ADAM FRANK-LITTLE BOOK OF ALIENS

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Episode Transcript

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This is later with Lee Matthews theLee Matthews Podcast more what You Hear weekday
afternoons on the Drive. His nameis Adam Frank and he is a self
professed as alien optimist, but he'salso has the advantage of being an astrophysicist,
Professor Department of Physics and Astronomy atthe University of Rochester and author of

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Light of the Stars, Alien Worlds, and the Fate of Earth. His
newest creation, the Little Book ofAliens, and he in it says the
human species is poised at the edgeof its greatest and most important journey.
Well, Adam Frank and Little Bookof Aliens, what journey would that be?
Well, first of all, Lee, thank you for having me on.

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And that journey, the one Italk about in the book, is
you know, after being an astrophysicistfor thirty years, I want people to
understand how close we are to answeringthat question. Are we alone? Using
taw these new technologies we have,we may be the last generation that doesn't
know whether or not there's alien lifeout there. I see some of these

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fantastic pictures of crab nebula and distantareas and worlds and they're so very colorful
and beautiful. Will they be thatway with the naked eye? You know,
there's some when those telescopes you dosee some you know, people tweaking
the colors, and in some casesthose are infrared, those are colors the

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eye can't even see. But what'sreally amazing about those telescopes is that they
can actually see into the atmospheres ofplanets, exoplanets that are light years away.
And as in the book, Ishow that that's how we're going to
be able to find life on thesedistant alien worlds, but they're light years
away. I've always had this question, even going back to my astronomy electives

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that I took in college. Lightyears. That means if we had physically
the ability to travel the speed oflight, it would still take years to
get there. That's true, andthat's why the capacity to do it from
a distance. We couldn't do thisbefore. The capacity to investigate these alien

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planets from a distance using things likethe James Webspace Telescope is so amazing.
And what I try and show inthe book is show people how we can
do it now, and we're justgoing to get a lot better at it.
With like the newer telescopes, theones that are on the board that
we're developing right now. So eventhough these things may be ten light years
away and would take ten years toget to at the speed of light,

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using our telescopes right now, wecan peer into their atmospheres and look for
what do we call either biosignatures ortechno signatures that could tell us that there's
life right now on them. LittleBook of Aliens and Adam Frank is here,
So some of these systems that we'relooking at, are they that similar
to Earth and proximity to a star, proximity to water. Yeah, that's

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a key idea. That's a greatquestion because the key idea that we've been
going on is this idea of whatwe call the habitable zone, that there's
a band of orbits around any starwhere if you poured water out on the
surface, it would just stay liquidwater. Because we think liquid water is
necessary for life. So the waywe're going to find life, and as

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I talk about, you know,I kind of really explore this is by
looking at planets like Earth that arein the right place. They don't have
to be exact Earth analogs, right, you can have planets that are sort
of Earth sized, but there aregoing around stars that are much smaller than
the Sun, what we call dwarfstars. But basically, what we think
water, we think water is thekey. Liquid water is the key.

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Now I'm getting back to the thisis this is the part that I think
blows people's minds because we start throwingout some of these numbers, like we
throw out the national deficit as though, you know, we keep this in
our back pocket. But when youare looking in to the telescope, when
you're when you're when you've told thetelescope look at this particular system and you're
seeing and let's say it is tenlight years away. Conceivably, that means

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the system could have ceased to existand we're just seeing the light because it's
taken ten years for it to getto us. But you still have a
reasonable when you see something like this, a reasonable idea of its age and
where it is and its life cycle. Yes, we can tell we can
date the stars. We can literallyfrom the starts themselves. We can tell

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whether that's a newly born planetary starand planetary system, or whether it's a
planetary system that is you know,tens of billions of years old, So
the Earth is about four and ahalf billion years and we'd had life on
Earth for over three point eight orat least three and a half billion years,
so we think probably that's how longit takes to develop a civilization.

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But the cool thing is is thatlife appeared on Earth, at least microbial
life, immediately, So that doessuggest that life is pretty common. As
soon as Earth could have life,it got life. Adam Frank in his
book Little Book of Aliens, andwe're not talking about the Little Green Men,
but we might be talking about aextraterrestrial bacteria we could did. There's

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there's two possibilities, right, andwe can find them both. One is
looking for what I call dumb lifemicrobes forest I mean, I don't mean
to insult forests, right, yeah, but we can find those are biospheres
right where the just like on Earth's, life hijacks a planet. So a
biosphere is the sum total of lifeon the planet, and we can find
those from their signatures of how they'vechanged their at the planet's atmosphere. We

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can also find what are called technosignature. So the NASA grant that I
have I got I'm the principal investigatoron a NASA grant, the first one
to ever study intelligent life on planetsand techno signatures. Like all the technology
on a planet also changes a planet'show it behaves, and we can find
those as well. And that's oneof the things I'm really giving people an

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understanding of how close we are tofinding either biospheres or technospheres using the technologies
we have now reasonably what's the closestsystem we're looking at for one of these
types of life. Well, remarkably, the closest star with planets to us,
Alpha Centauri, or the proximate CentorySystem, is only four light years

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away. If you could travel ata good speed close to the speed of
light, you could get there inaround four to ten years. So that
is one of the first places thatwe're going to look. But if I
were to go to speed of light, I wouldn't have any any thickness,
would I. I would just bethis blob of because of the speed.
But yeah, I mean there arethere are ways around that I gather there

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are actually, you know, youcould accelerate on a spaceship at you know,
one ravity, like you could justbe sitting in your spaceship, you
wouldn't feel anything different than right now, and we could get you up to
speed close to the speed of lightpretty quickly. So it still is actually
reasonable, and there are people exploringthese ideas. I actually have a whole
chapter in the book where I gothrough all the ways you could cross interstellar

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distances right because whether it's us orwhether people think UFOs are actually aliens,
which you know I don't, Igo through all the ways you could either
travel just below the speed of light, you know, or even the possibilities
if we want to extend the physicswe understand to traveling faster than the speed
of light. Uh huh, Well, the Little Book of Aliens talks about
it, and Adam Frank is theone who's composed it. He's an astrophysicist

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and alien optimists. Can you definethat term? Yeah, alien optimists.
The reason I use that term isif you what's cool about the question are
we alone? Is that it's twothousand, five hundred years old. You
can see the Greeks, the ancientGreeks, yelling at each other about and
for all of history we've had eitherpeople being opimistic about it, saying,

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oh, there's so many stars inthe sky, there must be life in
the universe, and then optimists whosay, yeah, even though there's so
many stars in the sky, there'syou know, the odds of forming life
are low. So they are alienpessimists. So the whole history of the
human race has been optimists and pessimistsyelling at each other over their opinions.

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And I go through the history inthe book. But now what's amazing is
for the first time we can actuallyget data. And it's a bit arrogant
to assume of all the billions ofsystems that are there, that we're the
only ones. Well, that's whyI'm an optimist. I look at odds,
I look at how many stars thereare, and I say, look,
it's got to happened somewhere else.But you know, here's an interesting

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point. If we're just talking aboutcivilization, smart life. If every civilization
only lasts, say ten thousand years, which would be a lot longer,
you know, than we've lasted interms of technology, being a technological civilization,
then you know, the galaxy isso big that the odds that that
you're around when someone else is aroundkind of get pretty low. So it

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could be that we live in thesterile galaxy just because nobody makes it more
than a thousand years. Adam Frank, astrophysicist, alien optimists and author of
The Little Book of Aliens, availableeverywhere you get books. Thank you for
joining us. It was a realpleasure. Thanks a lot, Lake.
Thanks for listening to Later with LeeMatthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and

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remember to listen to The Drive Liveweekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia presentation