Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseHow should we search for extra terrestrial intelligence?
Daniel talks to Jill Tarter, longtime head of the SETI program, about how to look for alien intelligence
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All right, It's Jorge and Daniel here. And this holiday season, if you're looking for a gift for yourself or a friend or for your family, Why not get them the gift of answers about the universe. So check out our new book Frequently ask Questions about the Universe. You can find details at universe faq dot com. Thanks for supporting the podcast. Happy holidays everyone. How much have you thought about what it might be like to talk to aliens? While biologists wonder about what form alien life might take, linguists speculate about how we might communicate with them, and conspiracy theorists wonder whether aliens have already visited Earth and taken over our government. Physicists have long expressed confidence that they could most easily find common ground with aliens, assuming that math and physics are universal, not specific to Earth biology. Even more than that, physicists practically salivated the prospect of learning from aliens answers to big questions in physics, how to bend space and time or crack open black holes and play elaborate pranks on navy pilots. But what would it actually be like to try to learn physics from aliens? Could we even understand the cosmic secrets they might share with us? Would they be so advanced it would be like Schrodinger explaining quantum mechanics to his cat. Do we actually share math and physics with every intelligent civilization out there or would their minds be so alien it would just be impossible. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I can't wait to talk to the aliens and learn the secrets of the universe. There are so many things we don't understand about the universe, and if aliens visit or manage to send us a message, it seems likely that they might have been working on these questions for thousands or millions, or even billions of years. Imagine catapulting our understanding that far forward. We might learn about how quantum mechanics really works, or what's inside a black hole, or how the universe actually began. But is that making a basic mistake? Assuming that humans and aliens might think about science in the same way, how could we possibly anticipate what aliens might know, or think about or wonder at so Welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartMedia in which we dive deep into all these questions about the universe. We ask the biggest, the deepest, the craziest questions, and we strain for answers, explaining to you everything we understand and everything that we don't. My friend and co host Jorge is on a break, but I have a special treat for you today. We are very lucky to have as a guest one of the leading scholars in the field of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Today we'll be talking to Jill Tarter, astronomer and longtime chair of the SETI program, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and so today on the program, we'll be asking the question how should we be searching for extraterrestrial life? So it's my great pleasure to introduce doctor Jill Tarter. She's very well known for leading the SETI program for many years, and is also famous for introducing the phrase brown dwarf in her pH d thesis, which she completed at Berkeley nineteen seventy five. But she's also been a leading voice in the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence for more than three decades and has won many awards, including the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization, and being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Doctor Tarter, Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining us, Thank you for having me.
Daniel.
So I actually doug into your thesis a little bit. I thought it was quite fascinating.
Big basis to begin to.
Well, I actually also got my PhD from Berkeley, though several years later, and I was curious reading through it. It's not obvious the direction your career would take. So how did you get into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?
Like?
What set you on that course?
Well, it all had to do with Berkeley Graduate School and it was a big accident. So my first year at Berkeley, I was supported on a research assistantship to program the first computer that we ever had on our desktop.
Wow.
So it was a PDP eight slash s and it took two people to get it on the desktop, so it wasn't that small. But the other thing about it was that it had no language, so you had to program the whole thing in optal. For every instruction you wanted it to do, you had to set all the ones in zeros. Kind of a pretty arcane skill. But I found it interesting and fun, and so I did that for a year and then I went on to do other things. Finally, many years later, when I was about to finish my PhD and go off to a post dog. Stu Boyer, an X ray astronomer, had a really clever idea. He'd been reading the material that had been put out by NASA AMES on the search for life beyond Earth, and he said, you know, UC Berkeley has a radio telescope in northern California, and he was clever enough to know that with a radio telescope you can make essentially a noiseless copy of the voltage coming out of the telescope, and then on your copy you could process it looking for engineered signals while the astronomers went ahead and did whatever they were going to do anyway. So very clever, this idea of observing commensally. But he had no money, so he went begging for pieces of equipment, and somebody gave him a one hundred channel par autocarlator, and somebody else gave him this old PDP eight s computer. So somebody pointed out to Stu that I used to work on that computer, and he showed up in my office one afternoon with a copy of the cyclops report that had been done at NASA AIMES, saying the way to find extraterrestrial intelligence was to build an array of sixteen hundred hundred meter telescopes that never happened, But anyway, he gave me that as a recruiting tool and I read it and I just got really hooked. Here I was with potentially the right skills in the right place, at the right time to perhaps make a contribution to answering this age old question of are we alone? So I worked with the PDP eight s again and got a program with Stu up and running at that creek, and then, you know, as I said, I was hooked, and I've stayed hooked ever since.
It amazes me how we sometimes see sciences as like linear, natural, obvious progression, but so much of it depends on random accidents. Who happens to talk to who and be inspired by what? And if you ran the Earth science a hundred times with different initial conditions, you might get completely different trajectories, sort of intellectually, like where we end up as a species. So you mentioned this, the device that wasn't built. What is SETI actually doing? What instruments are they using and operating, and what are they actually listening for right now?
Well? SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which is a misnomer because we don't know how to find intelligence per se. We can't even define it. What we're doing is trying to find evidence that somebody else is using some technology that we can discover over the vast distances between the stars. And so it started out as using radio telescopes to try and find engineered signals, and then over time we expanded it into optical searches and infrared searches, and now we are trying to do something that we've known that we should be doing for the past twenty years, but just haven't had the technology to do it, and that is to look for transient signals. And the trick there is you want to look at all the sky, all the time, and at as many frequencies as you possibly can. And so now we are finally able to build starting in the optical and then moving into the radio telescopes that look at tens of thousands of square degrees at a time, and in one case, if we can complete the instrumentation, all the sky, all the time looking for these transient signals. So that's the exciting frontier for SETI today to try and get this sky coverage. And the other exciting thing is to begin to look look at the data in a different way. Historically, we have always looked at data and said, is there a signal of this description in the data, and we have defined the signals that we're interested in as being frequency compressed in the radio, or time compressed in the optical, or monochromatic lasers in the optical. But now we're beginning to see if we can use machine learning to help us find patterns of any kind in the data without having to pre describe what pattern we're looking for. So we're hoping that algorithms in the future will be able to look at data voltage is a function of time, intensity is a function of time and say there's information content here, or no, this is all noise.
That's fascinating. If we need artificial intelligence to recognize alien intelligen.
Well, that alien intelligence is quite likely to be artificial itself finding.
Machines, So maybe we need machines as interpreters. But still we need to somehow train that machine learning. We need to teach it the kind of things that we are looking for. We can't just raising generic intelligence and say go out and find some aliens right, doesn't there need to be some thought in advance for the kinds of things we're teaching our machine learning algorithm to find.
Well, actually, the real problem is how do you get a null set? How do you give it data that you know has no information content. You know, when you have a data set and we've explored it for X, y, and z, it doesn't mean that Q isn't there. So generally to get a null set, you generate it randomly on a computer and then you can give it lots of examples of different signals that we have detected or that we generate ourselves as the counter. And again it's early days. We're very hopeful, and we'll see what happens.
Right. I suppose you can't just take the data we see from the sky and say assume there's nothing here, because the whole point is to look for data in the sky, So then it would learn to ignore signal that is there. So you mentioned something fascinating, which is thinking about the messages that we would send or the ones that we have sent. And I know that in the early days of space exploration. You know, for example, there's a golden record we put on some of our probes and there's a message we sent out via Arisibo. How do you look at those messages that we've sent sort of with modern eyes, How would you design a message to generic aliens now you hope would be observable and detectable to the broadest set of intelligence.
Well, I do something that we haven't done with the Arecibo message or any of the other messages that we've transmitted, and that is I would do it for ten thousand years, all right. If you send a finite transmission, then that message is going to go past your target in a finite amount of time, and the receivers would have to be looking at you at just the right time, in just the right way as your message flies past in order to detect it. And the probability of that is pretty small. So I think what you want to do is start transmitting and then don't stop right so that whenever an emerging technology wakes up and begins to explore its environment, your signal will be there for them to find when and if they develop the right technologies and the right strategy and are motivated to be looking. So that's I think what I would do, and the reason that I'm not at all in emor of efforts to transmit messages today because we're just not grown up enough to be able to culturally be able to manage such a long term project.
It's like just shouting once in the night and hoping that somebody hears. You know, it's fascinating as our message sort of sweeps across the universe. It's always somewhere, but the chances that it happens to arrive when somebody is listening do seem pretty small. Do you think that's something our civilization would ever be capable of of sending messages for tens of thousands of years? Do you think our civilization will last long enough to be able to do that?
I hope so. And in fact, one of the things that I think about is that suppose the distribution of lifetimes of technological civilizations or technologies, because that's what we're going to find is the technology is bimodal, So you have lots of short lived technologies. They emerge, develop and either turn themselves off or do themselves in. They don't have a very long lifetime when compared to the ten billion year history of the Milky Way galaxy. But now there might be an addition some very long lived civilizations. And it might be that the probability of listening from short lived technology to a long lived technology is dependent on discovering other technological civilizations that have made it to an old age. And I think that's one of the things that today motivates me to continue working on this project. How can we have a long future for life on this planet? And if so, how? And the answer to me is, if anybody else has made it through, that means we can figure it out too.
So are you suggesting that discovering a long standing alien civilization might help us build a civilization that's long standing just knowing that it's possible.
Well, I think that's not unlikely or not impossible. If I know that there's a solution to a problem, even if I can't figure it out right now, I have more motivation to figure out the solution. I know it's possible, So how the heck am I going to solve them?
That's very inspirational. I hope that's true. In all of these searches, we're looking for signals, signals generated by technologies which in the end are somewhat similar to ours, and there seems to be an implicit assumption there that their information, their messages will be encoded in ways that are familiar to us, even if the actual code is alien. The fact that they are sending messages coded in electromagnetic radiation of some kind assumes that the civilization is mathematical or scientific. Do you think that it's possible for us to imagine aliens in a more broad sense, you know, to think about aliens that might not do math or might not have a scientific exploration, or do you think that we can only search for aliens that are sort of similar to us intellectually that we could ever communicate with them.
Well, they're kind of two pieces to that question. One, we have a certain amount of technology in the twenty first century, and we understand a certain subset of physics, and those are the tools we have. We can't use tools that we don't have. We can't search for things that we don't yet understand. And in terms of another technology, we're actually trying to think more broadly than we originally did, so not just radio signals or not just optical signals, but something that we call a techno signature, something that is the result of someone doing something with technology out there, and it's particularly important to think about that now because we're moving from the generation of ten meter class optical instruments and one hundred element interferometers to thirty forty meter telescopes and interferometers like mearkt square kilometer array that are going to have thousands of elements. So our ability to see things on the sky is going to improve dramatically, and we want to be thinking about, oh, what's that, and how the what's that might be interpreted in terms of technology, So we're thinking about signals that are almost natural or things that are obviously engineered. And obviously engineered has been the piece that we've been doing thus far. But when you begin to think about almost natural, you think about maybe a pulsar, right which has a period it's very constant, and then it changes its period. Now we've seen that in the data because there are starquakes on these neutron stars that change the moment of inertia and change the period of the pulsar. But what we haven't seen is a pulsar that starts at one period, changes to a second period, and then goes back to the first period. But those could well be in our data sets as we search the sky for pulsars, so it's almost natural, and we would catch it in a net when we're doing an astronomy survey. So another example I like to think about is transit. So we've been finding all these exoplanets because they cast a shadow on the image of the star and change the stellar luminosity as the planet transits in front of the star. Now, the IAU has declared that planets are spherical, right, and so their shadows are going to be circular. But what about some giant constructed artifact that's like a Venetian blind or a triangle. Well, in the higher order moments of the light curve at ingress and egress, you could tell the difference if you looked hard enough, between a triangular shadow and a circular shadow. So that might be an almost natural signal that would in fact ultimately lead us to technology.
Wow. Fascinating. So we have a whole spectrum of things which we classify as natural because we think they're not the product of intelligent action. Things are clearly artificial, like a signal that says hello, we got your a resiba message, here's our address. And now you're imagining things in between which are subtle evidence of deviations from sort of natural evolution of the universe because of intelligent actions.
You know, we are going to have so many new and different eyes on the cosmos that we ought to be broadening our thinking.
That's fascinating and it seems like a very worthwhile. It still seems to me to be indicative of sort of the way that our minds work. We build things that are square, we build things that are symmetric, and we're imagining that maybe aliens could do that as well. And I certainly take your point that we can't look for things that we don't understand, and we can't look for things that we can't imagine. Does that frustrate you that you know that it might be that the spectrum of intelligence aliens out there could be so much broader than we can imagine that it might make it impossible to ever discover them.
Yeah.
Well, for the longest time, we said, okay, if they have some technology that we might be able to detect in some fashion, they're going to have to have math. Right, we can't build things without some artificial way to represent them and construct them.
And so we.
Thought, okay, so that means math is the universal language of the cosmos. And then we had some really interesting talks at the Seti Institute by people who study the human brain, and they pointed out that, yeah, they might well have math and be representing exactly the same things that our mathematical programs do, but that all math and the way we represent things is inevitably shaped by the nature and structure of our human brain. And so they might well be talking about exactly the same thing, the same mathematics, but the representation of it might be so different that we don't recognize it as such. So now that's Soubbery now.
And if you look back at the sort of the history of the development of mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics, you know there are still like big open questions about how to even build a mathematical system that's self consistent, and a lot of mathematicians, practicing mathematicians sort of ignore that and say, look, we have a system that mostly works. We can get stuff done. But it tells you that if human history had gone another way, if a different philosopher had been born or been influential, we might all think very differently mathematically. And so if the spectrum of like possible human explorations of you know, ways to think is so potentially broad, and it's sort of terrifying to imagine how broad it might be when you include aliens.
Yeah, well, there are anthropologists who tell us that there are some very isolated tribal groups that don't have a zero in their worldview. So you can do what you can do, and you can't do what you can't yet do.
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I don't know about soon. I think this could well be a multi generational exploration. And the reason I say that is that the volume that might need to be searched, even if an electromagnetic signal is the right thing to be looking for, that volume is really vast. And so when SETI turned fifty, I tried to do calculation that would show how vast it was and how much we had searched to date for an electromagnetic signal. Again, assuming that's the right thing to be looking for, there are nine different parameters that you have to explore space and time and polarization and modulation and intensity all of us. And so I tried to make a guess at how what the range of each of those parameters might be, and then I multiplied them altogether some sort of a nine dimensional volume. And I'm not any good at visualizing nine dimensional volumes. So I said, okay, here's the analogy that volume. I'm going to set it equal to the volume of all the Earth's oceans and then ask how much of the Earth's oceans have we searched in fifty years. And at that time the answer was one glass of water out of the ocean.
Right.
That shows you how vast the search might need to be. And then when SETI turned six stay ten years later, the students at Penn State, we did the calculation and they said, oh, it's not a glass, it's more like a small swimming pool. So that was a big improvement over ten years, but still not a lot of the ocean. So I think that it might be multi generational, either because we haven't yet invented the right technology, we don't understand the physics that's involved, or simply because the search is so vast it's going to take a while. It's getting faster all the time, primarily because of Moore's law and the improvements in our computational capabilities, but it may have to go on for a while.
The exciting thing for me about research like that is that you just don't know until you begin. If you're searching for a signal which is obvious or really subtle. Like in your ocean analogy, you only need a glass of water to find salt, right, But if you're looking for a particular fish, may have to look through millions and millions of glasses. And in our case, we just don't know right how many civilizations are out there they're super rare, or if they're everywhere. So have your hope sort of changed over the years that when you first got involved in this, in that first project you described using a PDP, did you think I might discover aliens tomorrow if your hopes sort of kept up or have they dimmed over the decades.
Well, that's still true. We could discover something tomorrow, or it might be my granddaughter's generation that succeeds. We don't know. And this is one of those questions that you don't know the answer until you find the answer. And if anybody you know, if I told you anything different, right, that would be religion and not science, So no one knows. I still think it's worthwhile. Humans have been asking themselves this question since we walked out of the caves. We're really intrigued with how we fit into the cosmos. Compare something else that might be out there.
So every day you're looking at information could be the day that you get the signal that says wow. And now, like human history, pivots on that point, before that moment and after that moment. So in your career or in the decades that we've been doing this, have there been any moments when you thought to yourself, this could be any sort of like ooh, this looks real kind of moments.
Yeah, there have been a few, and they've all turned out to be false positives, but some of them took a lot longer to dismiss than others. Let's see, we usually observe with two widely spaced telescopes, and we require that the signal be found at both and that it have the appropriate light travel time between them, and then it have if it's an arrowband signal, we can require that it have a differential Doppler signature that represents the Earth's rotation. Right, So we have all these tests that we need to do. But back in nineteen I think it was ninety eight, we were using a telescope in green Bank, West Virginia and another one in Woodbury, Georgia, and lightning struck the telescope in Georgia and went through the electronics and fried a disk drive, so that telescope was off the air for days before FedEx could get a new dis drive into the facility. But we still had time, and that's of course a very precious thing on the telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. So we kept observing with that one telescope in a manner that radio astronomers have often used. They stare at a target or source, and then they look away, and then they go back and they differentiate between the on and the off source. So we tried that with the Green Bank telescope, and sort of like five o'clock in the morning, I saw a signal that was clearly artificial. Looked in this waterfall plot, as we call it, like a picket fence. So I saw multiple frequencies lit up, and the spacing between those frequency features was constant. That's not mother nature. And so I saw this every time I looked at the target that we were tracking, and every time we pointed the telescope away from that target, it went away. And this went on for a while, and then I finally got clever idea. I said, okay, we've been observing here for a couple of weeks. Let me look through all the data that we have taken when looking at other parts of the sky and see if we've ever seen a signal that has that frequency spacing right. It's a very significant characteristic. And so I wrote a program and it actually compiled me and I ran it. But I was excited. I mean I was really excited, and so I was sloppy with my output, and when I looked at the output, I actually missed the fact that, yes, we'd seen that particular signature when looking in other places on the side, but you know, being excited, and I dismissed it. So we continued tracking that and I woke up my colleagues, got them to help, and finally, as the source set in the west, the change in the drift rate, the change with frequency and time of the signal was consistent with something that was rising to the zenith, not setting on the horizon. And so sadly, by the end of the afternoon we knew that this wasn't a real extraterrestrial signal. We didn't know what it was. It took a while of doing web searches and it turned out it was the Soho spacecraft in orbit, not around the Earth, we would have caught that much earlier, but around the sun. And telescopes, like human eyes, which have peripheral vision, telescopes have side lobes where the sensitivity is much lower, but it's not zero. And so every time I pointed at the target, the sun would be in the sidelobe, and when I moved the telescope to a different direction, the sun fell out of that silope, and the sun tracked the Earth's rotation just as the target did. And so it took us a while to figure that one out, but it was exciting. It was immediately an enormous amount of adrenaline, and then disappointing when we figured it out, and we figured out a couple of different ways to avoid having that happen to us again.
Well, it's a fascinating moment because on one hand, you desperately want to believe it's sort of your scientific fantasy. On the other hand, you want to push on it as hard as possible because you definitely don't want to announce something if it's not real, and so you have to be like the biggest cheerleader and also the biggest skeptic at the same time.
Yeah, make me a liar.
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Hi.
I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
So, what would happen? Wellcus through, what would happen if you got a signal and you were not able to identify as coming from any satellite or any nearby object, and all the evidence pointed to it coming from another star and it seemed sincerely artificial. Is there a real protocol, sort of political for what happens in that scenario? Do you have to contact US government or are you allowed to talk to scientists from other countries about it?
Well, when we were an ass the project, yeah, there was a protocol and it included which associate administrator was going to notify the White House? Right, it was that detail. Now that we are philanthropically privately funded and the other SETI projects like Breakthrough This and are also privately funded, there is a protocol that we've informally agreed upon. It has no enforceability, but basically it says, at the discovery site, you try and use another instrument now that you know what you're looking for. Probably a normal off the shelf Hewlett Packard spectrometer will allow you to find that signal. So you try and just detect it with instrumentation that you didn't build and software that you didn't write as a confirmation. And then if you do that and you have some more confidence, then indeed you do quietly call up the director of some observatory to the west and ask for a little bit of discretionary time to see, knowing what they're looking for, if they can detect the signal, and that's probably your best headge against a hoax, a deliberate hoax. And then if you get that independent confirmation, then you sit down and figure out how you're going to tell the world. And one of the things that you might consider doing is sending out what used to be called an IAU telegram, something that goes to all the observatories around the world, discreetly telling them what you've found and prepping them for the fact that there will be a press conference coming up very quickly, because what you want to do is train up a bunch of professionals who can interpret for their local media what's actually been found, and not leave the media to make it up for themselves, right, because it's probably going to be maybe ambiguous, right, and you don't want the media writing their own story, so you'd like to give them as much assistance in understanding what's really been discovered. And then you tell the world, and you want to be very careful that you make sure that everyone who's been involved in any way gets appropriate credit. Then you hope that the network at the SETI Institute or wherever the discovery site is doesn't melt from the world trying to get hold of you, and you see what happens.
So walk through a hypothetical best case scenario. Say we see an artificial signal and other people confirm it and we believe that it's there, Then what do we do? Do we respond? Do you write a message back and you spend a decade trying to decoded understand the contents of it and debate how to respond. Do we spend one hundred years going back and forth before we learn each other's language and understand each other's mathematics.
Oh, we've thought about it, and we've held workshops and basically, should we respond and if so, who will speak for Earth? And what will they say? And I think the disappointing thing for me at the moment is we've held a number of workshops. They haven't really involved very much of the world's diverse cultures. It's been sort of pretty waspy and pretty male. So we continue to think about this, and I continue to try and find a way to take this question globally and find appropriate venues to ask other cultures and other ways of being and thinking what they would do, how they feel. So it's a work in progress. You know, Freeman Dyson and Here's Alive would listen to me talk and this is a very very highbrow approach to doing things. He would just chuckle and he'd say, come on, Jill, if you ever make such an announcement, anybody anywhere on the planet that has access to a transmitter, we'll grab that transmitter and just start saying whatever the hell they please, And then he you know, with a twinkle in his eye and said, wouldn't that cacophony be about the best representation of the Earth today that we could make.
That sounds like broadcasting Internet comment sections out to aliens essentially. So the thing that's exciting but also frustrating to me is that there's so much information, you know, impacting the Earth, so much electromagnetic radiation and particle radation, that we are just not gathering. You talk about like seeing the whole sky. The information from an alien species, from an extrastrian intelligence could be hitting the Earth like right now at this moment and just be you know, absorbed by rocks and concrete and Walmart parking lots, et cetera. So I wonder what would you do if you were given in a billion dollar or ten billion dollar or an unlimited budget. It would be your sort of fantasy detector or observatory to accomplish this task.
We've thought about that, and because we can't promise results, because we can't say that we're even looking in the right way right and maybe we should be looking for zeta rays, except we don't know what zata rays are. I would put that big chunk of money in an endowment, and I would live off the interest from that endowment to allow for a multi generational exploration, an opportunity in the future to employ technologies that we don't have today. That would be my approach to it. There's certainly lots of things that we would like to build, and we're in the process of building some. And we're also getting better at this concept to commensal observing. So in the radio, for example, the very large array in Socorino, Mexico is probably the most productive radio telescope that we have in twenty seven to twenty five meter districts. So one of the people at the SETI Institute, Andrewsinian and his team are figuring out a way to get the voltage out of all of those antennas and build a commensal program for that, and they'll take that and they'll apply it in the future to the square kilometer array in South Africa. So there are new things we'd like to build. We've got this error of going from I think already mentioned ten meter class optical telescopes to thirty and forty meter telescopes and the large synoptic survey telescope looking at all the sky every few days. We need to figure out how we can piggyback on those how we can find things in those data that make people go, huh, what's that. So there's a lot of things coming up neutrino detectors, there have been some suggestions of how information transferred with neutrinos could impact other parameters that are easier to detect than the neutrinos themselves. So I'd like to continue pushing all of those things, looking at the universe in new ways, looking at archival data for things like I think I already explain these almost natural signals, and just keep in mind that the conclusion that we are alone is so significant that it really does require a systematic and very thorough exploration of the cosmos before your will, and to make that conclusion, Yep, give me a lot of money. I'll put in an endowment. I'll live on the interest and do lots of interesting new things along the way.
I'm sure well, if I was a zillionaire, I would definitely write a big check to SETI So thinking about you know, our real universe, of course, is absolutely fascinating. But there's a lot of exploration of this topic in science fiction. And so if I could ask you, what is it your sort of favorite depiction of extraterrestrial contact in movies or in a book, your favorite fictional depiction.
Well, Contact did a really great job, right because it was written by Carl Sagan, who knew the business.
I really liked The.
Arrival because of the concept that if you're going to write in circles, you need to know the future. I thought that was an intriguing concept. And of course everybody is now remembering Rendezvous with Rama given the passage of the Muamua through our solar system. There's another part that I love. It's called Dora and Summer. And the hero in the book lived in this drafty old cottage and it rained a lot, and he had a cat named Petronius. And the cat kept going to door after door after door, figuring that one of those doors is going to open onto sunshine rather than rain.
So I have a cat named Petrini's wonderful. Well, thanks very much for taking some time to talk to us about how humanity is searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, what we can do, and what we are doing in the future. I hope that the project does continue for another ten thousand years and that we managed to put ourselves out there and speak to the cosmos and let them know that we're here.
Well, Daniel, thank you for this opportunity to talk to people, because I think it's really important. I mean, SETI is sometimes seen as unimportant and fringe and not having any real tangible value, but I disagree with that. I think that if we get to talk to people and have them think about life evolving somewhere else, it's like holding up a mirror to the planet Earth and saying, hey, you, all of you, you are all the same when compared to something else that might have evolved on a planet around another star. And it's important to get that concept across because we face so many challenges on this planet in our future, and those challenges are going to require global cooperation to find solutions. So the more that we can make people think of themselves as Earthlings rather than Americans or Chinese or some other thing. We're all the same on this planet and we all have to work together. So I really think SETI has a very practical application.
Right now, Well, here's one earth thing who totally agrees with you, So thanks very much for devoting your life and your career to this vitally important project. All right, have a.
Good day, Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the universe is a production iHeartRadio.
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