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Did Earth get a message from aliens? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:06
Speaker 1: In many ways, it's a scientific dream come true, a
0:08
Speaker 1: fantasy even to be indulged during daydreams. Usually it goes
0:12
Speaker 1: something like this. You're sitting at your desk where you
0:15
Speaker 1: monitor some telescope or communications equipment. Suddenly you see something unusual,
0:21
Speaker 1: interrupting endless hours of monotony. It's some kind of signal,
0:25
Speaker 1: something you've never seen before, something that can't have come
0:28
Speaker 1: from any Earth source and isn't produced by any natural phenomenon.
0:33
Speaker 1: It's a signal from space. It's humanity's first interplanetary email.
0:38
Speaker 1: Of course, that's exciting, it's amazing, it's mind blowing, but
0:41
Speaker 1: you know it's actually just the first step. The existence
0:45
Speaker 1: of the signal says hey, aliens are here. But what
0:49
Speaker 1: is the message that's encoded inside? What does that alien
0:52
Speaker 1: email have to say? Does it say you killed my father,
0:56
Speaker 1: prepared to die? Does it say here's our alien unified
1:00
Speaker 1: theory of everything? Or is an interstellar version of a
1:03
Speaker 1: Nigerian oil scam? Of course we're dying to know. But
1:06
Speaker 1: how do we crack the message? How do we know
1:09
Speaker 1: what the alien code is? How do we figure it out?
1:12
Speaker 1: And hanging over the whole enterprise is the question What
1:16
Speaker 1: if we can't What if we never figure out what
1:19
Speaker 1: it means, and there's a growing sense of doubt that
1:22
Speaker 1: it actually means anything. What if it's not an alien
1:25
Speaker 1: email but some kind of weird universe electromagnetic purp. Now
1:30
Speaker 1: this scientific fantasy has turned into a kind of scientific nightmare.
1:34
Speaker 1: Today in the podcast, we're going to be digging into
1:36
Speaker 1: the true story of a message from the skies and
1:39
Speaker 1: what it might mean. We'll be answering the question did
1:43
Speaker 1: Earth get a message from aliens?
2:01
Speaker 2: Welcome to Daniel and Kelly is extraordinary universe. I'm Kelly
2:05
Speaker 2: Wiener Smith, and I think probably there are aliens out there. Daniel,
2:09
Speaker 2: how are you doing? What's your story?
2:13
Speaker 1: Hi? I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a particle physicist and a
2:15
Speaker 1: professor at UC Irvine, and I wish I could say
2:18
Speaker 1: I was an alien.
2:19
Speaker 2: That is not what I expected you were going to
2:21
Speaker 2: go with today. Why do you wish you were an alien?
2:24
Speaker 1: Earth just seems like such a wonderful place to visit,
2:26
Speaker 1: And you know, there's so many friendly physicists and other
2:28
Speaker 1: scientists who want to know all of your secrets of
2:31
Speaker 1: the universe. I just imagine it would be a great
2:34
Speaker 1: experience to be an alien, arrive on Earth and get
2:38
Speaker 1: to hang out with a bunch of cool nerds.
2:40
Speaker 2: Okay, sweet, No, I'm down for that. Okay. So, if
2:43
Speaker 2: you were able to send a message that you knew
2:46
Speaker 2: aliens were going to get, what would you send out
2:50
Speaker 2: into space if you knew it would be received?
2:53
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, Kelly, Wow, the hardest question time.
2:58
Speaker 2: Oh Man, no balls here.
3:01
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, I pretty strongly believe that any message we send
3:04
Speaker 1: out into space will be undecipherable, untranslatable without us there
3:10
Speaker 1: to explain it or to interact with them or some
3:13
Speaker 1: kind of common context. I love the message that we
3:16
Speaker 1: did send out into space, but I think it's probably
3:19
Speaker 1: impossible for aliens to figure out what we meant by that,
3:21
Speaker 1: because I think there's so much of us in it,
3:24
Speaker 1: so much of our cultural context, and that it's hard
3:26
Speaker 1: for us to see that and to strip it away.
3:28
Speaker 1: But of course, if you gave me the opportunity, I
3:30
Speaker 1: would still send something, probably a picture of my kids.
3:33
Speaker 2: Aw, that's cute. I think if I was going to
3:36
Speaker 2: send a message out in a space, one thing that's
3:38
Speaker 2: kind of universal is music, especially instrumental music. So I
3:44
Speaker 2: think i'd send some like beautiful music out into space,
3:46
Speaker 2: because I agree. I think if you sent like we
3:48
Speaker 2: come in peace, they wouldn't know what that means. I mean,
3:50
Speaker 2: I can listen to music from a culture I know
3:52
Speaker 2: nothing about and still feel kind of choked up about it.
3:55
Speaker 2: I don't know. Maybe that's the closest we have to
3:57
Speaker 2: something universal.
3:58
Speaker 1: Maybe I mean it's the universe, maybe across humans. And
4:02
Speaker 1: I can appreciate music from other species like bird song
4:05
Speaker 1: can be quite nice. But I don't know if that
4:07
Speaker 1: means that it's universal beyond Earth right, other than just
4:11
Speaker 1: speculation and hope, do we have any solid evidence biologically
4:15
Speaker 1: for music being something that has to fundamentally be part
4:18
Speaker 1: of intelligence.
4:19
Speaker 2: No, absolutely not. But I think it's maybe one of
4:21
Speaker 2: our best chances at sending something that represents our whole species.
4:25
Speaker 2: Because almost all of us are excited about music.
4:28
Speaker 1: That means we have to send them Taylor Swift or
4:30
Speaker 1: like the Macarena or something.
4:32
Speaker 2: I think we could take a more historical perspective.
4:38
Speaker 1: What's more likely to get us invaded or nuked from orbit? O?
4:40
Speaker 2: God, let's withhold the makarena. Bleeps.
4:45
Speaker 1: But we don't just have to speculate about signals to
4:47
Speaker 1: send to aliens, because humanity has sent messages to the
4:50
Speaker 1: skies in the past, and we've done so in response
4:53
Speaker 1: to weird lips and bleeps we've heard from the cosmos.
4:57
Speaker 2: Do you think most people know about the weird blue
5:00
Speaker 2: in bleeps we've heard. I think we should ask our audience.
5:03
Speaker 1: One of the best candidates for a potential alien signal
5:06
Speaker 1: is something we're going to be talking about on the
5:07
Speaker 1: podcast today. It's called the Wow signal because someone wrote
5:11
Speaker 1: wow next to the computer print out when they first
5:13
Speaker 1: saw it. Was it Aliens? Was it the Russians? Was
5:16
Speaker 1: it just birds?
5:17
Speaker 2: I think the writing wow next to it thing is
5:20
Speaker 2: really cute, better than WTF or something a WTF signal?
5:24
Speaker 1: I love it, And so I asked folks what they
5:26
Speaker 1: thought the Wow signal might be. Was it a message
5:29
Speaker 1: from aliens? Or are we just fooling ourselves. Here's what
5:32
Speaker 1: people had to say.
5:33
Speaker 2: I'm not sure what calls the Wow signal.
5:36
Speaker 1: Maybe supernova, maybe maybe aquasa.
5:39
Speaker 2: Some sort of cosmic anomaly.
5:42
Speaker 1: I don't remember if there's been any resolution on its origin,
5:46
Speaker 1: so I'd love to hear progress on that.
5:48
Speaker 2: The Wow signal is a seventy two second narrow band
5:51
Speaker 2: high energy signal sent by the Santee, an alien race,
5:54
Speaker 2: in an attempt to find refuge from their failing three
5:57
Speaker 2: body problem.
5:57
Speaker 1: It must be very impressive to be called the WOW.
6:01
Speaker 1: That's the signal that was seen by SETTI for a
6:03
Speaker 1: brief time. I don't think it's known what caused it,
6:05
Speaker 1: no idea, It never never repeated.
6:08
Speaker 2: My guess is the WOW signal was a short transmission
6:12
Speaker 2: from a satellite that just happened to be in the
6:15
Speaker 2: beam of the Big Year at the time, something that
6:18
Speaker 2: they thought was alien. But they've recently done done some
6:21
Speaker 2: research to improved that it was actually a massive comet
6:23
Speaker 2: going between one planetary signal and US. I think it
6:26
Speaker 2: had something to do with hydrogen. I'm curious to hear.
6:29
Speaker 1: To find out the WOW signal was just a glitch,
6:32
Speaker 1: a random occurrence. Or who was written upside down and
6:37
Speaker 1: he was thinking about his mom mikes would be moving.
6:40
Speaker 1: Electrons burst from like a pulsar equasar that collided with
6:44
Speaker 1: the cloud of hydrogen, which then created the signal of
6:47
Speaker 1: sweatpast Earth. If you'd like to virtually answer these persons
6:50
Speaker 1: on the street questions, we'd love to have you participate
6:52
Speaker 1: please write to us two questions at danieland Kelly dot org.
6:57
Speaker 1: That's danieland Kelly dot O RG Kelly, is.
7:00
Speaker 2: K E l L Y not I E. That's the
7:02
Speaker 2: wrong way to spell it. Sorry to I E. Kelly's
7:05
Speaker 2: out there. Let's go ahead and alienate the audience for
7:08
Speaker 2: no reason. So I thought the answers that we got
7:10
Speaker 2: this time around were great. I really loved the person
7:13
Speaker 2: who was quick on their feet and had the upside
7:16
Speaker 2: down and it actually met mom answer, like, oh, message
7:21
Speaker 2: for mom, I got to call home.
7:23
Speaker 1: Maybe moms are the most universal thing in the universe, Kelly.
7:26
Speaker 2: I love that idea. I think that's probably right. Everyone
7:30
Speaker 2: everywhere loves their mom.
7:31
Speaker 1: I don't know. We have a running joke as a
7:33
Speaker 1: family whenever we watch a movie, either the dad or
7:35
Speaker 1: the mom is usually like a terrible character. And so
7:39
Speaker 1: you know, when you see a mom acting badly on
7:41
Speaker 1: the screen, my kids are like, moms are the worst.
7:43
Speaker 1: Oh you see a dad behaving terribly, and they're like,
7:46
Speaker 1: dads are the worst. Oh my gosh. But anyway, I
7:49
Speaker 1: hope aliens out there have really nice moms.
7:52
Speaker 2: I hope so too. Well. So another common guess was
7:55
Speaker 2: that this was just a like equipment problem or some
7:59
Speaker 2: you know, environmental phenomena. So let's get into where we
8:02
Speaker 2: collected the WOW signal, what it looked like, and let's
8:05
Speaker 2: jump in.
8:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Wow signal is a really exciting example something
8:08
Speaker 1: I think is really important, which is basically just listening
8:12
Speaker 1: to the universe and trying to hear messages. You know,
8:15
Speaker 1: we don't have a whole lot of ways of communicating
8:18
Speaker 1: with aliens because we're stuck on this rock. You know,
8:20
Speaker 1: space is vast and rockets are slow, and even photons
8:24
Speaker 1: don't go very fast compared to the huge distances between
8:28
Speaker 1: here and any other stars. So our best chance to
8:31
Speaker 1: discover life is not to land on some other planet
8:34
Speaker 1: or for other aliens to land here, but to hear
8:36
Speaker 1: from them, right, to get a message from space. And
8:39
Speaker 1: so the best way to figure out are we alone
8:42
Speaker 1: in the universe is to listen to hear if other
8:44
Speaker 1: people are basically sending us interplanetary emails.
8:48
Speaker 2: I feel like it's common for people to try to
8:50
Speaker 2: convince you that the question they work on is really
8:52
Speaker 2: important by prefacing it with one of the most important
8:55
Speaker 2: questions humankind will ever have to answer. And people often
8:58
Speaker 2: say whether or not we're alone one of the most
9:00
Speaker 2: important questions humankind will ever have to answer. And I
9:03
Speaker 2: think that's the one time that I believe it. I
9:05
Speaker 2: think that might actually be one of the most important questions.
9:08
Speaker 2: What do you think what do you think is the
9:09
Speaker 2: most important question humans could ever answer?
9:12
Speaker 1: Man, you are dropping the big questions kind of.
9:14
Speaker 2: Getting us off track.
9:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, I agree, And I think we know
9:19
Speaker 1: it's one of the most important questions because it's one
9:21
Speaker 1: of the oldest questions, and there's a question we've been
9:23
Speaker 1: asking since we've been asking questions. It's up there with
9:27
Speaker 1: like how big is the universe and where does it
9:29
Speaker 1: all come from? It changes the whole context of our experience,
9:32
Speaker 1: you know, in a way that like some question in
9:35
Speaker 1: organic chemistry, can you synthesize this polysaccharator or whatever? I
9:39
Speaker 1: don't even know enough chemistry to make that joke, you know,
9:41
Speaker 1: like the answer doesn't change what it means to be human,
9:45
Speaker 1: what it means to be alive, and how you should
9:46
Speaker 1: live your life. But if we know we're alone in
9:49
Speaker 1: the universe, we're the only thinking beings that really changes
9:53
Speaker 1: what it means to be human. And also if we're
9:56
Speaker 1: one in the zillion changes what it means to be human.
9:59
Speaker 1: So yeah, I agree this is one of the deep questions.
10:01
Speaker 1: I don't personally work on this question, which means I'm
10:03
Speaker 1: not like invested in it that same way, but I
10:05
Speaker 1: agree it's one of the most important questions basically anybody's
10:08
Speaker 1: ever asked.
10:09
Speaker 2: And I also don't work on this question, but I
10:11
Speaker 2: still think it would probably profoundly change the way I
10:14
Speaker 2: see everything. And I feel like, also over the course
10:16
Speaker 2: of my life, I've been more and more convinced that
10:18
Speaker 2: probably there's something else out there. During my lifetime, we've
10:21
Speaker 2: learned so much about other exoplanets and how much is
10:24
Speaker 2: out there, and I feel like, statistically it would be
10:28
Speaker 2: really surprising if we were alone. And so anyway, I'm
10:31
Speaker 2: more excited about listening.
10:32
Speaker 1: I think it's really interesting how scientists have hunches like that.
10:35
Speaker 1: I don't think that's widely enough understood that you know,
10:37
Speaker 1: we're scientists and we're doing science and we're trying to
10:39
Speaker 1: be objective, but also look where people we got feelings
10:42
Speaker 1: and guesses and emotions, and that's important because that drives
10:45
Speaker 1: how science is done. Like, if you believe in something,
10:48
Speaker 1: you're more likely to investigate it, And of course you
10:50
Speaker 1: can investigate it in a very scientific way and try
10:53
Speaker 1: to draw objective answers, but it changes the kind of
10:55
Speaker 1: things you do with your science, little places you spend
10:57
Speaker 1: your time. So these like scientific hunches, they're important. You know,
11:01
Speaker 1: these feelings that scientists have.
11:03
Speaker 2: Well, I think you need to be honest about them,
11:05
Speaker 2: because if you feel like something is right, then you
11:07
Speaker 2: need to be extra careful to make sure you're not
11:09
Speaker 2: tricking yourself into something. You know. I think people who
11:12
Speaker 2: are like, oh, scientists, they're always unbiased and they're just
11:15
Speaker 2: looking for the truth. It's like, no, we're humans. We
11:17
Speaker 2: like have a hunch that things are going to go
11:19
Speaker 2: one way or another, and you need to be honest
11:21
Speaker 2: about that and then try extra hard to prove yourself
11:23
Speaker 2: wrong if you know you're leaning in a certain direction exactly.
11:26
Speaker 1: And I feel just that way about the aliens question.
11:29
Speaker 1: People write to me about this because I'm very skeptical
11:32
Speaker 1: of all the videos that we've seen, you know, gimbal
11:35
Speaker 1: and the Tiktac video and all this stuff. And I
11:37
Speaker 1: talked to Mick West once about it and he helped
11:39
Speaker 1: us debunk them. And the reason I feel so skeptical
11:42
Speaker 1: about them is that the threshold is absolutely, very very high.
11:44
Speaker 1: And one reason for that is that I really want
11:46
Speaker 1: it to be true, Like I want there to be aliens,
11:48
Speaker 1: and I want them to be here on Earth visiting us.
11:50
Speaker 1: I would so love for that to be true that
11:52
Speaker 1: I have to be extra scrupulous about believing this stuff, right,
11:55
Speaker 1: It needs to be really, really rock solid, because I
11:58
Speaker 1: know I'm biased in fame of believing it, And.
12:01
Speaker 2: So I bet you want it to be true because
12:04
Speaker 2: you would love to know their physics theories and if
12:07
Speaker 2: they imagine with ours.
12:09
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I would love to talk to a theoretical physicists
12:11
Speaker 1: from another planet, if they even do theoretical physics. And
12:14
Speaker 1: you know, of course that I'm writing a book on
12:16
Speaker 1: that exact question, but also because it would instantly answer
12:19
Speaker 1: so many other questions about the prevalence of life, Like
12:22
Speaker 1: your hunch that there is life out there in the
12:25
Speaker 1: universe is informed, of course by science. You know, there
12:27
Speaker 1: are a lot more planets, a lot more stars, a
12:29
Speaker 1: lot more earth like planets and all that stuff, But
12:31
Speaker 1: there's still the question of how often life arises, and
12:34
Speaker 1: something we don't even understand here on Earth, right, And
12:37
Speaker 1: so that would help us understand that question, which I
12:39
Speaker 1: feel like is so deep and informs the context of
12:42
Speaker 1: our lives so profoundly that yeah, I'm desperate to know.
12:47
Speaker 1: And also because it's a question that has an answer,
12:49
Speaker 1: and the answer is out there. Yeah, like the aliens
12:52
Speaker 1: are either there or they're not. You know, it's just
12:54
Speaker 1: a fact about the universe and we just don't have
12:56
Speaker 1: the answer. It's like if somebody puts the answer in
12:58
Speaker 1: an envelope in front of you, you're going to be
13:00
Speaker 1: so desperate to open it, right. That's to me what
13:02
Speaker 1: science is is like ripping open the envelopes of the universe.
13:05
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I just started this book called The Zoologists
13:09
Speaker 2: Guide to the Galaxy, and the argument that he's making
13:12
Speaker 2: is that natural selection must be acting everywhere, and so
13:15
Speaker 2: there are some things you can predict about how animals
13:18
Speaker 2: will look and anyway, as a biologist, I would just
13:20
Speaker 2: love to know, like do they have something like DNA
13:23
Speaker 2: like we do? Are there other ways of encoding things?
13:26
Speaker 2: I mean, it does feel like they must be shaped
13:29
Speaker 2: by natural selection, but is that true? And what do
13:31
Speaker 2: they look like now? And I'm only about the first
13:34
Speaker 2: quarter of the way into the book and it's a
13:36
Speaker 2: very interesting argument. But okay, so we both agree.
13:39
Speaker 1: Well, I actually talk to Eric Kirshenbaum and interviewed him
13:42
Speaker 1: for the book that I'm writing. He's hilarious, and you know,
13:44
Speaker 1: I believe his arguments that like, basically critters or always
13:47
Speaker 1: going to munch on other critters, and that affects how
13:50
Speaker 1: aliens evolve. And you can learn a lot about how
13:53
Speaker 1: aliens might behave from the things that have happened here
13:56
Speaker 1: on Earth. But maybe he's totally wrong, and the only
13:58
Speaker 1: way to know he is to meet the aliens.
14:00
Speaker 2: That's right. Anyway, So we have spent way longer than
14:03
Speaker 2: we intended talking about why we should look you and
14:06
Speaker 2: I are convinced that we should be looking how do
14:09
Speaker 2: you look?
14:10
Speaker 1: Well, Basically, the right way to do it is to
14:12
Speaker 1: open every single technological eyeball or earball that you can
14:17
Speaker 1: right listen to the skies in every possible way, because
14:20
Speaker 1: we can't anticipate how are aliens going to try to
14:23
Speaker 1: connect with us? Now, Because we're scientists, the first thing
14:26
Speaker 1: we do is the easiest thing, Right, every time you
14:29
Speaker 1: try something in science, you always do the dumbest, simplest,
14:31
Speaker 1: cheapest thing first, because hey, that might just work something
14:35
Speaker 1: you're done right, and when that doesn't work, then you
14:37
Speaker 1: get more creative and more expensive. So the simplest, easiest
14:40
Speaker 1: thing to do is to just listen for radio waves.
14:43
Speaker 1: Like it's that simple. You know, we have these things
14:45
Speaker 1: that can send messages from one part of the Earth
14:47
Speaker 1: to the other by exciting the electromagnetic field. You know,
14:50
Speaker 1: that's how radio waves work. You have an antenna somewhere,
14:53
Speaker 1: electrons inside of it are oscillating because of the current
14:56
Speaker 1: that makes oscillating electromagnetic waves, which is then reach an
14:59
Speaker 1: antenna you have which wriggles the electrons in your antenna,
15:03
Speaker 1: which creates a current which feeds into your circuit and
15:05
Speaker 1: then gets translated into sound for your ears. Right, So
15:08
Speaker 1: the idea is, Look, you don't need air or anything
15:11
Speaker 1: to send radio waves. You can send them from here
15:13
Speaker 1: to the moon. You can send them from here to Mars.
15:15
Speaker 1: They go through space itself, just like light does. Right.
15:19
Speaker 1: Radio waves are fundamentally just another kind of light. Light
15:23
Speaker 1: exists in lots of different frequencies. We can see it
15:26
Speaker 1: from like red up to violet, but it exists in
15:29
Speaker 1: higher frequencies we can't see the ultraviolet and lower frequencies,
15:32
Speaker 1: we can't see the infrared and radio waves, and so
15:35
Speaker 1: this is basically like listen for radio waves from space
15:40
Speaker 1: because we have that technology.
15:42
Speaker 2: So we could also look for like photons from far away.
15:46
Speaker 2: Are there any kind of waves that would not travel
15:50
Speaker 2: through space and could not be used to send a message?
15:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, we can definitely look for signals from space,
15:56
Speaker 1: like if aliens are shining a laser beam at us
15:59
Speaker 1: and turn it on and off in Morse code or
16:01
Speaker 1: the alien equivalent, we could totally see that. The different
16:04
Speaker 1: frequencies have different strengths and weaknesses because the universe is
16:08
Speaker 1: transparent or opaque at different frequencies. Like the visible spectrum
16:12
Speaker 1: is nice because the universe is mostly transparent. Like if
16:15
Speaker 1: you shine a laser beam from here to Alpha Centauri,
16:18
Speaker 1: it's gonna make it and they can see that laser
16:21
Speaker 1: because visible light can go through space. It's transparent. And
16:24
Speaker 1: you know, it didn't always used to be that way.
16:26
Speaker 1: Earlier in the history of the universe, it was filled
16:28
Speaker 1: with a plasma and the universe was opaque. And so
16:31
Speaker 1: it's just like in our era of the universe that
16:33
Speaker 1: it's mostly transparent to this, but space is not actually
16:36
Speaker 1: empty right, there's lots of dust and gas and stuff,
16:39
Speaker 1: so some frequencies of light can penetrate that and some
16:41
Speaker 1: of them can't. So radio waves in infrared and ultraviolet
16:44
Speaker 1: and X rays, some of those things can make it
16:46
Speaker 1: through gas and dust and some of them can't. So
16:48
Speaker 1: the right thing they do is still listen on all
16:50
Speaker 1: the frequencies because we don't know where they're coming from
16:53
Speaker 1: and how they can transmit, So they might be invisible
16:56
Speaker 1: to us because they're behind gas and dust in the
16:58
Speaker 1: center of the galaxy or something else. But radio is
17:01
Speaker 1: sort of easy. We have lots of receivers for radio,
17:03
Speaker 1: We have large antenna, and we've been doing it a
17:05
Speaker 1: little while, so radio is sort of like the first place.
17:08
Speaker 2: To go, you know, there's lots of radio stations on Earth.
17:11
Speaker 2: Is everything that we transmit to each other by radio
17:16
Speaker 2: also making it out into space, Like have the aliens
17:18
Speaker 2: heard the Macarena or will they in many late years
17:21
Speaker 2: or whatever? Or does it depend on where we're aiming it,
17:24
Speaker 2: Like our radios aimed towards Earth, and so those messages
17:27
Speaker 2: aren't going out into deep space.
17:28
Speaker 1: No, we have definitely beamed the Macharina into deep space.
17:31
Speaker 1: Embarrassingly right now, or maybe they love it, you know,
17:34
Speaker 1: and maybe that's the reason they're going to come, which
17:37
Speaker 1: would be wonderful. Messages can be beamed, they can be aimed,
17:40
Speaker 1: but generally radio is not right. Radio is broadcast in
17:43
Speaker 1: every direction, so you can pick up your tailor switch
17:45
Speaker 1: in every direction, which means that it's also broadcast up
17:48
Speaker 1: right and out into space, and also with our TV signals,
17:51
Speaker 1: and so yes, our signals have left the planet though
17:54
Speaker 1: you know, we've only been transmitting for about one hundred years,
17:57
Speaker 1: and that means that there's like a bubble one hundred
18:00
Speaker 1: light years wide within which you can pick up signals
18:03
Speaker 1: from Earth. And one hundred light years seems like a
18:06
Speaker 1: long way because light travels really really fast, right, but
18:09
Speaker 1: the galaxy is one hundred thousand light years across, So
18:12
Speaker 1: the fraction of the Milky Way which is filled with
18:15
Speaker 1: Earth signals is really really small. And as you get
18:19
Speaker 1: further and further from Earth, those signals get weaker. If
18:23
Speaker 1: you're twice as far away, the signals get four times
18:25
Speaker 1: a week. If you're ten times further away, then they
18:27
Speaker 1: get one hundred times this week. So because they're not
18:30
Speaker 1: typically aimed, they get really pretty weak when you get
18:32
Speaker 1: to like the next star. So, for example, our radio
18:35
Speaker 1: telescopes couldn't pick up Earth like transmissions from the nearest star.
18:41
Speaker 2: Okay, so the nearest aliens living on a planet orbiting
18:44
Speaker 2: the nearest star wouldn't necessarily be able to eavesdrop on
18:48
Speaker 2: all of the communications we were sharing by radio during
18:51
Speaker 2: World War II, for example, so they might not know
18:54
Speaker 2: about those atrocities, and then don't have to be so
18:56
Speaker 2: insecure about how our species looks exactly.
18:58
Speaker 1: If we knew they were there, beam them a message,
19:01
Speaker 1: which they probably could receive, assuming they had technology similar
19:04
Speaker 1: to ours. But if we're just broadcasting into space, then
19:07
Speaker 1: by the time it gets there. Again, if they have
19:09
Speaker 1: technology similar to ours, they wouldn't be able to pick
19:11
Speaker 1: it up. If they're far advanced and their technology is
19:14
Speaker 1: much more powerful, then yeah, maybe they're listening to us
19:16
Speaker 1: right now and they watched every episode of I Love Lucy,
19:19
Speaker 1: in which case we got some splaining to do.
19:24
Speaker 2: I'm enjoying your choice of pop culture references, and I'm
19:27
Speaker 2: not sure if I'm getting some insights into your preferences
19:30
Speaker 2: here or not. So let's take a break for some commercials,
19:34
Speaker 2: and when we get back, we'll talk about Sagittarius A.
19:54
Speaker 2: All right, we're back. During the break, you told me
19:57
Speaker 2: something that I didn't know, which means I didn't read
20:00
Speaker 2: our outline very carefully, which is that Sagittarius A is
20:05
Speaker 2: a black hole discovered by radio waves. All right, tell
20:09
Speaker 2: me more about that.
20:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, we do radio to talk to each other, but
20:13
Speaker 1: astronomers do radio to listen to the skies. But not
20:16
Speaker 1: in the beginning. Radio astronomy has its origins in the
20:19
Speaker 1: radio industry. The first radio telescope was built by somebody
20:23
Speaker 1: at Bell Labs, essentially to listen to see like, hey,
20:25
Speaker 1: how much noise is there in the radio spectrum? How
20:28
Speaker 1: much do we have to worry about this if we
20:30
Speaker 1: want to transmit radio around the world. So this is
20:32
Speaker 1: like in the thirties, This is not somebody doing astronomy.
20:35
Speaker 1: This is just like, hey, this is a commercial, useful technology.
20:38
Speaker 1: Let's figure out how noisy it is. And then after
20:41
Speaker 1: World War Two there are a lot of advances in
20:43
Speaker 1: radar which then got applied to radio astronomy, and that's
20:46
Speaker 1: when it first took off and people started listening in
20:49
Speaker 1: depth to the skies and they immediately discovered something really
20:52
Speaker 1: really weird that there was a point in the sky
20:54
Speaker 1: where you couldn't really see anything interesting, but it was very,
20:58
Speaker 1: very loud in the radio. It wasn't loud or equivalently
21:01
Speaker 1: bright in the visible like if you look with a telescope,
21:04
Speaker 1: you couldn't really see anything there, but that point in
21:06
Speaker 1: the sky was extraordinarily loud in the radio.
21:10
Speaker 2: Why are black holes screaming in radio?
21:16
Speaker 1: Death metal? Of course? I mean what kind of music
21:19
Speaker 1: is a black hole going to make? You know? Soell
21:21
Speaker 1: Garden right, it's not John Denver for sure. Yeah. So
21:27
Speaker 1: why do things in the sky emit in radio? Well,
21:30
Speaker 1: all electromagnetic radiation that includes visible photons and X rays
21:33
Speaker 1: and everything are emitted by charged particles being accelerated. It's
21:38
Speaker 1: a fundamental piece of electromagnetism. Like you have an electron,
21:41
Speaker 1: you accelerate, it means you're giving it a kick in
21:43
Speaker 1: order to conserve momentum. It's going to shoot off a
21:45
Speaker 1: photon in the other direction, right, That's how charge particles
21:48
Speaker 1: get accelerated. Every time a charge particle is accelerated, it's
21:51
Speaker 1: going to give off a photon. So what's happening here
21:54
Speaker 1: is you have electrons moving at high speeds being bent
21:56
Speaker 1: by the strong magnetic fields around the black hole, and
22:00
Speaker 1: that corresponds to radio and it's fascinating because stars don't
22:04
Speaker 1: produce radio waves. If you listen to the sky in radio,
22:06
Speaker 1: you don't hear from the stars. They admit in the
22:08
Speaker 1: visible spectrum, they admit in the infrared, but they're pretty
22:11
Speaker 1: quiet in the radio. And so this is like another
22:14
Speaker 1: way to see what's out there in the universe. It's like, well,
22:16
Speaker 1: some stuff is loud in this frequency, some stuff is
22:19
Speaker 1: loud in that frequency. The sky looks very different at
22:22
Speaker 1: different frequencies.
22:23
Speaker 2: Okay, So we looked out and there was an area
22:26
Speaker 2: that was screaming sound garden. It was screaming at us
22:30
Speaker 2: in radio. We decided that was a black hole. We
22:32
Speaker 2: named it Sagittarius A.
22:34
Speaker 1: That's right, And that really kicked off the whole era
22:36
Speaker 1: of radio astronomy, and people started listening to the sky
22:39
Speaker 1: discovering all sorts of stuff, and of course people were wondering, like, hey,
22:43
Speaker 1: are we also going to get messages from non black holes?
22:46
Speaker 1: And you know, maybe aliens are sending messages to us.
22:50
Speaker 1: And there's one frequency in the radio which astronomers particularly
22:53
Speaker 1: think maybe aliens are going to use this channel to
22:55
Speaker 1: talk to us, and that's called the twenty one centimeters
22:58
Speaker 1: hydrogen line. A cloud of hydrogen will very naturally emit
23:02
Speaker 1: at this particular frequency because it corresponds to like an
23:05
Speaker 1: energy gap in hydrogen. You get hydrogen hot and excited,
23:09
Speaker 1: and then it cools back down and it emits a photon.
23:11
Speaker 1: When those electrons dek back down, it admits of this
23:14
Speaker 1: particular frequency. And because hydrogen is like the basic building
23:17
Speaker 1: block of the universe is hydrogen, everywhere, anybody who does
23:20
Speaker 1: radio astronomy is going to hear hydrogen and they're going
23:23
Speaker 1: to listen to hydrogen and use this to study the universe.
23:26
Speaker 1: So it's sort of like figuring out, Hey, anybody out
23:28
Speaker 1: there who's curious about the universe is probably paying attention
23:31
Speaker 1: to this channel. So let's spam this channel, or let's
23:34
Speaker 1: listen to this channel to see if this is what
23:36
Speaker 1: people using to talk to each other.
23:37
Speaker 2: Okay, that's very cool. And so once we think we
23:41
Speaker 2: Eves dropped on something, how long ago did this happen?
23:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, so people have been listening to this for a
23:47
Speaker 1: long long time, wondering if we're going to get a message,
23:49
Speaker 1: and then there was this fantastic moment. It was August fifteenth,
23:52
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven. This took place at Ohio State. They
23:55
Speaker 1: have a radio telescope they called the Big Ear. Love
23:58
Speaker 1: that name. And the way this telescope works is it's
24:01
Speaker 1: just a bunch of antennas. Right. You say telescope, and
24:04
Speaker 1: you imagine like a scientist using one eyeball to look
24:07
Speaker 1: through a glass or something. Right, But a telescope is
24:09
Speaker 1: a general word for anything that can listen to the skies,
24:12
Speaker 1: and so this telescope is just a bunch of radio
24:14
Speaker 1: antennas spread out across a cornfield somewhere. That's how they
24:17
Speaker 1: listen to these radio waves. You can also have like
24:19
Speaker 1: a big dish, you know, like the Green Bank Observatory
24:22
Speaker 1: and the Parks observatories. These are actually big dishes help
24:25
Speaker 1: focus it. But you can also just spread out a
24:27
Speaker 1: bunch of antennas on the ground, and that's what the
24:29
Speaker 1: Ohio State Big Ear was. And the way this thing
24:32
Speaker 1: worked is it scanned for ten seconds and then it
24:35
Speaker 1: processed it through a computer for two seconds and then
24:37
Speaker 1: summarized the strength of anything it saw. So it's like
24:39
Speaker 1: ten seconds of scanning, two seconds of analysis. And printing out.
24:43
Speaker 1: And when I say printing out, I mean literally this
24:45
Speaker 1: telescope feeds its data into an old fashioned computer and
24:48
Speaker 1: IBM eleven thirty, which is then printed out the data
24:51
Speaker 1: like onto one of those line printers, you know, like
24:56
Speaker 1: like this is the output of the telescope. Yeah, exactly.
25:00
Speaker 1: And so some human had to then go like literally
25:03
Speaker 1: sift through these pages to see, like, hey, was there
25:05
Speaker 1: anything interesting last night? You watch a movie of like
25:08
Speaker 1: Discovering Aliens, and there some guy like sifting through pages
25:11
Speaker 1: looking for something interesting, Like that's what really happened.
25:14
Speaker 2: So was there someone whose job was just to sit
25:17
Speaker 2: there constantly, so someone was always on shift. Presumably our
25:20
Speaker 2: eyes detect patterns, and so we'd look for things that
25:23
Speaker 2: look like a pattern or something different than what we
25:25
Speaker 2: were usually seeing.
25:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this had to be scanned visually, and they
25:28
Speaker 1: would transform the signal from the telescope into a code.
25:32
Speaker 1: And so if they saw basically nothing in this spectrum,
25:35
Speaker 1: it would be a space. If they would put a
25:37
Speaker 1: one or two or three. If it was a stronger signal,
25:39
Speaker 1: all the way up to nine. For a fairly strong signal,
25:41
Speaker 1: it got really strong, it would go into letters ABCDFG
25:45
Speaker 1: all the way up to you. You was the maximum
25:47
Speaker 1: signal that could detect that was saturating it. And so
25:49
Speaker 1: there was this morning August fifteenth, nineteen seventy seven, when
25:53
Speaker 1: they saw a signal that was seventy two seconds long,
25:56
Speaker 1: so six observing periods, which corresponds to six legs, and
26:00
Speaker 1: the signal was six E, the letter Q, the letter
26:03
Speaker 1: U J and five. Now this is very confusing because
26:06
Speaker 1: it makes it sound like, oh, the aliens sent us
26:08
Speaker 1: an email and it was these letters six EQUJ five.
26:12
Speaker 1: Like I said, a license plate. You should not use
26:14
Speaker 1: your decoding skills to try to understand what the aliens
26:17
Speaker 1: meant from these letters. These just correspond to the strength
26:21
Speaker 1: of the signal. If you translate this back from the
26:23
Speaker 1: particular code that this experiment used, it basically just means
26:27
Speaker 1: that the signal got stronger and then very very strong,
26:29
Speaker 1: and then quieter. So it's like a blip. It goes
26:32
Speaker 1: up and then comes down.
26:34
Speaker 2: But you're missing two seconds every ten seconds, that's right.
26:39
Speaker 2: So it could be even more complicated, that's right.
26:43
Speaker 1: Because the telescope can't sample constantly because the computer was slow, essentially,
26:47
Speaker 1: and so you're missing two seconds Also, the signal could
26:50
Speaker 1: have been longer. We only saw it for seventy seconds
26:53
Speaker 1: because that's how long it was visible for. This telescope
26:56
Speaker 1: can't be pointed. It's just like laying on a cornfield somewhere,
26:59
Speaker 1: and as the Earth rotates, it basically scans different parts
27:02
Speaker 1: of the sky, and so it just naturally scanned across
27:06
Speaker 1: this region for seventy seconds. It could have still been emitting. Right,
27:09
Speaker 1: you can't like turn the earth back and like hold
27:11
Speaker 1: on a second.
27:11
Speaker 2: That was great, go back.
27:14
Speaker 1: Also, they didn't see this until like you know, days
27:16
Speaker 1: later when they got to looking at this output. But
27:18
Speaker 1: still it was a very strong signal like the letter's
27:21
Speaker 1: Q and you in there tell you it's a very
27:24
Speaker 1: very powerful signal. It's very loud compared to like the
27:27
Speaker 1: average noise you expect in this spectrum. It's exactly the
27:31
Speaker 1: kind of thing at the twenty one centimeter line you
27:33
Speaker 1: might expect to get from aliens.
27:36
Speaker 2: So we've got this message that caught our attention, and
27:39
Speaker 2: so presumably, as you mentioned, you don't get things that
27:42
Speaker 2: are this loud most of the time. And so what
27:44
Speaker 2: do you do with it? Now? Yeah, how do you
27:48
Speaker 2: figure out what it was? From? Just this information.
27:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Well, the first thing you do is you're
27:54
Speaker 1: write wow on the piece of paper next to it,
27:56
Speaker 1: forever immortalizing yourself and your handwriting in the history of astronomy. Right,
28:01
Speaker 1: that's literally what it did, Like on that physical piece
28:03
Speaker 1: of paper, he wrote wow exclamation point because it was
28:05
Speaker 1: very unusual, and that really highlights the nature of the
28:08
Speaker 1: problem and also a hint to try to figure it out, Like,
28:10
Speaker 1: this is an unusual signal compared to what we typically see.
28:14
Speaker 1: That means that, like we listen to the sky in radio,
28:16
Speaker 1: we look around, we hear, we know the kind of
28:19
Speaker 1: things we expect to see, you know, black hole this
28:21
Speaker 1: and black hole that, and random electrones amid different clouds.
28:24
Speaker 1: We know typically what the sky does, and this is unusual.
28:28
Speaker 1: Unusual doesn't necessarily mean aliens, right, it means not the
28:32
Speaker 1: typical thing, quite rare, very weird. Again, not necessarily aliens.
28:37
Speaker 1: It means it's fascinating, It means we could learn something.
28:40
Speaker 1: It means it's definitely something you should pay attention to
28:42
Speaker 1: and look for more examples of. But how to interpret
28:45
Speaker 1: that is difficult. And this is like a classic thing
28:47
Speaker 1: in science. You know, we're always doing this two hypothesis test,
28:50
Speaker 1: where like, do we reject the current hypothesis do we
28:54
Speaker 1: accept the new hypothesis. You can't just reject the current
28:56
Speaker 1: one and be like, yeah, I have no explanation. You
28:59
Speaker 1: need some explanation, some way to describe this, some theory
29:02
Speaker 1: that says this is why we should see this particular
29:05
Speaker 1: weird thing and not some other weird thing. And that's
29:08
Speaker 1: very hard, you know. How do you look at this
29:10
Speaker 1: signal and say I'm convinced this is from aliens? It's
29:14
Speaker 1: very challenging. It's not an easy thing to do.
29:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially when you only see it once and you
29:19
Speaker 2: get no more extra information, and so you can't try
29:21
Speaker 2: to match it up with a natural phenomenon or something
29:23
Speaker 2: like that. And so what did they try doing?
29:25
Speaker 1: People try to do lots of stuff. Number one is like,
29:27
Speaker 1: look for other examples of this. Do we see this
29:30
Speaker 1: anywhere else? In this guy? Has anybody else ever seen one?
29:33
Speaker 1: And nobody's been able to repeat this like it didn't
29:35
Speaker 1: come back. You know. A classic possible explanation for this
29:38
Speaker 1: is like, oh, it's something out there that's emitting, but
29:41
Speaker 1: like a pulsar, right. Pulsars are neutron stars, which are
29:44
Speaker 1: remnants from stellar collapse. You have a star, it burns
29:47
Speaker 1: its life mostly at the end. It's very very bright,
29:50
Speaker 1: it burns out very quickly, it collapses. You're left with
29:53
Speaker 1: this very dense remnant. Sometimes those are spinning really really fast,
29:57
Speaker 1: and they're spinning off center, so they have like a
29:59
Speaker 1: b shooting up and down their poles, and that beam
30:02
Speaker 1: is now sweeping across the universe. And if you're in
30:05
Speaker 1: the path of that beam, you're not always in the
30:07
Speaker 1: path of the beam. It's like a lighthouse. It's sweeping
30:10
Speaker 1: past you regularly. So pulsar is cool. And actually, when
30:13
Speaker 1: pulsars were first discovered, people thought, oh, maybe this is
30:15
Speaker 1: aliens because they were regular it's like beep, beep, beep.
30:19
Speaker 1: But this was just one beep, so it's not a pulsar.
30:22
Speaker 1: This never came back again. Nobody's ever seen anything this
30:26
Speaker 1: strong from that direction in the sky. So they were
30:28
Speaker 1: able to like immediately filter out a bunch of possible explanations.
30:32
Speaker 1: And for me, there's sort of two simultaneous things you
30:34
Speaker 1: need to do. One is like, well, let's see if
30:36
Speaker 1: there are prosaic explanations, you know, just some natural phenomena
30:40
Speaker 1: we haven't seen before. And also let's actively try to
30:43
Speaker 1: figure out if it looks like an alien signal. And
30:46
Speaker 1: this is the challenge I was referring to earlier, like
30:48
Speaker 1: how do you do that? How do you decode an
30:51
Speaker 1: alien signal? And the challenge really is that you don't
30:54
Speaker 1: know what you're trying to decode it into. Like let's
30:56
Speaker 1: say the Aliens encode their message somehow, even if you
30:59
Speaker 1: could guess correctly how to decode it, how would you
31:02
Speaker 1: know that you've done it correctly? Right, you don't know
31:04
Speaker 1: what you're translating it back into. It's not like the
31:06
Speaker 1: Aliens have written in English, and once you figure out
31:09
Speaker 1: the puzzle, some message is going to pop out and
31:11
Speaker 1: be like, Hi, we're from Alpha Centauri. Right. You have
31:14
Speaker 1: to somehow not only know the system they're using to
31:17
Speaker 1: translate their ideas into radio waves and reverse that, but
31:21
Speaker 1: you have to be able to recognize the message when
31:24
Speaker 1: it's decoded, which we can't do because we have no
31:26
Speaker 1: idea how the aliens think or what they might be saying.
31:29
Speaker 2: So, like I imagine if they had been trying to
31:31
Speaker 2: communicate with us, maybe it would be something easier ish
31:37
Speaker 2: to figure out, like the prime numbers or you know,
31:39
Speaker 2: maybe we all would have converged on that, because I
31:41
Speaker 2: think that's the thing that's pitched often as some way
31:43
Speaker 2: to communicate our intelligence to other life forms. But if
31:45
Speaker 2: we only got it once for a little while, if
31:49
Speaker 2: it is an alien message, it would probably be eavesdropping, right,
31:51
Speaker 2: because otherwise it would have been pointed at us. Maybe
31:54
Speaker 2: this was a message for someone else, which I think
31:56
Speaker 2: makes it even less likely that we'd be able to
31:58
Speaker 2: figure it out. Anyway. It's a hard problem.
32:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right, and people often think, oh, well, if
32:04
Speaker 1: it's mathematics, it's probably simpler somehow to translate or easier
32:08
Speaker 1: to recognize, but that's not necessarily true. You know, we
32:11
Speaker 1: don't know how much of mathematics is human, and how
32:13
Speaker 1: much of mathematics is universal, how much it just reflects
32:16
Speaker 1: our thinking, and how much it reflects something deep in
32:19
Speaker 1: the universe. Even if you're going to start off with mathematics,
32:23
Speaker 1: you still have to use some kind of symbol, some
32:25
Speaker 1: kind of way to represent the number one or the
32:28
Speaker 1: number seven. Here's what eleven looks like. And so there's
32:31
Speaker 1: always going to be some sort of cultural influence because
32:34
Speaker 1: the way we communicate is through symbols, like right now,
32:38
Speaker 1: I'm translating my ideas into words, and because we agree
32:41
Speaker 1: on the meaning of those words, I imagine that my
32:43
Speaker 1: words are creating in your mind the ideas that are
32:46
Speaker 1: in my mind. Right, But that's because we've agreed in
32:49
Speaker 1: common on the meaning of those words. And every single
32:52
Speaker 1: kind of communication method that's not like directly brain to brain,
32:56
Speaker 1: we don't have telepathy, relies on this translation right where
32:59
Speaker 1: you go to symbols and then back to ideas, and
33:02
Speaker 1: those symbols fundamentally are arbitrary. The way we represent one
33:06
Speaker 1: or the way we represent like mathematical operations, all of
33:09
Speaker 1: those things are cultural symbols. And so we talked on
33:12
Speaker 1: the top of the episode about the messages we've sent
33:14
Speaker 1: into space, Like Carl Sagan and Francis Drake designed this
33:18
Speaker 1: pioneer plaque that they sent into space hoping maybe someday
33:22
Speaker 1: aliens would get it right. They got to actually answer
33:24
Speaker 1: the question that you posed to me, and they did
33:26
Speaker 1: their best. But if you look at what they did, like, man,
33:29
Speaker 1: there's so much humanity in that message. They tried to
33:33
Speaker 1: encode the structure of atoms and spin flip transitions, and
33:36
Speaker 1: they were really ambitious and frankly, I think it's impossible
33:40
Speaker 1: for aliens to get that message and actually understand what
33:42
Speaker 1: it means without already knowing a lot about us.
33:46
Speaker 2: The biologist in May, didn't it also include pictures of
33:49
Speaker 2: human bodies naked to be like, this is what we
33:51
Speaker 2: look like?
33:51
Speaker 1: Yeah? It did.
33:53
Speaker 2: I think that's kind of cool, but also could just
33:56
Speaker 2: be confusing. Is that what they eat?
34:00
Speaker 1: Here's how we look like when you eat us for dinner? Yeah,
34:03
Speaker 1: it could be a recipe. I actually talk to a
34:05
Speaker 1: philosopher about this, because you know, philosophers think deeply about
34:09
Speaker 1: like stripping away all of our assumptions and what does
34:11
Speaker 1: this really mean? And how do we know what we're
34:13
Speaker 1: doing here? I talk to Kareem Jabbari, a philosopher in
34:16
Speaker 1: Sweden who thinks a lot about this and game theory
34:19
Speaker 1: and should we communicate with aliens or are we likely
34:21
Speaker 1: to get misinterpreted? And here's his comment. He says, quote
34:24
Speaker 1: translation between speakers with no common language requires repeated interaction
34:29
Speaker 1: and a familiar context. This implies that translating a message
34:33
Speaker 1: conveyed to us by an encoded signal is not only
34:35
Speaker 1: very difficult, but practically impossible. What he means. Thereby, repeated
34:40
Speaker 1: interaction in a familiar context is basically like, Hey, if
34:43
Speaker 1: I point to a rock, I can say rock and
34:45
Speaker 1: you can look at it. And if I do that
34:47
Speaker 1: a few times, you're like, Okay, this symbol. He's telling
34:50
Speaker 1: me this word rock means this thing, and we can
34:53
Speaker 1: build up from that a common dictionary. If you just
34:55
Speaker 1: get a message, you have basically no hope of every
34:58
Speaker 1: decoding it because you don't the symbols, and you also
35:01
Speaker 1: can't recognize it if you have decoded it correctly.
35:04
Speaker 2: I don't communicate back to do a lingo. But it's
35:09
Speaker 2: teaching me Russian. It's working with me in my language.
35:13
Speaker 2: That's why it's different.
35:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's translating it for you. And also it's telling
35:17
Speaker 1: you when you're right and telling you when you're wrong.
35:20
Speaker 2: Okay, So like if someone just sent me a book
35:24
Speaker 2: in Russian, I would be screwed. But so like we
35:26
Speaker 2: translated the Rosetta Stone and that wasn't a back and forth.
35:29
Speaker 2: Oh but we knew one of the three languages, and
35:32
Speaker 2: we couldn't do it before then.
35:33
Speaker 1: The Rosetta Stone had one of the languages we already knew,
35:36
Speaker 1: and one of the languages we didn't, so that was helpful. Plus,
35:39
Speaker 1: did you know that after we discovered the Rosetta stone,
35:41
Speaker 1: it took us twenty years to decode that message on
35:45
Speaker 1: the Rosetta stone, And that's for like a message, We
35:48
Speaker 1: already knew what it said, right, And the reason is
35:50
Speaker 1: that we had all sorts of backwards ideas about what
35:53
Speaker 1: hieroglyphics were. People thought hieroglyphics were like pictorial. They're like, oh, look,
35:57
Speaker 1: the bird symbol must be something about birds, right. It
36:00
Speaker 1: turns out that was totally wrong. All hieroglyphics are actually phonetic,
36:04
Speaker 1: like the bird signal means a sound that a speaker
36:06
Speaker 1: would make. And so because they had this wrong cultural
36:10
Speaker 1: assumption about hieroglyphics, it took them twenty years to figure
36:13
Speaker 1: it out. And it wasn't until people use their cultural
36:15
Speaker 1: context from the other languages to figure this out. And
36:18
Speaker 1: there are lots of examples of languages here on Earth
36:21
Speaker 1: that other humans have written down that nobody's ever translated,
36:25
Speaker 1: like Etruscan. Nobody has ever figured out how to translate it.
36:28
Speaker 1: Trust can we be a bunch of examples of it
36:29
Speaker 1: and nobody's ever been able to translate it? So yeah,
36:32
Speaker 1: I think it's pretty much hopeless to translate a message
36:35
Speaker 1: from aliens unless the aliens show up and they like
36:37
Speaker 1: point at apples and donuts, and you know, we can
36:40
Speaker 1: have basically a duo lingo conversation with them.
36:42
Speaker 2: So I feel like I'm usually the pessimistic one. It's
36:45
Speaker 2: nice that the tables have turned. And on that note,
36:47
Speaker 2: let's take a little break, all right. So we've established
37:06
Speaker 2: that it's really hard to send messages and receive messages
37:10
Speaker 2: that anybody would have any hope of understanding, but that
37:12
Speaker 2: hasn't stopped humans from trying. Nothing stops us from trying.
37:17
Speaker 2: So we talked about the voyager plaques and what's on them.
37:19
Speaker 2: What have been some other methods or proposed methods for
37:22
Speaker 2: communicating with aliens.
37:23
Speaker 1: So there's been a bunch of really good ideas and
37:25
Speaker 1: also a bunch of really hilarious absurd attempts. One of
37:29
Speaker 1: my favorites is Austrian astronomer Joseph von Littrow. He proposed
37:35
Speaker 1: that we take huge trenches and write out math equations
37:38
Speaker 1: in them by filling them with water and then topping
37:40
Speaker 1: them with curosene and setting them on fire. He thought
37:43
Speaker 1: maybe Martians could see them from Mars and recognize that
37:47
Speaker 1: we're here and we're smart. Just look at our flaming math.
37:51
Speaker 2: So, I mean, that's epic. I guess this was back
37:54
Speaker 2: when we thought that there were canals ferrying water around
37:58
Speaker 2: on the Martian surface. Yeah, exactly, all right.
38:00
Speaker 1: Back before we really knew anything about Mars, you know,
38:03
Speaker 1: and it could have been there could have been intelligent
38:04
Speaker 1: life on Mars before we had the technology to look
38:07
Speaker 1: more carefully.
38:07
Speaker 2: Sure, all right, well, so that's how I would like
38:09
Speaker 2: to communicate with Zach from now on. I'm going to
38:12
Speaker 2: put aside a little part of our yard so that
38:14
Speaker 2: we can communicate with flaming mass.
38:16
Speaker 1: What else, So we actually sent a message in response
38:19
Speaker 1: to the wow signal. The WOW signal we know comes
38:22
Speaker 1: from the Sagittarius constellation. So the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico,
38:26
Speaker 1: now sadly destroyed, sent a message in response. A bunch
38:30
Speaker 1: of humans sat down and decided, here's how we would
38:33
Speaker 1: encode a message, and includes things like you know, what
38:36
Speaker 1: our DNA looks like and what a human looks like,
38:39
Speaker 1: all encoded into this two D sort of pictogram, and
38:42
Speaker 1: we beamed it into space. Hoping that maybe somebody, if
38:45
Speaker 1: they had sent us the Wow signal, was going to
38:47
Speaker 1: get this as a reply, and.
38:49
Speaker 2: I assume our mail was left unresponded to.
38:53
Speaker 1: We haven't heard any response to the ARCIPA message. But
38:55
Speaker 1: you know, maybe there's a fleet of ships coming to
38:58
Speaker 1: destroy us or welcome into the galactic community. Guy who knows.
39:03
Speaker 1: And you know, there's a lot of responsibility there, like
39:05
Speaker 1: if you're going to broadcast from Earth on behalf of humanity,
39:09
Speaker 1: Like it's interesting. There should be some thought that goes
39:12
Speaker 1: into this, And I want to ask you about this.
39:14
Speaker 1: You thought a lot about like international law and what
39:17
Speaker 1: you can do in space. Are there any laws about
39:19
Speaker 1: you know, stepping up to the mic and speaking for humanity?
39:22
Speaker 2: No? No, I did look into this, and it's a
39:24
Speaker 2: topic that has come up at the United Nations, but
39:28
Speaker 2: no decision has actually been made, so there is no guideline.
39:33
Speaker 2: So I think as Americans, we want to believe that
39:35
Speaker 2: the message would come to us first. And if so,
39:38
Speaker 2: there's no rule that says we have to like consult
39:41
Speaker 2: the international community to say like, hey, we're gonna tell
39:44
Speaker 2: them where we are. Is that okay? Everyone? We could
39:46
Speaker 2: just do that. There's a group called SETI, the Search
39:50
Speaker 2: for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and they do have a protocol that
39:54
Speaker 2: was informed by the International Astronautical Association.
39:59
Speaker 1: Is that right, sounds like a thing that could exist.
40:00
Speaker 2: Sure, Yeah, some like smart spacey people. They came up
40:03
Speaker 2: with a procedure for like what we should do, and
40:05
Speaker 2: it does involve like if you get a message, be
40:08
Speaker 2: careful deciphering it, share what you know, consult the United Nations,
40:13
Speaker 2: and try to get some input from everybody. And so
40:15
Speaker 2: like they've got some good procedures and they're probably one
40:17
Speaker 2: of the groups that's more likely to receive these messages.
40:20
Speaker 2: But no, there's no like specific international protocol for what
40:23
Speaker 2: we're supposed to do, so you could just get rogue messages.
40:27
Speaker 2: But I mean they've already like watched all of our
40:29
Speaker 2: TV shows and listened to the BBC, so like, you know,
40:33
Speaker 2: they probably know what we're about. The gig is up.
40:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's nothing left to hide. Well. I actually had
40:38
Speaker 1: a chance to talk to Jill Tartar. She was a
40:41
Speaker 1: director of SETI for a long time, and I asked
40:43
Speaker 1: her this question once. Here's what Jill had to say.
40:46
Speaker 3: Oh, we've thought about it and we've held workshops and
40:49
Speaker 3: basically should we respond and if so, who will speak first?
40:53
Speaker 3: And what will they say? And I think the disappointing
40:57
Speaker 3: thing for me at the moment is we've held a
41:00
Speaker 3: number of workshops. They haven't really involved very much of
41:04
Speaker 3: the world's diverse cultures. It's been sort of pretty waspy
41:10
Speaker 3: and pretty male. So we continue to think about this,
41:15
Speaker 3: and I continue to try and find a way to
41:20
Speaker 3: take this question globally and find appropriate venues to ask
41:26
Speaker 3: other cultures and other ways of being and thinking what
41:31
Speaker 3: they would do, how they feel. So it's a work
41:33
Speaker 3: in progress.
41:34
Speaker 2: You know.
41:35
Speaker 3: Freeman Dyson and here's alive and would listen to me
41:39
Speaker 3: talk and this is very very highbrow approach to doing things.
41:45
Speaker 3: He would just chuckle and he'd say, come on, Jill,
41:49
Speaker 3: if you ever make such an announcement, anybody anywhere on
41:54
Speaker 3: the planet that has access to a transmit will grab
41:59
Speaker 3: that trend and just start saying whatever the hell they please.
42:05
Speaker 3: And then he, you know, with a twinkle in his eye,
42:07
Speaker 3: and so he said, yeah, wouldn't that cacophony be about
42:12
Speaker 3: the best representation of the Earth today that we could make.
42:16
Speaker 2: I am feeling totally depressed because I think you're probably right.
42:20
Speaker 2: They're going to be getting like the dankest memes and
42:23
Speaker 2: all of the weirdest stuff that humans have to offer
42:27
Speaker 2: as soon as we get that message. So probably no
42:29
Speaker 2: hope of a concerted message set by all of us.
42:32
Speaker 2: They're just going to get like all of our spam
42:34
Speaker 2: all at once.
42:35
Speaker 1: All right, So we have no hope of really ever
42:36
Speaker 1: decoding this thing unless the aliens have somehow figured out
42:40
Speaker 1: English and write to us in our own language, which
42:43
Speaker 1: you know is not impossible and is the basis for
42:45
Speaker 1: a lot of good science fiction. But in the meantime,
42:48
Speaker 1: we haven't just been sitting idly by. We've been looking
42:50
Speaker 1: for other explanations for what the Wow signal could be,
42:53
Speaker 1: because again, it was very unusual, it's very weird. Doesn't
42:56
Speaker 1: mean as aliens, but it does mean it's an opportunity
42:59
Speaker 1: to potentially learning about what's out there in the universe,
43:02
Speaker 1: And so we ruled out things like pulsars and stellar flares.
43:06
Speaker 1: These things tend to be more periodic, they tend to
43:08
Speaker 1: repeat themselves. The people also look really really carefully for
43:11
Speaker 1: like more boring explanations. Is this just an Earth signal
43:15
Speaker 1: bouncing off of a satellite, and you know, Earth's stuff
43:17
Speaker 1: doesn't tend to broadcast in this regime is protected for astronomy.
43:21
Speaker 1: So for example, if you're a radio station, you should
43:23
Speaker 1: not be broadcasting in the twenty one centimeter line. If
43:25
Speaker 1: you're building like a drone, you should not be using
43:27
Speaker 1: this frequency to communicate between the controller and the drone.
43:30
Speaker 1: It's like protected, it's supposed to stay quiet. That doesn't
43:33
Speaker 1: mean that there isn't some like rogue station out there broadcasting.
43:36
Speaker 1: And maybe this like bounces a satellite or something, but again,
43:39
Speaker 1: it doesn't really look like it. They were able to
43:40
Speaker 1: triangulate it to a place in the sky who was
43:42
Speaker 1: fairly constant as the Earth moves, which suggested it doesn't
43:46
Speaker 1: come from an earth like place. For it to come
43:48
Speaker 1: off like a satellite in the sky, the satellite would
43:51
Speaker 1: have to like be very slowly moving and not be tumbling.
43:54
Speaker 1: It'd be very weird. And for a long time there
43:57
Speaker 1: was just really no good explanation for this guy who
44:00
Speaker 1: discovered it, Jerry Emon. He said, quote, I'm convinced that
44:03
Speaker 1: the WOW signal certainly has the potential of being the
44:07
Speaker 1: first signal from extraterrestrial intelligence. I'm like, all right, the
44:10
Speaker 1: guy's invested in it. He's the one who wrote wow
44:13
Speaker 1: on it. But you know he's also a serious astronomer.
44:15
Speaker 1: He's not just somebody who's going to make these claims.
44:18
Speaker 1: But as time goes on, we understand more and more
44:20
Speaker 1: about the universe and we're better at thinking about like
44:23
Speaker 1: rare things that could happen out there in the universe.
44:26
Speaker 1: And so pretty recently there was a paper that explained
44:29
Speaker 1: what might have caused the WOW signal.
44:32
Speaker 2: Well, don't keep me waiting. What do they think it is?
44:36
Speaker 1: Basically, they think it was a giant space laser, a
44:39
Speaker 1: random organization of events in the sky that happened to
44:43
Speaker 1: create this huge emission. This pulse of light pointed at Earth.
44:47
Speaker 2: So it wasn't like aliens pointing a laser at us
44:50
Speaker 2: hoping that we'd bet at it like a cat or something.
44:52
Speaker 2: This was like the universe accidentally makes lasers.
44:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly right now. Lasers are something we know very
44:59
Speaker 1: very we well here on Earth. Essentially, you have a
45:01
Speaker 1: population of gas, and the gas can go up and
45:04
Speaker 1: down on energy level, and if you pump energy into them,
45:07
Speaker 1: they go up the energy level, and then they relax,
45:09
Speaker 1: they go down an energy level they release a photon
45:12
Speaker 1: of a particular wavelength that corresponds to that energy level,
45:15
Speaker 1: and if you get a bunch of them in the
45:17
Speaker 1: right conditions and the right cavity, they can resonate. And
45:19
Speaker 1: that's what a laser is. It's like a little cavity
45:21
Speaker 1: filled with these special atoms that have energy pumped in
45:24
Speaker 1: just the right frequency, so they emit a very coherent
45:27
Speaker 1: beam of powerful light. And this we can make here
45:30
Speaker 1: on Earth, of course, but you could also randomly assemble
45:32
Speaker 1: the ingredients in space. If you have something which dumps
45:35
Speaker 1: a bunch of light into a pocket of gas that
45:38
Speaker 1: has the right conditions, it can absorb that and then
45:40
Speaker 1: they can emit it and they can generate a very bright,
45:42
Speaker 1: pulseive light. And in this case, it's not actually a
45:44
Speaker 1: space laser, but a space maser with an M like
45:48
Speaker 1: for mom, oh good, exactly. And a maser is not
45:52
Speaker 1: a laser that emits moms. It's a laser that emits
45:55
Speaker 1: microwave photons. So you know that your microwave in your
45:59
Speaker 1: kitchen is something that just beams light into your food
46:02
Speaker 1: at a particular wavelength. The wavelength of that light is
46:05
Speaker 1: what makes it called microwaves. It's fairly short wavelength compared
46:09
Speaker 1: to like radio waves.
46:10
Speaker 2: But so then why was the radio telescope picking up
46:14
Speaker 2: micro waves.
46:15
Speaker 1: Because microwaves are in the radio. There's so many terrible
46:19
Speaker 1: names here, like we didn't understand for a long time
46:21
Speaker 1: the connection between radio waves and visible light and all
46:24
Speaker 1: this kind of other stuff. So different parts of the
46:27
Speaker 1: electromagnetic spectrum, which all should just be called light or
46:30
Speaker 1: should be called one thing, they all have different names,
46:32
Speaker 1: and they're all overlapping and historically inconsistent. Anyway, this thing
46:36
Speaker 1: in space emits light in the microwaves, So it's a maser,
46:40
Speaker 1: not a laser. And interestingly, maser's actually predated lasers. Humans
46:45
Speaker 1: invented masers before they invented lasers. Laser is much more famous,
46:49
Speaker 1: so the masers don't get the licensing fees or whatever.
46:51
Speaker 1: But if you have just the right stuff lined up
46:53
Speaker 1: in the sky, you have like a source like a
46:56
Speaker 1: magnetar or something, which emits a bunch of light and
46:59
Speaker 1: then it hits a cloud of hydrogen gas. That hydrogen
47:03
Speaker 1: gas acts like a mazer and creates a pulse of microwaves.
47:07
Speaker 1: And if it all lines up where you have like
47:09
Speaker 1: the source and then the gas and then the Earth.
47:11
Speaker 1: Then the Earth can get washed over in this sudden, rare,
47:15
Speaker 1: difficult to reproduce wash of radio waves at just the
47:19
Speaker 1: right frequency.
47:20
Speaker 2: So if we haven't seen this again, how do we
47:25
Speaker 2: know that that's what happened? Because I feel like, ideally
47:29
Speaker 2: what you'd want is to see it again at the
47:30
Speaker 2: same time as this maser thing has happened, you can
47:32
Speaker 2: be like, Bam, that's it.
47:34
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Because science shouldn't just be descriptive. So I'm like, hey,
47:37
Speaker 1: I can come up with a plausible explanation. You should
47:40
Speaker 1: be able to prove that this is what it is.
47:42
Speaker 1: And so what they did is they went back through
47:43
Speaker 1: the Aricibo data, the radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and
47:47
Speaker 1: they said, look, maybe this happens all the time, and
47:49
Speaker 1: this one WOW signal was just like the brightest one
47:52
Speaker 1: we've ever seen. So they went back and looked more carefully,
47:54
Speaker 1: and they found a bunch of examples of similar signals,
47:57
Speaker 1: not nearly as powerful as the Wow signal, but the
48:00
Speaker 1: same shape, the same features in the Aerocibo data. And
48:04
Speaker 1: this is exactly what you would expect, like if this
48:06
Speaker 1: happens sometimes in the universe, you would expect occasionally to
48:09
Speaker 1: be right in the center of the action when it's
48:11
Speaker 1: super bright, and you would expect more often to see
48:14
Speaker 1: weaker examples of it. So the brightest ones should be
48:17
Speaker 1: rarest and less bright ones should be more common. And
48:20
Speaker 1: they see a bunch of less bright versions of the
48:22
Speaker 1: WOW signal in the Aerocibo data, And that's pretty compelling, right.
48:27
Speaker 1: It suggests that there is a mechanism for generating these
48:30
Speaker 1: kinds of signals out there in the universe, and that
48:32
Speaker 1: we've seen them before. So if that's true, that means
48:35
Speaker 1: the WOW signal probably was this kind of thing, and
48:39
Speaker 1: it was rare. It wasn't usual, it was lucky right.
48:42
Speaker 1: Everything had to line up just right, especially powerful magnetar
48:45
Speaker 1: flare especially well lined up with Earth. Probably we're not
48:49
Speaker 1: going to see another one of these for a long time.
48:51
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean, necessarily, though, that it was aliens.
48:54
Speaker 2: Science ruins everything, although vaccines are nice. My field does
49:01
Speaker 2: good stuff.
49:03
Speaker 1: Or maybe this is how aliens communicate, you know, maybe
49:05
Speaker 1: there's like a galactic civilization out there and the way
49:07
Speaker 1: they talk to each other is by inducing magnetars to
49:10
Speaker 1: create masers in hydrogen gas and be messages and they'd
49:14
Speaker 1: sent us a blast, and we haven't responded. We've like
49:17
Speaker 1: left them on red for decades and.
49:19
Speaker 2: Decades we've responded, Oh no.
49:21
Speaker 1: You're right, we did respond, but we didn't respond in
49:23
Speaker 1: the same way. Right, we sent our own radio message, right,
49:25
Speaker 1: And maybe they're like, what's that. Yeah, And even if
49:28
Speaker 1: this message wasn't aliens, that doesn't mean aliens aren't out there,
49:31
Speaker 1: and it doesn't mean they aren't talking to us, and
49:33
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean that they can't hear our messages. And
49:36
Speaker 1: so there's actually a group out there. You talked about SETI,
49:38
Speaker 1: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. There's another group that's more aggressive.
49:42
Speaker 1: They're called medi that wants to send messages to extraterrestrial intelligence.
49:47
Speaker 1: They think like Earth should be out there. We should
49:49
Speaker 1: be shouting that we exist, that we should be broadcasting
49:53
Speaker 1: our location. We should be inviting everybody to come and
49:55
Speaker 1: have dinner with us or of us, And so they've
49:58
Speaker 1: been sending messages Like twenty seventeen, they sent a message
50:02
Speaker 1: that was basically like a science and math Wikipedia page
50:05
Speaker 1: to a red dwarf star located fair only nearby.
50:09
Speaker 2: It feels to me like that is the kind of
50:12
Speaker 2: thing that should maybe have to go through the un first,
50:14
Speaker 2: like humanity should decide do we want to be like
50:17
Speaker 2: blasting our address out into the cosmos and letting people
50:20
Speaker 2: know that we're here. I guess technology gives people power
50:24
Speaker 2: that is good in bad.
50:25
Speaker 1: Yeah. Essentially, the Internet's comments section is getting broadcasted to
50:28
Speaker 1: the galaxy, and so let's hope that doesn't piss off
50:31
Speaker 1: the aliens.
50:32
Speaker 2: Well, if they're not going to attack us over the Macarina,
50:34
Speaker 2: maybe we're going to be okay.
50:37
Speaker 1: Or maybe it's the reason they come, right, Maybe something
50:40
Speaker 1: somebody says in the Internet comment section is the reason
50:43
Speaker 1: why aliens come and share with us all the secrets
50:46
Speaker 1: of the universe. Let's end on an optimistic note.
50:49
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, on a low probability optimistic note, but let's
50:53
Speaker 2: do it.
50:54
Speaker 1: And even if this isn't aliens, and even if we
50:56
Speaker 1: never meet aliens, the lesson here is that when you
50:59
Speaker 1: listen to this, when you look out into the universe,
51:01
Speaker 1: you always see something new, something weird, something fascinating. That
51:05
Speaker 1: does teach us about how the universe works. Even if
51:08
Speaker 1: the only thing we've learned from the Wow signal is like, hey,
51:10
Speaker 1: sometimes universe organizes massive astronomical masers that beams powerful messages
51:16
Speaker 1: through the universe. That's pretty cool, right, and understanding how
51:19
Speaker 1: that all works, and understanding the crazy things that are
51:22
Speaker 1: out there in the universe. It's worth doing. So we
51:25
Speaker 1: should be listening to the sky with all of our
51:27
Speaker 1: eyeballs and earballs.
51:29
Speaker 2: Agreed, we need a lot more big ears out there.
51:32
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And this is not my science, and this is
51:35
Speaker 1: not Kelly's science, so we're not like self invested here.
51:37
Speaker 1: But I definitely think we need more funding for this
51:40
Speaker 1: kind of work.
51:41
Speaker 2: I'm emotionally invested, but not professionally invested. Yes, I would
51:44
Speaker 2: like more answers, Yes, exactly.
51:46
Speaker 1: But you know, I believe in more funding for all
51:48
Speaker 1: kinds of science. Like you're studying duck mating rituals, Like, yes,
51:52
Speaker 1: that's funded. You never know what we're going to learn.
51:54
Speaker 1: I don't understand why we don't fund more science in general.
51:57
Speaker 1: It's such a great investment by humanity for humanity, about humanity.
52:01
Speaker 1: It's human scientists that are getting paid to do this stuff.
52:04
Speaker 1: It's just good all around.
52:05
Speaker 2: I don't understanding there's a fascinating woman who studies duck
52:08
Speaker 2: mating rituals who we should really have on the show
52:10
Speaker 2: so coming soon.
52:14
Speaker 1: So thanks very much everybody for listening to the messages
52:17
Speaker 1: from our brains to yours. We're not aliens. You're probably
52:21
Speaker 1: not an alien, but still we'd like to talk about aliens.
52:24
Speaker 2: Thanks everyone. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio.
52:36
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52:38
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52:41
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52:43
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