this. So again, many, many proponents really kind of bulk up that argument that many critics use, which is, you know, it's possible that their, their hostile and could wipe us out. And many proponents are like, you're being ridiculous.

You're being irrational, paranoid, childish, even they're very dismissive of it. But if you dig into what the many critics are saying, they're not saying like, yeah, of course an alien civilization is hostile and can, and is going to wipe us out. If we contact them, they're saying, we don't know that they're not hostile. And we all agree that there is a chance, however small that they could be hostile. And because the consequences of that chance coming true would result in the end of humanity, that makes it not worth doing or else doing a lot more cautiously than what you guys are proposing right now.

Because what we're proposing right now is basically the people of many unelected people who have access to radio telescopes sending out messages for the rest of the world. Again, I know I've said it before, but you really have to step back and think about what they're doing, especially if you think all of this is ridiculous. It can be ridiculous seeming, but at its core, there's a definite controversy there, and a rightful controversy, a worthy one. Now has the movie been made yet where a rogue, meddy computer nerd late at night, kind of like Newman in Jurassic Park, sneaks in and broadcasts a message that they've crafted

that actually gets heard and brings about the invitation for visitation. That was the subplot to Sleep List in Seattle, don't you remember? You're right, I guess every idea has been taken. It's all been done. There's nothing new under the sun, Chuck. Unless some aliens show up, that will change a lot. I think this wraps up our Alien Contact episode. We did UFOs too, a two-parter on Project Blue Book, remember?

Yeah. Did we do some live thing at Comic-Con once? That was on UFOs in general, I think. Okay. All right. So this wraps it up until we actually get that contact, and then we'll have to follow up. Yeah.

We'll put an asterisk on there. Okay. Or as you would say, an asterisk. I don't say that right, do I? Since I just made fun of Chuck, and really lovingly, everybody, it's time for Listener Mail. With intention. I'm going to call this, oh, I'm getting you back, because you got something wrong.

In the Skydiving episode, we had a few people write in already, but TJ's is more concise, so I'm going to go with TJ. Okay. So the guy in the Skydiving episode, Josh was explaining stall speed for an aircraft and said that the prop planes can fly slower before their engines stall. Not exactly correct. In aviation, stall speed refers to the minimum speed an aircraft can fly that the wings generate lift.

So it's a wing stall. If you fly slower than an aircraft's stall speed, the wings are not provided enough lift to overcome the aircraft's weight, and it'll drop like a rock. Man, that would be so bad. Please enjoy the great content, and can always rely on you guys for hours of education and entertainment. Sincerely, that is TJ Singh. That's awesome.

Thanks, TJ. Well put, gently put, and one of my very best friends when I was a really little kid was named TJ, Thomas Jefferson even. He was a bicentennial baby. Really? Yeah. That's pretty great. And listen to this PS.

This is awesome. Sincerely, TJ. Thanks, and auto response to let riders know their email was received would be appreciated. Oh, yeah. Well, how about this, TJ? I'm letting you know with my mouth, message received. Yeah, I'm going to write it back, though, because I always let people know when we read their email.

Very nice. Thanks again, TJ. Thank you, Chuck. That was a good pick. And thank you, everybody out there, for listening to us. If you want to get in touch with us like TJ did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast. I'm Amber Ruffin, and I'm her gorgeous sister, Lacey Lamar. In fact, Lacey is not that gorgeous.

Amber, get on with it. Okay, everybody. We have exciting news to share. We're teaming up with Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network to bring you our brand new podcast called The Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber Show. We did it. We sold a bunch of books, we conquered late night, and now we'll play fun quizzes and games with friends and take you along for the ride.

Listen to the Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber Show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the I Hard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jay Shetty, and on my podcast On Purpose, I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet, Oprah, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Hart, Lewis Hamilton, and many, many more. On this podcast, you get to hear the raw real life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used, the books they read, and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours.

Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the I Hard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon. America loves its founding fathers, but that's a tough act to follow as a founding son. I'm Bob Crawford. Join me, Patrick Warburton, and Nick Offerman as we bring the sixth president to life. Was there ever witnessed such a bare-faced corruption in any country before? Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.

Listen to Founding Son, a curiosity podcast on the I Hard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.