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The Overlooked Radio Frequencies in the Search for Aliens · The Last Observer: Science and Beyond

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: What if I told you that astronomers recently searched over
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: six million stars for signs of alien technology, and you know,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: to pull off this massive feat, they didn't even point
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: a telescope at the sky.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: I mean, it sounds completely counterintuitive, right, but it truly
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: is a profound pivot in how we approach the cosmos.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because for generations, humanity has just been staring up
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: into the dark. We build these increasingly massive satellite dishes,
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: we tune our instruments, and we practically beg the universe
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: to say hello exactly.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we've been desperate to know we aren't alone out.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: There, right, And the assumption has always been that the
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: search requires like new billion dollar observatories, decades of dedicated listening,
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: and just endless patients. But today we're exploring a paradigm
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: shift that completely flips that entire script.
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: It really does. It flips it on its head.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: We are looking at a fundamental, really perspective altering question
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence or SETI. What if
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: we've been listening for extraterrestrial life in the exact wrong place,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: on the exact wrong frequencies and missing the millions of
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: hidden stars we've already accidentally observed.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: And that's the thing. For decades, we have operated under
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: a highly specific, very rigid set of assumptions about how
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: an advanced alien civilization might try to get our attention.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: We basically made up rules for them, right, pretty much.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: We essentially decided ahead of time what frequency the universe
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: would be broadcasting on, and we designed our entire search
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: apparatus around that single.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Gas, which is wild when you think about it.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: It is, but you know, science thrives on challenging foundational assumptions.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: So what we were seeing now is a massive course correction.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: Astronomers are completely moving away from traditional radio frequencies. They
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: are hunting for techno signatures in old recycled data, data
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: originally gathered for entirely different purposes, and in doing so,
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: they're coming to this just mind boggling realization about the
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: sheer volume of the galaxy. We have already in importantly.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Surveyed that concept, the idea of accidentally surveying the galaxy.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: That is what completely hooked me on this topic. Fascinating
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: because when we talk about cosmic real estate, the numbers
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: just get incomprehensibly huge so fast, and to think we
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: might have just been tuning our radios to the wrong
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: station this whole time while staring right at the evidence.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's staggering.
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: Staggering is the right word for it. Yeah.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: So to really understand this shift, I feel like we
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: have to start at the beginning. We need to explore
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: the comfort zone that astronomers are currently trying to break
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: out of, this very specific slice of the radio dial
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: known as the water hole.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: Right, the water hole. To understand why modern astronomers are
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: moving away from it, you first have to understand the
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: logic of why we set up camp there in the
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: first place.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Since the dawn of modern radio astronomy, going all the
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: way back to people like Frank Drake and Project OSMA
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: in the mid twentieth century, SETI projects have heavily, almost
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: exclusively targeted a very narrow band radio frequencies.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: Like how narrow are we talking.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: We're talking about the range between one point four to
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: two gigahertz and one point sixty six gigaherts.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Okay, let me just unpack this for a second. Out
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, which is infinite, right, it
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: ranges from incredibly long, lazy radio waves that are kilometers long,
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: all the way up to hyper energetic gamma rays that
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: are smaller than.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: An ad exactly an infinite spectrum.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: And we decided to zoom in on this one tiny,
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  Speaker 1: tiny sliver between one point four to two and one
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: point sixty six gigahertz. There has to be a highly
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: specific physical reason for that, right, We didn't just throw
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: a dart at a board.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: No, definitely not. There is a reason, and it comes
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: down to a mix of intercellar logic, fundamental physics, and
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: honestly a bit of poetic chemistry.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Poetic chemistry, I like that.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: Well, let's look at the lower bound first, the one
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: point four to two gigahertz. In the vacuum of space,
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: hydrogen is the most abundant element. It makes up roughly
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: seventy five percent of all the normal matter in the universe.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: Right, it's everywhere everywhere.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: Now, a neutral hydrogen atom is simple. It's just one
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  Speaker 2: proton and one electron, and both of these particles have
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: a property called spin. You can think of them as
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: tiny magnets.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Okay, tiny magnets, got it.
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  Speaker 2: Most of the time, their magnetic poles are aligned in
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  Speaker 2: a higher energy state. But very rarely, and I mean
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: about once every ten million years for a single atom.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: Wait ten million years.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, once every ten million years, that electron will spontaneously
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: flip its spin so it is anti aligned with the proton.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: Okay, I mean a once in ten million years event.
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  Speaker 1: Doesn't exactly sound like a reliable radio station to tune
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  Speaker 1: into for.
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  Speaker 2: Single atom, No, it wouldn't be. But when you're looking
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: at giant molecular clouds in deep space, you are looking
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  Speaker 2: at octillions of hydrogen atoms.
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  Speaker 1: Oh right, sheer volume exactly.
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  Speaker 2: Because there is so much hydrogen out there, these rare
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: spin flips are actually happening constantly across the cloud. And
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: when that electron flips to a lower energy state, it
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: releases a very specific photon of energy.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: And let me guess that photon has a very specific frequency.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: You got it. The wavelength of that photon is exactly
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: twenty one centimeters, which corresponds to a radio frequency of
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: one point four to two gigahertz.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it is the loudest, most ubiquitous natural hum in
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: the galaxy.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, So one point four to two gigaherts is the
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: natural broadcast frequency of hydrogen. Literally the most common thing
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: in the universe. So what about the upper bound the
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: one point sixty six gigahertz.
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  Speaker 2: Right, So if you look slightly higher up the dial
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: to one point sixty six gigaherts, you find the natural
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: emission frequency of the hydroxyl radical, and hydroxyl radical is
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: just one oxygen atom bonded to one hydrogen atom.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: Ah an h and oh. So wait, they are targeting
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: the frequencies bounding the exact chemistry required for water.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: Precisely, you combine those you get water, the foundational solvent
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: for all known.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Biology, that is the poetic chemistry you mentioned.
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: Exactly decades ago, the pioneers have SETI looked at this
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  Speaker 2: and thought, you know, if there is another intelligent civilization
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: out there, and they are scientifically advanced enough to build
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  Speaker 2: radio transmitters, they'll know this.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: They'll know about the universal abundance of hydrogen and hydroxyl.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: Right, they will know the chemical formula for water. But
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: more importantly than just the symbolism of water, they will
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: know that the space between those two frequencies on the
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: radio dial is unusually quiet.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: What do you mean by quiet? Because if space is
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: full of like stars and pulsars and supernovas. I imagine
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: it's incredibly noisy across the entire spectrum.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: It is noisy, but the noise isn't distributed evenly. Think
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: of it as a valley between two massive mountains of static.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: If you tune your receiver below one gigahertz the radio
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: background noise of the galaxy itself, which is caused by
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: electrons spiraling in magnetic fields known as synchrotron radiation, it
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: becomes deafening.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, So it just drowns everything out completely.
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: It rounds out weak signals. On the other hand, if
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: you tune your receiver above ten gigahertz, you start running
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: into quantum noise from the receiver equipment itself and interference
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: from our own atmosphere.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: So you have the sweet spot in the middle.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: Yes, right there, between one and ten gigaherds, there is
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: a natural dip in the background static. It's known as
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: the microwave window. And sitting right at the absolute lowest
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: quietest point of that valley is the space between one
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  Speaker 2: point four to two and one point six six gigaherts
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  Speaker 2: the water hole. The water hole.
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  Speaker 1: So it's a combination of physical utility and universal symbolism
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  Speaker 1: It's like, Uh, if the universe is this massive, sprawling,
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  Speaker 1: noisy city, the water hole is the central park.
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  Speaker 2: That's a great way to look at it.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: Right. It's quiet, everyone knows where it is because of
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: fundamental physics, and it represents water. So the assumption was,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: if you want to build an interstellar beacon to say
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  Speaker 1: you know we are here, you broadcast it right there,
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  Speaker 1: hoping someone on another rocky planet is sitting by the
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: fountain listening.
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  Speaker 2: That is the exact assumption that has driven millions of
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  Speaker 2: dollars of funding and decades of telescope time. It is
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: a beautiful, elegant hypothesis.
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  Speaker 1: But I hear a butt coming.
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  Speaker 2: But it is also highly anthropocentric.
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  Speaker 1: Meaning human centered.
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  Speaker 2: Exactly, it assumes that an alien civilization's logic maps perfectly
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: onto human logic. We assumed they would value water, that
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  Speaker 2: they would use radio frequencies in this specific way, and
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  Speaker 2: that they would even want to be.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: Found, right, And that's where I think the logic really
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: starts to fray. If you're say a machine intelligence, or
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: if your biology is based on liquid methane like the
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: lakes on Titan, you might not care about water at all.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: You wouldn't you might not see any poetic romance in
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: the frequencies of hydrogen and hydroxyl exactly.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: And even if they do use water, perhaps their technology
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  Speaker 2: has simply moved past radio. Limiting our search to the
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  Speaker 2: waterhole is like trying to listen to an entire symphony
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  Speaker 2: orchestra but deciding ahead of time that you only care
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  Speaker 2: about the cellos.
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  Speaker 1: You just completely ignore the brass, the percussion, the woodwinds.
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  Speaker 2: You're deaf to the rest of the music. The universe
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  Speaker 2: is unimaginably vast, and the ways in advanced technology could
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  Speaker 2: manifest in the electromagnetic spectrum are equally.
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  Speaker 1: Vast, which brings us to the actual shift happening right now.
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  Speaker 1: And this is where we have to talk about the
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: work of Louisa Mason.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: Yes, her research is pivotal here.
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  Speaker 1: She's a PhD researcher at the University of Manchester and
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: she presented some truly groundbreaking work at the Royal Astronomical
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham. She essentially looked at
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: this sixty year old tradition of staring at the waterhole
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  Speaker 1: and decided it was finally time to change the dial.
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  Speaker 2: And what she did is genuinely pioneering because she moved
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: the search into a completely new parameter space. New parameter
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: space yeah, meaning instead of using traditional radio telescopes tuned
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: to the waterhole, she utilized the Atacama Large Millimeter Submillimeter Array,
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: which is commonly known as LMA. Okay, ALMA, she conducted
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: this observatory's very first SETI survey, and she did it
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: by looking at much higher radio frequencies, specifically in the
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: millimeter and submillimeter bands.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, wait, I have to push back here on the
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: history of this ALMA is one of the most famous,
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: most powerful observatories on the planet.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: Right, it's a marvel of engineering.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: So if these higher millimeter frequencies are so full of potential,
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: why have they been almost completely unexplored for SETI until now?
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Like where astronomers just stubbornly attached to the romance of
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: the water hole.
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: Well, it wasn't just dogma, though institutional inertia certainly played
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: a role. Funding naturally flows toward the established paradigms.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: You know, sure, you fund what you know exactly, Yeah.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: But the primary reason these frequencies were ignored for so
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: long is purely physical and technological Higher frequencies like millimeter
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: and submillimeter waves are incredibly difficult to observe from the
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: surface of the Earth.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: Why is that. I mean radio waves pass right through
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: the atmosphere, don't they. That's why we can listen to
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: the radio in our cars.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: Low frequency radio waves pass through, yes, But as you
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: move up the spectrum to higher frequencies, the physical size
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: of the waves get smaller, down to just a few millimeters,
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: and at that specific size they start interacting with the
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: molecules in Earth's atmosphere, specific water vapor. The water molecules
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: in our atmosphere actually resonate with and absorb these high
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: frequency radio waves.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, So they literally get soaked up.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: By the sky pretty much. If you build a telescope
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: at sea level and try to look at the millimeter ban,
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: all you will see is the thermal radiation of the
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: water vapor in the air right above you. You are
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: essentially blinded by our own weather.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: So the atmosphere acts like a brick wall for these
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: specific frequencies.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: Precisely. That is why Alma had to be built where
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: it is.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: Where is it?
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: Alma is located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: on the Chojnan Toru Plateau, at an elevation of over
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: sixteen thousand feet.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: Sixteen thousand feet that's incredibly high.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: It's one of the highest driest places on planet Earth.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: You have to get above the vast majority of the
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: water vapor in the atmosphere to even have a chance
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: of seeing these frequencies.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Clearly, Okay, but hold on, I have a question about this.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: If water vapor in Earth's atmosphere completely blocks these high frequencies,
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: wouldn't a water rich Earth like exoplanet also block their
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: own aliens from transmitting them?
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: Ah? That is a phenomenal question.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: Right, because if they live under atmosphere like ours, they
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: couldn't broadcast a millimeter wave out into space any more
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: than we could easily receive one before we build Alma
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: up on a mountain. So why look for a signal
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: that is so easily trapped by planetary atmospheres.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: It really cuts to the heart of how we model
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: alien behavior, and there are a few ways to answer it. First,
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: we just cannot assume they live on a pale blue
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: dot like ours. True, they might inhabit an arid planet,
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: or they might exist entirely in orbital megastructures or space
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: habitats that are totally devoid of atmospheric interference.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: Oh, sure, space stations exactly.
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: But second, and perhaps more importantly, if you want to
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: build a truly powerful interstellar beacon, you wouldn't build it
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: on the surface of your planet anyway.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: You won't know.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: You would build it in space. You would construct a
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: massive transmitter array in orbit, or perhaps use your own
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: stars a gravitational lens to focus the beam. An advance
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: civil isation wouldn't let their local weather dictate their interstellar
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: communication strategy.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: That makes perfect sense. If you have the energy to
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: blast a signal across one hundred light years, you definitely
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: have the rocket technology to put the transmitter in orbit exactly.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: So for decades, we simply didn't have the hardware in
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: the right location on Earth to.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: Even attempt this kind of search until LMA.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: Until LMA became fully operational, Yes, we were fundamentally blind
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: to this part of the spectrum. And you know, LMA
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: isn't just one telescope dish. It's an array of sixty
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: six highly precise antennas spread out over distances of up
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: to sixteen kilometers.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: Sixteen kilometers wide. How does that even work?
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: They use a technique called interferometry. By sinking all sixty
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: six dishes together using atomic clocks and feeding their signals
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: into a massive supercomputer called a correlator, they can essentially
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: create a single virtual telescope that has the resolving power
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: of a dish sixteen kilometers wide.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: That is just a marvel of modern engineering.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: It truly is. And Mason's work is essentially asking in
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: the field, now that we finally have this eye open,
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: what happens when we use it to look for technology?
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: But this is where the store takes a turn that
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: I find absolutely fascinating because you'd think that to open
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: up a brand new frontier of astronomy, to do something
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: that has literally never been done before with this multi
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: billion dollars sixty six dish virtual telescope, she would have
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: had to apply for hundreds of hours of highly competitive,
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: incredibly expensive telescope time, you would think, so, yeah, she
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: would have had to command the array, point those massive
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: dishes at specific target stars and wait for weeks to
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: gather data. But she didn't do that at all.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: No, she didn't. And what makes her methodology so elegant
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: is its extreme efficiency. Getting dedicated observation time on an
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: instrument like LMA is notoriously difficult. I can imagine thousands
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: of astronomers around the world are fighting for a few
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: precious hours to look at black holes or early galaxy formation.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: Instead of fighting that battle, Mason utilized the LMA science
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: a archive. Yes, she took observations specifically within what ALMA
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: may categorizes as ban three, that had originally been collected
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: years prior by other astronomers for completely unrelated astrophysical research.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: So somebody else requested the time pointed the telescope, gathered
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: the data on a dust cloud or a dying star,
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: published their paper, and then the raw data just went
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: into a digital filing cabinet.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: Exactly every major observatory keeps an archive. Once the proprietary
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: period for the original researchers expires, that raw data becomes
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: available to the global astronomical community. That is brilliant it
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: is Mason took their old data, downloaded it, and ran
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: a completely different kind of search algorithm on it. She
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: was looking at the exact same patch of sky, the
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: exact same photons that hit the dishes in Chile, but
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: she was asking the data a completely different question.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, but if the original astronomers were looking at the
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: gas dynamics of a nebula, what exactly is she searching
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: for in that recycled data. How do you separate in
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: an alien transmit from the background noise of the nebula itself.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: She was searching for a very specific type of anomaly
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: known as a narrow band radio signal. Narrowband Yes, and
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: understanding the physics of a narrowband signal is crucial to
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: understanding the entire premise of modern SETI. When we look
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: at the universe, it is incredibly loud. Stars, pulsars, quasars,
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: interstellar gas clouds, accretion disks around black holes. They all
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: emit radio waves. But these natural astrophysical processes are messy.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: They're governed by thermodynamics. They emit broadband signals because they
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: are hot and chaotic. They smear their electromagnetic energy across
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: a massive, wide range of frequencies.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: So if you were to look at a star on
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: a graph, its energy output would look like a wide,
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: gentle hill covering thousands of different frequencies simultaneously, exactly like
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: the static you hear when a radio is tuned between stations.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: It's just a wash of white noise across the spectrum.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: Precisely, the physics of a star simply cannot produce a
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: signal that is confined to a single race within frequency.
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: It violates the laws of thermal physics as we understand them.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: But a narrowband signal is the exact opposite. How So,
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: a narrowband signal compresses all of its electromagnetic energy into
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: one very specific, tight frequency bin.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: It is highly coherent, and nature doesn't do coherent not
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: like this.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: No, as far as our current understanding of atrophysics goes,
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: there is no known natural process in the universe that
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: produces a truly narrowband coherent radio signal over a sustained.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: Period, which means, if you find one, someone had to
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: build it.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: That is the working hypothesis. Yes, a narrowband signal requires intent,
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: It requires engineering. It requires a physical circuit, an oscillator,
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: and a deliberate focusing of energy. It strongly indicates artificial technology,
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: or what the field calls a technosignature.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: So okay, imagine you are standing in the middle of
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: a dense, vibrant rainforest. That's the universe. It is chaotic
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: and loud. You hear the wind rustling through millions of
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: lee u is the rush of a waterfall a mile away,
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: a thousand different bugs, buzzing birds, calling branches snapping, A.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: Perfect metaphor for broadband noise.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah right, it's a symphony of broadband noise. But then,
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: cutting through all that organic chaos, you hear a single, pure, sustained,
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: perfectly pitched synthesizer. Note this one note, just one unbroken frequency,
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: holding steady. You instantly know that a tree didn't evolve
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: to make that sound. The waterfall didn't generate it. A
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: piece of technology made it. Absolutely so, Mason is taking
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: these digital recordings of the cosmic rainforest, running them through
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: a mathematical filter, probably some form of fast Fouria transform,
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: and listening exclusively for that one pure synthesizer. Note it
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: is the ultimate needle in a haystack.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: That is an excellent way to conceptualize it. The Fourier
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: transform is exactly the mathematical tool used to break down
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: that messy, chaotic wave into its individual frequency components, searching
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: for that single anomalous spike of energy. Wow. And what
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: makes approach so revolutionary is that the haystack she is
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: searching through was built from data we already had sitting
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: on a server.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: We didn't have to go collect more hay exactly.
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: It proves that we don't necessarily need to build entirely
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: new observatories or run decades long, dedicated set emissions just
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: to look for life the evidence the techno signature might
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: already be captured on our hard drives, gattered for another
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: purpose Entirely, we just needed the right software and the
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: right perspective to filter the static and listen for the synthesizer.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: But the most shocking part of this entire analysis isn't
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: the archival method right, and it isn't even the shift
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: to the high frequency millimeter bands. The real mind bending
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: discovery came when she and her team realized exactly how
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: large that digital haystack actually was.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: Yes, this is where it gets truly wild.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: And this brings us to a concept that completely changes
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: the math of astronomy. We have to talk about stellar
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: by catch.
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: Stellar by catch it's a term borrowed directly from commercial fishing.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: Like when they catch dolphins and tuninets.
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: Exactly like that when a trawler casts a massive net
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: into the ocean hoping to catch a specific school of tuna,
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: they inevitably haul up a dozen other species of fish, turtles,
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: and crabs that they weren't targeting. In astronomy, the concept
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: is remarkably similar. It refers to the unintentional observation of
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: additional stars in the background and foreground when a telescope
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: is aimed at a primary scientific target.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: Right, Because when we think of a telescope, we often
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: think of it like a laser pointer pointing exactly at
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: one star. But space is three dimensional, and a telescope's
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: field of view is actually a two dimensional cone stretching
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: out into infinity.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: That's a vital distinction.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: Yes, so if an astronomer points LMA at a really
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: interesting distant nebula, they aren't just looking at the nebula.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: That cone of observation is capturing photons from every single
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: star that happens to be sitting in the foreground between
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Earth and the nebula, as well as every single star
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: is sitting far away in the background directly behind it.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: Exactly. The telescope captures the physical slice of the universe.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: The target might take up the center of the image,
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: but the rest of that cone is filled with cosmic bycatch.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: Okay, so they have all these extra stars right now.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: For a long time, astronomers who wanted to repurpose archival
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: data have tried to estimate just how much of this
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: bycatch is in their files. If I'm looking for alien
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: signals in an old observation of a black hole, I
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: need to know how many other stars happen to be
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: in the background, so I know how many Lotto tickets
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: I'm actually holding.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: And how do they normally figure that out? Do they
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: just look at the image and count the dots of light?
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: It's much more complex than that, primarily because many of
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: the stars are too faint to show up as distinct
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: visual dots. Traditionally, astronomers have relied on massive star catalogs okay,
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: like a map. Yes. The most famous and comprehensive current
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: catalog is maintained by the Gaya Space Observatory, which is
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: operated by the Europeans Base Agency. Gaya has meticulously mapped
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: the positions, distances, and motions of over a billion stars
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: in our galaxy. It is a monumental achievement in astrometry.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: A billion stars sounds like an incredible data set until
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: you remember that there are somewhere between one hundred billion
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: and four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: A billion map stars is essentially just a rounding error
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: in the grand scheme of the galaxy.
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: That is the core limitation. Gaya is incredible, but it
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: operates primarily in the optical and near infrared spectrums. It
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: maps the light we can physically see oh I see.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: This means it struggles to map stars that are extremely faint,
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: like red dwarfs, which ironically make up the vast majority
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: of the stellar population. And more importantly, Gaya misses stars
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: that are accluded by thick clouds of interstellar dust.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: Right because dust blocks visible light.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: Exactly, the disk of the Milky Way is filled with
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: dust lanes that block visible light, acting like a fog.
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: So if you rely solely on an optical catalog like
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: GAYA to tell you how the stars were inside your
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: telescope's cone of you, you are drastically massively undercounting the
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: true number.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: So Luisa Mason didn't use Gaya when she wanted to
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: know how many stars she was actually looking at in
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: her archived LMA data. She didn't rely on a catalog
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: of photograph light she went in a completely different, much
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: more theoretical direction.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: She did she utilized the Basin Song galactic model.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: Okay, we need to slow down here, because this is
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: where the science gets almost philosophical. I was completely glown
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: away when I realized what this was. What exactly is
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: the Basmal Song galactic model.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: To put it simply, the Basono Cell model is not
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: a photograph. It is not a direct observation of the sky.
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: It is an incredibly complex mathematical simulation of the Milky
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: Way galaxy, a simulation yes developed over decades by astronomers
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: at the Basilosil Observatory in France. It is essentially a
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: synthetic statistical twin of our galaxy running on a supercomputer.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: How do you even begin to build a synthetic galaxy
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: like What are the inputs for something like that?
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: You feed it the fundamental laws of physics. They input
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: decades of a stay bablished astronomical data, theories of stellar revolution,
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: the initial mass function, which dictates how many large stars
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: are born versus small stars. They add the dynamics of
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: dark matter halos, the rotation curve of the galactic disk,
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: and the density of gas and dust. It models the
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: different populations of the galaxy, like the thin disk, the
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: thick disk, the stellar halo, and the central bulge, each
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: with their own ages and metallicities.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: That is an insane amount of data.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: It is, and based on all these interacting physics engines,
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: the model calculates where stars must be, what type of
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: stars they are, and how far away they are, regardless
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: of whether our telescopes are powerful enough to see them
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: through the dust.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: So instead of looking at a map of what human
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: instruments have successfully photographed, she looked at a simulation of
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: what the immutable laws of physics dictate must exist in
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: that specific cone of space exactly.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: And this highlights a crucial philosophical point in astronomy. The
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: universe doesn't stop existing just because our lenses aren't powerful
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: enough to cap or because dust is in the way.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: The Bizon Sun model bridges the gap between observation and reality.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: It allows astronomers to define a specific coordinate in the sky,
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: to find the field of view of their telescope, and
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: ask the simulation, based on the mass and dynamics of
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: the Milky Way, how many stars are truly in this cone.
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: So let's look at the numbers because this is the
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: data point that fundamentally changes how we view SETI. When
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: you apply this synthetic model to actual real world data,
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: the jump and scale is almost terrifying.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: It really is.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: Mason and her team didn't just look at her four
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: LMA files. They applied this method to an earlier, much
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: larger SETI survey to prove the point. This prior survey
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: consisted of one three hundred and twenty seven individual telescope
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: pointings they aim to dish one thousand, three hundred and
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: twenty seven times at specific targets in the sky.
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, and when the researchers originally checked that archival data
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: against the traditional Visual Gaya catalog, the catalog told them
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: that within those one thousand, three hundred and twenty seven
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: cones of observation, they had captured roughly two hundred and
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: eighty eight thousand stars in their bycatch two.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: Hundred and eighty eight thousand stars, which honestly sounds like
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: an amazing hale. You went looking at thirteen hundred specific
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: targets and you got a quarter of a million extra
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: stars for free.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: It's a great bonus.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: You get to check all of them for a narrow
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: band alien signal. But then Mason's team took those exact
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: same one thousand, three hundred and twenty seven coordinates with
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: the exact same telescope parameters, and instead of asking the
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: Gaya catalog, they asked the Bizon Song simulation. They asked
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: the underlying physics of the galaxy, and.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: The model revealed that based on the true stellar density,
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: mass distribution, and dust mechanics of those specific regions of
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: the Milky Way, those one thousand, three hundred and twenty
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: seven pointings didn't capture two hundred eighty eight thousand stars.
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: They likely captured over six point one million stars.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: Six point one million the number jump from under three
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: hundred thousand to over six million.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: It's a staggering increase.
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: That is a two thousand percent increase. That is millions
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: of hidden suns, millions of potential souls systems, billions of
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: potential planets where civilization could be broadcasting a narrowband synthesizer note,
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: and we had absolutely no idea we had already recorded
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: data on them.
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: It completely reframes our understanding of the archives sitting on
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: our servers. It tells us that our task observational efforts. However,
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: localized or limited we thought they were were actually massively
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: more comprehensive.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: We were looking at so much more than we knew.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: Every time, and the stronomer turns on a radio telescope
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: and points it anywhere in the sky. They are dragging
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: an impossibly deep, voluminous net through the cosmic ocean. We
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: have surveyed exponentially more of the galaxy than we ever
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: gave ourselves credit for, entirely by accident.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: It's like taking a picture of your friend in a
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: crowded stadium in the nineteen nineties. You think you just
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: have a picture of your friend eating a hot dog,
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: But then thirty years later you run that negative through
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: a highly advanced AI upscaler and you realize you perfectly
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: captured the faces of fifty thousand people in the background,
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: in the shadows, all the way up to the nosebleed seats.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: That's a perfect analogy, and if you run facial recognition
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: on that newly revealed background, you might find something incredible
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: that was there the whole time. That's what we are
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: doing with the universe right now.
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: And if we step back and connect this to the
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: broader philosophical implications, it fundamentally alters the math of the
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: Fermi paradox.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: Oh right.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: The Fermi paradox famously asks, if the universe is so vast,
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: so old, and life is presumably common, where is everybody?
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: Why haven't we heard from them?
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: Because space is just too big?
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: Right. For a long time, the defense has been, well,
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: space is big, and we haven't really looked at that
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: many stars yet, our sample size is too small. The
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: application of the Bizan sool model dismantles part of that defense.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: It tells us our sample size is actually millions of
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: times larger than we accounted for.
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: Okay, the tension is unbearable. At this point, we've established
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: this massive shift. We've moved out of the anthropocentric water hole.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: We are using the high frequency Alime telescope array to
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: see through the atmosphere. We are digging through recycled archive
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: data looking for a narrow ban. Synthesizer notes, Yes, and
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: we now know that even a tiny sliver of observation
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: catches millions of hidden stars in its net. So what
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: did they actually find when Louisa Mason ran the algorithms
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: on those four archived ALEM observations searching these newly discovered
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: millions of stars. Did we hear the synthesizer? Did we
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: find a techno signature?
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: The verdict across the two narrow frequency ranges within those
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: four archived LM observations was clear and unambiguous. No candidate
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: technosignatures were found above the detection thresholds.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: Nothing.
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: There was no coherent synthesizer note. There was just the beautiful, messy,
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: chaotic broadband noise of astrophysics.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: I know that for a lot of people listening, hearing
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: that result immediately brings a sense of deflation. It's always
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: the punchline with SETI, isn't it. We looked really hard,
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: we developed amazing new math, and we found absolutely nothing.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: It can feel that way, sure.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: But when you really dig into what this project represents,
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: it doesn't feel like a failure.
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: At all, and it shouldn't. Neither Mason nor her esteemed
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: collaborators view this as a failure, and it's important to
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: mention the wider team involved in this research problem. Professor
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: Michael Garrett, doctor Andrew Simian, and doctor Kelvin Wandia.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: Some heavy hitters.
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. These are heavyweights in the field of radio astronomy
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: and Setti and their shared conclusion is crucial to understanding
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: the scientific process. An absence of signal does not equate
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: to an absence of life.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: Right Because let's put the scale back into perspective. She
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: looked at four files four archived observations from Alma. Even
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: if those four cones of observation contain millions of hidden stars,
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: they still represent a microscopic fraction of the sky.
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: Exactly four observations is a single drop and a cosmically
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: infinite ocean. The lack of a detected signal in two
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: highly specific narrow frequency windows across four random slices of
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: the sky is not empirical evidence that we are alone
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: in the universe.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: It just means we didn't find them there at that time.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: It simply means that nobody was broadcasting a powerful narrow
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: band millimeter wave signal from those specific stars, perfectly aimed
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: at Earth at the exact moment the light reached our
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: telescope array. The alignment required for a successful detection is
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: still phenomenally complex.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: It's like walking out to the edge of the Pacific
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: Ocean with a shot glass, dipping it into the surf,
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: pulling it up, looking inside, and declaring to the world. Well,
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: I don't see any great white sharks in this glass. Therefore,
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: sharks do not exist in the ocean.
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: Is exactly.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: It's a completely irrational, premature conclusion based on an impossibly
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: constrained sample size.
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: That is precisely the trap we have to avoid. The
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: true scientific value of this specific endeavor isn't the immediate
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: discovery of an alien civilization. The value is that it
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: is a flawless proof of concept.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: It's a new toolkit.
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: Yes, it is a methodological triumph that changes the roadmap
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: for the future. What Luisa Mason, Garrett Semeon and Wandia
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: have done is proved definitively that we can and absolutely
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: must aggressively reuse existing telescope archives.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: We have so much data already.
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: Exactly, they've proved that our modern computational tools like the
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: best on Sun model and advanced Fourier transforms can uncover
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: deep layers of data in environments we previously dismissed or ignored.
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: And most importantly, they have proven that we have the
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: capability to break free from the waterhole and expand our
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: search across a much broader portion of the radio spectrum.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: It's basically an open invitation to the entire scientific community.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: It's a wide open door for other astronomers, graduate students,
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: data scientists, and theorists. They are essentially putting this out
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: into the world and saying, look at the staggering amount
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: of hidden data we found using just four files from
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: a public hard drive. Imagine what is hiding in the
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: rest of them.
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: It fundamentally democratizes the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Well, in
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: the past, if you wanted to look for aliens, you
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: had to be the director of a major observatory command,
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: millions of dollars in grants, and secure hundreds of hours
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: of dedicated dishtime.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: Very exclusive, very.
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: But today, because of this methodology, the barrier to entry
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: has vanished. You need a high speed Internet connection, a
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: solid understanding of data processing and signal filtering, and the
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: creativity to ask a unique question of data that is
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: already sitting freely in the public domain.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: That's incredible.
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: The future of SETI might not happen at a telescope
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: in the desert. It might happen on a laptop in
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: a university library.
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: So as we wrap up our explanation today, let's quickly
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: retrace the steps of this massive conceptual shift. We started
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: with the realization that for over half a century, humanity
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: has been huddled around the cosmic water hole. That narrow
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: band between one point four to two and one point
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: sixty six gigar hurt right.
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: Assuming everyone wanted to meet by.
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: The fountain exactly, we assumed that an alien civilization would
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: share our poetic reverence for the chemistry of water and
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: broadcast their presence in that quiet valley of the spectrum.
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: But then we explored how modern researchers are actively breaking
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: free from that anthropocentric dogma by utilizing the incredible interferrama
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: tree of the LMA array high in the Chilean Andes.
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: They're pushing through the atmospheric interference and into the uncharted
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: high frequency frontier of the millimeter and submlimeter bands.
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: We are finally overcoming our own technological and cultural blind spots.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: We looked at the sheer genius of digital recycling, digging
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: through archived observations that were originally meant for studying dust
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: clouds and stellar formation, running that messy broadband data through
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: rigorous filters, and listening closely for the artificial narrowband whispers
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: of technology.
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: Hunting for that pure, unbroken synthesizer note hidden inside the
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: chaotic static of the cosmic rainforest.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: And perhaps most profoundly, we unpacked the awe inspiring paradigm
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: shifting reality of stellar bycatch. By moving away from visually
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: limited catalogs like GAYA and instead applying the rigorous statistical
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: physics of the business on galactic model, we discovered the
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: hidden depths of our own archives.
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: We learned that a survey we thought look to two
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: hundred and eighty eight thousand stars had actually inadvertent cast
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: a net over six point one million hidden suns.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: It truly is a masterclass in shifting your perspective, which
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: leads me right back to where we started. If you
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: lose your keys in a dark parking lot, you don't
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: just endlessly look under the single street lamp because it's
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: the only place with light. You have to figure out
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: how to see in the dark. You have to check
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: the shadows.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: You have to look at the data differently.
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: Today we learned that by applying new math to old data,
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: we uncovered millions of stars we didn't even know we
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: had already observed the data. The cosmic real estate was
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: sitting there all along. We just weren't looking at it
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: the right way. So I want to leave you with
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: the final thought to maul Over today, If millions of
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: hidden stars were just sitting quietly in our past observations,
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: what other massive world changing discoveries, Perhaps the ultimate answer
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: to the question of whether we are alone, are currently
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: sitting on a hard drive somewhere right now, completely ignored,
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: just waiting for someone to ask a slightly different question.