June 12, 2019 • 47 mins
For years, fast radio bursts have mystified astronomers across the planet. These millisecond-long blips of intense, unexplained radio signals pop up all over the sky, temporarily outshining radio pulsars despite being perhaps a million times farther away. Before 2013, many astrophysicists doubted that they even existed. Now their existence is undeniable — but what exactly are they?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:24):
to the show. My name is Max, my name is
they call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Michig. Controlled deconds. Most importantly, you
are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. At the very end
of a whirlwind week as we record this, so as
we've been doing recently, we just want to check in
(00:46):
with each other. Matt, how's it, how's it going? Let's
go really well. Just finished an interview with John Douglas,
the FBI profiler from mind Hunter, about Wayne Williams. It
was awesome, nice, nice, looking forward to hearing that. Know,
how are you doing? Okay? Um me and you had
a little bit of a Chicago adventure doing stuff for
ad sales and I just got back. I want to
(01:08):
learn more about that. What we basically just present kind
of a faux podcast for advertisers so they understand how
add ads work and podcasting. Because you think it'd be obvious,
but a lot of people don't really. You know, old
school marketers are more into like radio and like television
and more traditional forms of advertising. So we literally do
a kind of pretend podcast with panelists who are executives
(01:29):
in our company, and then you go and some are
great on Mike, which is yeah. And you know, the
week before that, I was in Texas, uh doing it,
doing a similar thing. So we've been we've been on
the road, and I think, well, I think all of
us will end up traveling over the summer. But of
course the best part of this crazy job is getting
(01:49):
together to hang out with with you three in the
studio and all of you listening to Day. But if
you say I love listening show, I also love communicating
in my own way. You know, I I have ears,
but I also have a voice, and I have something
to say. We have got your back. You can call
us directly. We are one eight three three st d
(02:13):
w y t K. Leave a message. You've got three minutes,
and if it takes more than that, just call back
and feel free to get weird with it. If you
don't want us to use your name, make sure to
say that in the message. Today's question are we alone?
This is one of the most profound, disquietening, fundamental questions
(02:35):
of the human species, and since before the dawn of
recorded history, we have explored this question via stories, theories, myths,
and legends about what could be out there on the
edges of the map, or what could be out there
in the stars, even before we understood exactly what uh
galaxies and solar systems and stars are actually like. And
(02:59):
it's an interesting it's an interesting evolution, right, because we've
talked about this in the past and episodes on UFO
abductions and fay culture, right, and the whole idea of changelings.
The characters of our myths and our folklore are not
set in stone, not near as much as we we
sometimes think we had for thousands and thousands and thousands
(03:23):
of years legends about demons and angels and supernatural beings,
and now we still have these same sorts of phenomena
occurring in our oral traditions, but the stories have shifted
from from the fay or the fair folk, true stories
about extraterrestrials, extra dimensional entities and so on. And if
(03:44):
you look back at those stories, the fascinating thing is
the story of an alien abduction. Aside from the window dressing,
it mirrors beat by beat the story of being abducted
by the l or faith folk, you know, pulling a
Van Winkle. But the the ideas, we were always looking
(04:05):
for intelligent non human species, something very different from us,
that shared one fundamental trait sapiens wisdom, sentience. This search
continues today. Spoiler alert. You will run into many people
who feel like they have cracked the case, but they're not.
Everyone agrees with them. Yeah, it's true. And the search
(04:27):
actually in real life continues today. And what is it now?
Keep losing track? Yeah? Uh? And some people really thought
that we'd found an answer to this question unequivocally, but
then something happened. Well what happened? Here are the facts.
So starting in two thousand seven, uh, there are these
(04:49):
things called fast radio bursts that radio astronomers started to detect.
It's a phenomena. It's different. It's very different from other
types of radio waves that are intercepted by some of
the instruments that we use, like the one you guys
went out to the Green Bank out in West Virginia
and the Radio Quiet Zone. Those things are always looking
(05:09):
and they'll find things well. In particular, these are called
fast radio bursts. Let's give you the story behind it.
There's an astronomer named Duncan Lorimer and his student David Narkovic,
and they found the first official fast radio burst when
they were looking for pulsar data. So they're looking for
that and they end up coming across this weird little thing,
(05:29):
this quick little millisecond first. Uh, and they're like, man,
what the heck is that stuff? Oh, And then Duncan says,
let's call it a Lormer burst. They are They are
commonly called Lormer burst, but we don't know how how
it went down like that. You're right, Matt. It's it's
typically gonna last one too, maybe maybe a few more milliseconds.
(05:53):
And it's also a transient pulse. That's important because that
means we cannot predict where these things will occur, which
which comes into our story in a big way. Uh.
And since we can't predict where they occur, we don't
know when to look for them or where to look
for them, And we also don't know what causes them.
(06:14):
We just know that they are one of the largest
discharges of energy that we have witnessed. And it's so
weird to think that they're that large. But they only occur,
or at least we only measure them in these tiny moments.
It's literally like the blink of an eye. One of
these objects can let loose as much energy as the
Sun puts out in an entire year. Let's say that
(06:36):
doesn't impress Let's just say that, but that would be
weird if it didn't. But you know, if you're a
really hard sell, it's also enough energy to run, Oh,
a little thing called humanity. Ever heard of it? The
human race, civilization as we know it's. Yeah, run humanity,
not in ancient times, but run twenty nineteen uh, human
(06:59):
life across the in it for ten trillion years uh,
without any change in its strength or any variants over time,
which is impressive. But that's that's also telling us that
there's no gearing up to whatever is causing this, you
know what I mean. We don't see arise the peak
that Matt's talking about there all over the sky. They're
(07:22):
not concentrated on the plane of the Milky Way. They're
also very very very very far away. And that's why,
despite being so powerful, the strength of the signal reaching
Earth is actually one thousand times less than the signal
that would come from a mobile phone on the moon
trying to call one eight three three S T D
(07:42):
W Y t K. But feel free to give it
a shot if you want. Just think about that. The
moon is so far away half of us can't get
service in like the airport, so that so it's amazing
that's something like green Bank can sense a signal that's small,
and the only reason we can, since this signal from
(08:03):
billions of light years away, is because it is so powerful.
On the CETI website, they describe the actual energy that's
being measured by our instruments to detect one of these
is less than the energy you would take for an
ant to move its leg, basically the the amount of
a TP that that would take. That's what they're detecting.
(08:24):
It's smaller than that. And yet because it's so small,
we can we understand because of the distance how strong
it is. That that's mind blowing to me. So what
could be doing this? These are happening now as you listen.
These are happening now. We don't know how many are
occurring because the way we end up finding them. People
have proposed a number of possible explanations, and the big
(08:49):
ones right now would be it's a black hole. It's
it's just it's something with a black hole. And then
someone else says, no, that's malarkey, that's space age malarkey.
It's obviously rotating neutron stark, all right, And and more
people come in, uh no hashtag no sukalos and say
it's extraterrestrial life. Yeah, it sounds like a special dressing. Yes,
(09:12):
I'll have the I'll have the cops salad six the sucalos.
But this is pretty strange stuff, right. I mean, we
have to stress that these are not live events because
they're billions of light years away. That means, if we
look at a timeline, this occurred a long, long, long
long time ago and took the speed of light to travel.
(09:34):
Here reminds me of that episode of the Adventures of
Pete and Pete where there is an alien character that's
in the school and um, they're obsessed throughout the episode
about Johnny Unitis and this football game that gets transmitted
and it takes like years for this alien kids civilization
to see the broadcast because it's and so they're only
(09:55):
just now seeing it. And they think Johnny Unitis is
like this current. You know it's are because they're like
seeing it because it takes that long for radio waves
to travel through space. It also reminds me of this
may be a deep cut to some of us, but
I've recently rewatched this and the nostalgia made me love it.
Do you guys remember that film Explorers. It's like those
(10:15):
three kids build a spaceship. Yeah, Chuck, I mentioned it
on movie Crashing. I've never seen it or even heard
of it, and I looked it up briefly and it
was sort of a contemporary with like flight of a
navigator like kind of that. Also the main characters named Ben,
but they get these dreams from what turns out to
be a UFOs and I won't turns out to be aliens. Sorry.
(10:39):
UFO could be anything, right, it can be a hot
air balloon. But this, this is important for our purposes
because just like you're talking about with that uh, that
gap in time in transit of information, the aliens in
that film are also fascinated with very old television and
radio programs that made it out there in space, and
(11:02):
it's an endearing story. Unfortunately, the science is a little
tougher because as as those signals travel from Earth, they
tend to dissipate and they can get lost in the background.
Noise man, Are you're saying that Pete and Pete got
it wrong? Then I'm saying that you know they're no
Bill Nye. That's fair. I think it's unfair. I actually
(11:23):
missed the Pete and Pete but one of uh, one
of my friends, one of our mutual friends actually is
uh still head over heels or I should say over
the moon for this show for Pete and Pete's right,
and let us know if you liked Pete and Pete,
that's one where the one kid had the tattoo, right,
yea Petunia, you can make a dance. It's also the
first place I ever heard of who Iggy Pop was
(11:44):
because he was in the show. He played none as
Dad and he would just build in the credits as
Iggy Pop. I'm like, what kind of name for a
person is Iggy Pop? And then it turns out he's
this total crazy anarchist punk rock guy. That's like that
guy the main actor in Young Einstein. His name was
Yahoo Serious And that was the breaking point for me
(12:05):
as a child when I was like, hmmm, I think
sometimes people in Hollywood don't use their real names, but
but yes, this is this is strange stuff. It's not
it's not live. We're we're getting these details way after
they happened. And additionally, our searches were largely not live
because we were, Matt, as you said, we were going
(12:27):
through this archive data. So what Duncan Lormer found was
information that he pulled from a survey of different pulsars,
and it just happened to contain this information of what
we now call f s B s. And the thing was,
as soon as we found one back in oh seven,
(12:48):
we started finding more and more by astronomers and places
around the world had found sixteen. And as they were
discovering more detecting more, scientists began to realize that there
must be more to this fast radio burst thing than
they originally thought. So by two thousand twelve, Victoria Caspy
(13:11):
of McGill University figured that as many as ten thousand
fast bursts occur every single day across the sky. And
yes they're powerful, um but they're also incredibly short, and
that's why they're very difficult to catch, except when they repeat.
(13:33):
Oh and we'll learn about that right after a word
from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. It's called
this part of the episode. Don't call it a comeback
just because that's a cool phrase. In November of astronomer
named Paul Scholes at McGill University in Canada found ten
(13:57):
and there's a quote here, non periodically repeated fast radio
pulses in archival data gathered in May and June by
their Cebo radio telescope. So these ten bursts that he
discovered have dispersion measures and sky positions consistent with the
(14:18):
original burst, which was called f RB one to one
oh two that was detected back in two thousand and twelve.
This means that this series of bursts, unlike any other
radio burst discovered beforehand. It's repeating from the same place,
the same massive discharge of energy is happening over and
(14:42):
over again. And what they also figured out was that
like the burst the original burst, in each of these
emissions has a plasma dispersion measure that is a full
three times larger than anything possible for any source within
(15:05):
the Milky Way galaxy. That means that whatever this is
is so far away it's not even in our galaxy
and it's happening, Uh at least you know, ten or
eleven times, probably more that we haven't caught this. This team,
Schultz's team thinks that finding this rules out self destructive
(15:28):
cataclysmic event, you know, like the kind of trick that
can only happen once, like a magician actually sawing someone
in half. Well, yeah, it's like it reminds me of
just an explosion right when you're when you're thinking about
that amount of energy that gets released. If you think
about the the impact wave or the wave that gets
sent out whenever there's a massive explosion here on Earth,
(15:49):
like um, that wave is essentially what that radio burst
would be once it reaches Earth. That's what we're what
you're thinking. So you can only have that one time
with the initial explosion or when when a stark lapses
into a black hole, you get that initial burst of
energy that would be sent out. But like you said,
been it doesn't happen over and over and over and
over again, at least not with those kinds of explosions
(16:10):
that that happened out in the cosmos. Right, you explode
a star, it's gone, and the thing is to other
folks This meant that there might just be some intelligence
um manipulating, directing actively causing these fast radio bursts, which
is mind boggling and the implications. But this one burst
(16:31):
is not or this one location burst is not the
only example. Quite recently, this year January twenty nineteen, as
we call it on this planet, astronomers discovered a second
source of repeating fast radio bursts. They named this one,
uh fast radio burst one eight zero eight one four.
They're not being they're being super specific with the names,
(16:54):
and they have a system, but it's not as anthropomorphological
as naming hurricanes, right. And this was found at a
place called the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment or CHIME,
which is way better named than f RBO one four.
So they found six bursts between August and October, consistent
(17:16):
with origination from a single position in the sky. This
meant that this discovery was still very very recent for
our society. Uh. This meant that just in in less
than in less than fifteen years, they had found things
(17:38):
that were fundamentally changing their understanding of what these bursts were.
Because when they detected this stuff, they said, well, we
found one and we thought that might have been exceptional,
But now we found two that are exhibiting the same traits.
We think there may be a substantial population of points,
(17:58):
specific points in the Uni verse that were billions of
years ago omitting these massive bursts of energy for milliseconds
at a time. And yeah, what in the heck could
cause that? Get to the aliens. Get it's time for
the aliens. We're all waiting for it. So some researchers
have argued that the mysterious phenomena called fast radio burst
(18:20):
could be evidence of advanced alien tech. Specifically, the argument
is that the most um I would say, the most
academic argument, the most sophisticated argument is that these bursts
maybe energy leakage from planet sized transmitters that are powering
interstellar probes. Yeah. This comes to us from a guy
(18:42):
named Ave Loebe at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
and he had to deal with we've we've talked about
this before. He had to deal with some opprobrium and
some uh some side, some side, I at the very
least from his colleagues in this discipline. Because often in
the volunted halls of ivory towers, certain types of research
(19:05):
are considered off limits or fundamentally um wrongheaded. Yeah, there
we go. Wrongheaded. Oh that's an old Bush administration quote.
Wrong Headed hit the mainstream during the Bush administration as
a way to say not that something was factually inaccurate,
(19:25):
but that it was dumb to talk about it. So
someone would say like, well, you know, it turned out
there were no weapons best destruction in a rock, and
someone else would go, you know, that is wrongheaded, because
why don't just say wrong before dumb. It's like a
very diplomatic, couched kind of term, right, And it's also
removing removing response responsible from yes for the fact that
(19:49):
whatever they're saying is true. You just don't think it's
right headed. But no one ever said right headed either.
It's just wrong headed. But yeah, so so obvious. Loop
and team have to have to deal with some criticism,
a little bit of controversy. But their defense for this was,
you know, they said, look, we're not we're not crazy
people anymore crazy or unstable than the average astrophysicist. We
(20:13):
think there's nothing wrong with this question, and they explained it,
uh the following way. We've got a great quotation from them.
Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration
and origin at great distances, and we haven't identified a
possible natural source with any confidence, and artificial origin is
worth contemplating and checking. That's it. It's just saying no, not,
(20:37):
it's not a dumb question. It's worth looking into it. Yeah.
And and in the article from the Smithsonian, the Harvard
Smithsonian Center where they're talking about that, they you know,
they make a great point of sciences about checking a
hypothesis and deciding whether or not there's enough evidence to
support that, and then can you repeat it right? And
in this case, I think we do ourselves as humanity
(20:59):
a disservice if we completely throw this out the window,
rather than at least checking a box and saying, okay,
well it's not this thing, but let's at least conceptualize
what it could be if it were absolutely absolutely That's
how investigations and research work. I was personally. You can
find a paper online, read the full paper, and it's
(21:20):
pretty fascinating. I was personally um persuaded by the possibility
of this. They built a pretty defensible argument. So Loeb
has a co author, a guy named u Monosity Lingham
is from Harvard, and what they looked at was just
the feasibility of something. Is it possible to build something
(21:41):
that could do this, that could create this much energy?
And keep in mind when you're learning about this, that
this is within our understanding on this planet of how
physics works overall, and exactly how the what the limits
of technology are, right, because if someone were building something
that could create uh fast radio burst, they would be
(22:02):
on a way different position in the kardashianv scale. So
here's what they found. They said, Okay, could you build
a radio transmitter strong enough to give even that very
very weak signal to us this far away? And they said,
you know, if the transmitter were solar powered, it would
(22:22):
have to be absorbing sunlight on an area of a
planet twice the size of Earth. And if so, think
about the total land massive Earth. Multiply that by two.
If you took all the sunlight that was falling on
that much land, you would generate enough Again, from my
(22:43):
our understanding, you would generate enough power to uh to
make this thing kind of happen. So you would have
to construct it. That's the other thing. How would you
construct something that is two Earth's worth of fully functioned
solar power? Right? And I would I would just argue that,
(23:04):
you know, I'm look, I'm no Harvard Smithsonian physicist here,
but if you're talking about Kardashian scale, then maybe you're
talking about, you know, something that could harness the entire
power of a star. You know, what are those things
called Dyson spheres? Uh? You know, it wouldn't have to
be the planet that's absorbing the sunlight. It could be
(23:27):
the thing that's absorbing the star. You just in general, right, right, anyway,
cut out the middleman. Yeah, I'm just saying that's a
very good argument. Well they so they said, okay, we
know that our species can't build that yet, but according
to the laws of physics as we understand them, it
is possible to build that. And they also said, okay,
(23:49):
well all right, we know energy wise it's possible. But
if we built this transmitter, how how can we actually
make it work? From an engineering perspective, which of people forget.
And that's one of the most important things in any
construction project, whether we're talking autonomous vehicles and space shuttles
or a good a good paper clip, you know what
(24:11):
I mean. So, if you're an engineer out there listening,
thank you so much. Thanks for saving the show clip.
It's just such a perfect object. I'm a flexible straw fan. Yeah,
I'm easily We're talking about this earlier. I think I
am so easily impressed by small, smart inventions. Um I
feel about crazy straws. I love them too crazy for me,
(24:31):
too crazy. They're definitely a statement. Yeah, they just make
me uncomfortable. And someone who's like, I want all this
soda eventually, but not all at once. I wanted to
be a drink and a form of entertainment. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
It's like someone saw the board game mouse Trap and
they said, what if I could put that between me
and everything I drink? So let's talk about the transmitter.
(24:55):
That was like, so, what happens if you can even
build one of these things? If your harness that Yes,
from the engineering perspective, how could you make something like
this work without immediately burning itself up in a fiery inferno?
You know you would be you would be capable of
keeping it running from multiple uses. According to this paper,
(25:17):
if you've created a water cooled device that was also
twice the size of Earth, so we're four earths deep now,
to make one location that could send uh f RB
fast radio burst and then that's that's just the fact. Okay,
so that's the crazy news. There's no proof that happened,
(25:38):
but it is technically possible, right, that's technically correct. Someone
say the best kind of correct to say that a
civilization that was way better than us could could potentially
build it. But it doesn't answer the biggest question, why
would you build this? Yeah? Why the hell would you
double size the Earth with all that water and all
(26:00):
that just land mass to gather solar energy and then
make a giant radio burs Why? Why the hell would
you do that? How about powering interstellar light sales? There
would go about that? What is that? Yeah, that's a
good question. Um. So the amount of power that it's
involved in such a device would be enough to push
a million tons of payload, or about twenty times the
(26:23):
largest cruise ship on Earth. And uh, here's a quote
from Lingham that's big enough to carry living passengers across
interstellar or even inter galactic distances. So to power a
light sale, um, the transmitter would need to focus a
beam on it continuously. It would be like wireless transmission
of this energy. Yeah, this this stuff is fascinating, Um,
(26:47):
because there's there's some stuff we're gonna talk about a
little later about attempting to use this kind of technology
here on Earth, and some plans to make use of
it there. And just to back check, really good, this
is a completely um the a radical form of technology. Right,
solar sales are at this time, they're they're in a
drawing board phase. Uh. The idea is that you can
(27:11):
propel a spacecraft or some object through through the ink,
which I like to call space through through the ink,
using the radiation pressure exerted by sunlight on large mirrors.
So you're pushing it with light like you were saying, no,
it's it's turning it into a space sailboat. And a
(27:31):
good analogy would be like a sailboat, where the light
is exerting the force on the mirrors in the same
way that wind would be exerting force on a sail. Yeah,
And in this way, it's almost like a giant laser
giant laser beam. Now, let's keep in mind that whatever
speed an object like this would be traveling at, it
(27:53):
would not be the speed of light. It would be
much much, much much slower. And if there were people
living on that thing to pay on where they were going,
or there were entities living on a thing to pay
on where they were going, then it would be um,
it could very well be something like that sci fi
(28:13):
concept of the arc, you know what I mean, where
the people who actually are keep saying people, where the
entities who actually arrive at the destination or the endpoint
are generations removed from the people who began the journey.
So back to how this power would work. To power
such a thing, the transmitter would need to shoot the
(28:34):
focused beam of this energy at the sale continuously, and
to earthly observers this would appear in the form of
a brief flash caused by the sale and its host planet,
star or galaxy all moving in relation to us relative
to us right, so we wouldn't have a consistent vantage point.
(28:55):
I would also would also wonder if it's possible to
pan on how how this will work out technologically speaking,
I wonder if it's possible for them to just shoot
beams not continually, not continuously, rather but shoot them in
burst to give it, you know, and to give it
(29:16):
a little more thrust, and then maybe even adjust the
sales and hit a burst again if it needs to
make a turn. So as a result of what you
were saying, all that that beam is moving across the sky,
but it only points at us for a for a moment,
you know, like a flashlight in the dark, and repeated
appearances of the beam which are have been observed, right,
(29:38):
it can't really be explained through the normal things like
the death of stars or or the collapse of black
holes or something. These repeated appearances might give us clues
about an artificial origin. Now in the paper they are
very clear to say that this is all speculation, and
other investigators pooh pooh and tut this all the livelong
(30:00):
day and a tiske it they do, they tisk as well.
There's a been a there's a lot of tiscree and
topology going on, because the big question is, again, what
could motivate any sort of society or civilization to produce
signals that are so intense they can be seen from
other galaxies. There was a great line on this, and
(30:21):
I think it was maybe uh Space dot com or
Science News where they said this would be like the
sinking Titanic using a flare gun bright enough to be
seen from Mars, Like what would you what would you do?
And this also reminds me of that that old sci
fi trope, which I think is possible. Uh, you know
(30:46):
where we finally get a signal back from all the
setty stuff we've been we've been sending out there and
all these other radio signals and it's coming from inside
the house. I was gonna say, Um, the actually, the
way the story goes is they get a message back
and it translates to s they'll hear you, which is
I mean, that's the great filter. Right. But but okay,
(31:10):
so we've got the aliens and the big news for
today's episode is the aliens are actually possible? Is that
extraterrestrial thing? From what we understand about physics and the
nature of the universe, Uh, this extraterrestrial angle is possible.
It's not proven, but more and more people are saying,
maybe we are not the best qualified to search for
(31:34):
signs of life. Let's ask our our new, uh quickly
up and coming children of humanity for some help. Let's
throw artificial intelligence into the mix. What are we talking about.
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor. So
(32:00):
on August, astronomers with the Breakthrough Listen Project, which is
a one hundred million dollar project to hunt for Science
of Intelligent alien life. Uh, these folks spot at twenty
one repeating light pulses. Uh, we've been referring to form
this whole episode Fast Radio Bursts f RBS, and they
(32:21):
were emanating from the dwarf galaxy f RB zero two. Um,
and that was all within an hour's time. Right, So
let's talk about Breakthrough Listen for just a second to
to establish what they are. Breakthrough Listen is, according to
its own website, Breakthrough Initiatives dot org, the largest ever
(32:44):
scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth. Uh.
They are searching on a scale that's unprecedented in any
other publicly available uh forums. So they're also being aided
by CETI. They are all in general, Yes, yeah, they are. Uh.
(33:05):
They have been surveying the one million closest stars to Earth,
the center of the galaxy, the galactic plane, and they
listen to they listen for at least messages or signals
from the one galaxies closest to our own, closest to
the Milky Way. So they are not messing around, and
(33:26):
they have they have another program that was a particular
interest to us, Right, Yeah, there's one called breakthrough star
Shot that is actually exactly what we were talking about
in the last section about solar sales and using some
type of light beam like a laser of sorts of
focused energy beam too to send these very tiny, very
(33:47):
very very tiny probes out through space with a solar sale,
um by shooting, by shooting this thing at them. And
it's another thing. Um, this star shot project, just like
the one we talked about before Breakthrough listen is again
a hundred million dollars and maybe it's combined funding. We
haven't actually seen their books, but um, they got a
lot of money from that Uri Milner character, this Russian
(34:08):
born billionaire, and they're talking about you would only have
to aim this beam because of the energy you would
produce at the solar sale for nine minutes. And once
you've done that, then you get this thing up to
roughly twenty of the speed of light and it's just
going to travel out through to some other star system,
maybe to Alpha Centauri, maybe somewhere else like that, um,
(34:32):
just to see what's out there. Proximate B that they're
just gonna send out probes, these tiny little baby probes,
and they're thinking it will take about thirty years roughly
to make this kind of thing happen. And by the way,
billions and billions and billions of dollars, billions and billions
and billions and billions and billions and billions for with
(34:52):
our current technology. They're saying, it's roughly eight point four
billion is what it will be to actually make this
laser beam thing happen. Um in the out dude. The uh,
the area that they would need is roughly a kilometer wide,
um thing to to actually hold this laser to transmit
the light. Yeah. Yeah, And so this this is a
(35:17):
fascinating project. No, like a lot of these ambitious projects,
they're probably if they get to it, they're probably going
to run over their deadline. That's probably not gonna be
in the next thirty years, or at least if it
happens the next thirty years, it'll probably be them working
with someone else. Future historians will rightly think that it's
(35:41):
ridiculous that so many great ideas that are feasible were
held back because of our obsession with generating money. Uh
not the you know, the economy is not the best
plan we've had, but I guess it's got us where
we are so far, right so best of luck to listen,
star Shot and all the folks that break Through. If
(36:02):
you happen to be listening today, would love to interview
you about some of this stuff. So when when I
read about star Shot, one of the things that I
noticed that we should definitely point out is again, this
would be an ARC scenario, you know, like depending on
where they fly to. Yeah, yeah, it's a one way shot.
(36:24):
So these researchers applied machine learning techniques to a data
set from August of the researchers a Breakthrough Listen, led
by a doctoral student named Jerry Young. They wanted to
train this algorithm, which they called a convolutional neural network,
to spot f rbs out of four hundred terabytes of data.
(36:46):
This thing essentially guide intern job look through this and
see if it meets the parameters of this. It's kind
of like the strategy that I T companies used to
optimize search results. You know, if you Google something and
they dug up just from using this approach. An additional
(37:06):
seventy two light flashes. Uh So that brought the total
number of f rbs detected on that day from that
single source to nine three. And it looks like We're
going to see more and more of this sort of
partnership between humans and algorithms. We're gonna have more sophisticated algorithms,
(37:27):
maybe ultimately machine consciousness. Whatever you feel best describes AI
helping us, and it will be significant. However, one thing
that no machine consciousness, no algorithm can tell us yet
is why this would happen, Why why these things would exist.
So the most exciting part of the stories that it
(37:50):
actually could be aliens. We can only say that here's
the tricky part, because no one knows what causes these
fast radio burst The vast majority of people looking into
this are almost certain it is caused by something mundane,
by nature, not technology, like a magnetar, which is something
you'll have to well, a magnetar is cool. Magnetar sounds
(38:12):
it sounds like metal bands, it sounds like it sounds
like it could be a villain. In the seventies kids cartoons,
I am magnetar, yeah, or it sounds like a really
really weird uh here and gone scent instrument from the eighties,
it was like, all right, and we've got you know,
(38:33):
Derek Jeter on magnetar. Well, see, yes, exactly. But a
magnetar is actually just a highly magnetized neutron star magnet
And the thing is this giant star spins on a
millisecond scale, like is spinning so fast that the way
the radiation comes off of it, it could explain why
(38:55):
you'd get this quick burst essentially that then occurs like
nine do something times in a certain span in a
single twenty four hour period. Um, I don't know. It's
just it's really interesting. It's something that could be out there.
It's not exciting, but it would you be okay with
the nicknamed magnetar. Sure, Mac, I want to get a
(39:16):
pow man, all right, to photoshop. I've got to get
some magnets. Are pictures of Matt up, Matt the Magnetar
Frederick So okay, I'll take workshopping. So people are betting
on this mundane explanation. Why is it because they're being
funny duddies sticks in the proverbial mud and sort of,
but not not, that's not the entire reason. See, these
(39:40):
bursts are seeing all across the sky, and that means
that if they're coming from all these different, multiple locations
all the time, that if someone were to build this,
some entity were to build this, they would have been
building tons of them. Like It's like it would be
the universe equivalent of quick trips or mattress firms. You know,
(40:03):
our Starbucks is a better analogy. It's just so much
stuff to build. That's for Earth's worth of just land,
for everything, and for every single one. So how could
if these are aliens, how could they build a network
that size that again is billions of years old and
(40:25):
these are billions of light years apart. How could they
build this sort of thing? Uh? Really, when if you
look at their timeline, they there hasn't been very much
time since the Big Bang from what we know at
this point when these would have had to be constructed,
assuming that they were constructed very very quickly. So even
(40:46):
if you think of a reason for doing this, it's
hard to think of the organization this would be. This
would literally be something spanning the known universe. And also,
we have to look at ourselves. The search for alien
is really at this point kind of a search for ourselves.
Were very narcissistic outfit. You know, we're desperate not to
(41:07):
be alone in the universe, and we have an m O,
we have a pattern, we have a type, we have
historically attributed tons of new new astronomical mysteries to extraterrestrials.
They're multiple examples. Yeah, it's true. A half century ago,
Soviet scientists thought they were pretty sure that quasars were
(41:28):
actually signals being broadcast by advanced societies, uh, in a
galaxy far far away. Well, yeah, because as soon as
we first can detect something on you know, on Earth here,
and it's some kind of strange signal that's repeating, especially
or a signal you know, that appears to come from
a very specific place and and and doesn't stop, then
(41:52):
we we hope it's that it's the thing you're talking about, Ben,
We it's our m o. We we need it so
badly to be something else that we truly thought that's
what quasars were. They were somebody's sending out radio signals.
And in the nineteen sixties they even like referred to
them as little green men, right, And that's I mean,
in in a hope that maybe we'll get to meet them.
(42:12):
I know this is something that's been discussed, but I
think it's so funny that historically we always expect that
aliens from another galaxy far far away are gonna like
communicate with us on our terms in some way, you know,
or like through methods that we can understand. I think
that's always a funny misnowmen, where we think we're kind
of at the center of the university and they're they're great. Uh,
(42:33):
they're great and truly mean this noble uh. Research initiatives
going on to to figure out how best to communicate
with a non human entity. And one of the one
of the weirdest analogs we have now is communication with
maritime invertebrates, you know, the octopus, the swid, the cuttle fish.
(42:56):
In the octopus case especially, there's some of the most
intelligent non mammals that we know of the the closest
thing we have two aliens that are intelligent and they're great.
Thank god they don't have spines and they don't really
live very long, because otherwise we we would be eventually
(43:19):
possibly sharing sharing the planet with the sapient species. Oh,
by the way, there is a I think a European
country maybe Germany, recently granted legal personhood to chimpanzees dolphins. Yeah,
we talked about that years ago, but so maybe those
are sapients as well. So now we know ave Lobe
(43:44):
and his team are correct and that it is possible,
uh to be is possible that some civilization who had
its ducks in way better rows than our civilization could
have built something that would propel spacecraft to travel between
the stars into the ink, kind of like a space
(44:06):
age version of Noah's Ark. But possible is not always plausible.
And the big question here is one of motivation. So
so what do you think? Let us know? Also, while
we're at it, should we be encouraging the attention of
extra terrestrials? That's the big question. The late Stephen Hawkins
was very much against the idea of encountering extraterrestrials on
(44:30):
our home turf. Also, yeah, we're biased because we communicate
through sound and sight, right, what about an entity that
just communicates through senses we don't have or senses they're
less important to us, like smell, you know what I mean?
The feeling that the best job of exploring that is arrival,
because there was like the language barrier with those aliens
and it was much more of a visual language than
(44:51):
it was And I mean, I can't remember exactly, but
that was a good one in terms of like this
expectation of being able to communicate one to one with
the aliens, and they were like yeah, yeah, yeah yeah,
and read the book to read this story. Ted Chang
wrote that he is man, he has great I've been
reading a lot of Um. I've been writing or reading
(45:13):
a lot more sci fi recently, I even more than usual.
I recently read one called The Three Body Problem. Uh.
It's hard science fiction by a Chinese writer. Highly recommend it.
If you're interested part of a trilogy those watch out,
you'll get sucked in. So tell us aliens as we
stay here in the south, or your firum ery gain
um and uh, let's see. They're all sorts of ways
(45:35):
that you can tell us you are opinion. You can
give us a phone call, Yeah we are one three
three std w y t K, leave a message you
might get on the show. You can also do the
old Facebook internetty thing with our Facebook group, which is
what we kind of pitch is the best way to
get ahold of us and the amazing community of listeners
(45:56):
that you guys are a part of by very nature.
Just listening this show right now, you can find that
at here. It's where it gets crazy. All you have
to do is. I think answer a simple question, which
is like when name one of our names, or if
you get really clever and creative, are awesome? Mods tend
to screenshot those and send them to us, and you're
gonna get in if you just say something creative and
(46:16):
do a nod in a way to something from the show,
and we love that. Make us laugh. We're a pushovers.
We're an easy crowd. You should see us at comedy shows.
We do a lot for stand up comics. Uh confidence, yes, hey,
and everyone prepare yourselves. Black Mirror has a new season
coming out really soon on Netflix. Serious. Yeah, the inside
scoop on this. I know what's coming to June. I
think that's awesome. I can't wait. Nice. I hope we
(46:38):
do some more choose your own adventure stuff, which is
brilliant for Netflix's algorithms, So you can find us there.
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter, and
if none of that quite bags or badgers, you can
email us directly. We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com.
(47:00):
M H. Stuff They Don't Want You to Know is
a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i heart radio, app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:24):
to the show. My name is Max, my name is
they call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Michig. Controlled deconds. Most importantly, you
are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. At the very end
of a whirlwind week as we record this, so as
we've been doing recently, we just want to check in
(00:46):
with each other. Matt, how's it, how's it going? Let's
go really well. Just finished an interview with John Douglas,
the FBI profiler from mind Hunter, about Wayne Williams. It
was awesome, nice, nice, looking forward to hearing that. Know,
how are you doing? Okay? Um me and you had
a little bit of a Chicago adventure doing stuff for
ad sales and I just got back. I want to
(01:08):
learn more about that. What we basically just present kind
of a faux podcast for advertisers so they understand how
add ads work and podcasting. Because you think it'd be obvious,
but a lot of people don't really. You know, old
school marketers are more into like radio and like television
and more traditional forms of advertising. So we literally do
a kind of pretend podcast with panelists who are executives
(01:29):
in our company, and then you go and some are
great on Mike, which is yeah. And you know, the
week before that, I was in Texas, uh doing it,
doing a similar thing. So we've been we've been on
the road, and I think, well, I think all of
us will end up traveling over the summer. But of
course the best part of this crazy job is getting
(01:49):
together to hang out with with you three in the
studio and all of you listening to Day. But if
you say I love listening show, I also love communicating
in my own way. You know, I I have ears,
but I also have a voice, and I have something
to say. We have got your back. You can call
us directly. We are one eight three three st d
(02:13):
w y t K. Leave a message. You've got three minutes,
and if it takes more than that, just call back
and feel free to get weird with it. If you
don't want us to use your name, make sure to
say that in the message. Today's question are we alone?
This is one of the most profound, disquietening, fundamental questions
(02:35):
of the human species, and since before the dawn of
recorded history, we have explored this question via stories, theories, myths,
and legends about what could be out there on the
edges of the map, or what could be out there
in the stars, even before we understood exactly what uh
galaxies and solar systems and stars are actually like. And
(02:59):
it's an interesting it's an interesting evolution, right, because we've
talked about this in the past and episodes on UFO
abductions and fay culture, right, and the whole idea of changelings.
The characters of our myths and our folklore are not
set in stone, not near as much as we we
sometimes think we had for thousands and thousands and thousands
(03:23):
of years legends about demons and angels and supernatural beings,
and now we still have these same sorts of phenomena
occurring in our oral traditions, but the stories have shifted
from from the fay or the fair folk, true stories
about extraterrestrials, extra dimensional entities and so on. And if
(03:44):
you look back at those stories, the fascinating thing is
the story of an alien abduction. Aside from the window dressing,
it mirrors beat by beat the story of being abducted
by the l or faith folk, you know, pulling a
Van Winkle. But the the ideas, we were always looking
(04:05):
for intelligent non human species, something very different from us,
that shared one fundamental trait sapiens wisdom, sentience. This search
continues today. Spoiler alert. You will run into many people
who feel like they have cracked the case, but they're not.
Everyone agrees with them. Yeah, it's true. And the search
(04:27):
actually in real life continues today. And what is it now?
Keep losing track? Yeah? Uh? And some people really thought
that we'd found an answer to this question unequivocally, but
then something happened. Well what happened? Here are the facts.
So starting in two thousand seven, uh, there are these
(04:49):
things called fast radio bursts that radio astronomers started to detect.
It's a phenomena. It's different. It's very different from other
types of radio waves that are intercepted by some of
the instruments that we use, like the one you guys
went out to the Green Bank out in West Virginia
and the Radio Quiet Zone. Those things are always looking
(05:09):
and they'll find things well. In particular, these are called
fast radio bursts. Let's give you the story behind it.
There's an astronomer named Duncan Lorimer and his student David Narkovic,
and they found the first official fast radio burst when
they were looking for pulsar data. So they're looking for
that and they end up coming across this weird little thing,
(05:29):
this quick little millisecond first. Uh, and they're like, man,
what the heck is that stuff? Oh, And then Duncan says,
let's call it a Lormer burst. They are They are
commonly called Lormer burst, but we don't know how how
it went down like that. You're right, Matt. It's it's
typically gonna last one too, maybe maybe a few more milliseconds.
(05:53):
And it's also a transient pulse. That's important because that
means we cannot predict where these things will occur, which
which comes into our story in a big way. Uh.
And since we can't predict where they occur, we don't
know when to look for them or where to look
for them, And we also don't know what causes them.
(06:14):
We just know that they are one of the largest
discharges of energy that we have witnessed. And it's so
weird to think that they're that large. But they only occur,
or at least we only measure them in these tiny moments.
It's literally like the blink of an eye. One of
these objects can let loose as much energy as the
Sun puts out in an entire year. Let's say that
(06:36):
doesn't impress Let's just say that, but that would be
weird if it didn't. But you know, if you're a
really hard sell, it's also enough energy to run, Oh,
a little thing called humanity. Ever heard of it? The
human race, civilization as we know it's. Yeah, run humanity,
not in ancient times, but run twenty nineteen uh, human
(06:59):
life across the in it for ten trillion years uh,
without any change in its strength or any variants over time,
which is impressive. But that's that's also telling us that
there's no gearing up to whatever is causing this, you
know what I mean. We don't see arise the peak
that Matt's talking about there all over the sky. They're
(07:22):
not concentrated on the plane of the Milky Way. They're
also very very very very far away. And that's why,
despite being so powerful, the strength of the signal reaching
Earth is actually one thousand times less than the signal
that would come from a mobile phone on the moon
trying to call one eight three three S T D
(07:42):
W Y t K. But feel free to give it
a shot if you want. Just think about that. The
moon is so far away half of us can't get
service in like the airport, so that so it's amazing
that's something like green Bank can sense a signal that's small,
and the only reason we can, since this signal from
(08:03):
billions of light years away, is because it is so powerful.
On the CETI website, they describe the actual energy that's
being measured by our instruments to detect one of these
is less than the energy you would take for an
ant to move its leg, basically the the amount of
a TP that that would take. That's what they're detecting.
(08:24):
It's smaller than that. And yet because it's so small,
we can we understand because of the distance how strong
it is. That that's mind blowing to me. So what
could be doing this? These are happening now as you listen.
These are happening now. We don't know how many are
occurring because the way we end up finding them. People
have proposed a number of possible explanations, and the big
(08:49):
ones right now would be it's a black hole. It's
it's just it's something with a black hole. And then
someone else says, no, that's malarkey, that's space age malarkey.
It's obviously rotating neutron stark, all right, And and more
people come in, uh no hashtag no sukalos and say
it's extraterrestrial life. Yeah, it sounds like a special dressing. Yes,
(09:12):
I'll have the I'll have the cops salad six the sucalos.
But this is pretty strange stuff, right. I mean, we
have to stress that these are not live events because
they're billions of light years away. That means, if we
look at a timeline, this occurred a long, long, long
long time ago and took the speed of light to travel.
(09:34):
Here reminds me of that episode of the Adventures of
Pete and Pete where there is an alien character that's
in the school and um, they're obsessed throughout the episode
about Johnny Unitis and this football game that gets transmitted
and it takes like years for this alien kids civilization
to see the broadcast because it's and so they're only
(09:55):
just now seeing it. And they think Johnny Unitis is
like this current. You know it's are because they're like
seeing it because it takes that long for radio waves
to travel through space. It also reminds me of this
may be a deep cut to some of us, but
I've recently rewatched this and the nostalgia made me love it.
Do you guys remember that film Explorers. It's like those
(10:15):
three kids build a spaceship. Yeah, Chuck, I mentioned it
on movie Crashing. I've never seen it or even heard
of it, and I looked it up briefly and it
was sort of a contemporary with like flight of a
navigator like kind of that. Also the main characters named Ben,
but they get these dreams from what turns out to
be a UFOs and I won't turns out to be aliens. Sorry.
(10:39):
UFO could be anything, right, it can be a hot
air balloon. But this, this is important for our purposes
because just like you're talking about with that uh, that
gap in time in transit of information, the aliens in
that film are also fascinated with very old television and
radio programs that made it out there in space, and
(11:02):
it's an endearing story. Unfortunately, the science is a little
tougher because as as those signals travel from Earth, they
tend to dissipate and they can get lost in the background.
Noise man, Are you're saying that Pete and Pete got
it wrong? Then I'm saying that you know they're no
Bill Nye. That's fair. I think it's unfair. I actually
(11:23):
missed the Pete and Pete but one of uh, one
of my friends, one of our mutual friends actually is
uh still head over heels or I should say over
the moon for this show for Pete and Pete's right,
and let us know if you liked Pete and Pete,
that's one where the one kid had the tattoo, right,
yea Petunia, you can make a dance. It's also the
first place I ever heard of who Iggy Pop was
(11:44):
because he was in the show. He played none as
Dad and he would just build in the credits as
Iggy Pop. I'm like, what kind of name for a
person is Iggy Pop? And then it turns out he's
this total crazy anarchist punk rock guy. That's like that
guy the main actor in Young Einstein. His name was
Yahoo Serious And that was the breaking point for me
(12:05):
as a child when I was like, hmmm, I think
sometimes people in Hollywood don't use their real names, but
but yes, this is this is strange stuff. It's not
it's not live. We're we're getting these details way after
they happened. And additionally, our searches were largely not live
because we were, Matt, as you said, we were going
(12:27):
through this archive data. So what Duncan Lormer found was
information that he pulled from a survey of different pulsars,
and it just happened to contain this information of what
we now call f s B s. And the thing was,
as soon as we found one back in oh seven,
(12:48):
we started finding more and more by astronomers and places
around the world had found sixteen. And as they were
discovering more detecting more, scientists began to realize that there
must be more to this fast radio burst thing than
they originally thought. So by two thousand twelve, Victoria Caspy
(13:11):
of McGill University figured that as many as ten thousand
fast bursts occur every single day across the sky. And
yes they're powerful, um but they're also incredibly short, and
that's why they're very difficult to catch, except when they repeat.
(13:33):
Oh and we'll learn about that right after a word
from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. It's called
this part of the episode. Don't call it a comeback
just because that's a cool phrase. In November of astronomer
named Paul Scholes at McGill University in Canada found ten
(13:57):
and there's a quote here, non periodically repeated fast radio
pulses in archival data gathered in May and June by
their Cebo radio telescope. So these ten bursts that he
discovered have dispersion measures and sky positions consistent with the
(14:18):
original burst, which was called f RB one to one
oh two that was detected back in two thousand and twelve.
This means that this series of bursts, unlike any other
radio burst discovered beforehand. It's repeating from the same place,
the same massive discharge of energy is happening over and
(14:42):
over again. And what they also figured out was that
like the burst the original burst, in each of these
emissions has a plasma dispersion measure that is a full
three times larger than anything possible for any source within
(15:05):
the Milky Way galaxy. That means that whatever this is
is so far away it's not even in our galaxy
and it's happening, Uh at least you know, ten or
eleven times, probably more that we haven't caught this. This team,
Schultz's team thinks that finding this rules out self destructive
(15:28):
cataclysmic event, you know, like the kind of trick that
can only happen once, like a magician actually sawing someone
in half. Well, yeah, it's like it reminds me of
just an explosion right when you're when you're thinking about
that amount of energy that gets released. If you think
about the the impact wave or the wave that gets
sent out whenever there's a massive explosion here on Earth,
(15:49):
like um, that wave is essentially what that radio burst
would be once it reaches Earth. That's what we're what
you're thinking. So you can only have that one time
with the initial explosion or when when a stark lapses
into a black hole, you get that initial burst of
energy that would be sent out. But like you said,
been it doesn't happen over and over and over and
over again, at least not with those kinds of explosions
(16:10):
that that happened out in the cosmos. Right, you explode
a star, it's gone, and the thing is to other
folks This meant that there might just be some intelligence
um manipulating, directing actively causing these fast radio bursts, which
is mind boggling and the implications. But this one burst
(16:31):
is not or this one location burst is not the
only example. Quite recently, this year January twenty nineteen, as
we call it on this planet, astronomers discovered a second
source of repeating fast radio bursts. They named this one,
uh fast radio burst one eight zero eight one four.
They're not being they're being super specific with the names,
(16:54):
and they have a system, but it's not as anthropomorphological
as naming hurricanes, right. And this was found at a
place called the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment or CHIME,
which is way better named than f RBO one four.
So they found six bursts between August and October, consistent
(17:16):
with origination from a single position in the sky. This
meant that this discovery was still very very recent for
our society. Uh. This meant that just in in less
than in less than fifteen years, they had found things
(17:38):
that were fundamentally changing their understanding of what these bursts were.
Because when they detected this stuff, they said, well, we
found one and we thought that might have been exceptional,
But now we found two that are exhibiting the same traits.
We think there may be a substantial population of points,
(17:58):
specific points in the Uni verse that were billions of
years ago omitting these massive bursts of energy for milliseconds
at a time. And yeah, what in the heck could
cause that? Get to the aliens. Get it's time for
the aliens. We're all waiting for it. So some researchers
have argued that the mysterious phenomena called fast radio burst
(18:20):
could be evidence of advanced alien tech. Specifically, the argument
is that the most um I would say, the most
academic argument, the most sophisticated argument is that these bursts
maybe energy leakage from planet sized transmitters that are powering
interstellar probes. Yeah. This comes to us from a guy
(18:42):
named Ave Loebe at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
and he had to deal with we've we've talked about
this before. He had to deal with some opprobrium and
some uh some side, some side, I at the very
least from his colleagues in this discipline. Because often in
the volunted halls of ivory towers, certain types of research
(19:05):
are considered off limits or fundamentally um wrongheaded. Yeah, there
we go. Wrongheaded. Oh that's an old Bush administration quote.
Wrong Headed hit the mainstream during the Bush administration as
a way to say not that something was factually inaccurate,
(19:25):
but that it was dumb to talk about it. So
someone would say like, well, you know, it turned out
there were no weapons best destruction in a rock, and
someone else would go, you know, that is wrongheaded, because
why don't just say wrong before dumb. It's like a
very diplomatic, couched kind of term, right, And it's also
removing removing response responsible from yes for the fact that
(19:49):
whatever they're saying is true. You just don't think it's
right headed. But no one ever said right headed either.
It's just wrong headed. But yeah, so so obvious. Loop
and team have to have to deal with some criticism,
a little bit of controversy. But their defense for this was,
you know, they said, look, we're not we're not crazy
people anymore crazy or unstable than the average astrophysicist. We
(20:13):
think there's nothing wrong with this question, and they explained it,
uh the following way. We've got a great quotation from them.
Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration
and origin at great distances, and we haven't identified a
possible natural source with any confidence, and artificial origin is
worth contemplating and checking. That's it. It's just saying no, not,
(20:37):
it's not a dumb question. It's worth looking into it. Yeah.
And and in the article from the Smithsonian, the Harvard
Smithsonian Center where they're talking about that, they you know,
they make a great point of sciences about checking a
hypothesis and deciding whether or not there's enough evidence to
support that, and then can you repeat it right? And
in this case, I think we do ourselves as humanity
(20:59):
a disservice if we completely throw this out the window,
rather than at least checking a box and saying, okay,
well it's not this thing, but let's at least conceptualize
what it could be if it were absolutely absolutely That's
how investigations and research work. I was personally. You can
find a paper online, read the full paper, and it's
(21:20):
pretty fascinating. I was personally um persuaded by the possibility
of this. They built a pretty defensible argument. So Loeb
has a co author, a guy named u Monosity Lingham
is from Harvard, and what they looked at was just
the feasibility of something. Is it possible to build something
(21:41):
that could do this, that could create this much energy?
And keep in mind when you're learning about this, that
this is within our understanding on this planet of how
physics works overall, and exactly how the what the limits
of technology are, right, because if someone were building something
that could create uh fast radio burst, they would be
(22:02):
on a way different position in the kardashianv scale. So
here's what they found. They said, Okay, could you build
a radio transmitter strong enough to give even that very
very weak signal to us this far away? And they said,
you know, if the transmitter were solar powered, it would
(22:22):
have to be absorbing sunlight on an area of a
planet twice the size of Earth. And if so, think
about the total land massive Earth. Multiply that by two.
If you took all the sunlight that was falling on
that much land, you would generate enough Again, from my
(22:43):
our understanding, you would generate enough power to uh to
make this thing kind of happen. So you would have
to construct it. That's the other thing. How would you
construct something that is two Earth's worth of fully functioned
solar power? Right? And I would I would just argue that,
(23:04):
you know, I'm look, I'm no Harvard Smithsonian physicist here,
but if you're talking about Kardashian scale, then maybe you're
talking about, you know, something that could harness the entire
power of a star. You know, what are those things
called Dyson spheres? Uh? You know, it wouldn't have to
be the planet that's absorbing the sunlight. It could be
(23:27):
the thing that's absorbing the star. You just in general, right, right, anyway,
cut out the middleman. Yeah, I'm just saying that's a
very good argument. Well they so they said, okay, we
know that our species can't build that yet, but according
to the laws of physics as we understand them, it
is possible to build that. And they also said, okay,
(23:49):
well all right, we know energy wise it's possible. But
if we built this transmitter, how how can we actually
make it work? From an engineering perspective, which of people forget.
And that's one of the most important things in any
construction project, whether we're talking autonomous vehicles and space shuttles
or a good a good paper clip, you know what
(24:11):
I mean. So, if you're an engineer out there listening,
thank you so much. Thanks for saving the show clip.
It's just such a perfect object. I'm a flexible straw fan. Yeah,
I'm easily We're talking about this earlier. I think I
am so easily impressed by small, smart inventions. Um I
feel about crazy straws. I love them too crazy for me,
(24:31):
too crazy. They're definitely a statement. Yeah, they just make
me uncomfortable. And someone who's like, I want all this
soda eventually, but not all at once. I wanted to
be a drink and a form of entertainment. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
It's like someone saw the board game mouse Trap and
they said, what if I could put that between me
and everything I drink? So let's talk about the transmitter.
(24:55):
That was like, so, what happens if you can even
build one of these things? If your harness that Yes,
from the engineering perspective, how could you make something like
this work without immediately burning itself up in a fiery inferno?
You know you would be you would be capable of
keeping it running from multiple uses. According to this paper,
(25:17):
if you've created a water cooled device that was also
twice the size of Earth, so we're four earths deep now,
to make one location that could send uh f RB
fast radio burst and then that's that's just the fact. Okay,
so that's the crazy news. There's no proof that happened,
(25:38):
but it is technically possible, right, that's technically correct. Someone
say the best kind of correct to say that a
civilization that was way better than us could could potentially
build it. But it doesn't answer the biggest question, why
would you build this? Yeah? Why the hell would you
double size the Earth with all that water and all
(26:00):
that just land mass to gather solar energy and then
make a giant radio burs Why? Why the hell would
you do that? How about powering interstellar light sales? There
would go about that? What is that? Yeah, that's a
good question. Um. So the amount of power that it's
involved in such a device would be enough to push
a million tons of payload, or about twenty times the
(26:23):
largest cruise ship on Earth. And uh, here's a quote
from Lingham that's big enough to carry living passengers across
interstellar or even inter galactic distances. So to power a
light sale, um, the transmitter would need to focus a
beam on it continuously. It would be like wireless transmission
of this energy. Yeah, this this stuff is fascinating, Um,
(26:47):
because there's there's some stuff we're gonna talk about a
little later about attempting to use this kind of technology
here on Earth, and some plans to make use of
it there. And just to back check, really good, this
is a completely um the a radical form of technology. Right,
solar sales are at this time, they're they're in a
drawing board phase. Uh. The idea is that you can
(27:11):
propel a spacecraft or some object through through the ink,
which I like to call space through through the ink,
using the radiation pressure exerted by sunlight on large mirrors.
So you're pushing it with light like you were saying, no,
it's it's turning it into a space sailboat. And a
(27:31):
good analogy would be like a sailboat, where the light
is exerting the force on the mirrors in the same
way that wind would be exerting force on a sail. Yeah,
And in this way, it's almost like a giant laser
giant laser beam. Now, let's keep in mind that whatever
speed an object like this would be traveling at, it
(27:53):
would not be the speed of light. It would be
much much, much much slower. And if there were people
living on that thing to pay on where they were going,
or there were entities living on a thing to pay
on where they were going, then it would be um,
it could very well be something like that sci fi
(28:13):
concept of the arc, you know what I mean, where
the people who actually are keep saying people, where the
entities who actually arrive at the destination or the endpoint
are generations removed from the people who began the journey.
So back to how this power would work. To power
such a thing, the transmitter would need to shoot the
(28:34):
focused beam of this energy at the sale continuously, and
to earthly observers this would appear in the form of
a brief flash caused by the sale and its host planet,
star or galaxy all moving in relation to us relative
to us right, so we wouldn't have a consistent vantage point.
(28:55):
I would also would also wonder if it's possible to
pan on how how this will work out technologically speaking,
I wonder if it's possible for them to just shoot
beams not continually, not continuously, rather but shoot them in
burst to give it, you know, and to give it
(29:16):
a little more thrust, and then maybe even adjust the
sales and hit a burst again if it needs to
make a turn. So as a result of what you
were saying, all that that beam is moving across the sky,
but it only points at us for a for a moment,
you know, like a flashlight in the dark, and repeated
appearances of the beam which are have been observed, right,
(29:38):
it can't really be explained through the normal things like
the death of stars or or the collapse of black
holes or something. These repeated appearances might give us clues
about an artificial origin. Now in the paper they are
very clear to say that this is all speculation, and
other investigators pooh pooh and tut this all the livelong
(30:00):
day and a tiske it they do, they tisk as well.
There's a been a there's a lot of tiscree and
topology going on, because the big question is, again, what
could motivate any sort of society or civilization to produce
signals that are so intense they can be seen from
other galaxies. There was a great line on this, and
(30:21):
I think it was maybe uh Space dot com or
Science News where they said this would be like the
sinking Titanic using a flare gun bright enough to be
seen from Mars, Like what would you what would you do?
And this also reminds me of that that old sci
fi trope, which I think is possible. Uh, you know
(30:46):
where we finally get a signal back from all the
setty stuff we've been we've been sending out there and
all these other radio signals and it's coming from inside
the house. I was gonna say, Um, the actually, the
way the story goes is they get a message back
and it translates to s they'll hear you, which is
I mean, that's the great filter. Right. But but okay,
(31:10):
so we've got the aliens and the big news for
today's episode is the aliens are actually possible? Is that
extraterrestrial thing? From what we understand about physics and the
nature of the universe, Uh, this extraterrestrial angle is possible.
It's not proven, but more and more people are saying,
maybe we are not the best qualified to search for
(31:34):
signs of life. Let's ask our our new, uh quickly
up and coming children of humanity for some help. Let's
throw artificial intelligence into the mix. What are we talking about.
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor. So
(32:00):
on August, astronomers with the Breakthrough Listen Project, which is
a one hundred million dollar project to hunt for Science
of Intelligent alien life. Uh, these folks spot at twenty
one repeating light pulses. Uh, we've been referring to form
this whole episode Fast Radio Bursts f RBS, and they
(32:21):
were emanating from the dwarf galaxy f RB zero two. Um,
and that was all within an hour's time. Right, So
let's talk about Breakthrough Listen for just a second to
to establish what they are. Breakthrough Listen is, according to
its own website, Breakthrough Initiatives dot org, the largest ever
(32:44):
scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth. Uh.
They are searching on a scale that's unprecedented in any
other publicly available uh forums. So they're also being aided
by CETI. They are all in general, Yes, yeah, they are. Uh.
(33:05):
They have been surveying the one million closest stars to Earth,
the center of the galaxy, the galactic plane, and they
listen to they listen for at least messages or signals
from the one galaxies closest to our own, closest to
the Milky Way. So they are not messing around, and
(33:26):
they have they have another program that was a particular
interest to us, Right, Yeah, there's one called breakthrough star
Shot that is actually exactly what we were talking about
in the last section about solar sales and using some
type of light beam like a laser of sorts of
focused energy beam too to send these very tiny, very
(33:47):
very very tiny probes out through space with a solar sale,
um by shooting, by shooting this thing at them. And
it's another thing. Um, this star shot project, just like
the one we talked about before Breakthrough listen is again
a hundred million dollars and maybe it's combined funding. We
haven't actually seen their books, but um, they got a
lot of money from that Uri Milner character, this Russian
(34:08):
born billionaire, and they're talking about you would only have
to aim this beam because of the energy you would
produce at the solar sale for nine minutes. And once
you've done that, then you get this thing up to
roughly twenty of the speed of light and it's just
going to travel out through to some other star system,
maybe to Alpha Centauri, maybe somewhere else like that, um,
(34:32):
just to see what's out there. Proximate B that they're
just gonna send out probes, these tiny little baby probes,
and they're thinking it will take about thirty years roughly
to make this kind of thing happen. And by the way,
billions and billions and billions of dollars, billions and billions
and billions and billions and billions and billions for with
(34:52):
our current technology. They're saying, it's roughly eight point four
billion is what it will be to actually make this
laser beam thing happen. Um in the out dude. The uh,
the area that they would need is roughly a kilometer wide,
um thing to to actually hold this laser to transmit
the light. Yeah. Yeah, And so this this is a
(35:17):
fascinating project. No, like a lot of these ambitious projects,
they're probably if they get to it, they're probably going
to run over their deadline. That's probably not gonna be
in the next thirty years, or at least if it
happens the next thirty years, it'll probably be them working
with someone else. Future historians will rightly think that it's
(35:41):
ridiculous that so many great ideas that are feasible were
held back because of our obsession with generating money. Uh
not the you know, the economy is not the best
plan we've had, but I guess it's got us where
we are so far, right so best of luck to listen,
star Shot and all the folks that break Through. If
(36:02):
you happen to be listening today, would love to interview
you about some of this stuff. So when when I
read about star Shot, one of the things that I
noticed that we should definitely point out is again, this
would be an ARC scenario, you know, like depending on
where they fly to. Yeah, yeah, it's a one way shot.
(36:24):
So these researchers applied machine learning techniques to a data
set from August of the researchers a Breakthrough Listen, led
by a doctoral student named Jerry Young. They wanted to
train this algorithm, which they called a convolutional neural network,
to spot f rbs out of four hundred terabytes of data.
(36:46):
This thing essentially guide intern job look through this and
see if it meets the parameters of this. It's kind
of like the strategy that I T companies used to
optimize search results. You know, if you Google something and
they dug up just from using this approach. An additional
(37:06):
seventy two light flashes. Uh So that brought the total
number of f rbs detected on that day from that
single source to nine three. And it looks like We're
going to see more and more of this sort of
partnership between humans and algorithms. We're gonna have more sophisticated algorithms,
(37:27):
maybe ultimately machine consciousness. Whatever you feel best describes AI
helping us, and it will be significant. However, one thing
that no machine consciousness, no algorithm can tell us yet
is why this would happen, Why why these things would exist.
So the most exciting part of the stories that it
(37:50):
actually could be aliens. We can only say that here's
the tricky part, because no one knows what causes these
fast radio burst The vast majority of people looking into
this are almost certain it is caused by something mundane,
by nature, not technology, like a magnetar, which is something
you'll have to well, a magnetar is cool. Magnetar sounds
(38:12):
it sounds like metal bands, it sounds like it sounds
like it could be a villain. In the seventies kids cartoons,
I am magnetar, yeah, or it sounds like a really
really weird uh here and gone scent instrument from the eighties,
it was like, all right, and we've got you know,
(38:33):
Derek Jeter on magnetar. Well, see, yes, exactly. But a
magnetar is actually just a highly magnetized neutron star magnet
And the thing is this giant star spins on a
millisecond scale, like is spinning so fast that the way
the radiation comes off of it, it could explain why
(38:55):
you'd get this quick burst essentially that then occurs like
nine do something times in a certain span in a
single twenty four hour period. Um, I don't know. It's
just it's really interesting. It's something that could be out there.
It's not exciting, but it would you be okay with
the nicknamed magnetar. Sure, Mac, I want to get a
(39:16):
pow man, all right, to photoshop. I've got to get
some magnets. Are pictures of Matt up, Matt the Magnetar
Frederick So okay, I'll take workshopping. So people are betting
on this mundane explanation. Why is it because they're being
funny duddies sticks in the proverbial mud and sort of,
but not not, that's not the entire reason. See, these
(39:40):
bursts are seeing all across the sky, and that means
that if they're coming from all these different, multiple locations
all the time, that if someone were to build this,
some entity were to build this, they would have been
building tons of them. Like It's like it would be
the universe equivalent of quick trips or mattress firms. You know,
(40:03):
our Starbucks is a better analogy. It's just so much
stuff to build. That's for Earth's worth of just land,
for everything, and for every single one. So how could
if these are aliens, how could they build a network
that size that again is billions of years old and
(40:25):
these are billions of light years apart. How could they
build this sort of thing? Uh? Really, when if you
look at their timeline, they there hasn't been very much
time since the Big Bang from what we know at
this point when these would have had to be constructed,
assuming that they were constructed very very quickly. So even
(40:46):
if you think of a reason for doing this, it's
hard to think of the organization this would be. This
would literally be something spanning the known universe. And also,
we have to look at ourselves. The search for alien
is really at this point kind of a search for ourselves.
Were very narcissistic outfit. You know, we're desperate not to
(41:07):
be alone in the universe, and we have an m O,
we have a pattern, we have a type, we have
historically attributed tons of new new astronomical mysteries to extraterrestrials.
They're multiple examples. Yeah, it's true. A half century ago,
Soviet scientists thought they were pretty sure that quasars were
(41:28):
actually signals being broadcast by advanced societies, uh, in a
galaxy far far away. Well, yeah, because as soon as
we first can detect something on you know, on Earth here,
and it's some kind of strange signal that's repeating, especially
or a signal you know, that appears to come from
a very specific place and and and doesn't stop, then
(41:52):
we we hope it's that it's the thing you're talking about, Ben,
We it's our m o. We we need it so
badly to be something else that we truly thought that's
what quasars were. They were somebody's sending out radio signals.
And in the nineteen sixties they even like referred to
them as little green men, right, And that's I mean,
in in a hope that maybe we'll get to meet them.
(42:12):
I know this is something that's been discussed, but I
think it's so funny that historically we always expect that
aliens from another galaxy far far away are gonna like
communicate with us on our terms in some way, you know,
or like through methods that we can understand. I think
that's always a funny misnowmen, where we think we're kind
of at the center of the university and they're they're great. Uh,
(42:33):
they're great and truly mean this noble uh. Research initiatives
going on to to figure out how best to communicate
with a non human entity. And one of the one
of the weirdest analogs we have now is communication with
maritime invertebrates, you know, the octopus, the swid, the cuttle fish.
(42:56):
In the octopus case especially, there's some of the most
intelligent non mammals that we know of the the closest
thing we have two aliens that are intelligent and they're great.
Thank god they don't have spines and they don't really
live very long, because otherwise we we would be eventually
(43:19):
possibly sharing sharing the planet with the sapient species. Oh,
by the way, there is a I think a European
country maybe Germany, recently granted legal personhood to chimpanzees dolphins. Yeah,
we talked about that years ago, but so maybe those
are sapients as well. So now we know ave Lobe
(43:44):
and his team are correct and that it is possible,
uh to be is possible that some civilization who had
its ducks in way better rows than our civilization could
have built something that would propel spacecraft to travel between
the stars into the ink, kind of like a space
(44:06):
age version of Noah's Ark. But possible is not always plausible.
And the big question here is one of motivation. So
so what do you think? Let us know? Also, while
we're at it, should we be encouraging the attention of
extra terrestrials? That's the big question. The late Stephen Hawkins
was very much against the idea of encountering extraterrestrials on
(44:30):
our home turf. Also, yeah, we're biased because we communicate
through sound and sight, right, what about an entity that
just communicates through senses we don't have or senses they're
less important to us, like smell, you know what I mean?
The feeling that the best job of exploring that is arrival,
because there was like the language barrier with those aliens
and it was much more of a visual language than
(44:51):
it was And I mean, I can't remember exactly, but
that was a good one in terms of like this
expectation of being able to communicate one to one with
the aliens, and they were like yeah, yeah, yeah yeah,
and read the book to read this story. Ted Chang
wrote that he is man, he has great I've been
reading a lot of Um. I've been writing or reading
(45:13):
a lot more sci fi recently, I even more than usual.
I recently read one called The Three Body Problem. Uh.
It's hard science fiction by a Chinese writer. Highly recommend it.
If you're interested part of a trilogy those watch out,
you'll get sucked in. So tell us aliens as we
stay here in the south, or your firum ery gain
um and uh, let's see. They're all sorts of ways
(45:35):
that you can tell us you are opinion. You can
give us a phone call, Yeah we are one three
three std w y t K, leave a message you
might get on the show. You can also do the
old Facebook internetty thing with our Facebook group, which is
what we kind of pitch is the best way to
get ahold of us and the amazing community of listeners
(45:56):
that you guys are a part of by very nature.
Just listening this show right now, you can find that
at here. It's where it gets crazy. All you have
to do is. I think answer a simple question, which
is like when name one of our names, or if
you get really clever and creative, are awesome? Mods tend
to screenshot those and send them to us, and you're
gonna get in if you just say something creative and
(46:16):
do a nod in a way to something from the show,
and we love that. Make us laugh. We're a pushovers.
We're an easy crowd. You should see us at comedy shows.
We do a lot for stand up comics. Uh confidence, yes, hey,
and everyone prepare yourselves. Black Mirror has a new season
coming out really soon on Netflix. Serious. Yeah, the inside
scoop on this. I know what's coming to June. I
think that's awesome. I can't wait. Nice. I hope we
(46:38):
do some more choose your own adventure stuff, which is
brilliant for Netflix's algorithms, So you can find us there.
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter, and
if none of that quite bags or badgers, you can
email us directly. We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com.
(47:00):
M H. Stuff They Don't Want You to Know is
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