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Fringey Mini - Let's talk to aliens · Journey to the Fringe

• 0:00
  I do have a choice. Let me see how we put this.
• 0:03
  One about a message and one about a coastal erosion.
• 0:07
  I don't know what to come up with. I thought
• 0:09
  about it for a second. Can't think of anything.
• 0:12
  Okay. I got to go with message just because rich
• 0:15
  people's emotions is my thing. And I feel that's
• 0:18
  just kind of encroaching a little bit on my territory.
• 0:22
  This one is from Scientific American. Wow. March
• 0:26
  30th, 2020. Do those still exist? Or did they
• 0:29
  all immigrate? No, they're gone. They should
• 0:32
  rename it scientific expats at this point. Okay,
• 0:36
  it's an eight minute read. Don't time me. It'll
• 0:39
  make me nervous and you won't get anything good
• 0:42
  out of this episode. Okay. Researchers made a
• 0:45
  new message for extraterrestrials. This is by
• 0:48
  Daniel Oberhaus. Upon discovering the existence
• 0:51
  of intelligent life beyond Earth, the first question
• 0:54
  we are most likely to ask is, how can we communicate?
• 0:58
  This might be like an early 2000 reference, but
• 1:01
  I always assume the first thing going out to
• 1:03
  aliens is ASL. How? Age, sex, location. Oh. Yeah.
• 1:12
  I don't know why I was thinking ESL. Yeah, no.
• 1:17
  Do you speak English? We should actually be blaring
• 1:21
  that out into the vacuum of space. That is, like,
• 1:25
  the most normal for us at this point. Hence my
• 1:27
  conclusion. Yelling as loud as possible, do you
• 1:29
  speak English? Do you speak English? If they
• 1:31
  send anything back, send the same thing back,
• 1:33
  but slower somehow. Yeah, and you say it, like,
• 1:36
  partially in a really bad accent. And of course,
• 1:40
  now that... ASL has, I'm thinking of it, yeah
• 1:44
  of course ASL is gonna be the question that we're
• 1:47
  asking. That's probably a really dated reference
• 1:50
  at this point. Anybody listening should know.
• 1:52
  I assume that's where we get market. The owls.
• 1:56
  How do we communicate? As we approach the 50th
• 1:59
  anniversary of the 1974 Arecibo message, humanity's
• 2:04
  first attempt to send out a missive capable of
• 2:08
  being understood by extraterrestrial intelligence,
• 2:11
  the question feels more urgent than ever. Advances
• 2:14
  in remote sensing technologies have revealed
• 2:17
  that the vast majority of stars in our galaxy
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  host planets and that many of these exoplanets
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  appear capable of hosting liquid water on their
• 2:26
  surface. a prerequisite for life as we know it.
• 2:30
  The odds that at least one of these billions
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  of planets has produced intelligent life see
• 2:34
  favorable enough to spend some time figuring
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  out how to say hello. In early March, an international
• 2:42
  team of researchers led by Jonathan Jian of NASA's
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  Jet Propulsion Laboratory posted a paper on the
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  pre -print server ARXIV .org that detailed a
• 2:53
  new design for a message intended for extraterrestrial
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  recipients. The 13 -page epistle referred to
• 3:00
  as the quote beacon in the galaxy and quote is
• 3:03
  meant to be a basic introduction to mathematics,
• 3:06
  chemistry and biology that draws heavily on the
• 3:10
  design of the Arecibo message and other past
• 3:12
  attempts at contacting extraterrestrials. The
• 3:15
  researchers included a detailed plan for the
• 3:17
  best time of year to broadcast the message and
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  proposed a dense ring of stars near the center
• 3:23
  of our galaxy as a promising destination. Importantly,
• 3:28
  The transmission also features a freshly designed
• 3:31
  return address that will help any alien listeners
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  pinpoint our location in the galaxy so they can,
• 3:38
  hopefully, invade Earth. It actually kicks off
• 3:42
  an interstellar conversation. Are there any planets
• 3:45
  that we don't like that we should be telling
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  them what we're at? Just like, you know what,
• 3:50
  maybe it's Pluto. It's probably Pluto. That was
• 3:52
  my first instinct. Yeah, it's probably Pluto.
• 3:55
  that we should be sending them to, just to see
• 3:57
  if it's good. It's true. I like the way you think.
• 3:59
  I feel like they didn't do that, though. I feel
• 4:01
  like they told them exactly where we are. Yeah.
• 4:05
  Yeah. And at the same time, too, if we sent them
• 4:07
  to Pluto, they'd probably figure out, hey, this
• 4:09
  is weird. There's this weird little tiny dick.
• 4:10
  This is a bad planet. Yeah. This is bad. And
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  there's clearly a habitable planet over there
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  that has giant skyscrapers on it. It's probably
• 4:22
  them that sent us there. We're kind of pissed
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  now The motivation for the design was to deliver
• 4:30
  the maximum amount of information about our society
• 4:33
  and the human species in the minimal amount of
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  message and quote Yeah, you know just like our
• 4:39
  daily routines a list of fears and weaknesses
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  when we sleep kind of how we're shitty but we
• 4:45
  love to go to war. Quote, with improvements in
• 4:48
  digital technology, we can do much better than
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  the Arecibo message from 1974. and quote, every
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  interstellar message must address two fundamental
• 5:00
  questions, what to say and how to say it. Nearly
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  all the messages that humans have broadcast in
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  the space so far start by establishing common
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  ground with a basic lesson in science and mathematics,
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  two options that are presumably familiar to both
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  ourselves and extraterrestrials. Can you imagine
• 5:18
  a spacefaring species that did not figure out
• 5:21
  math? there's a good chance just because like
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  in theory an infinite universe so if it's higher
• 5:27
  than a 0 .0 infinity 1 % chance it happened yeah
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  just like it's just like yeah no it is and it's
• 5:35
  just like the bros from high school that figured
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  it out and nobody knows how it works and they
• 5:44
  just got the one thing and it's like please don't
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  break down because we don't know how i Or even
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  further, a society that's been around for so
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  long that they forgot math. Like they got into
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  space and then they got super lazy and they just
• 5:59
  forgot. That's true. I like all of these options
• 6:02
  and all of them are very possible given that
• 6:05
  there's infinite universes and planets. Yeah,
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  it's not just possible. It has happened. Definitely.
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  If a civilization beyond our planet is capable
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  of building a radio telescope to receive our
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  message, it probably knows a thing or two about
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  physics. We just proved that wrong. A far messier
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  question is how to encode these concepts into
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  the communi - Hey, wow, that's a fancy word.
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  Human languages are out of the question for obvious
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  reasons, but so are our numeral system. Though
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  the con - Whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah. If science
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  fiction, which leads all of our technologies,
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  is to be believed, then basically everything
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  speaks English. Yeah, we already proved that.
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  Like, that's just how it works. We already talked
• 6:45
  about that. That is our basic - It's just something
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  - And Chelsea, I just need to warn you, we are
• 6:51
  now recording over eight minutes. Do you think
• 6:54
  that they also don't say bear? You know what?
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  There is probably at least one society out there
• 7:00
  that still has the word for bear. Probably. Just
• 7:03
  like the Spanish. They do say bear. Or their
• 7:07
  English is exactly the same as ours except the
• 7:10
  original word for bear is bear and they kept
• 7:13
  it and or changed it to a new word which was
• 7:15
  the original word for bear. Anyhow, both of those
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  things exist out there. It's crazy. I closed
• 7:20
  the tab, which is something I'm not used to doing.
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  I feel really uncomfortable because I got the
• 7:27
  eight minute warning. But I would like to say
• 7:29
  this is something actually one of my friends
• 7:32
  and I were talking about. He was studying in
• 7:34
  school about signage and how you communicate
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  to someone in the future, for instance, of like
• 7:42
  a nuclear reactor and say Earth ended. It went
• 7:46
  through a catastrophe and the English is lost.
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  How do you communicate danger? Well, and signs
• 7:52
  can't last that long. They would weather too
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  much. Well, that's true. So how would you go
• 7:58
  about indicating that this is dangerous in a
• 8:02
  way that if language or natural disaster happened
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  that you would be able to? It's kind of the same
• 8:08
  concept, I think. How do you communicate with
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  aliens? How do you communicate with future? civilizations
• 8:14
  where everything is lost. And I do know one of
• 8:17
  the answers that they tried for conveying that
• 8:19
  this is nuclear material stay away is genetically
• 8:22
  modifying cats in the area to be not radioactive
• 8:26
  but like glow when they come near the radioactiveness
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  and they would pass down like folktales through
• 8:33
  society that if you see a glowing cat to stay
• 8:35
  away from it. I thought you meant that they also
• 8:36
  taught the cats to talk and tell them to stay
• 8:40
  away. We're going to teach cats English. There's
• 8:46
  no way that could go wrong. Exactly. Everybody
• 8:49
  speaks English. We already established that in
• 8:53
  the communicator. Every society is just like
• 8:55
  seconds away from adopting it once they get smart
• 8:59
  enough. Anyhow, you guys got 48 hours. You go
• 9:03
  teach your cats English and see how it goes.
• 9:06
  Bye. Anyhow, bye.