April 20, 2023 • 43 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and we're just doing what we can together, moddeling
through the both of us, and this is stuff you
should know.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Wow, Ed Waite has set up.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I wanted to make sure the bar was really low.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
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 Inner Cosmos. Oh, yes, that we wanted
to plug. That sounds super awesome. You know, have you
ever heard of David Eagleman. He's a neuroscientist. Seems like
he might have come up before, but he's from Stanford.
He's a best selling author and he's you know, he
(00:49):
explores these insightful questions about modern brain science, how it
intersects our lives. It's just kind of write up stuff
you should know. Is ali definitely and I think the
listeners would really checking it out.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
So go check it out.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
What's it called again, It's called Inner Cosmos. 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 Estra Terrestrial
(01:25):
Jerk Intelligence.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah, and that's go listen to that episode. It's great.
That's listening out for stuff out in the Great Beyond.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
We did the Golden Records?
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Did the Golden Records? What were those?
Speaker 2 (01:38):
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,
(01:59):
which is and I think our location in the universe too.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Okay, here's where we are and this is a.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Penis you think exactly. Check it out.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
So now we're moving on to probably the culmination, which
is something called medi.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Oh wait, we did one more too, Yeah, No, we did. Okay,
you didn't want to talk about that?
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Well, what was it? I can't remember.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Uh. I'll tell you, Chuck that there's a great name
for it, and uh 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 uh
it was just an all around good name.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
It was kind of along these lines a little bit, right, man.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Oh, I got it how alien contact might work. Isn't
that a great name?
Speaker 1 (02:48):
That's great?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Right, But like I said, now we're going to talk
about MEDI 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 goop it up and you always snicker it's cute.
But let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
So, Chuck, you said that active SETI METI. They're one
and the same. But 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 are now figuring
out how to shout out into the universe and send
(03:41):
those transmissions that we're hoping to find from alien civilizations
ourselves out there for other alien civilizations to find.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
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, Like, great idea,
let's start sending messages out. But a lot of people
are saying, oh no, no, let's slow our role here, right,
and we'll get into all the pros and cons toward
the end. But there is an idea that capital g
(04:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah. I saw someone say that it should be as
obvious to us as the full moon is, Like.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
The universe should be pretty obvious theeming.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
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 Tarter. She
said that that concluding that life, that the universe is
(05:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
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 sixty something years? Yeah, And she's like,
that's nothing. So the idea of METI comes along, and
some people say that, you know, we may as well,
(05:31):
because we've been inadvertently bouncing, you know, since the advent
of satellites for communication and television and stuff like that. Right,
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.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
He'll always says that I love.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
That his ears are burning right now.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
It's a good later run a business with intention sure,
as opposed to being reactive.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Right exactly, So he'd be a medi supporter. It sounds
like we should ask him sometime So there's a there's
a thing. It's 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.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
In something like that cow has already seen the city exactly, Yeah,
can't take it back to the farm exactly, mixing metaphors.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
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 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're
if we switch over to purposeful transmissions, directed transmissions, what
(06:50):
what con will say?
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Intentional intentional transmissions.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
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 like slow our role
here and take our time and not let doritos do it.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Right, Yeah, that'll make happen at more sense in a minute.
But Yeah, there's something in risk management called the cautionary principle,
and it's basically saying, like, if 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
(07:45):
more research and figure out ways to make it safer,
or don't do it at all. And that's the argument principle. Yeah,
that's a lot. 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
(08:06):
basically a group of rogue people are trying to do
it solo for the whole world.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
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 nineteenth century, there
was a German mathematician named and these weren't crackpots. These
were pretty respected people in their fields. Carl Friedrich Gauss.
(08:37):
He said, here's what we should do. Why don't we
cut down a bunch of the Siberian forest. Why don't
we plant wheat fields kind of like crop circles, but
in the shape of big right triangles. To just let people,
your people, let these ets see it. If they can
see it, at least they'll know that we understand the
Pythagorean theorem. Then about so, let's we'll get a bunch
(09:01):
of free wheat out of it. Wheat not weed.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
I said, wheat.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Oh okay, they said weed.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
I can't see Carl Friedrich Gouss calling it weed.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
That'd be funny, though, if they just planted a huge
marijuana fields. They're like, you might as well kill two
birds here.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
That initiative might have happened back then.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
So then a few decades later in Austrian astronomery, name
named Joseph von Littrew said, how about this, you like
wacky ideas, why don't we dig big twenty mile wide
trenches that are in different geometric shapes and fill them
with kerosene and set them on fire.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
It's a little you don't have anything but smoke inhalation
to show for it after that's done. At least with
Gouss's idea, you had wheat or weed, depending on what
you grew.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
But these were sort of the early ideas of how
we could potentially send a message, you know, obviously before
the advent of radio telescopes.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yes, and they were dumb, dumb ideas, but it does
show that we were thinking about this. We we want
to contact other civilizations that may be out there. Sure
there were I'm sure other proposals that didn't quite make
the historical cut. But if we kind of flash forward
to November of nineteen sixty two, we come to probably
(10:17):
what you could call the first medi broadcast. It was
Soviet astronomers at a radar station in the Crimea. I
think it's one that's still there today called evepteriea a
seventy millimeters or seventy meter telescope. Seventy millimeters wouldn't be
very powerful, baby scope, but back in nineteen sixty two
(10:39):
they broadcast in morse code a three word message to
a star that was about two thousand light years away,
and the message said world. You could also interpret the
word is peace. Lenin they're being very sick of fan
it USSR. They're being jingoistic.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
About ten years later, Americans and Soviets 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. Sure Neil deGrasse Tyson wanted to go,
(11:20):
but they said, you're only thirteen years old or so,
just once you just concentrate on, you know, getting a date.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Maybe just keep at it, buddy, just stay that kid.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
He's like, but I want to go. And then James
Elliott was an astronomer that was there and he had
the idea and 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 him
to the far side of the moon and then blow
them up and that'll be detectable from one hundred and
ninety light years away. And everyone was like, yeah, not
(11:54):
a great idea.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, you can kill two birds with one stone, but
you also lose the moon in the bargain. So no,
it was 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
(12:16):
the universe. I think that was more like nineteen sixty
or something like that. This is well into the seventies,
so Drake was already legendary, at least as legendary as Sagan,
and those two actually teamed up in nineteen seventy four
and they got together and I guess you could call
this probably the first at least Western or American medi transmission.
(12:39):
It is called the Aricibo Message.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
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 Arasibo
telescope in Puerto Rico, and they just kind of wanted
(13:03):
to show it off, so they aimed at at the
M thirteen cluster, about three hundred thousand stars twenty five
thousand light years away this time, and considering the Soviet
when twelve years earlier it was two thousand light years away.
They had you know, this is really getting out there
at this point.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Right, And the message they beamed was usay you yes, hey.
Actually the message they beamed was pretty remarkable, especially for
its time.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
So they said gerald forward, but who really.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
They use 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,
(13:54):
all these are human constructs to understand math, but they're
not necessarily a universal life language. You can make a
pretty good case that binary is a universal language, that
there's at base such a thing as something and not
something everywhere in the universe, and that's what they use
to transmit this message. And still today it's pretty much
(14:16):
agreed upon. If you're going to craft yourself a mety message.
You're probably gonna want to use binary because it's it's
probably the language of the universe.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Yeah, that's 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.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
For how alien contact might work.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Yeah, like, can we even wrap our brains around the
fact that they may not even like understand what our
three dimensions are, much less what languages or whatever, you know.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
And I mean we also kind of tangentially got into
that and the Nuclear Semiotics episode. Oh yea, it's even
talking to other humans ten thousand years in the future
is virtually impossible. We're talking about like 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.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, for sure. So Sagan goes on, if we're kind
of going on a timeline here in seventy seven 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 kind of a publicity thing because
the voyager one is really slow, only goes about thirty
(15:31):
eight thousand miles an hour, and Sagan was even like,
this is not going to get very far out there.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
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 in Sagan too himself that he was probably just
trying to inspire humans to start thinking beyond Earth.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
Sure, because there was just virtually.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
No chance whatsoever that any civilist was going to encounter
this one tiny, slow moving space probe. It's possible that
they could have noticed it, and we're tracking it, but
the chances are very low. So I think he was
trying to keep 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,
(16:21):
what we want to say, and in doing that we
kind of examine our own values, like we strip away
all the now 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 intelligences
about ourselves to get across who we are.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, totally. So maybe before we take a break will
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 is a radio engineer,
big medi guy named Alexander Zeitsef. He initiated for broadcasts
(16:59):
one ninety nine, two thousand and one, two thousand and three,
in two thousand and eight 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
(17:20):
here on Earth, then maybe you can understand this. NASA
did another publicity stunt when when they beamed the Beatles
song across the universe toward Polaris in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
They I can't remember if they were criticized for that
or not. Yeah. There was also you mentioned Dorito's. Dorito's
held a contest in the UK to come up with
a thirty second ad that got across humanity, and the
winning entry was a bunch of chips that escaped from
(17:55):
a bag and sacrificed one of their own to the
god of Salsa. Dorito's is like yeah, nailed it. That's
exactly all of humanity. We do that all the time.
And they transmitted that that thirty second commercial over and
over for six hours. Eh, boy at a star called
forty seven ursa majoris, which is forty nine light years
(18:16):
away or forty five light years away.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Can you imagine getting six hours of the same Dorito's
commercial over and over again and not being like, I'm
gonna invade that place. This is just too annoying.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
And then should we even mentioned this last guy? Uh? 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 nineteen
(18:53):
eighty five. And then I guess he I'm curious what
he did between eighty five and two thousand and nine
if that's what he did in eighty five. But finally
in two thousand and nine 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.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
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 arras who beamed messages for
one reason or another, usually artistic or commercial.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Yeah, speaking of commercial, Yeah, God, look at that. I
just stepped all over it too. We'll be right back, Okay,
(20:03):
So we are back. We are catching up to the future,
and we're going to start with a man named Douglas
vakoch vakok I think it's fake koch veakoch v a
koc h. He's a SETI guy, and he was there
for about sixteen years where he worked his way up
to the director of Interstellar Message Composition, which is you
(20:27):
know exactly you know 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. Now and he said, fine, I'm
going to leave and I'm going to go start my
own little group called Mehdi. And that's where Mehdi was born.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Yeah, and SETI also refused to go the opposite way
and outright ban messaging extraterrestrials. And so there were some
like high level critics of Mehdi 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
(21:09):
a big deal. It's a really heated discussion, like people
will start screaming at each other over this. Oh really, yeah,
it's it's yeah, there's a lot of pettiness and backstabbing
and s talking. It's it's it's strange.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Science fight, science fight.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Yeah. And I'm not saying it's strange that it's controversial.
I'm saying the way that these scientists carry out the
debate and arguments is strange.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Right, It's it's uh, they don't they don't thumb wrestle
like any old dates, right, or what is it? Thumb war?
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah? One, two, three, four, Yeah, we.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Always called it thumb wrestling. Though this whole thumbre thing
is just that's what the kids are doing these days.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
All right, very important work we're doing here, the thumb
wrestling thing. So Mehdi has one. They have actually tried
this one time in two thouy seventeen. They did a
one short series of transmissions. They also use the ones
and zeros technique because you said it was best, it
(22:21):
is and they said, Josh said it was best, so
let's go with that. And again in it included, you know,
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. This is just going to count
how long it's been traveling.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
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 you'll talk about later. It has a
time stamp saying when are they proposed as a time
stamp saying when the message was sent? But I don't
understand a countdown clock. It doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
I don't think it's a countdown I think it's just
a counting clock either.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Way, how would you do that with binary ones and zeros?
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Oh, I don't know. I just kind of figured the
clock was separate.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
I really don't understand. I looked all over for it.
I did find that aw Techer had a little ten
second snippet aboard one of those transmissions is pretty pretty
good Awtecher there. I don't know that German, Austria and
I don't maybe British Scottish, I don't remember. But anyway,
they're like a electronic duo that's been around for a
(23:37):
long time. It's really really good, you know, kind of weird.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Did they wear helmets so you can't see their faces?
Speaker 2 (23:43):
No, nothing like that. They dressed kind of normcore and
they're just a couple of normal guys. But their their
music is really it can be really like a tonal
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 Autecher after this and
(24:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Okay, I'll have to check that out. So that one
message that they sent in twenty seventeen, was blasted out
to an exoplanet and we'll get to you know, sort
of the thinking these days is to send them toward exoplants.
We'll get more into that in a sect. But it's
called g J two seventy three B and that's about
(24:31):
twelve light years from Earth and if someone there gets
it or something there gets it, we would get a
message back potentially in twenty forty two.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
So that was the only one that MEDI sent so far.
Like the MEDI Institute right there's the NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory is working on one that I mentioned, the beacon
in the galaxy, and it's it kind of follows in
the footsteps of messages going all the way back to
the Aricibo message, where it's saying like, hey, this is
(25:03):
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 to 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
(25:29):
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
(25:53):
toward exoplanets.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Yeah, and they've narrowed it down, narrowed it down to
about twenty exoplanets right now out of the roughly fifty
three hundred that we have confirmed exists 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 you know, like Goldilocks. It's not too warm,
it's not too cold, there's probably surface water and an atmosphere.
(26:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
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 Aricibo message went out,
Frank Drake was immediately criticized for doing that that was
very reckless. This is nineteen seventy four that he did that.
Every time somebody sends just a transmission out for fun
(26:55):
or kicks or as a Dorido's commercial, or even like
as a serious metisage, 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.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
And then secondly, we 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
(27:30):
advanced than us that it does risk completely wiping us out.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Yeah, and I guess you know, 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
you know, kind of like we mentioned earlier, said he's
been around for about sixty years, and they haven't been
(27:59):
super well fun over that time, so they haven't even
reached the potential of what SETI could be. Yet. There's
a Russian billion billionaire name Yuri Milner who has said,
I'll give you guys one hundred million dollars over ten
year period. And by the end of that period, it's
called the Breakthrough Listen Initiative. We should be able to
(28:20):
scan ten times more sky than we can now using
telescopes that are about fifty times more sensitive.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Hey, get this, and I saw real quick, Chuck. I
thought that the sensitivity is so much that they would
be able to detect a one hundred watt laser same
as about one hundred 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.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
That's so, I thought you were going to say something
about like an alien fart.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
That's essentially that. Okay, all right, let's not mince words here.
That's one and the same.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
I thought that's where you're headed. So yeah, that's one
of the big arguments is SETI is in his and see,
let's just slow our role here and just keep listening.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
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 into 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 was
a former chair of SETI and a big critic of Mehdi.
(29:28):
He basically called it that unauthorized diplomacy. And if you
think back to our How Alien Contact Might Work episode,
didn't even have to look it up that time. Nice.
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
(29:52):
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 glow will consensus before we ever say anything.
And so medi critics are saying, if if we have
that as a as a guide line, as a guardrail
(30:14):
after we receive a message, shouldn't that count like doubly
and crafting a message and sending it out initially like
as a first first message and yeah, and many proponents
is shut up.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Well they kind of do, but Gertzy series 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 Dorrito's or Craigslist.
We didn't even mention craiglist, craigslisten a message out. Yeah,
you should be prosecuted in the Hague, get the International
(30:48):
Court of Justice. And I think in the two thousands
there were a couple of dozen scientists that all got
on board signed a position statement against Mehti 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
(31:08):
begin with.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Sure, it's a great point, it's a great great analogy there.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Thanks. Should we take a break.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Oh yeah, let's take a break. I forgot we hadn't
taken our second one.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
All right, we'll take our second break and we'll talk
about what Mehdi says right after this.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Okay, So Mehdi says, all right, we hear you. I
will even grant you that there is a slight risk
to this at vanishingly small risk. But we have some
counter arguments to all of your bs. So the number
one is we feel that ETI is out there. Other
intelligent civilizations are actually waiting for us to signal them
(32:10):
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 in regalactic civilizations not
to disturb up and coming ones before they say that
they're ready to be contacted. And they said, what we
(32:32):
want to do is send that message that we're ready.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
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 prim minis,
they don't say priminis the premise 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,
(32:57):
then we've just what have we been doing this whole time?
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, we're all going to live and die as civilizations
without ever being in touch with one another. And what
kind of a tragedy.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Would that be? That'd be a pretty big tragedy.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Another one is what we talked about earlier, that we've
already made our presence known.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Right, Yeah, And we've been blasting out television through space
for since nineteen fifty one with I Love Lucy, and
that message I Love Lucy is seventy two light years
away from Earth by now, and we've been like, if
we can send the Real Housewives shows into outer space,
then surely we should be a little more intentional and
(33:34):
send out something else that actually shows our intelligence.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Andy Cohen just said, hey, well you are right, you're
not wrong.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Watch what happens.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
So I said that people can really kind of easily disassemble.
This argument 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. Right,
if you really dig into it, those radio and TV
(34:07):
transmissions are so degraded when they escape out into space
that you, like you just couldn't pick them up. You'd
have to be in our backyard to pick up any
of that, and a right and know where it came from.
If you were in our backyard, the further away you are,
the less chance you have of picking up not just
(34:28):
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 it's it's actually mind boggling. John Gertz just
gave an example of a space alien space telescope that
(34:51):
was five hundred and fifty astronomical units away. That's zero
point eight percent 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
(35:13):
pick Earth up every thirteen thousand years. So the idea
that we're just shouting out into the universe that we're
here just from being and broadcasting and emitting electro magneticism,
Oh God, I gotta rephrase that.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
You did it.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
I don't think that's a word though. Sure Anyway, it's
a not a valid argument.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Although wouldn't that be funny if aliens finally came down
and they just met all of us and they all
went lucy right, just called everything Lucy.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
That's like, oh, what was it? I think it was.
There was some I want to say Futurama where there
was like a race that had picked up Ally McNeil,
and they wanted to know what happened, and they showed
up like trying to find what happened at the at
the end, it was pretty good.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
That's funny. They would be very surprised to learn that
she married Han Solo.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Well they yeah, they would. It's still surprising, but they
took it as a as a real thing that they
were watching something real and not like a show.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
All right, So now we get into that final criticism
that we had kind of hung on too. 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,
(36:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
Right, And so they're saying, what Medi'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
MEDI 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.
(37:26):
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 developed altruism for their own society, which is
how they would have survived. 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
(37:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Right. It's kind of interesting, though, when 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?
(38:18):
But I never hear anyone saying, well, what if they're
both kind of like planet Earth?
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Right?
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Like Earth is everything. It's people that would welcome you,
or people that would spit in your face and start
a fistfight, like who knows? Why does it have to
be one or the other?
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Right, it's like Topeka and Kansas City, right. 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.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
And the other thing is this, so again many many
proponents really kind of bulk up that argument that MEDI
critics use, which is, you know, it's possible that they're
hostile and could wipe us out. And many proponents are like,
you're being ridiculous, You're being a rational, paranoid, childish even
they're very dismissive of it. But if you dig into
(39:20):
what the MEDI critics are saying, they're not saying like, yeah,
of course, an alien civilization is hostile 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
(39:42):
coming true would result in the end of humanity, right,
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 medi and elected people who have access to radio
telescopes sending out messages for the rest of the world. Again,
(40:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Now, has the movie been made yet where a rogue metti,
you know, computer nerd late at night, kind of like
a newman in Jurassic Park, right, you know, sneaks in
and broadcasts a message that they've crafted that actually gets
heard and brings about the invitation for visitation.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
That was the subplot to Sleepless in Seattle, don't you remember?
Speaker 1 (40:56):
You're right, I guess every idea has been taken.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
It's all been done. There's nothing new under the sun, Chuck,
unless some aliens show up, and that will change a lot.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
I think this wraps up our alien contact episode. We
did UFOs too, a two parter on Project blue Book.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Remember, Yeah, and did we do some live thing at
Comic Con once.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
That was on UFOs. In general, I.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
Think, okay, all right, so this wraps it up until
we actually get that contact, and then we'll have to
follow up.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Yeah, we'll put an asterisk on there. Yeah, or, as
you would say, an astros.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
I didn't say that, right do.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Since I just made fun of Chuck and really lovingly everybody,
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
With intention. I'm gonna call this correct. I'm getting you back. Okay,
you got something wrong in the skydiving episode. We had
a few people right in already, but TJ's is more concise,
so I'm gonna go with tech. Okay, Hey, guys, Scotting.
In the Skydiming episode, Josh was explaining stall speed for
an aircraft and said that the prop planes can fly
(42:07):
slower before their engine stall. Not exactly correct. In aviation,
stall speed refers to the minimum speed and aircraft can
fly that the wings generate lyft, 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.
It'll drop like a rock man.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
That would be so bad.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
I always enjoy the great content and can always rely
on you guys for hours of education and entertainment. Sincerely,
That is TJ. Singh.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
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 bi centennial baby.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Really yeah, that's pretty great. And listen to this PS.
This is awesome. Sincerely, TJPS. An auto response to let
writers know their email was received would appreciated. Oh yeah,
well how about this, TJ. I'm letting you know with
my mouth message received. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna write
(43:10):
it back THO, because I always let people know when
we've read their email.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
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 Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and we're just doing what we can together, moddeling
through the both of us, and this is stuff you
should know.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Wow, Ed Waite has set up.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I wanted to make sure the bar was really low.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
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 Inner Cosmos. Oh, yes, that we wanted
to plug. That sounds super awesome. You know, have you
ever heard of David Eagleman. He's a neuroscientist. Seems like
he might have come up before, but he's from Stanford.
He's a best selling author and he's you know, he
(00:49):
explores these insightful questions about modern brain science, how it
intersects our lives. It's just kind of write up stuff
you should know. Is ali definitely and I think the
listeners would really checking it out.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
So go check it out.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
What's it called again, It's called Inner Cosmos. 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 Estra Terrestrial
(01:25):
Jerk Intelligence.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah, and that's go listen to that episode. It's great.
That's listening out for stuff out in the Great Beyond.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
We did the Golden Records?
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Did the Golden Records? What were those?
Speaker 2 (01:38):
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,
(01:59):
which is and I think our location in the universe too.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Okay, here's where we are and this is a.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Penis you think exactly. Check it out.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
So now we're moving on to probably the culmination, which
is something called medi.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Oh wait, we did one more too, Yeah, No, we did. Okay,
you didn't want to talk about that?
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Well, what was it? I can't remember.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Uh. I'll tell you, Chuck that there's a great name
for it, and uh 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 uh
it was just an all around good name.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
It was kind of along these lines a little bit, right, man.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Oh, I got it how alien contact might work. Isn't
that a great name?
Speaker 1 (02:48):
That's great?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Right, But like I said, now we're going to talk
about MEDI 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 goop it up and you always snicker it's cute.
But let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
So, Chuck, you said that active SETI METI. They're one
and the same. But 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 are now figuring
out how to shout out into the universe and send
(03:41):
those transmissions that we're hoping to find from alien civilizations
ourselves out there for other alien civilizations to find.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
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, Like, great idea,
let's start sending messages out. But a lot of people
are saying, oh no, no, let's slow our role here, right,
and we'll get into all the pros and cons toward
the end. But there is an idea that capital g
(04:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah. I saw someone say that it should be as
obvious to us as the full moon is, Like.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
The universe should be pretty obvious theeming.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
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 Tarter. She
said that that concluding that life, that the universe is
(05:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
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 sixty something years? Yeah, And she's like,
that's nothing. So the idea of METI comes along, and
some people say that, you know, we may as well,
(05:31):
because we've been inadvertently bouncing, you know, since the advent
of satellites for communication and television and stuff like that. Right,
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.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
He'll always says that I love.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
That his ears are burning right now.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
It's a good later run a business with intention sure,
as opposed to being reactive.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Right exactly, So he'd be a medi supporter. It sounds
like we should ask him sometime So there's a there's
a thing. It's 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.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
In something like that cow has already seen the city exactly, Yeah,
can't take it back to the farm exactly, mixing metaphors.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
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 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're
if we switch over to purposeful transmissions, directed transmissions, what
(06:50):
what con will say?
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Intentional intentional transmissions.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
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 like slow our role
here and take our time and not let doritos do it.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Right, Yeah, that'll make happen at more sense in a minute.
But Yeah, there's something in risk management called the cautionary principle,
and it's basically saying, like, if 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
(07:45):
more research and figure out ways to make it safer,
or don't do it at all. And that's the argument principle. Yeah,
that's a lot. 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
(08:06):
basically a group of rogue people are trying to do
it solo for the whole world.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
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 nineteenth century, there
was a German mathematician named and these weren't crackpots. These
were pretty respected people in their fields. Carl Friedrich Gauss.
(08:37):
He said, here's what we should do. Why don't we
cut down a bunch of the Siberian forest. Why don't
we plant wheat fields kind of like crop circles, but
in the shape of big right triangles. To just let people,
your people, let these ets see it. If they can
see it, at least they'll know that we understand the
Pythagorean theorem. Then about so, let's we'll get a bunch
(09:01):
of free wheat out of it. Wheat not weed.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
I said, wheat.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Oh okay, they said weed.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
I can't see Carl Friedrich Gouss calling it weed.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
That'd be funny, though, if they just planted a huge
marijuana fields. They're like, you might as well kill two
birds here.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
That initiative might have happened back then.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
So then a few decades later in Austrian astronomery, name
named Joseph von Littrew said, how about this, you like
wacky ideas, why don't we dig big twenty mile wide
trenches that are in different geometric shapes and fill them
with kerosene and set them on fire.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
It's a little you don't have anything but smoke inhalation
to show for it after that's done. At least with
Gouss's idea, you had wheat or weed, depending on what
you grew.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
But these were sort of the early ideas of how
we could potentially send a message, you know, obviously before
the advent of radio telescopes.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yes, and they were dumb, dumb ideas, but it does
show that we were thinking about this. We we want
to contact other civilizations that may be out there. Sure
there were I'm sure other proposals that didn't quite make
the historical cut. But if we kind of flash forward
to November of nineteen sixty two, we come to probably
(10:17):
what you could call the first medi broadcast. It was
Soviet astronomers at a radar station in the Crimea. I
think it's one that's still there today called evepteriea a
seventy millimeters or seventy meter telescope. Seventy millimeters wouldn't be
very powerful, baby scope, but back in nineteen sixty two
(10:39):
they broadcast in morse code a three word message to
a star that was about two thousand light years away,
and the message said world. You could also interpret the
word is peace. Lenin they're being very sick of fan
it USSR. They're being jingoistic.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
About ten years later, Americans and Soviets 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. Sure Neil deGrasse Tyson wanted to go,
(11:20):
but they said, you're only thirteen years old or so,
just once you just concentrate on, you know, getting a date.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Maybe just keep at it, buddy, just stay that kid.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
He's like, but I want to go. And then James
Elliott was an astronomer that was there and he had
the idea and 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 him
to the far side of the moon and then blow
them up and that'll be detectable from one hundred and
ninety light years away. And everyone was like, yeah, not
(11:54):
a great idea.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, you can kill two birds with one stone, but
you also lose the moon in the bargain. So no,
it was 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
(12:16):
the universe. I think that was more like nineteen sixty
or something like that. This is well into the seventies,
so Drake was already legendary, at least as legendary as Sagan,
and those two actually teamed up in nineteen seventy four
and they got together and I guess you could call
this probably the first at least Western or American medi transmission.
(12:39):
It is called the Aricibo Message.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
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 Arasibo
telescope in Puerto Rico, and they just kind of wanted
(13:03):
to show it off, so they aimed at at the
M thirteen cluster, about three hundred thousand stars twenty five
thousand light years away this time, and considering the Soviet
when twelve years earlier it was two thousand light years away.
They had you know, this is really getting out there
at this point.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Right, And the message they beamed was usay you yes, hey.
Actually the message they beamed was pretty remarkable, especially for
its time.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
So they said gerald forward, but who really.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
They use 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,
(13:54):
all these are human constructs to understand math, but they're
not necessarily a universal life language. You can make a
pretty good case that binary is a universal language, that
there's at base such a thing as something and not
something everywhere in the universe, and that's what they use
to transmit this message. And still today it's pretty much
(14:16):
agreed upon. If you're going to craft yourself a mety message.
You're probably gonna want to use binary because it's it's
probably the language of the universe.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Yeah, that's 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.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
For how alien contact might work.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Yeah, like, can we even wrap our brains around the
fact that they may not even like understand what our
three dimensions are, much less what languages or whatever, you know.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
And I mean we also kind of tangentially got into
that and the Nuclear Semiotics episode. Oh yea, it's even
talking to other humans ten thousand years in the future
is virtually impossible. We're talking about like 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.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, for sure. So Sagan goes on, if we're kind
of going on a timeline here in seventy seven 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 kind of a publicity thing because
the voyager one is really slow, only goes about thirty
(15:31):
eight thousand miles an hour, and Sagan was even like,
this is not going to get very far out there.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
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 in Sagan too himself that he was probably just
trying to inspire humans to start thinking beyond Earth.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
Sure, because there was just virtually.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
No chance whatsoever that any civilist was going to encounter
this one tiny, slow moving space probe. It's possible that
they could have noticed it, and we're tracking it, but
the chances are very low. So I think he was
trying to keep 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,
(16:21):
what we want to say, and in doing that we
kind of examine our own values, like we strip away
all the now 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 intelligences
about ourselves to get across who we are.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Yeah, totally. So maybe before we take a break will
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 is a radio engineer,
big medi guy named Alexander Zeitsef. He initiated for broadcasts
(16:59):
one ninety nine, two thousand and one, two thousand and three,
in two thousand and eight 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
(17:20):
here on Earth, then maybe you can understand this. NASA
did another publicity stunt when when they beamed the Beatles
song across the universe toward Polaris in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
They I can't remember if they were criticized for that
or not. Yeah. There was also you mentioned Dorito's. Dorito's
held a contest in the UK to come up with
a thirty second ad that got across humanity, and the
winning entry was a bunch of chips that escaped from
(17:55):
a bag and sacrificed one of their own to the
god of Salsa. Dorito's is like yeah, nailed it. That's
exactly all of humanity. We do that all the time.
And they transmitted that that thirty second commercial over and
over for six hours. Eh, boy at a star called
forty seven ursa majoris, which is forty nine light years
(18:16):
away or forty five light years away.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Can you imagine getting six hours of the same Dorito's
commercial over and over again and not being like, I'm
gonna invade that place. This is just too annoying.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
And then should we even mentioned this last guy? Uh? 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 nineteen
(18:53):
eighty five. And then I guess he I'm curious what
he did between eighty five and two thousand and nine
if that's what he did in eighty five. But finally
in two thousand and nine 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.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
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 arras who beamed messages for
one reason or another, usually artistic or commercial.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
Yeah, speaking of commercial, Yeah, God, look at that. I
just stepped all over it too. We'll be right back, Okay,
(20:03):
So we are back. We are catching up to the future,
and we're going to start with a man named Douglas
vakoch vakok I think it's fake koch veakoch v a
koc h. He's a SETI guy, and he was there
for about sixteen years where he worked his way up
to the director of Interstellar Message Composition, which is you
(20:27):
know exactly you know 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. Now and he said, fine, I'm
going to leave and I'm going to go start my
own little group called Mehdi. And that's where Mehdi was born.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Yeah, and SETI also refused to go the opposite way
and outright ban messaging extraterrestrials. And so there were some
like high level critics of Mehdi 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
(21:09):
a big deal. It's a really heated discussion, like people
will start screaming at each other over this. Oh really, yeah,
it's it's yeah, there's a lot of pettiness and backstabbing
and s talking. It's it's it's strange.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
Science fight, science fight.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Yeah. And I'm not saying it's strange that it's controversial.
I'm saying the way that these scientists carry out the
debate and arguments is strange.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Right, It's it's uh, they don't they don't thumb wrestle
like any old dates, right, or what is it? Thumb war?
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah? One, two, three, four, Yeah, we.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Always called it thumb wrestling. Though this whole thumbre thing
is just that's what the kids are doing these days.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
All right, very important work we're doing here, the thumb
wrestling thing. So Mehdi has one. They have actually tried
this one time in two thouy seventeen. They did a
one short series of transmissions. They also use the ones
and zeros technique because you said it was best, it
(22:21):
is and they said, Josh said it was best, so
let's go with that. And again in it included, you know,
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. This is just going to count
how long it's been traveling.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
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 you'll talk about later. It has a
time stamp saying when are they proposed as a time
stamp saying when the message was sent? But I don't
understand a countdown clock. It doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
I don't think it's a countdown I think it's just
a counting clock either.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Way, how would you do that with binary ones and zeros?
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Oh, I don't know. I just kind of figured the
clock was separate.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
I really don't understand. I looked all over for it.
I did find that aw Techer had a little ten
second snippet aboard one of those transmissions is pretty pretty
good Awtecher there. I don't know that German, Austria and
I don't maybe British Scottish, I don't remember. But anyway,
they're like a electronic duo that's been around for a
(23:37):
long time. It's really really good, you know, kind of weird.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Did they wear helmets so you can't see their faces?
Speaker 2 (23:43):
No, nothing like that. They dressed kind of normcore and
they're just a couple of normal guys. But their their
music is really it can be really like a tonal
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 Autecher after this and
(24:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Okay, I'll have to check that out. So that one
message that they sent in twenty seventeen, was blasted out
to an exoplanet and we'll get to you know, sort
of the thinking these days is to send them toward exoplants.
We'll get more into that in a sect. But it's
called g J two seventy three B and that's about
(24:31):
twelve light years from Earth and if someone there gets
it or something there gets it, we would get a
message back potentially in twenty forty two.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
So that was the only one that MEDI sent so far.
Like the MEDI Institute right there's the NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory is working on one that I mentioned, the beacon
in the galaxy, and it's it kind of follows in
the footsteps of messages going all the way back to
the Aricibo message, where it's saying like, hey, this is
(25:03):
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 to 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
(25:29):
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
(25:53):
toward exoplanets.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Yeah, and they've narrowed it down, narrowed it down to
about twenty exoplanets right now out of the roughly fifty
three hundred that we have confirmed exists 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 you know, like Goldilocks. It's not too warm,
it's not too cold, there's probably surface water and an atmosphere.
(26:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
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 Aricibo message went out,
Frank Drake was immediately criticized for doing that that was
very reckless. This is nineteen seventy four that he did that.
Every time somebody sends just a transmission out for fun
(26:55):
or kicks or as a Dorido's commercial, or even like
as a serious metisage, 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.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
And then secondly, we 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
(27:30):
advanced than us that it does risk completely wiping us out.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Yeah, and I guess you know, 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
you know, kind of like we mentioned earlier, said he's
been around for about sixty years, and they haven't been
(27:59):
super well fun over that time, so they haven't even
reached the potential of what SETI could be. Yet. There's
a Russian billion billionaire name Yuri Milner who has said,
I'll give you guys one hundred million dollars over ten
year period. And by the end of that period, it's
called the Breakthrough Listen Initiative. We should be able to
(28:20):
scan ten times more sky than we can now using
telescopes that are about fifty times more sensitive.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Hey, get this, and I saw real quick, Chuck. I
thought that the sensitivity is so much that they would
be able to detect a one hundred watt laser same
as about one hundred 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.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
That's so, I thought you were going to say something
about like an alien fart.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
That's essentially that. Okay, all right, let's not mince words here.
That's one and the same.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
I thought that's where you're headed. So yeah, that's one
of the big arguments is SETI is in his and see,
let's just slow our role here and just keep listening.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
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 into 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 was
a former chair of SETI and a big critic of Mehdi.
(29:28):
He basically called it that unauthorized diplomacy. And if you
think back to our How Alien Contact Might Work episode,
didn't even have to look it up that time. Nice.
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
(29:52):
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 glow will consensus before we ever say anything.
And so medi critics are saying, if if we have
that as a as a guide line, as a guardrail
(30:14):
after we receive a message, shouldn't that count like doubly
and crafting a message and sending it out initially like
as a first first message and yeah, and many proponents
is shut up.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Well they kind of do, but Gertzy series 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 Dorrito's or Craigslist.
We didn't even mention craiglist, craigslisten a message out. Yeah,
you should be prosecuted in the Hague, get the International
(30:48):
Court of Justice. And I think in the two thousands
there were a couple of dozen scientists that all got
on board signed a position statement against Mehti 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
(31:08):
begin with.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Sure, it's a great point, it's a great great analogy there.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Thanks. Should we take a break.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Oh yeah, let's take a break. I forgot we hadn't
taken our second one.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
All right, we'll take our second break and we'll talk
about what Mehdi says right after this.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Okay, So Mehdi says, all right, we hear you. I
will even grant you that there is a slight risk
to this at vanishingly small risk. But we have some
counter arguments to all of your bs. So the number
one is we feel that ETI is out there. Other
intelligent civilizations are actually waiting for us to signal them
(32:10):
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 in regalactic civilizations not
to disturb up and coming ones before they say that
they're ready to be contacted. And they said, what we
(32:32):
want to do is send that message that we're ready.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
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 prim minis,
they don't say priminis the premise 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,
(32:57):
then we've just what have we been doing this whole time?
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, we're all going to live and die as civilizations
without ever being in touch with one another. And what
kind of a tragedy.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Would that be? That'd be a pretty big tragedy.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Another one is what we talked about earlier, that we've
already made our presence known.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Right, Yeah, And we've been blasting out television through space
for since nineteen fifty one with I Love Lucy, and
that message I Love Lucy is seventy two light years
away from Earth by now, and we've been like, if
we can send the Real Housewives shows into outer space,
then surely we should be a little more intentional and
(33:34):
send out something else that actually shows our intelligence.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Andy Cohen just said, hey, well you are right, you're
not wrong.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
Watch what happens.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
So I said that people can really kind of easily disassemble.
This argument 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. Right,
if you really dig into it, those radio and TV
(34:07):
transmissions are so degraded when they escape out into space
that you, like you just couldn't pick them up. You'd
have to be in our backyard to pick up any
of that, and a right and know where it came from.
If you were in our backyard, the further away you are,
the less chance you have of picking up not just
(34:28):
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 it's it's actually mind boggling. John Gertz just
gave an example of a space alien space telescope that
(34:51):
was five hundred and fifty astronomical units away. That's zero
point eight percent 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
(35:13):
pick Earth up every thirteen thousand years. So the idea
that we're just shouting out into the universe that we're
here just from being and broadcasting and emitting electro magneticism,
Oh God, I gotta rephrase that.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
You did it.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
I don't think that's a word though. Sure Anyway, it's
a not a valid argument.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Although wouldn't that be funny if aliens finally came down
and they just met all of us and they all
went lucy right, just called everything Lucy.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
That's like, oh, what was it? I think it was.
There was some I want to say Futurama where there
was like a race that had picked up Ally McNeil,
and they wanted to know what happened, and they showed
up like trying to find what happened at the at
the end, it was pretty good.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
That's funny. They would be very surprised to learn that
she married Han Solo.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Well they yeah, they would. It's still surprising, but they
took it as a as a real thing that they
were watching something real and not like a show.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
All right, So now we get into that final criticism
that we had kind of hung on too. 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,
(36:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
Right, And so they're saying, what Medi'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
MEDI 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.
(37:26):
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 developed altruism for their own society, which is
how they would have survived. 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
(37:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Right. It's kind of interesting, though, when 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?
(38:18):
But I never hear anyone saying, well, what if they're
both kind of like planet Earth?
Speaker 2 (38:23):
Right?
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Like Earth is everything. It's people that would welcome you,
or people that would spit in your face and start
a fistfight, like who knows? Why does it have to
be one or the other?
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Right, it's like Topeka and Kansas City, right. 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.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
And the other thing is this, so again many many
proponents really kind of bulk up that argument that MEDI
critics use, which is, you know, it's possible that they're
hostile and could wipe us out. And many proponents are like,
you're being ridiculous, You're being a rational, paranoid, childish even
they're very dismissive of it. But if you dig into
(39:20):
what the MEDI critics are saying, they're not saying like, yeah,
of course, an alien civilization is hostile 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
(39:42):
coming true would result in the end of humanity, right,
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 medi and elected people who have access to radio
telescopes sending out messages for the rest of the world. Again,
(40:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Now, has the movie been made yet where a rogue metti,
you know, computer nerd late at night, kind of like
a newman in Jurassic Park, right, you know, sneaks in
and broadcasts a message that they've crafted that actually gets
heard and brings about the invitation for visitation.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
That was the subplot to Sleepless in Seattle, don't you remember?
Speaker 1 (40:56):
You're right, I guess every idea has been taken.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
It's all been done. There's nothing new under the sun, Chuck,
unless some aliens show up, and that will change a lot.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
I think this wraps up our alien contact episode. We
did UFOs too, a two parter on Project blue Book.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Remember, Yeah, and did we do some live thing at
Comic Con once.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
That was on UFOs. In general, I.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
Think, okay, all right, so this wraps it up until
we actually get that contact, and then we'll have to
follow up.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Yeah, we'll put an asterisk on there. Yeah, or, as
you would say, an astros.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
I didn't say that, right do.
Speaker 2 (41:38):
Since I just made fun of Chuck and really lovingly everybody,
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
With intention. I'm gonna call this correct. I'm getting you back. Okay,
you got something wrong in the skydiving episode. We had
a few people right in already, but TJ's is more concise,
so I'm gonna go with tech. Okay, Hey, guys, Scotting.
In the Skydiming episode, Josh was explaining stall speed for
an aircraft and said that the prop planes can fly
(42:07):
slower before their engine stall. Not exactly correct. In aviation,
stall speed refers to the minimum speed and aircraft can
fly that the wings generate lyft, 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.
It'll drop like a rock man.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
That would be so bad.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
I always enjoy the great content and can always rely
on you guys for hours of education and entertainment. Sincerely,
That is TJ. Singh.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
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 bi centennial baby.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Really yeah, that's pretty great. And listen to this PS.
This is awesome. Sincerely, TJPS. An auto response to let
writers know their email was received would appreciated. Oh yeah,
well how about this, TJ. I'm letting you know with
my mouth message received. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna write
(43:10):
it back THO, because I always let people know when
we've read their email.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
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 Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
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