March 21, 2013 • 26 mins
Is there life out there in the cosmos and if so how do we find it? How might it find us? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Julie and Robert discuss the history of SETI as well as what classic TV shows our alien neighbors might be listening to.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my name
is Julie Tuglass. And this is part two of our
steady episode the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This again, this
is part two. I highly recommend you listen to part
(00:25):
one first. Sometimes when we do a part one in
a part two, you can kind of take them in
any order you want, But this is not the case here. Uh,
there's a definite, uh narrative structure in place, and uh,
it just won't make sense if you don't listen to
part one first. That's right. We created the setup so
that when we get to this part that you guys
have a little bit more of an understanding of the
context of exp planets and aliens. So I hope you
(00:47):
guys enjoy Part two. Yeah, we're talking about set, we're
talking about the possibility of intelligent alien life elsewhere in
the cosmos, and we're talking about radio waves. I thought
it's important to point out that there's a reason why
why radio waves are so important in all of this. Uh.
In Nidograsse Tyson's book Space chronicles. He points out that
(01:10):
radio waves are a communication band of choice for potential
alien civilizations due to the radio waves ability to traverse
the galaxy unimpended by interstellar gas and dust clouds really well,
travel really well. So it's it's something we can look
for that we know travels vast distances and again, and
and that's the one of the things that we as
(01:31):
we mentioned when we're talking about firm and paradox and
the Drake equation, is that when we're talking about finding
life elsewhere in the universe, we're talking vast stretches of
time and space, I mean to to the level that
it's really difficult for us to to think about it. Uh,
you know, like it's it's like thinking about thinking about
in terms of like finding your soul mate. It's like
that that person is out there in the world and
(01:53):
they're alive, and they didn't exist, you know, you know,
five thousand years ago, and it's it's not a situation
where they won't exist for another five Imagine that you're
super picky, and so you kind of have to apply
that Drake equation to your soul mate, right, so like
they have to be like exactly like five ten and
three quarter inches and they have to be I don't
(02:13):
know how many more like constraints can you put on that, right,
you could put like a hundred million constraints on it.
And that is what it's like searching for that signal.
So steady the search for extraterrestial intelligence. There's the Study
Agency and this was set up in the sixties in
Earnest by dedicated astronomers who are trying to figure this out.
(02:35):
Could they really pick up a signal? Now the search
uses large radio telescopes and with these telescope, scientists involved
in the STEADY hope to detect radio signals that are leaking.
This is what we're thinking leaking from other intelligent civilizations,
or that other civilizations have specifically aimed that signal at us. Yeah,
so either we'll listen in on on an alien phone
(02:58):
call essentially, or we will risk eve that alien phone
call that we both hope and dreadful. Now, according to
Marshall Brain, he is the founder of Hastaff Works, He's
got a nice blog post on this. He says, the
problem with steady is that it requires massive computational resources
because think of all that data that you have to
comb through Study is listening to a huge number of frequencies.
(03:20):
Then the computer has to look at each frequency separately
and try to decide if it's carrying an intelligent signal
as opposed to noise. To give you an idea of
the scope of the problem, the antenna used by Study
at Home records thirty five gigabytes of data every day.
It takes millions of hours of computation time just to
process one day's worth of data. Now he's talking about
(03:40):
a program that's called Study at Home that sort of
runs the data for you in the background. Yeah. Yeah,
the distributed computing program where you would install this on
your home computer. You could have to go use the
restroom or you go to have lunch or whatever. Screensaver
kicks in and your computer instead of working on your
own you know, efforts in your word, process a thing
or what have you, It then contributes that computing power
(04:02):
to studies problem of analyzing all of this data. That's right.
It grinds away on that data, which is really cool. So, uh,
the other problem, I guess you could say the problem
of having so much data is, uh, you know, trying
to tune into the most probable frequencies. So one way
to go about this is to determine the best range,
(04:23):
and the one to tend giga hurt range is the
best range to listen is the quietest. Study also uses
large multi channel bandwidth signal processors that can scan millions
or billions of frequencies uh simultaneously, and that's really what's
what they're more leaning towards these days. Yeah, and then
there are so many factors you have to take into
account to you have to you have to worry about
(04:43):
about waves that are actually emitted by us, that are
just bouncing back from from something else, say, you know,
a piece of space garbage, even um pulsars to pulsars,
because that was a big one. Yeah, the pulsars are
sending out this signal, this pulse, and when we first
just governed them, we didn't know what they were. They're like,
oh my goodness, this is it, this, this could be it.
(05:04):
And then we we looked a little deeper when we've
realized that will actually there are these things and we'll
call them pul stars because they're pulsing starts start exactly
stars emitting a pulls um. And I also wanted to
mention too that most of study research has been done
by renting time on existing radio telescope, So it's not
even something that's in an endeavor that we can do constantly. Right,
you have to rent the time because it's super expensive
(05:26):
to to even get this sort of technology, uh for
your own devices, right. Yeah. And it's a nonprofit and
they depend on the funding from a variety of different sources.
NASA UM kicks in and as well as you know,
even just you know, individuals and various groups out there
contribute to the steady effort because it's something that's it's
(05:47):
you know a lot of people will leaeve in it,
and for good reason, because it is if you if
you consider the even the possibility that there's life out
there in the universe, then it's it's it's essential that
we find out what it is and what it might
consist of. Yep. And the three main radio telescopes are
the Parks Radio Telescope in Australia. Uh, there's the telescope
in green Bank, West Virginia and the r CEBO Radio
(06:10):
Telescope in Puerto Rico. And I believe that's the one
that was in the movie Contact. Yes, at least in
the intro stuff. Yeah, and of course SETTI continues to
evolve with the times. A laser technology has made it
possible to search the optical portion of the electromatetics spectrum
for pulses of laser light that are just a few
nanoseconds long and duration so short you have to really
(06:32):
fine tune it to to actually you know, record them
and analyze them. But during that nanosecond they can actually
briefly shine brighter than the light of nearby stars. So
there's just another area set he's looking for the possible
clues and trying to intercept that phone call. Yeah, and
just to give everybody an idea of friendly, how how
(06:52):
huge this is, this this um this idea of trying
to pick up this particular signal. Uh. There are a
couple of different ways to go at at. One is
called the wide field search. So you have this expansive
sky beyond right, what do you do? I mean, that's
a ton of data that's coming at you at any
little point that you decide to concentrate on. So with
(07:12):
the wide field search and this method, you survey large
chunks of the sky for one at a time for signals,
and it allows the entire sky to be searched at
a low resolution for short period of time. The problem
is the low resolution, right, But if you get some
data back that says, hey, this seems kind of like
a hot area, then can go back later with high resolution.
That's the idea at least, and then you have targeted searches.
(07:35):
And this method you make intensive investigations of a limited
number of sunlike stars. So again that's that sort of
Goldilocks area that you would be looking for. And the
targeted search allows more detailed investigations of small areas that
we think might be probable locations of e T. Now
what what happens if you think you've heard a signal, Well,
(07:57):
then you have to analyze that signal. You just run
to the press and say we got it, we got
it here that we just they said, they just totally
morse coded us um from the article has study works
on on hastaf works dot com. If a signal detected,
there are a series of steps that follow to confirm
that signal is extraterrestrial. First, the radio telescope is moved
(08:17):
off the target. The signal should go away, right, and
then it should return When the telescope is pointed back.
So they come and say, let's just make sure that
this is the real deal, move this off access and
then take it back. UH. Known Earth or Near Earth's
sources such as satellites must be ruled out stuff that's
originating from that object or bouncing back from you know,
(08:40):
Earth signal bouncing back off that object. Similarly, quasars pulsars
have to be ruled out as well, and then the
signal has to be confirmed by another radio telescope, preferably
one on a different continent to say, are you guys
hearing the same thing that we are hearing? UM? All right,
so so far we don't. We haven't really had that contact.
(09:00):
But in nineteen seventies seven there's something called the Wow
signal that was detected, and this got people really excited
because it is still an anomaly. It's certainly the seventy
two second signals something that that seems to be something
that was picked up by the big Ear radio telescope
in Ohio just outside of Delaware, UM and the main
(09:24):
astronomer and all of this American astronomer Jerry ruh Emon
PhD and UH, and he's even kind of gone back
and forth on it. Um. I was reading some of
his writings about it, and like for a while he
was he was just he was of the mindset, now
there's got to be a you know, a terrestrial explanation
for this and what have you. But on the thirtieth
anniversary of the Wow signal, he had this, uh, this
(09:47):
really cool bit to say. I'm just gonna read the
quote here. He says, Thus, since all of the possibilities
of the terrestrial origin have been either ruled out or
seemed improbable, and since the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin
has not been able to be ruled out, I must
conclude than an E. T. I extraterrestrial intelligence might the
MND is bolded and to tell us us UM might
(10:08):
have sent the the signal that we received as the
Wild Source. The fact that we saw the signal and
only one beam could be due to an E. T.
I sending a beacon signal in our direction and then
sending it in another direction that we couldn't detect. Of course,
being a scientist, I await the reception of additional signals
like the wild source that are able to be received
and analyzed by many observatories. Thus, I must state that
(10:30):
the origin of the wild signal is still an open
question for me. There's simply two little data to draw
many conclusions. In other words, as I stated above, I
choose not to quote draw vast conclusions from the half
vast data unquote. Yeah, there's this great quote too that
he says it was sort of like a tug on
the cosmic fishing line. So it doesn't prove that you
(10:51):
have a fish on the line, but it does say
that you should keep your line in the water because
there might be something there. And what is so mysterious
about the signal is that it was being in minted
from an area that was not a Goldilocks zone. It
was sort of the void. It was sort of like
there's nothing there, and they couldn't figure out like what
what was the what was originating, what was making that?
(11:11):
And a couple of really interesting theories came out of that,
which I think helped to sort of color our ideas
of why we haven't picked up a significant signal since
And that's this idea that that it was a lighthouse signal.
So rather than it just being like hey, and we're
just gonna send this universe the signal out into the
universe constantly. It was sort of like, we have limited
(11:35):
energy and resources and maybe even technology, and it's going
to be more of a lighthouse signal that just kind
of goes around and well, and that was one of
the ideas. Yeah, that Aimon mentioned the idea that it's
blasted this signal at Earth and then it turned blasted
in another direction, so we didn't get a heat signal
because it's you know, it's going in a circle or
what have you. It's it's it's trying to send out
the signal to anybody who might be out there and
(11:55):
letting them know, hey, what's up or or if if
it is. Indeed, and even with the true lighthouse saying
stay away because we have rocks or hideous monster gods
here and you should you shouldn't come anywhere near us. Well,
there is that zoo theory, right that that that we
have been picked up on and there's an intelligent extraterrest
fields out there. They're saying, hey, just let them do
(12:16):
their thing. We're just watch them from a distance like
a colony of ants and see what are up to um.
And then there's also the idea that maybe that technology
died or the technology from that society died out, or
maybe it's just that we didn't overlap. So in other words,
by the time that we started listening, we missed any
(12:37):
sort of signals that might have been sent out. Yeah,
I mean the whole thing that possibility, as well as
just the lighthouse possibility. It reminds me of any of
these movies where someone is stranded on a desert aisle
and that that plane flies over, and generally they're like
a sleep or doing something else. You're talking to a
volleyball when it happened planes flying over, and so they
frantically try and get that plane's attention, but it's too late.
It's already passed over. And maybe there just wasn't a
(12:58):
very good way to get its attention to begin with.
So there's this kind of like haunting feeling. What if
they did. What if that was an attempt at communication
from a distance civilization, and in one one way or another,
we were too late. We were just we we didn't
have the technology to respond or our our time the
time light line, or where the life cycle of our
(13:19):
civilizations didn't overlap, were can't overlap enough for that to
be possible. You know, it's like you know, it's like
star torn lovers out there in the cosmos. It's beautiful.
But that's what makes people so obsessed up about it
because they say, again, we've got the ingredients of this
primordial soup. There's got to be a possibility here. Um,
let's just keep listening. And that is what Study is
(13:42):
trying to do. And Study is not just listening. They're
preparing too. And we had mentioned this in a previous podcast,
guess about a couple of years ago, and I think
it was called Alien Etiquette one on one. Yeah, that
was one of the early ones that we did together.
They the Study Institute had a workshop in Paris in
two thousand and two inviting people from all different disciplines
to discuss the ways in which we might communicate with
(14:03):
aliens and the best modes to do it. And then
I really love this one. Two eight NASA sponsored a
course at the University of Wyoming called Interstellar Message Composition,
and UH students were asked to ponder how aliens might
communicate and how you would translate between languages and so
on and step forth. One of the students wrote a
(14:24):
poem about menstruation with syllables arranged in the Fibonacci sequence
in her quest, I think to try to let extraterdials
know about some of the human biology. Yeah, I mean,
because you never know what the talking points are going
to be. You want to be like, hey, do you
guys have ad menstruation and they're like, yeah, yeah, we
do actually, and then you have something to talk about
like oh, how quaint. Yeah, it's like a first date
(14:44):
between species um civilizations. Um. I mean you could make
the argument that you need to appoint somebody like you
know what if Dennis Rodman was the was the go
to man. You know, he's doing so well, Dennis Rodman, Well, yeah,
I mean he's he's been doing so well in term
of just being an international emissary, you know, going out
to North Korea on unofficial behalf of the United States.
(15:06):
So maybe we send him to other worlds to talk
to the hideous monster gods. I don't know. All right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come
back more setting. Well, a lot of this has been
us looking out at the cosmos, But what about trying
(15:26):
to take the perspective of an extra terrestrial life form
looking at us. What would Earth the exo planet look like, yeah,
because we we're talking about okay, other signal signals that
we uh, we receive that we may either be listening
in or being told directly. So it's kind of like
this in this situation. It makes me think of when
(15:46):
you're at a restaurant or something, or any public place
and you're having a conversation with somebody, or maybe you're
on the phone, and then you realize too late that
you're an earshot of someone else and you're like, oh,
my goodness, did they listen to that whole conversation up
and at this point? And then only then can you
maybe have a directed comment to them and greet them
or whatever. So the idea here is that long before
we even thought about sending a signal, a radio signal
(16:09):
out into the Great Blafe Beyond, we were inadvertently leaking
all these radio signals. And it's you know, it wasn't
the worst stuff that we've necessarily that we've we've contributed,
but not all of it is exactly something that we
would put on the galactic resume. Hey, otherwise you're right, Um,
it's sort of like cleaning up our Facebook page if
(16:32):
we could write it's like only eighteen year old and
then you see yourself as a thirty year old exactly. Um.
So yeah, like you said, we've been kind of leaking
out this the triatus of humanity since the nineteen thirties
in the form of AM and FM radio broadcast, TV
broadcasts and then satellite and radar broadcast. Um. And then
(16:53):
there's also just the other sort of ambient noise like
every time you open your garage door. These are all
signals that are being out there. So we have lots
of groaning noises, we have lots of uh, I mean
ultimately a lot of footage of us, of us as
a biological specimen that I think is going to be
good regardless. But then you haven't suddssed that the monster costumes.
(17:14):
You have various levels of fiction and fantasy, you have
actual depictions of humanity, and it's that it's worth of
us waging war on each other, um, waging genocide and
mas just some really horrible images for another culture to
look at and go, oh, I don't know if we
need these guys in our in our friend group. Yeah.
And what's interesting about that is, say it's say that
you pick up on our frequency, and then it's sort
(17:36):
of like this ocean of sound coming at us, and
and the first thing that you hear that is from
the nineteen thirties, and then you can move onto the
nineteen fifties and it's like bits and pieces from the
honeymoon or that's the name of the show, right, Yeah, Honeymooners.
I Love Lucy. Yeah, trying to make sense of all this, Yeah, yeah,
I found that really interesting. To the edge of this
radio bubble, that is that is admitted by our planet
(17:59):
and by our culture, uh, is about seventy lot years away,
you know, just spreading out like like ripples in a pond,
and and near that edge, that's where you find stuff
like I Love Lucy and the Honeymooners, and I looked
it up. I was like, oh, I wonder if I
never really watched those shows. I wonder if interplanetary relations
were ever covered, and and of course they were to
(18:21):
a certain extent. There is an episode of The Honeymooners
called The Man from Space in which Jackie Gleeson dressed
up in a like a really bad, uh like robot
alien costume, and then Ralph comes into the door and
is scared, like he's terrified. He's like, ah, and then
he voices some concern over the possibility of of alien invasion.
So even right there in the Honeymooners, they might clickoff
(18:44):
and say, whoa, there's some sort of you know, underlying
fear that we might invade them. Maybe we should we
should lay low. And then there's and I Love Lucy
episode called Lucy Is Envious that features two different sets
of of bad Martian costumes, like Lucy and her friend
around the roof wearing Martian costume is trying to scare
people off the roof for some reason, and I think
paying them to do it, Yeah, I don't know. And
(19:05):
then then there I think their husbands come in and
scared them wearing the Martian costumes. It's uh. And so
this is the thing that's out there on that bubble,
right yeah. And it's concerning what we think are is
intelligent extraterrestrial life, which is very interesting. I did find
it really fascinating that Jackie Gleason was apparently a big
UFO enthusiast, So I wonder what he would make of
that to to you know, that is into the idea
(19:27):
of extraterrestrial life as he was, um, you know that
he's kind of an emissary of it. It's hard to say, right,
because then there's the whole thing about how we project
all sorts of things onto other beings, and we have
these expectations, and really we don't even really know what
we're dealing with because, as we had pointed out in
one of the Slime episodes, intelligence can be many different
(19:48):
things in many different forms, so it may not be
what we expect. I wanted to point out to that
if if some sort of extraterrestrial life we're looking at
us um they might pick up that we are just
chemically all over the place. They might look at Earth
and they might look at the biomarkers that indicate our
(20:08):
planet is rife with flora and fauna, and they would
do this through spectroscopy, the analysis of light through a spectrometer,
which allows us to look at the chemical fingerprint of
every element in chemical and see how much of it
is absorbed, emitted, and scattered throughout a particular atmosphere. So
if intelligent aliens were to set their spectrometer sits on us,
(20:31):
what would they see. They'd see an unusual amount of methane.
As we noted, things in parts of the Belgian cows
and such. Um, they would see sodium from sodium vapor,
street lights switching on. They would just see all sorts
of things that they wouldn't necessarily expect, and all sorts
of industrial pollution as well. Right, Yeah, they would see exactly,
(20:53):
they would see some some of the what we call
the anthroposyne era markers that's a man made chemic goals,
and they would know automatically like there's this this is
a very loud planet with a lot of different things
going on, um, and it would be pretty obvious that
something was afoot. Yeah. In his book Neotographs Test and
also mentioned some of the you know, possible reasons that
(21:15):
we haven't been discovered, Like, I mean, the idea that
we're not necessary. It's easy to get into your mind,
the idea like a super intelligent species out there and
they're just all knowing and and they just either they
you know, they found us and they just don't want
to do anything about it, or yeah, right, you know,
but you know, it's a big universe. It is a
(21:35):
big universe. There's a lot of time and a lot
of distance involved here, and it's easy to I mean,
it's like finding a needle in a haystack, And so
there's their possibilities that the Earth is a little clue
close to the Sun that even if they were receiving
this data, it would be confusing and they wouldn't really
know exactly what they were looking at. And you know,
you have the wrong extraterrestrial analyzing the data that day
(21:58):
that maybe you know, maybe he us to get home
to his wife. So you know, give it the due
diligence that it's required. Does this point to the limits
of knowledge too? Because it has had noted that intelligence
and intelligent life can be something beyond what we know
or we define as intelligent life. And if there is
an extraterrestrial um civilization out there that is intelligent, I'm
(22:23):
putting that in air quotes, maybe there are a completely
different form that that's different from ours that they wouldn't
be able to recognize the markers of what our intelligent
civilization is. Yeah, you know, a lot of our our
fears of alien invasion and all of this, a lot
of that is because we're reflecting our our understanding of
ourselves out there into the void. Uh. And you know,
like I was saying earlier, a lot of it comes
(22:43):
down to there's sort of a self centeredness even in
our attempt to understand what's going on beyond us. We
want to know how we fit in, how we relate,
how we stack up, and and so as we're you know,
we we we imagine a being, We imagine a civilization
out there that would take at least some of the
same interest that we have. So you look at it
at humans, and what if we don't. We want to
plan our flag on things, we want to put our
(23:05):
name on things. We want to colonize other worlds in
the long term because that's the that is what would
allow the long term survival of the species itself. We
want to keep what we are and and we ultimately
were terrified of change. We want to, uh, we want
to in many cases, we want to ravage other places
for their resources. We want to continue to grow into
(23:25):
and to fuel ourselves. So we we look to the
possibility of other civilizations and we kind of expect shades
of this as well. But you know, but what if
the the extratrustrial life is more of a you know,
a passive species and more passive culture. What if they
aren't interested in interfering or reaching out to us? What
if they just want to check us off on the list, like, oh,
there's life here, we'll let just write it down, tell
(23:47):
us what it is, and we'll us put it to
the books. Maybe that's all they want. Indeed, maybe it is.
And you know, in the meantime, we'll continue to be listening,
right or rather study well, and uh, there's not a
huge future right now for study. There there was a
dedicated um telescope array that was planned, called the Allen
Telescope Array, but the budget cuts have have sort of
(24:09):
put that into hibernation. But the meantime, said, it continues
to eavesdrop on the universe, uh, through rented radio telescopes.
As of now, they still have an artist in residence,
Charles Lindsay adding these cool structure installation pieces with a
sound component and all, and it's really cool stuff. But
that was like a two thousand eleven through two thousand
(24:30):
thirteen gigs. So I don't do not know if they're
going to have a second artist in residence. It would
be awesome if they did, because the whole point of
that was to try to change our perspective of what
intelligent life might be, right and in through different forms
and shapes and I think he captured some really interesting imagery.
In fact, we'll definitely put that up on Facebook. Yeah yeah,
and you know, and and steady again. It's it's something
(24:52):
that even casual observers to space exploration, you know, people
with a casual interest in science fiction and whatevy. It's
it's a very real latable uh and and noble goal,
you know. It's like it's so I think it's a
great entry point for people to to learn more about
science and get excited about science and face exploration. All right,
(25:12):
So there you have it. Um, a little bit about
the history of Cetti, some of the big points in
their history, what they're doing and uh, and what the
future may hold for them and uh. We could sit
around and ponder and uh and hypothesize and imagine what
alien life might consist. Tough just all day, but you
have to keep that confined to certain hours of the
day so you can get done. So, UM, we would
(25:33):
love to hear from you, guys if you have anything
to add on this. What do you think about the
possibility of life elsewhere in the universe? Do you think
it exists? Do you know it exists? We love those
stories as well. Uh, so let us know. You can
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and you can find us on Tumbler. On Facebook and Tumbler,
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we go by the handle blow the Mind. And you
can always drop us in binary code at below the
(25:55):
Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit howstuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my name
is Julie Tuglass. And this is part two of our
steady episode the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This again, this
is part two. I highly recommend you listen to part
(00:25):
one first. Sometimes when we do a part one in
a part two, you can kind of take them in
any order you want, But this is not the case here. Uh,
there's a definite, uh narrative structure in place, and uh,
it just won't make sense if you don't listen to
part one first. That's right. We created the setup so
that when we get to this part that you guys
have a little bit more of an understanding of the
context of exp planets and aliens. So I hope you
(00:47):
guys enjoy Part two. Yeah, we're talking about set, we're
talking about the possibility of intelligent alien life elsewhere in
the cosmos, and we're talking about radio waves. I thought
it's important to point out that there's a reason why
why radio waves are so important in all of this. Uh.
In Nidograsse Tyson's book Space chronicles. He points out that
(01:10):
radio waves are a communication band of choice for potential
alien civilizations due to the radio waves ability to traverse
the galaxy unimpended by interstellar gas and dust clouds really well,
travel really well. So it's it's something we can look
for that we know travels vast distances and again, and
and that's the one of the things that we as
(01:31):
we mentioned when we're talking about firm and paradox and
the Drake equation, is that when we're talking about finding
life elsewhere in the universe, we're talking vast stretches of
time and space, I mean to to the level that
it's really difficult for us to to think about it. Uh,
you know, like it's it's like thinking about thinking about
in terms of like finding your soul mate. It's like
that that person is out there in the world and
(01:53):
they're alive, and they didn't exist, you know, you know,
five thousand years ago, and it's it's not a situation
where they won't exist for another five Imagine that you're
super picky, and so you kind of have to apply
that Drake equation to your soul mate, right, so like
they have to be like exactly like five ten and
three quarter inches and they have to be I don't
(02:13):
know how many more like constraints can you put on that, right,
you could put like a hundred million constraints on it.
And that is what it's like searching for that signal.
So steady the search for extraterrestial intelligence. There's the Study
Agency and this was set up in the sixties in
Earnest by dedicated astronomers who are trying to figure this out.
(02:35):
Could they really pick up a signal? Now the search
uses large radio telescopes and with these telescope, scientists involved
in the STEADY hope to detect radio signals that are leaking.
This is what we're thinking leaking from other intelligent civilizations,
or that other civilizations have specifically aimed that signal at us. Yeah,
so either we'll listen in on on an alien phone
(02:58):
call essentially, or we will risk eve that alien phone
call that we both hope and dreadful. Now, according to
Marshall Brain, he is the founder of Hastaff Works, He's
got a nice blog post on this. He says, the
problem with steady is that it requires massive computational resources
because think of all that data that you have to
comb through Study is listening to a huge number of frequencies.
(03:20):
Then the computer has to look at each frequency separately
and try to decide if it's carrying an intelligent signal
as opposed to noise. To give you an idea of
the scope of the problem, the antenna used by Study
at Home records thirty five gigabytes of data every day.
It takes millions of hours of computation time just to
process one day's worth of data. Now he's talking about
(03:40):
a program that's called Study at Home that sort of
runs the data for you in the background. Yeah. Yeah,
the distributed computing program where you would install this on
your home computer. You could have to go use the
restroom or you go to have lunch or whatever. Screensaver
kicks in and your computer instead of working on your
own you know, efforts in your word, process a thing
or what have you, It then contributes that computing power
(04:02):
to studies problem of analyzing all of this data. That's right.
It grinds away on that data, which is really cool. So, uh,
the other problem, I guess you could say the problem
of having so much data is, uh, you know, trying
to tune into the most probable frequencies. So one way
to go about this is to determine the best range,
(04:23):
and the one to tend giga hurt range is the
best range to listen is the quietest. Study also uses
large multi channel bandwidth signal processors that can scan millions
or billions of frequencies uh simultaneously, and that's really what's
what they're more leaning towards these days. Yeah, and then
there are so many factors you have to take into
account to you have to you have to worry about
(04:43):
about waves that are actually emitted by us, that are
just bouncing back from from something else, say, you know,
a piece of space garbage, even um pulsars to pulsars,
because that was a big one. Yeah, the pulsars are
sending out this signal, this pulse, and when we first
just governed them, we didn't know what they were. They're like,
oh my goodness, this is it, this, this could be it.
(05:04):
And then we we looked a little deeper when we've
realized that will actually there are these things and we'll
call them pul stars because they're pulsing starts start exactly
stars emitting a pulls um. And I also wanted to
mention too that most of study research has been done
by renting time on existing radio telescope, So it's not
even something that's in an endeavor that we can do constantly. Right,
you have to rent the time because it's super expensive
(05:26):
to to even get this sort of technology, uh for
your own devices, right. Yeah. And it's a nonprofit and
they depend on the funding from a variety of different sources.
NASA UM kicks in and as well as you know,
even just you know, individuals and various groups out there
contribute to the steady effort because it's something that's it's
(05:47):
you know a lot of people will leaeve in it,
and for good reason, because it is if you if
you consider the even the possibility that there's life out
there in the universe, then it's it's it's essential that
we find out what it is and what it might
consist of. Yep. And the three main radio telescopes are
the Parks Radio Telescope in Australia. Uh, there's the telescope
in green Bank, West Virginia and the r CEBO Radio
(06:10):
Telescope in Puerto Rico. And I believe that's the one
that was in the movie Contact. Yes, at least in
the intro stuff. Yeah, and of course SETTI continues to
evolve with the times. A laser technology has made it
possible to search the optical portion of the electromatetics spectrum
for pulses of laser light that are just a few
nanoseconds long and duration so short you have to really
(06:32):
fine tune it to to actually you know, record them
and analyze them. But during that nanosecond they can actually
briefly shine brighter than the light of nearby stars. So
there's just another area set he's looking for the possible
clues and trying to intercept that phone call. Yeah, and
just to give everybody an idea of friendly, how how
(06:52):
huge this is, this this um this idea of trying
to pick up this particular signal. Uh. There are a
couple of different ways to go at at. One is
called the wide field search. So you have this expansive
sky beyond right, what do you do? I mean, that's
a ton of data that's coming at you at any
little point that you decide to concentrate on. So with
(07:12):
the wide field search and this method, you survey large
chunks of the sky for one at a time for signals,
and it allows the entire sky to be searched at
a low resolution for short period of time. The problem
is the low resolution, right, But if you get some
data back that says, hey, this seems kind of like
a hot area, then can go back later with high resolution.
That's the idea at least, and then you have targeted searches.
(07:35):
And this method you make intensive investigations of a limited
number of sunlike stars. So again that's that sort of
Goldilocks area that you would be looking for. And the
targeted search allows more detailed investigations of small areas that
we think might be probable locations of e T. Now
what what happens if you think you've heard a signal, Well,
(07:57):
then you have to analyze that signal. You just run
to the press and say we got it, we got
it here that we just they said, they just totally
morse coded us um from the article has study works
on on hastaf works dot com. If a signal detected,
there are a series of steps that follow to confirm
that signal is extraterrestrial. First, the radio telescope is moved
(08:17):
off the target. The signal should go away, right, and
then it should return When the telescope is pointed back.
So they come and say, let's just make sure that
this is the real deal, move this off access and
then take it back. UH. Known Earth or Near Earth's
sources such as satellites must be ruled out stuff that's
originating from that object or bouncing back from you know,
(08:40):
Earth signal bouncing back off that object. Similarly, quasars pulsars
have to be ruled out as well, and then the
signal has to be confirmed by another radio telescope, preferably
one on a different continent to say, are you guys
hearing the same thing that we are hearing? UM? All right,
so so far we don't. We haven't really had that contact.
(09:00):
But in nineteen seventies seven there's something called the Wow
signal that was detected, and this got people really excited
because it is still an anomaly. It's certainly the seventy
two second signals something that that seems to be something
that was picked up by the big Ear radio telescope
in Ohio just outside of Delaware, UM and the main
(09:24):
astronomer and all of this American astronomer Jerry ruh Emon
PhD and UH, and he's even kind of gone back
and forth on it. Um. I was reading some of
his writings about it, and like for a while he
was he was just he was of the mindset, now
there's got to be a you know, a terrestrial explanation
for this and what have you. But on the thirtieth
anniversary of the Wow signal, he had this, uh, this
(09:47):
really cool bit to say. I'm just gonna read the
quote here. He says, Thus, since all of the possibilities
of the terrestrial origin have been either ruled out or
seemed improbable, and since the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin
has not been able to be ruled out, I must
conclude than an E. T. I extraterrestrial intelligence might the
MND is bolded and to tell us us UM might
(10:08):
have sent the the signal that we received as the
Wild Source. The fact that we saw the signal and
only one beam could be due to an E. T.
I sending a beacon signal in our direction and then
sending it in another direction that we couldn't detect. Of course,
being a scientist, I await the reception of additional signals
like the wild source that are able to be received
and analyzed by many observatories. Thus, I must state that
(10:30):
the origin of the wild signal is still an open
question for me. There's simply two little data to draw
many conclusions. In other words, as I stated above, I
choose not to quote draw vast conclusions from the half
vast data unquote. Yeah, there's this great quote too that
he says it was sort of like a tug on
the cosmic fishing line. So it doesn't prove that you
(10:51):
have a fish on the line, but it does say
that you should keep your line in the water because
there might be something there. And what is so mysterious
about the signal is that it was being in minted
from an area that was not a Goldilocks zone. It
was sort of the void. It was sort of like
there's nothing there, and they couldn't figure out like what
what was the what was originating, what was making that?
(11:11):
And a couple of really interesting theories came out of that,
which I think helped to sort of color our ideas
of why we haven't picked up a significant signal since
And that's this idea that that it was a lighthouse signal.
So rather than it just being like hey, and we're
just gonna send this universe the signal out into the
universe constantly. It was sort of like, we have limited
(11:35):
energy and resources and maybe even technology, and it's going
to be more of a lighthouse signal that just kind
of goes around and well, and that was one of
the ideas. Yeah, that Aimon mentioned the idea that it's
blasted this signal at Earth and then it turned blasted
in another direction, so we didn't get a heat signal
because it's you know, it's going in a circle or
what have you. It's it's it's trying to send out
the signal to anybody who might be out there and
(11:55):
letting them know, hey, what's up or or if if
it is. Indeed, and even with the true lighthouse saying
stay away because we have rocks or hideous monster gods
here and you should you shouldn't come anywhere near us. Well,
there is that zoo theory, right that that that we
have been picked up on and there's an intelligent extraterrest
fields out there. They're saying, hey, just let them do
(12:16):
their thing. We're just watch them from a distance like
a colony of ants and see what are up to um.
And then there's also the idea that maybe that technology
died or the technology from that society died out, or
maybe it's just that we didn't overlap. So in other words,
by the time that we started listening, we missed any
(12:37):
sort of signals that might have been sent out. Yeah,
I mean the whole thing that possibility, as well as
just the lighthouse possibility. It reminds me of any of
these movies where someone is stranded on a desert aisle
and that that plane flies over, and generally they're like
a sleep or doing something else. You're talking to a
volleyball when it happened planes flying over, and so they
frantically try and get that plane's attention, but it's too late.
It's already passed over. And maybe there just wasn't a
(12:58):
very good way to get its attention to begin with.
So there's this kind of like haunting feeling. What if
they did. What if that was an attempt at communication
from a distance civilization, and in one one way or another,
we were too late. We were just we we didn't
have the technology to respond or our our time the
time light line, or where the life cycle of our
(13:19):
civilizations didn't overlap, were can't overlap enough for that to
be possible. You know, it's like you know, it's like
star torn lovers out there in the cosmos. It's beautiful.
But that's what makes people so obsessed up about it
because they say, again, we've got the ingredients of this
primordial soup. There's got to be a possibility here. Um,
let's just keep listening. And that is what Study is
(13:42):
trying to do. And Study is not just listening. They're
preparing too. And we had mentioned this in a previous podcast,
guess about a couple of years ago, and I think
it was called Alien Etiquette one on one. Yeah, that
was one of the early ones that we did together.
They the Study Institute had a workshop in Paris in
two thousand and two inviting people from all different disciplines
to discuss the ways in which we might communicate with
(14:03):
aliens and the best modes to do it. And then
I really love this one. Two eight NASA sponsored a
course at the University of Wyoming called Interstellar Message Composition,
and UH students were asked to ponder how aliens might
communicate and how you would translate between languages and so
on and step forth. One of the students wrote a
(14:24):
poem about menstruation with syllables arranged in the Fibonacci sequence
in her quest, I think to try to let extraterdials
know about some of the human biology. Yeah, I mean,
because you never know what the talking points are going
to be. You want to be like, hey, do you
guys have ad menstruation and they're like, yeah, yeah, we
do actually, and then you have something to talk about
like oh, how quaint. Yeah, it's like a first date
(14:44):
between species um civilizations. Um. I mean you could make
the argument that you need to appoint somebody like you
know what if Dennis Rodman was the was the go
to man. You know, he's doing so well, Dennis Rodman, Well, yeah,
I mean he's he's been doing so well in term
of just being an international emissary, you know, going out
to North Korea on unofficial behalf of the United States.
(15:06):
So maybe we send him to other worlds to talk
to the hideous monster gods. I don't know. All right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come
back more setting. Well, a lot of this has been
us looking out at the cosmos, But what about trying
(15:26):
to take the perspective of an extra terrestrial life form
looking at us. What would Earth the exo planet look like, yeah,
because we we're talking about okay, other signal signals that
we uh, we receive that we may either be listening
in or being told directly. So it's kind of like
this in this situation. It makes me think of when
(15:46):
you're at a restaurant or something, or any public place
and you're having a conversation with somebody, or maybe you're
on the phone, and then you realize too late that
you're an earshot of someone else and you're like, oh,
my goodness, did they listen to that whole conversation up
and at this point? And then only then can you
maybe have a directed comment to them and greet them
or whatever. So the idea here is that long before
we even thought about sending a signal, a radio signal
(16:09):
out into the Great Blafe Beyond, we were inadvertently leaking
all these radio signals. And it's you know, it wasn't
the worst stuff that we've necessarily that we've we've contributed,
but not all of it is exactly something that we
would put on the galactic resume. Hey, otherwise you're right, Um,
it's sort of like cleaning up our Facebook page if
(16:32):
we could write it's like only eighteen year old and
then you see yourself as a thirty year old exactly. Um.
So yeah, like you said, we've been kind of leaking
out this the triatus of humanity since the nineteen thirties
in the form of AM and FM radio broadcast, TV
broadcasts and then satellite and radar broadcast. Um. And then
(16:53):
there's also just the other sort of ambient noise like
every time you open your garage door. These are all
signals that are being out there. So we have lots
of groaning noises, we have lots of uh, I mean
ultimately a lot of footage of us, of us as
a biological specimen that I think is going to be
good regardless. But then you haven't suddssed that the monster costumes.
(17:14):
You have various levels of fiction and fantasy, you have
actual depictions of humanity, and it's that it's worth of
us waging war on each other, um, waging genocide and
mas just some really horrible images for another culture to
look at and go, oh, I don't know if we
need these guys in our in our friend group. Yeah.
And what's interesting about that is, say it's say that
you pick up on our frequency, and then it's sort
(17:36):
of like this ocean of sound coming at us, and
and the first thing that you hear that is from
the nineteen thirties, and then you can move onto the
nineteen fifties and it's like bits and pieces from the
honeymoon or that's the name of the show, right, Yeah, Honeymooners.
I Love Lucy. Yeah, trying to make sense of all this, Yeah, yeah,
I found that really interesting. To the edge of this
radio bubble, that is that is admitted by our planet
(17:59):
and by our culture, uh, is about seventy lot years away,
you know, just spreading out like like ripples in a pond,
and and near that edge, that's where you find stuff
like I Love Lucy and the Honeymooners, and I looked
it up. I was like, oh, I wonder if I
never really watched those shows. I wonder if interplanetary relations
were ever covered, and and of course they were to
(18:21):
a certain extent. There is an episode of The Honeymooners
called The Man from Space in which Jackie Gleeson dressed
up in a like a really bad, uh like robot
alien costume, and then Ralph comes into the door and
is scared, like he's terrified. He's like, ah, and then
he voices some concern over the possibility of of alien invasion.
So even right there in the Honeymooners, they might clickoff
(18:44):
and say, whoa, there's some sort of you know, underlying
fear that we might invade them. Maybe we should we
should lay low. And then there's and I Love Lucy
episode called Lucy Is Envious that features two different sets
of of bad Martian costumes, like Lucy and her friend
around the roof wearing Martian costume is trying to scare
people off the roof for some reason, and I think
paying them to do it, Yeah, I don't know. And
(19:05):
then then there I think their husbands come in and
scared them wearing the Martian costumes. It's uh. And so
this is the thing that's out there on that bubble,
right yeah. And it's concerning what we think are is
intelligent extraterrestrial life, which is very interesting. I did find
it really fascinating that Jackie Gleason was apparently a big
UFO enthusiast, So I wonder what he would make of
that to to you know, that is into the idea
(19:27):
of extraterrestrial life as he was, um, you know that
he's kind of an emissary of it. It's hard to say, right,
because then there's the whole thing about how we project
all sorts of things onto other beings, and we have
these expectations, and really we don't even really know what
we're dealing with because, as we had pointed out in
one of the Slime episodes, intelligence can be many different
(19:48):
things in many different forms, so it may not be
what we expect. I wanted to point out to that
if if some sort of extraterrestrial life we're looking at
us um they might pick up that we are just
chemically all over the place. They might look at Earth
and they might look at the biomarkers that indicate our
(20:08):
planet is rife with flora and fauna, and they would
do this through spectroscopy, the analysis of light through a spectrometer,
which allows us to look at the chemical fingerprint of
every element in chemical and see how much of it
is absorbed, emitted, and scattered throughout a particular atmosphere. So
if intelligent aliens were to set their spectrometer sits on us,
(20:31):
what would they see. They'd see an unusual amount of methane.
As we noted, things in parts of the Belgian cows
and such. Um, they would see sodium from sodium vapor,
street lights switching on. They would just see all sorts
of things that they wouldn't necessarily expect, and all sorts
of industrial pollution as well. Right, Yeah, they would see exactly,
(20:53):
they would see some some of the what we call
the anthroposyne era markers that's a man made chemic goals,
and they would know automatically like there's this this is
a very loud planet with a lot of different things
going on, um, and it would be pretty obvious that
something was afoot. Yeah. In his book Neotographs Test and
also mentioned some of the you know, possible reasons that
(21:15):
we haven't been discovered, Like, I mean, the idea that
we're not necessary. It's easy to get into your mind,
the idea like a super intelligent species out there and
they're just all knowing and and they just either they
you know, they found us and they just don't want
to do anything about it, or yeah, right, you know,
but you know, it's a big universe. It is a
(21:35):
big universe. There's a lot of time and a lot
of distance involved here, and it's easy to I mean,
it's like finding a needle in a haystack, And so
there's their possibilities that the Earth is a little clue
close to the Sun that even if they were receiving
this data, it would be confusing and they wouldn't really
know exactly what they were looking at. And you know,
you have the wrong extraterrestrial analyzing the data that day
(21:58):
that maybe you know, maybe he us to get home
to his wife. So you know, give it the due
diligence that it's required. Does this point to the limits
of knowledge too? Because it has had noted that intelligence
and intelligent life can be something beyond what we know
or we define as intelligent life. And if there is
an extraterrestrial um civilization out there that is intelligent, I'm
(22:23):
putting that in air quotes, maybe there are a completely
different form that that's different from ours that they wouldn't
be able to recognize the markers of what our intelligent
civilization is. Yeah, you know, a lot of our our
fears of alien invasion and all of this, a lot
of that is because we're reflecting our our understanding of
ourselves out there into the void. Uh. And you know,
like I was saying earlier, a lot of it comes
(22:43):
down to there's sort of a self centeredness even in
our attempt to understand what's going on beyond us. We
want to know how we fit in, how we relate,
how we stack up, and and so as we're you know,
we we we imagine a being, We imagine a civilization
out there that would take at least some of the
same interest that we have. So you look at it
at humans, and what if we don't. We want to
plan our flag on things, we want to put our
(23:05):
name on things. We want to colonize other worlds in
the long term because that's the that is what would
allow the long term survival of the species itself. We
want to keep what we are and and we ultimately
were terrified of change. We want to, uh, we want
to in many cases, we want to ravage other places
for their resources. We want to continue to grow into
(23:25):
and to fuel ourselves. So we we look to the
possibility of other civilizations and we kind of expect shades
of this as well. But you know, but what if
the the extratrustrial life is more of a you know,
a passive species and more passive culture. What if they
aren't interested in interfering or reaching out to us? What
if they just want to check us off on the list, like, oh,
there's life here, we'll let just write it down, tell
(23:47):
us what it is, and we'll us put it to
the books. Maybe that's all they want. Indeed, maybe it is.
And you know, in the meantime, we'll continue to be listening,
right or rather study well, and uh, there's not a
huge future right now for study. There there was a
dedicated um telescope array that was planned, called the Allen
Telescope Array, but the budget cuts have have sort of
(24:09):
put that into hibernation. But the meantime, said, it continues
to eavesdrop on the universe, uh, through rented radio telescopes.
As of now, they still have an artist in residence,
Charles Lindsay adding these cool structure installation pieces with a
sound component and all, and it's really cool stuff. But
that was like a two thousand eleven through two thousand
(24:30):
thirteen gigs. So I don't do not know if they're
going to have a second artist in residence. It would
be awesome if they did, because the whole point of
that was to try to change our perspective of what
intelligent life might be, right and in through different forms
and shapes and I think he captured some really interesting imagery.
In fact, we'll definitely put that up on Facebook. Yeah yeah,
and you know, and and steady again. It's it's something
(24:52):
that even casual observers to space exploration, you know, people
with a casual interest in science fiction and whatevy. It's
it's a very real latable uh and and noble goal,
you know. It's like it's so I think it's a
great entry point for people to to learn more about
science and get excited about science and face exploration. All right,
(25:12):
So there you have it. Um, a little bit about
the history of Cetti, some of the big points in
their history, what they're doing and uh, and what the
future may hold for them and uh. We could sit
around and ponder and uh and hypothesize and imagine what
alien life might consist. Tough just all day, but you
have to keep that confined to certain hours of the
day so you can get done. So, UM, we would
(25:33):
love to hear from you, guys if you have anything
to add on this. What do you think about the
possibility of life elsewhere in the universe? Do you think
it exists? Do you know it exists? We love those
stories as well. Uh, so let us know. You can
find us on Facebook, and you can find us on Twitter, uh,
and you can find us on Tumbler. On Facebook and Tumbler,
we are stuff to bow your mind. And on Twitter
we go by the handle blow the Mind. And you
can always drop us in binary code at below the
(25:55):
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