you
This is really a great honor to to introduce today's talk
Some of you might have noticed there's been a lot of talks about
You know other star systems and biology and so on
That's completely deliberate on the part of Jacob Collins
You know background
And but also, I think it's really where the future is
And as noted before this is part of our 75th anniversary
Celebration the the colloquium series this summer is in honor of our 75th anniversary
But I'm particularly pleased today to have Dr.. Jill Tarter
She has devoted her career searching for evidence for sentient beings off Earth
There are others have spent their whole life searching for them on Earth
most of them failed
but at all serious seriousness that
She has changed our way of thinking about this her
Astronomical work is illustrated in in Carl Sagan's novel contact and the film version contact
and we understand that Jodie foster character was largely inspired by Jill so
The I think she's much Cooler, Jo
Yes, right
Asteroid seven four eight two four tartar 1999 TJ. Sixty has been named in her honor now
I have to say as a story about somebody wanted a man asteroid after me
An accent and they had submitted it
And I was a general air Force time said well it turns out that the international astronomical union won't allow
Things being named after military figures or political figures and not being a political figure they used the military figure
So they named it after my wife
When I told her about it, she says I'm sure that will be the one that destroys the earth or so
but Joe holds the bernard m oliver chair for Seti at the SeTi institute in Mountain View just
Down the road here, and she serves on the board of Trustees
We collaborate here at ames very closely with Sophia
And they have been the principal partner in the science analyses and team for Sophia
And kepler so really really proud of having that in 2004 time
Magazine named her is one of the hundred most influential people in the world pretty cool
And in 2012 was one of the 25 most influential people in space
She has a bachelor of engineering degree in Physics from Cornell University
And I understand she was the only woman a moment class of 300 engineering students so congratulations. I
hope that's much better now than
ana Ph
And a phd in astronomy from the university of California at Berkeley her talk today is entitled searching for et. Investment in our long future
Well Pete
I think you know how much of a pleasure it is for me to be back here since this was my first job as a
Postdoc with at NaSa ames and we were working on brown dwarfs back, then they've been found
Ets yet to happen
So I think many of you may think when you hear the word seti you may think that's fringe
You'll laugh to yourselves about little green men and flying Saucers Ufos
But in fact, I'm going to try today to convince you that
Seti the
Search and all the work that gets done here at ames
searching for other kinds of Life is
incredibly important to our future
because these topics
allow Us
to change perspective
They allow us to think about things and to see ourselves in a way
That is not often used by the general public
But I think it's something that we need to share with them because being able to step back
take this Cosmic larger picture view is
what we need to do in order to solve all of the challenges that face the
planet and all life on it and
So I hope that I can change your point of view and I hope that you'll get interested in
participating in these grand searches
so um
this whole story
Sort of your story my story our story began billions of years ago, right?
That's no secret to anyone, who'd taken a university astronomy course or anyone? Who's worked around this facility?
but it
It probably doesn't come first to your mind when you wake up in the morning
You need to change that
all right, so our
Universe Began in
An enormous expansion about 3.8 billion years ago and our milky way Galaxy was born about 10 billion years ago
and
we are
intimately connected with these faraway times and Faraway places
Because it takes a cosmos to make a human
Humans can trace their lineage not just back through the centuries of our own families
Not just back through the Millennia of our civilizations
With its buildings its art and its experiments with different forms of Governance
We trace our heritage not just back to the millions of years
Since we emerged
branched away from the apes not
Just back the two point four billion years during which Earth's atmosphere has been
Perfused with oxygen. Thanks to the ceaseless efforts of
photosynthetic cyanobacteria
not just back to the formation of the sun and the solar system about five billion years ago, but
all the way back
to
the Supernova explosion and death of a massive star
The Iron atom in the hemoglobin molecule in your blood the calcium atoms in your bones
Were fused deep within a massive star
That ended its life in a catastrophic convulsion
Leaving behind remnants such as this more modern example
Remnants that are now waiting to be incorporated into future
generations of stars and Planets and
Perhaps life
So it's taken Millennia for humans to piece together the story
Thus far and we're continuing on this journey
driven by our
curiosity and our desire
to understand to know our
place in
the universe
We want to know
Where do we come from where are we going?
What is why is and of course? We're really interested in whether or not?
There's anyone else out there
So so far the numbers suggest a universe of possibilities
Well this clicker is a little bit jet-lagged, okay?
So let's do it this way and right now
We're able to comprehend ourselves as living on a very fragile
Island of Life within this universe of possibilities
We're just beginning to appreciate the possibilities here on Earth
the possibilities for our future and those possibilities
require embracing this cosmic perspective
So extremophiles something that many of you here are familiar with
This life that we didn't even know about until a few decades ago
Driving in places that we once thought were completely inhospitable
To life and these organisms are now
illuminating the potential for life elsewhere and
the
possibility for a lot more
Habitable cosmic real estate out there than we months might have thought
So an appreciation of life's Incredible diversity and its scale is really the first step in
contemplating the universe
Beyond our own cosmic doorstep
It's important to remember that we are not the pinnacle
or the ultimate design of evolution
we're not the intentional product of four billion years of
plotting and planning
we're simply a part of
Today's
Snapshot of a perpetually transitional form
So as we pry open those cosmic doors
We're testing these possibilities and this amazing image
absolutely mind-blowing image is
The thanks to the curiosity science laboratory on Mars
Curiosity wasn't designed to find life
But it's showing us that the conditions that we think are
necessary for life
Did exist on this planet once and perhaps they still exist in places today?
buried beneath the surface of this frozen desert
Alternately life may be found farther out in the solar system
in the water oceans, beneath the ice of europa
Kalista ganymede right these large Moons of Jupiter or
Maybe in the Fa in lakes on the surface of Saturn's large Moon titan or even perhaps
On a tiny little moon enceladus with it's amazing cryo
ok no, and
these
Places are places that we or our surrogates
May visit in the future and may be able to interrogate
looking for life
But it also may be the case that we have to look farther Beyond our own solar system
and
until 1995
We actually didn't know whether there were any planets around solar type normal stars
but since march of 2009 the Kepler Spacecraft with which this
Facility is so heavily involved and so responsible for its success
Kepler has been following behind the earth and its orbit around the sun and
Its mission is to tell us how frequently?
planets the size of the Earth
Actually form around other stars
So Kepler has a 93
megapixel camera CCD camera
Real high-end version of what you have in your phones?
And it stares
Continuously at a hundred square degrees on the sky and it's in the direction
it's just a bit north of a plane of the milky way galaxy because there are a lot of stars in that direction and
Yet, not too many, so kepler
Instrumentation doesn't get confused
so Kepler's staring at that patch of sky which is like the size of your hand and
It's waiting for some of those
170,000 stars that it's concentrating on to blink or at least that's what it did between 2009 and 2012
2013 my mistake and as it turns out many of them did blink
And this transit method
Looking for a planet to pass in front of the star and Dim its lights for a few hours
In its brightness for a few hours
Is extraordinarily successful?
So to keep today on the kepler. Mast site. I looked up and there are forty two hundred and thirty-four
Can it the exoplanets that goes up and sometimes it goes down a little?
And nine hundred and seventy eight of them have been confirmed either by other ground-based
observatories and other methodology or
statistically using the Kepler Data
themselves and
It turns out that
Because we have this chauvinism in our search for life
We think liquid water is really important
Then there are a few of these stars
that appear
to have planets in
Orbit around them at just the right distance
so that if there were an atmosphere
Surrounding that planet it would be not too hot not too cold and might be able to support liquid water on its surface
and
So we think a lot about this habitable zone, and I heard a really nice talk at the seti institute a couple of weeks ago
Where my colleague Stephen kane?
Reminded us. I have to be careful here
We astronomers are going into hype land right we are talking about
habitable Zones
then
potentially habitable planets
Habitable planet, you know we really don't know
We know perhaps?
That the planet is Earth's size. We know its distance from the star is
potentially propitious
Sometimes we know its density and we can say perhaps. There's a Rocky world there
But it's going to be quite a while
A disappointingly long time I'm afraid
Before we can say for certain
What a habitable planet looks like and how many of them there are in the milky way Galaxy
nevertheless
Hypeeee
Alert having been given right we start to codify things all the things that we can
Remotely sense about planets around other stars
We try and compare them with Earth
and the first two in the list there have about
83% of their characteristics
Comparable to what we would measure on Earth and who knows maybe 83% is good enough, and maybe not
You know we actually don't even know
what's
absolutely necessary
about the Earth for there to be life here, so this is a
this is a game that intrigues the
public
Invites the public into our discussions, and that's all good
But we have to be sure we don't over promise
now
I've said it's going to take a long time I
Betcha Pete's going to beat me I
think that
that he might have something up his sleeve that could help us in this quest in a nearer term rather than a
farther term if we get lucky
All right, but recently at the seti institute. We were really pleased when
Lisa can't unknow and her colleagues
announced the discovery of this particular planet
Kepler-186
the Kepler-186 system and the fifth Planet
186f happens to Lie in the habitable Zone that surrounds the small star
Kepler-186 a and it's much closer to the sun than the Earth is
Because the star is much fainter
But this is looking like a very interesting Target and one that we should consider
continue to study
you know we have a a
problem as we do this research when we really have only an example of one and
Before we made started making these discoveries. We would make models of what other
planetary systems were going to be like I
Was really strange you know every time we made a model
We produced all these planets
And they were all going around in nice circular
Clockwork orbits, and they're all in a plane and a little Rocky dies or on the inside
the gas Giants way outside
just like us and
So it was an amazing wake-up call when we detected the first exoplanet around
51 pay it was bigger than jupiter and in an orbit so close to its star that it went around in
4.3 days
That really was an eye-opener
You know if you only have an example of one your models are probably going to be pretty biased and not very reliable
But now thanks to the Kepler. We actually have hundreds of
multi-Planet systems and we can study the dynamics of those and
Some of them are big guys on the inside little guys on the outside some of them are circular some of them are elliptical
We think some of these planets early in the history of formation actually gets thrown out of their planetary system
But the fact is now that we have many examples
we can begin to tease out and
Differentiate between what is necessary and what is contingent?
And we'd love to have that possibility
For biology as well
So when it you know it comes to life. We still got just this one example and
So we've really got to be careful um and not overly limit our
thinking about what might be possible or
Constrain the possibilities by saying it must be this
Let remember that homo Sapiens is just one single leaf on a very expansive
Tree of life, and that trees really densely packed with organisms that have been finely tuned
over
millions of years to meet their specific
survival needs and
Although you know we know that scientifically I
think a lot of our
fellow Inhabitants of the Planet
Certainly haven't internalized this idea and our egos haven't yet caught up
to this scientific understanding
We still have a tendency to say things like the ascent of man
pinnacle of evolution
Second time I've Gotten on this Hobby horse, so I really am
Adamant about its being important that this is a point of view a perspective
that the natural universe
does not share
So get over it
And as we think about these potential
Habitable worlds or in my case inhabitants elsewhere
We also really need to rethink what we mean about here and now
so
Simple right we're here right building 200 auditorium, and we're all familiar with Google Earth, and that makes us comfortable with
Conceiving ourselves as being here and as fewer at the altitude of low Earth orbit
Remote sensing satellites you would see us here
since Bill anders took this picture in
1968 coming around the limb of the moon we've appreciated ourselves here as an island universe
Cassini Spacecraft turned around from Saturn and took a picture of us here
There is a little dot under that arrow
That's where we are and of course in 1980 the voyager 1 spacecraft s that was leaving the solar system
starting on its Journey Outwards
it turned around and
took this pale blue dot picture and showed us that we were here embedded in the dial dust of a solar system and
Our star is here
right out in the boondocks of
spiral Galaxy
We're only one of a hundred billion or so two hundred billion three hundred billion four hundred billion. You know astronomical accuracy
stars in the Galaxy and that Galaxy is only one of a
Hundred billion
galaxies in the Observable universe
So that's our context for here, but if we look at this image from the hubble deep field
We're reminded that looking farther out in Space is
Looking backwards in time, and so we also have to think about now in this larger context
Where are we what's the future?
future of the solar system the future of the Galaxy and
What about us? What's our future?
And it's built upon this very deep past
so
In fact we we are the living and breathing products of about a billion years
Lineage of wandering stardust I mean we actually we are. What is hap? What happens?
when a primordial mixture
of hydrogen and helium evolved for so long
that it can begin to ask where it came from
So we are stardust and that's the reason there might be others out there as well
so in this context it really makes sense to
Ask is it really just us right and to crib a line from a pretty good?
science fiction movie about 15 years ago
If we're all there is it seems like an awful waste of space
but nevertheless that
Could be the answer we don't yet know
Let's assume that perhaps. We're not alone. What if somebody out there is
Asking and answering the same kinds of questions that we're posing here
Somebody that looks up a nice guy sees the same stars
But just from the opposite side
might the discovery of an older Cosmic culture
Inspire us
to find a way to
survive our increasingly
uncertain
technological adolescence I
Think that's what's that is good for?
50 years ago our
Human Journey to find answers to questions
Started down a new path and the exploratory science that we call seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
I don't think anybody certainly I hadn't thought to define it until just now seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
We began we began using
radio telescopes
Leftover tools from World War II and then at the beginning of the 21st century we began to use
Optical telescopes, and what we're looking for is signs of someone else's technology
so
We take a very pragmatic point of view
We can't define intelligence any better than anyone else can
But what we're using is a proxy for intelligence. We're looking for technology
Someone something that changes its environment in ways that can be sensed over interstellar distances
Right and we use the tools of the astronomers to search for these
This evidence our own technology is detectable over interstellar distances
And there's might be as well
even if we can't conceive of
the reason for the construction of that technology
even if we can't figure out why it's being sent a
determined program of searching might in fact discover it and
in fact while technologies change right the physics of the universe
Not so much, right?
We don't think that the physics of the universe is changing
at least very quickly
Things do seem to have been fairly stable over
Tens of billions of years
but signal carrying information between the stars I have to propagate through the interstellar medium and
Understanding the physics of the interstellar medium that means that it will constrain any engineers ours or theirs
About the kinds of signals that propagate well for that medium
so
we go looking for
Narrowband Radio signals because they transfer
Of travel across the interstellar medium almost
unchanged and
Nature can't produce this kind of signal technology can we go looking for very short?
Nanosecond bursts of light
Again because nature doesn't seem to to do that in ways that are detectable over large distances
but technology can and
in fact
We may be looking on
explicitly
in exactly the wrong ways
We may not yet have invented the right technology for this job
so
we do reserve the right to get smarter and
if somebody invents zeta Raise a
Few decades centuries from now and they are the obvious answer to interstellar communication
Well, then we'll start looking for zeta rays as well as everything else
it's just I'm
Doing a little digression here simply to say that you do what you can
You try and push what you can into new areas
But there's really not a lot you can do about what you can't conceive
Except stick around survive long enough until you figure it out, too
So whether or not seti succeeds is going to depend on longevity?
it's going to depend on the distance between
any two
Technological civilizations, and that's not just distance in space that the technologies are close enough to detect one another
but distance in time
the two
Technological civilizations have to line up in this ten billion year history of our Galaxy to be coeval
so a message that sent can be received and
unless
Technologies are long-lived
that's not going to happen so
Phil Marcin one of the co-authors of the first
Scientific paper on Seti had a lovely way of expressing that he refers to study as the archaeology of our
future
Any information we get will have traveled between the stars a long distance
So it's really archeology because it's telling us about their past, but if we were to detect a signal
Wow
we know
That it's possible
to become on old technology
We know that it's possible to have a long future
And I don't expect cosmic salvation. I don't expect them to tell us how to follow our problems, but merely the fact
That another advanced
technological civilization exists
Should motivate us to figure out a way
To solve our own problems and in the 50 years plus that we've been doing seti
Our tools haven't been optimal we've been using the tools of the astronomer
And if you take the 9 dimensional space that you might have to search through for different kinds of electromagnetic
signals assuming electromagnetic signals is the right thing to search for
You'd conclude
That if that 9 dimensional volume was equal to the volume of the Earth's oceans
so far in 50 years we've sampled an 8 ounce glass of that Ocean and
That's discouraging. We haven't sampled very much, but we haven't sampled very much, so we shouldn't draw negative conclusions and
the
important thing to understand is that we are in an era of
exponentially improving
Technology this is going to get better. We're going to be able to search more
we're going to be able to search faster right now and
continuing into
the next decades so I brought along they wanted a prop so I brought along a
1/8 scale Model of the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California
All right, and it doesn't look like your father's radio telescope, or your mother's radio telescope. It's pretty weird-looking
Very innovative, and if you can see there is a copper colored
Pyramid down there all right that is this
This is a log periodiC Frequency independent feed it
Collects all radio waves from half a gigahertz to 10 gigahertz
right when the size of the pennants
Are kind of like a dipole at half a wavelength?
Then this antenna gets excited. It's like the aerial of your car
Excite these pennants a current flows along the backbone up to the top a little circuit board
It turns it around puts it right down into there
voila you're in a cryogenic Dewar
from there to there, so to
Low-noise amplifiers are kept at 70 Kelvin in that dewar to senses of polarization this sense and this sense
they're amplified and
They come out on Coax cables at the back. They're amplified again. They go to a control room and they're processed
We keep that do or cold with a refrigerator that cysts right inside there, so this is our entire feed and receiver
Cabin and it's on each antenna, and it works
amazingly well
However, we're getting more noise than we thought we would get
So that system is going to be replaced and we're in the process of replacing it with this system
It won't go to as low a frequency we've essentially cut it in half so that we could fit it into a glass bottle
Evacuate the bottle and cool the whole thing down
Including all those little dipole fins and now at a colder temperature. We reduce the ohmic losses and
We improve our system temperature by a factor of two
Over the frequencies that we're currently working at that's like building twice as many antennas. That's pretty cool and
We also made the tip even smaller so we go up to a higher frequency
So this is only one of the instrumental
Improvements that are being made and it can be used for seti and are being driven and being enabled
by fast
available
computational capabilities
So it works really well these feeds and when we look at the planet mars. This is sometimes the way it looks like
And so I'm plotting frequency on the horizontal axis time on the vertical axis
I for every target that we look at we look at nine Billion one Hertz frequency channels
I don't have to tell you a lot about that slide
You can intuit that all that snow is noise, and those bright lines are signal and indeed
That's what this and when we looked at mars on this occasion both
mars reconnaissance orbiters and Mars Express were on our side of Mars and
we could catch their carriers that were being beamed back to
to the DSN
so this works at Mars, and it works at the edge of
the solar system
So same graph right sibility stare at it for a while. There's a signal in there coming from a lot farther away than Mars
So particular to you
Particularly to your eye it's a lot fainter on the other hand there it is and to our special purpose algorithms
There it is our
Computers can find these signals much much better than we can ourselves
If you're interested in figuring out what we're doing on any particular day John Richards at the seTi institute has put up this really neat
set of Pages on Betty Quest info
The one on the left see that's inspector Clouseau
Who's actually tapping his fingers because he's waiting for the observing to start and when the observing starts there is this?
Buxom young woman with binoculars looking at the sky right I
Was a little leery about that, but you know John was doing this he's doing a great job
and it's kind of hard to some creative license has to be allowed in the process and
The other picture is our progress to date
so what we're doing is looking at exoplanet systems either found by Kepler or
by ground-based
systems doing
Radial velocity or micro lensing studies and you can see the big concentration of the kepler
candidates on the sky and the other
Exoplanets are scattered around the sky we look at them three at a time
There's a lot of good reasons for that, but one of them is to help us exclude our own terrestrial signals
And it's a big project. They probably got another couple of years
Observing until we systematically have gone through all of the kepler exoplanet candidates
But we might not finish that in fact Kepler has been so good
that
it's basically telling us that all stars have planets and
So my colleagues are now discussing whether to jump on the bandwagon and let's just concentrate on the nearby stars
Signals will be easier to detect for a given transmitter power if we find them there might be some more relevance to having them close
By so we'll either finish this
Kepler project, and then see what test has provided us or
We'll begin now with known planets of known stars that are nearby
but we are observing at least 12 hours of every day with the allen telescope array, and
if you
happen to have an iPhone and you have the
Distant Suns
Application on it and you click on the little green radio telescope icon you
Can actually see well not so well up there?
But you can actually see the places on the sky that we are observing when you're looking
with your iPhone
So we're trying to open this up and let the public experience
What we're doing, and be part of it, but we've tried a couple of experiments on citizen Science projects
And we learned a lesson the hard way
We are a very small team and when you try and invite the world in to help you
The world needs a lot of help
so
We haven't found the right scale of citizen science project yet, which doesn't overwhelm our team
In just the support for the citizen science. We're still working on it
There has to be this is a sexy project there has to be a really good solution
Ten Years ago the folks at Berkeley came up with a good solution called Seti at home where?
You could donate the unused cPU cycles of your home computer to look for recorded data
and that's
continued to be a great idea and many many people have downloaded this screensaver, and this is sort of been a kickoff for
Distributed computing and citizen science around the world it's a great idea however
It's kind of install and forget, right
We'd like to find an application that engages people all the time
Have them actively thinking about Seti while they're using whatever the application is
because remember
my job to change your point of view I
Can't do that
If you're not thinking about things so we want to find the right tool to keep people actively engaged so uc Berkeley
records Data from Arecibo
And does a number of different types of searches on that Arecibo data they've also
developed a Wideband recorder at the GBt the Green bank radio telescope in
In West Virginia, Nrao telescope, and they do occasional Seti observing there
Lofar is a very low frequency telescope. That's spread across Europe and the netherlands that's beginning to do seti
there's a
group in Italy who's very very keen they're using a 64 metre telescope at Medici nough to do Seti
Down at JPL which was historically part of the NASa seti program
They've had to wait until they could figure out a way
To enable a sky survey on a telescope that's outside the fence
so the Gabart Apple Valley Radio telescope
Which is an educational facility is now hosting a sky survey
That the students are conducting and in Japan a gentleman
Has tried to organize the world Seti observers in what he called project dorothy?
Dorothy is Dorothy as in oz
This began as a tribute to the 50th anniversary of Frank drake's project Ozma
and
Occasionally around the world optical and radio telescopes look at the same set of targets simultaneously
so this is the radio spectrum of Seti and
We are also now since the beginning of the 21st
Century doing optical Seti which is not looking for a narrowband compression and frequency but looking for compression in time
Looking for Bright flashes of light that last a nanosecond or less
We don't think that nature can produce strong enough
emissions in that Coherent fashion
But lasers certainly can lasers focused by large telescopes can do even better, and so this is looking for someone else's laser
signals that's Shelley right in the middle with an instrument on lick that she built as a senior undergraduate program of
Thesis on the left are two students of Paul Horowitz from Harvard who built their own optical sky survey
telescope
in Harvard and
On the right is a small telescope just outside of Sydney in Campbelltown
That's used for optical Seti now the problem with optical Seti is that it gets blocked by dust and scattered?
in in its
Transfer between the stars so you'd like to move optical seti down into the infrared and
Technology is now becoming available to do that. It's an interferometer that Charlie Townes has on Mount Wilson. That's being
Instrumented by the Berkley group to do infrared City that Shelley right again
No longer a senior undergraduate, but a professor at the university of Toronto who is beginning to build a new?
optical Ir Seti Detector using new Diode technologies
And hopefully it will go on lick down on the left
We see the colossus a concept of Jeff koons saying look the one thing we can say about an advanced technology
Is they have a need for power they're going to process and they are going to have we heat
from that use of power
So we'll build a huge telescope that can detect the waste heat such as the back of this Dyson sphere
or
And such waste heat is now being looked for in the datasets from the wise
infrared telescope, so
optical Seti could detect our strongest lasers on Earth
Petawatt 10 to the 15 watts if it was a thousand light years away
Radio City can detect our strongest transmitter on Earth the Arecibo
Planetary radar if it were a thousand light years away
And within that thousand light years there about a million stars for us to have a chance for there to be one
Technological civilization within those million Stars longevity of the civilization has to be a hundred thousand years or greater
We're looking to the future to the large telescope jWSt
Looking for bio signatures the large optical telescopes the European elt and the u.s.
Tmt and the Tmt is not really that much smaller than the elt
Vlt 39 meters TmT 30 meters. It's just the elt
Advertised itself as being a life Detection system TMT
hasn't but I just found out last week that there's some spare space in the
Instrumentation plane, and maybe we can get an optical ir seti detector on there and in the radio
We look forward to the square kilometre array, which certainly has a great heritage from the Allen telescope array designs
So alright suppose none of this ever works
Suppose we don't find a signal I still think seti is really really really worthwhile
Because it has this amazing effect of holding up a mirror
showing us ourselves
From a cosmic perspective, and you know in that mirror. We are all the same and
So it has the effect of trivializing the differences along earthlings
Differences that we're willing to spill blood over we've got to get over that. I think Seti is a great way to do it and
so it's
this idea of deep time and deep place and our
position within it is something that astronomers and
geologists and geophysicists
can appreciate they get to
Enjoy it every day, but it's something we actually have to spread. It's an idea. It's a meme
We should be spreading that meme
across the Planet seti should become a global endeavor and then
Maybe we can figure out what the rest of that stardust has turned into thank
We have time for a couple of questions if you have a question
Please raise your hand when you get the microphone please stand up and ask your question
Thank you for coming here today my question is
Some years ago a couple of fellows may have heard of Brownlee and ward
wrote a book called Rare Earth in which they postulated that while
intelligent life may be exceedingly rare in our Galaxy that
microbial life might be comparatively ubiquitous in light of that as said he ever considered changing its focus from the
Smart end of the scale down to the not-so-Smart
I'm actually very glad that you phrased it as the end of the scale
because
My institution is called the seti institute
But we've got 75
Scientists over there who are doing?
astrobiology
Alright, so at Seti we consider it all a continuum looking for any kind of life trying to understand the origins
Of life and its distribution, and so seti is just one way so I would say the seti institute
Has already embraced from our beginning in 1984 that point of view?
Seti as a discipline is just one end of that spectrum
hyjal hello
So I wanted to make a comment. You suggested that
We're looking we need to be able to find civilizations that are 10 to the fifth years and longevity
Our civilization is one through 300 years if we think about our technological
civilization 100 years yeah, okay, even a hundred years if you think about the real technologies
So where orders of magnitude below the expectations and this was all part of drake's equations I?
Think this must be a little disheartening
especially in light of what like Carl Sagan thought when we turn the telescope to the sky we're going to be finding with lots and
lots of setup um I
understand your final point that it's worth looking but
Isn't it also worth turning inwards and looking at what we can do in unifying ourselves around other?
Topics that are so important I
Really hope the point that I'm trying to make is I think study gives us an opportunity to do precisely that
look if we could globally get on board a
Seti project, it's pretty benign right it isn't threatening
but it would be just one opportunity to get used to working with the others over there as
Opposed to shooting them
And so I think it's it's a sexy project
It's something that's easy to understand and it could
Potentially build
the base and the expectation for
solving problems that don't
The doe stop at National boundaries right that are really global and that we have to work on together
Let's get this one going. It's a no-brainer right? It's easy. It's not threatening if we can do this we can do anything
Good afternoon your talk was wonderful
I'm an elementary school teacher, and I teach some kids in the junior level as well
And I'm trying to teach them and very interesting what you're talking about, and I do try to teach them
What study is looking for which of course?
Extraterrestrial life and I noticed when you brought up the one
image up there it was about cells and
I'm wondering if you're ever looking at anything that isn't
Necessarily a compact cell but still can reproduce you know that tough definition of what's alive
You know reproduce take an energy make more itself so do you ever look for anything that isn't necessarily just you know cellular life
my astrobiology colleagues struggle mightily with the question of what is life and
they participated in an
Advise on National academies study that was published. Maybe three or four years ago now on weird life
Life that's other than life as we know it life that uses different metabolic Pathways different bio solvents
Wouldn't be discovered by any of light seeking instruments. We've currently built because they all rely on DNA
So in some sense, yes
Scientists at the Seti institute who are struggling with that?
But they're struggling just as much as I am about how to do what you can't conceive
So what does it mean?
To look for some other kind of life that we don't know how might you find it some work is being done
It's a really difficult question
So please join me in thanking Dr.. Jill Tarter
you
