Alien Life - Russell Kane, Lisa Kaltenegger and Chris Lintott

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Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brian Cox, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage from Glastonbury.

Today we're going to be talking about alien life and this is a very beautiful thing for me because 27 years ago I was playing this stage here and 20 minutes into my act the stage was stormed by a Klingon.

This is entirely true.

A Klingon ran on stage, tried to rugby tackle me, the top of his forehead fell off.

He then suddenly realised he wasn't a Klingon and ran away.

Is that how you met Brian?

That is how I met Brian.

He's still not a real boy as as we know, Russell.

Still not a real boy.

So we're just going to find out from you a couple of questions about alien life.

So first of all, how many people in this audience believe our planet has been visited by aliens?

They're all still in the healing field, aren't they?

They're going to come down here.

For the radio audience, that was four.

How many people believe they've been visited by aliens themselves?

None.

None.

This is.

I'll tell you what, Glastonbury has really changed.

Today, we are asking what do we know about the probability of life existing beyond Earth?

How are we searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life?

And if we do find extraterrestrials, what might they look like?

To help us achieve a close encounter, we are joined by Adon of the Zooniverse, Collator of Alien Worlds, and Ming the Merciless of Medium Wave.

I have no idea why they're calling you that, by the way.

Just so you know, we're going to find out who you are in a moment because our panel are.

Hello, I'm Chris Lentott from the University of Oxford and Gresham College and the closest I've come to thinking I'd found alien life was when I got a phone call from the Daily Mail about the most interesting star in the galaxy which turned out not to be aliens.

Hi, I'm Lisa Kaltinger.

I'm the director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University where we're trying to put together all the information to find life in the universe.

on planets around other stars and the closest I usually come to that is wiggly lines, the light from another planet.

Haven't found anything yet, but we'll tell you how life can be encoded in light if you know what you're looking for.

I'm Russell Kane, I'm a comedian and a presenter.

And the closest I've come to discovering alien life was yesterday when I visited my family in Clacton, and that's all they talked about: the threat of aliens.

But as long as they're British aliens and they're willing to be legal and work, they're going to be happy.

And this is our panel.

Let's start with you, Russell.

So,

in terms of just by instinct or general belief, do you believe there is other intelligent life?

Again, obviously, whether we're intelligent life, but intelligent life in our galaxy.

Well, I was raised in Essex, so Suffolk was the closest I came to discovering intelligent life.

I think it's almost mathematically impossible that there isn't some form of other life in the universe.

And we're going to whittle it down just to the galaxy, so we now whittle that down to just a hundred billion stars.

Yep.

No, I don't think there's any in our galaxy.

As I said, I have been to Chelmsford on a Saturday and seen something pretty close, but it was just my mate Gary who'd lit himself after a flaming sambuka went wrong.

Lisa, can we explore for a while the history of the search for alien life?

So are there any examples where we thought we discovered extraterrestrials?

And so when do we start scientifically looking for signals?

So the really key thing about this is right now, and I'm going to disagree a little bit with Russell here, we know one out of five stars has a planet that could potentially be like ours.

So basically it means it's a rock that is close enough to the star so it's warm but not far enough away so it's frozen over.

So we live in an incredible time and even if you give me just our galaxy, you give me 200 billion stars.

So one out of five could have another Earth.

And so that gets us to billions and billions of possibility.

And so in 95, astronomers found the first planet around another star.

And since then, basically every second day, we found a world that's circling another star.

And some of them are small enough.

And so you have to be very careful.

Because I don't know if you all remember the kennels on Mars.

You know, at one point people thought there were like big kennels on Mars with lots of water and margins waving our way.

We figured out with better instruments, that wasn't true.

The history is interesting because we've always looked for things like us.

So, you know, the Victorians, when they were writing about life in the solar system, were imagining big engineering societies, the canals on Mars.

There was this wonderful proposal to communicate with the Martians by building a giant mirror in the Sahara Desert and then focusing the sun's light to right onto the Martian desert.

And then the idea was the Martians would reply similarly.

So it's sort of these grand projects.

And then then 20th century, as things get more technological, by the 60s, people are thinking, well, we're a radio society.

And so they were looking for deliberate broadcasts out into the cosmos.

So the first attempts at SETI in the early 1960s, at Greenbank in the States, were looking for signals, right?

Not looking for the signs of life, but people sending us a message.

Because that's what we were imagining doing.

And then I think we got a little more insular.

And now we're a bit scared of the universe.

We're sort of trying to discover life, but we're not sure yet we want to talk to it.

But the fun part about this is too, it's kind of funny that we were thinking that anybody would find us, would send us a signal, say like, hi, we want to talk to you.

You know, I'm like, really?

You really think we are the most advanced thing in the universe that you want to talk to?

Because if I ask my students if they would want to talk to a planet that's just at the edge, you know, just got to the moon, but hasn't even gotten to Mars yet with boots on the ground, or if they wanted to talk to a planet that is like 5,000 years further and I'm thinking fifth element flying cars like all the stuff I want my students take the more advanced planet.

So are we on like a giant Tinder and we're being swiped constantly?

Yeah, we need so that are technologically better looking than us.

Our profile is really bad.

But we can work on it.

We can work on it.

So there are a couple of moments when there's the famous WOW signal for example.

So a couple of things that have been seen that the WOW signal was detected by the wonderfully named Big Ear Telescope in Ohio.

Astronomers are good in naming.

There you go, yeah.

Big ear is good.

It was being used for setting.

They were sort of scanning the sky.

The noddy one was first.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you build that one and then you get funding for the big ear, and we're now building the overwhelmingly large ear.

The noddy one didn't work at all because they put little bells on it, and that kept getting in the way of the alien signals.

So there was this sudden pulse of radio waves, which was found after the fact.

And it's called the WOW signal because the guy who was looking wrote WOW next to it.

And nothing like it's been seen, was seen in the rest of the survey but the problem is it happened once it was probably interference we had this just a couple of years ago where a project called breakthrough listen found a signal that was consistent with what you'd expect coming from a planet around proxima centuri our nearest star and they spent two or three years trying to work out whether this was real or not.

It leaked into the press, so then they had had a lot of pressure, but they eventually found that it some sort of interference.

They found it at other things.

So this is the problem.

If you're a radio astronomer, it's a noisy environment.

There's all this other stuff going on, and trying to hear the aliens is the hard part.

You've so got it every month, and it's just your phone.

You've left your phone next to the radar.

Oh, we've had problems with microwave.

Because quite often, isn't it?

When they have had moments of the Lovell Telescope of going, I think that's an alien signal.

And then someone walks in with their recently heated up Moussaka and they go, No, that was the microwave.

And that is...

Yeah, there was a broken microwave at the Parks Radio Telescope Visitor Center that fooled people for a couple of years.

If you were impatient and opened the door before it went ping, they detected a signal.

So it was intelligent life, but it was closer than they were.

There's Gary on his lunch bag.

But the cool thing about this is like, you know, we've been talking about talking, right, and listening, because that's the technology we knew and we thought would come, right?

But what has changed so fundamentally, what's completely changed our whole field, is that now we can collect the light.

We can actually read the information, we can explore planets without them wanting to talk to us, right?

Because this is a big question, right?

Does somebody want to find a signal?

And how much do we use radio, right?

So, how long are you doing?

You know, you're on radio right now, right?

I love radio, by the way.

I should have said that.

But I'm just saying, like, that might not be the technology in a thousand years, right?

And we don't want to have just a civilization right now at the same stage.

And so, looking at the air of another world, that's what we're doing right now with the huge James Webb Space Telescope, that's a completely different step because it doesn't require anybody to want to talk to have found us to know where to send a signal to.

You're doing stalking, basically.

Yeah, basically.

Stalking without being caught.

Could you give us a picture?

So, you said that we can use the JWST, the Webb Space Telescope, to look at the atmospheres of planets.

So, how, because these things are very small,

hugely difficult.

Thanks for pointing those out.

How do we do that?

So, basically, what we do, how we found most of the more than 5,600 planets around other stars, what we do is we look at the star.

A star is big and bright.

But if by chance the planet actually goes between our line of sight to the star, for a very small amount of time, you basically get the star appear a little bit less bright because part of the bright surface is blocked from our view.

This is how we find planets.

And while that's happening, so when the planet, it's star planet us, part of the stellar light gets filtered through the atmosphere of the planet before getting to us.

And molecules have a very different shape.

And light carries energy.

If you put your hand out, you know, it gets warm.

So if energy hits a molecule, it can rotate and swing.

And so the light doesn't make it through the atmosphere to my telescope anymore.

And so like a passport stamp, the light that doesn't get to my telescope tells me what's in the air of another world.

But it is so hard.

Let me just put what Brian said in context.

If you put the Earth 100 times next to each other, that's the diameter of the sun.

So you're already trying to find something tiny, non-bright, next to something huge and bright.

But if you want to look at the atmosphere, it's even worse because if we now shrink our Earth to the size of an apple the atmosphere is less thin than the peel of the apple but that we even possibly can do this now for the first time ever

I think that makes me believe in humankind and our curiosity and what we can do but this is still I mean I have huge there we go

But it's really difficult, right?

Because you can do this.

It's really difficult to do.

You can do this, and then arguing about what the molecules are and working out which of them tell us that there's life is going to be the really hard part.

I would argue.

Well, working out, no, but working out what's going on.

For example, Mars is next door.

We can go there.

We've sent rovers there.

And the Curiosity rover has picked up these burps of methane that seem to come from under the surface.

It occasionally drives through them and notices them.

It smells them.

But from orbit, we don't see the methane.

So we've got this discrepancy between what different satellites are seeing.

And that's a planet we can go and almost touch or smell.

And so doing this from light years away, getting your tiny wiggles in a spectrum, and then saying, Ah, I can see clearly that there's these molecules and therefore life, is going to be really difficult.

Could there be

a small subterranean cows?

It could be small ones.

No, it cannot.

Well, you know, it's one off a thousand.

Look at that.

Shutting down.

Now that we know about the intergalactic subterranean cows,

it's shut down by science.

No, but what were you going to say?

I was just saying that this is the really amazing thing about scientific discovery, right?

Because we find a signal, as Chris was just saying, methane, right?

And then everybody wishes for it to be life, right?

Me too.

I'm the first one of like, hopefully, the signs on metane on Mars are life.

And this is what I said before.

And then you kill your darlings.

Because yes, I wish for it to be life.

But as a scientifically trained person, I take my wishes out and I'm like, what are the explanations?

And unfortunately, we have thousands of explanations that are geological.

And then we have cows, tiny cows, somewhere in the column.

No, no, no, no, no, that's not saying that it's not cows, it's saying that there are loads of other explanations as well, which I agree with, right?

So it could be geology or some heating or some chemistry.

I would say I would go with you with methane-producing bacteria, but small cows in the case of marshes.

Small cows in the form of methane-producing bacteria.

I think the point is we can't entirely refute the miniature subterranean extraterrestrial cow, but it's not at the forefront of scientific research.

I agree with that.

Russell, I wanted to ask you about...

Yes, I will go and see burps of methane with you on the alternative stage.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, they're very good this year.

Yeah, they're brilliant.

What a band.

But I was wondering, because when we think of our own history,

anything that we've ever met that we have presumed ourselves to be more intelligent than, we've either eaten or enslaved.

I've had quite successful relationships, Robin.

Speak for yourself.

Oh, yeah, I've forgotten what your Tinder profile says about cannibalism and enslavement, right?

But no, I just wondered about, you know, how you feel about...

Because some people do get quite scared.

You know, even someone like Stephen Hawking talked about, you know, should we be sending out signals?

Should we be worried about other intelligent life?

What do you think about that?

I know it's off topic, the professors, but I genuinely believe what will get us while we're gazing up at a methane burp, at a tiny cow on a planet that we can't really see, is our AI will become super intelligent and consume us here on Earth.

Then we'll probably get acknowledged because we'll be intelligent enough to interact with the other planets.

But we'll all be dead, so we won't see it.

Well,

there is this theory that the reason we don't see, there are lots of ideas as to why we don't see a universe that's full of life and intelligence.

I think of it as the Star Trek universe with surprisingly similar-looking aliens on every planet.

So, this is what the one question my wife wanted me to ask today.

We argue about it.

If we encounter alien life, what is the likelihood it will be similarly physical to like be bipedal?

Will it be upright?

Will it use language?

Or could it just be a blob or an amorphous gas?

We've no idea, Aaron.

Is it all as likely as each other?

Well, the good thing is, like, the one thing you know about is physics, right?

So, if you have a very big planet, massive, then you expect life not to be upright because you would need a bone structure that's crazily dense, right, to make that happen.

So, then evolution should go a different way.

If you have a smaller planet, you'd expect something that's actually bigger.

If you have more oxygen, you'd expect something dinosaur-ish, maybe not dinosaur-ish, dinosaur-ish, but big.

So energy.

And so these things you can guess, but I always find it's really funny because if I look at the deep oceans, people ask me, it's like, how is it alien life, how's it going to look like?

I'm like, have you seen a blobfish?

I could have not imagined something like a blobfish or the other things, right?

And that's on my planet.

That's with my evolution, right?

And I couldn't imagine it here.

So it's going to be even more fun.

So there's a great set of theories or a great book by a guy called Simon Conway Morris, who's a paleontologist who looked at early life on Earth.

And he reckons that any intelligent life that exists will look like us.

It'll be bipedal, it'll be about six foot, it'll have two eyes.

And his argument is that you can look at what evolution does on the Earth, and for example, the eye has evolved many separate times.

Not always the same, but lots of creatures have eyes and they've evolved separately.

So we should assume that when we meet aliens from planets like ours, they'll have eyes.

But why would it be organic?

Given that if you were going to follow similar trajectories and say that happened on Earth, therefore eyes here, what's going to happen on Earth clearly is the most intelligent species will be technology that we've created.

Could it not be the case that it's

this idea that the reason we don't see a galaxy full of technological life is that you eventually produce a supercomputer that's intelligent.

I don't think we're close to that, but let's say that happens eventually.

The computer will want to do as much thinking as possible, maybe, and that's easier later in the universe because the universe is then colder.

So you create your superintelligent computer, it looks around, it says, oh, I'm a hundred billion years too early to do as much thinking as possible, and then it will shut down.

So then you have a galaxy full of sleeping computers.

That's really depressing.

Let me just pick this up because we do not know how to find that.

We know how to find biological things, right?

So this is where about two billion years ago, and this going back to Stephen Hawkins, right?

About should we talk, should we say that we hear?

So the first science paper I've ever written was actually I wanted to know how long you could spot life on the Earth if you were an alien looking.

And I named it differently because that's not what you can actually publish in science.

But for about 2 billion years, you'd be able to say that there's life on this planet because of the combination of oxygen and methane.

And so, the cat's out of the bag for about 2 billion years.

And I'm actually quite happy that nobody came and ate us yet.

So, I'm thinking that there might be actually a more peaceful universe than we think out there.

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We talk about the distinction between microbes.

So,

I suppose if we're talking about life in the solar system,

life on Mars perhaps, on Jupiter's moon Europa, or elsewhere, we're talking about microbes.

So, do we need to make a distinction between what we might just call slime or microbes, single-celled organisms, and then life at this level of complexity that we have?

I think the really interesting thing, great question.

The really interesting thing about this is that, for example, there are things they call tardigrades, the small water bears, that are like in a dew drop, so you need a microscope to see it, right?

And they have survived the last five mass extension, right?

So the question is what's intelligent, right?

And what's actually complex enough?

Fair enough, they don't have any radio telescopes, right?

They don't want to...

As far as we know.

As far as we know, they might have other things.

But the cool thing in this whole search is also what you just talked about.

Where is the line, right?

Then when you talk to biologists, they say like, no, life is simple.

Life is super complex, even single cellular line.

Life, but on the other hand, of course, I would like to find somebody with flying cars and super cool things, right?

But if we were just to find any life, doesn't matter.

We are so bad at searching for it just because it's so hard and the things are so small that if you found one,

that would mean it has to be everywhere in the universe.

and this is why even slime would get like a gold tick mark for me in celebration but we could also look at the history of the earth we've got some evidence here so we know that life on earth appeared really quickly so there's evidence that there was life on earth 3.7 billion years ago and the earth is what four and a half billion years and life probably goes back beyond that so once the conditions existed here microbes, simple life appeared.

If we define intelligence as having, I don't know, radio programs, podcasts, and gin and tonics or something, then we're what?

60 podcasts were what, 30 years ago?

So it took roughly 4.5 billion years to get to intelligence.

So you might say that that's evidence that intelligence is going to be rare, but we're going to have a cosmos filled with simple life, which, I know, I think it's satisfying from a science point of view, but it feels like nearly winning the lottery.

You know, it feels like we'd have a universe, we'd go from planet to planet exploring and find a remarkable diversity of slime to look at and have no one to talk to.

It's not hugely satisfying.

That's true, but what's really, really cool about this is there are actually planets out there that were older than the Earth is right now

when the Earth was formed.

So stars don't have the same age and their planets form with them.

So we have ancient planets out there and really newbies.

And we don't know yet how evolution goes other worlds could be faster could be slower so I think with so many opportunities the jury is still out whether or not there's only going to be simple or simple as single cellular life out there and this is why we're searching because we just don't know yes is there a distinction in your mind because as Chris said as you said Lisa the discovery of anything would be profound it would mean that we we are part of a living universe beyond the earth but would it satisfy you if we found just evidence of microbes microbes?

When we say alien life, are you thinking of school holidays?

Company holidays are approaching.

You know, universe of slime sounds like heaven.

That would keep my lot amused.

I think any evidence that there is anything other than us anywhere would be amazing.

Evidence, apart from, you know, when someone's microwave went off.

Because talking to Seth Shostak, who worked at SETI for many, many years, and he said that he actually felt that discovering slime won't excite that many people.

It'll be over and done with very quickly.

Oh, look, they've found life.

It depends what it's made of.

It could be made of an element we don't have on Earth.

It could have some sort of material in it that could cure cancer or accelerate our technology by a million years.

Yes, I would want to touch the Tauta, that slime.

Well, now you've made it into magic slime.

So that has changed the quality of the slime.

But so you, for you personally, that would be the discovery of some form of kind of living tissue like slime that you would feel psychologically that would have an effect.

I would believe that slime light years away would be comprised of stuff that we would be able to anticipate.

There would be something in it that would enrich and grow us as a human culture.

So,

this is going to be, I think what we've established is somebody's going to try to eat the slime just to see what happens.

It's a good question, given that the obviously we understand, we know about the laws of nature, we understand chemistry.

So, is there any way that we can speculate on constraints?

Well,

one of my worries about this stuff is that there'll be something very special about our biology.

So we know we have this intricate biochemistry that depends on a particular form of chemistry that produces DNA.

Now, we don't know whether there are other solutions to that problem.

But let's say they're not.

If we go to Mars now and we find tiny cows, which are a possibility, or bacteria under the surface, if they have the same DNA as us, we're never going to be able to say that they didn't come from Earth, because we have rocks moving between the two.

There were spacecraft that landed in the 60s that were not sanitized, so it's possible.

There was actually, there's an experiment going on right now where they're scraping stuff off the outside of the International Space Station because there appear to be bacteria that can survive in space.

So we may have just sent Earth bacteria to Mars.

If they have a completely different DNA, a different solution to passing on genetic information, great, we know they're Martian.

That would be exciting.

But what if we go there and discover that it's just us?

That's going to be really tricky, I think.

But I think if you go back to Brian's question, right?

So,

carbon has a lot of cool things, like being able to form really complicated chains, but also being effectively recycled.

So, this is why carbon is actually a good bet for scaffolding.

And then you have water that has, like, at a certain distance from the stars liquid, so you can actually concentrate it by just getting some of it to boil off and concentrate the liquid in the remaining water, then you rain back in, bring some more chemistry in.

And when you look at the universe, hydrogen and oxygen and carbon, so water and carbon, is kind of everywhere.

And so the building blocks of what life's based on here seem to be everywhere.

But then the question is, what's the solution?

Is life going to get to the solution of something like an RNA, DNA, like a cell?

And there, the question is, how fast, how much time does it have?

And if it has time, right, life as we know it is really good in adapting to things.

Can I ask a question?

Like, forgive me if this is really thick.

Obviously, I'm not a scientist.

How fast can evolution go in theory?

I mean, could you just grow an ear overnight or anything?

No idea.

No idea, because the thing is, how long does it have to try to figure out, ooh, you know what, oxygen is a great energy source, right?

It was just trial and error.

Oxygen was a waste product.

When they did photosynthesis, it was just light and energy, right?

And it produced oxygen, killed off 95% of life at that point.

But some of it adapted because oxygen is a great energy source.

And so, there's, if you talk to biologists, they would actually argue that if life evolves, it will get to oxygen and it will get, because it was more energy, to more complex forms, whether it's whales or dolphins, or you know, it's not gonna be the same, but

tiny cows, like tiny cows, maybe not on Mars, but maybe somewhere else.

But what would be your guess about the if I said to you, what's the average number of civilizations in a typical galaxy?

Chris, what would you say?

I think if you make me me guess, I think I have to say one,

because I'm an optimist and I want to believe in this grand.

I don't want super intelligent AI sitting and sleeping.

I want us to go and explore amongst the stars.

And I feel if we did that, we'd be obvious.

We found other ways to look for obvious civilizations.

We've looked for debris from alien mining, and we've looked for how aliens might affect their stars.

And we've even looked for some alien art without finding anything.

So I think one,

and we won the lottery, and we're it.

But I don't understand.

You've said, Lisa, 40 billion in our galaxy alone.

That's not counting the moons.

Yeah, so there's a potential 40 billion stars which have orbiting around them planets which are fit for life.

Why is it, because I know you've said that to me before, Brian, and I don't know how you feel, but

it just feels counterinstinctual and quite arrogant to say there's 40 billion,

but we're going to be the only one.

Why do we, but what do we base that on?

I kind of think it's a little bit people fall back before the Copernican revolution, where we were in the center of everything, right?

And then at least it was our sun in the center of everything.

And now it seems to be we, you know, we know our sun is not in the center of everything.

We are not.

Our planet is not.

And now it kind of starts to go to the thing like, no, no, but you need a yellow sun.

There are not that many yellow suns.

And you need one moon because that's what we have.

And you're like, when you talk to the biologists, they're like, no, you don't.

You don't need a yellow sun.

You don't need one moon, right?

Life will evolve for whatever condition it finds.

And so I'm more with you, Robin, on this thing.

He said, I find it's kind of very human-centric to think that we would be it, because that gives us a special position, again, in the galaxy, and we've basically gained our specialness back.

But what's really cool, and this is just going back to what Brian was saying, and Chris before, I teach at the university, I teach the intro to astronomy, and it was just really funny.

So the first planet around the the star 29 years ago, 30 years ago, 1995, right, was the discovery.

And so I'm like, happily, like, I don't know, five, ten years ago.

I walk into my class and I was like, and you know what?

There are planets around other stars.

And all my students look at me and be like, yeah?

Because none of them had lived in a time where we didn't know that because, you know, they are 20.

And so I was like, oh.

There was like no feedback.

And I was like, and some of them are within the habitable zone.

And they were like, yeah?

And I was like, and I'm looking for signs of life.

And I remember it was the funniest thing.

After the class, one of the students came and was like, could you speed it up a little bit, right?

We know they are planets.

We know they're at the right distance.

So what are you guys waiting for trying to get?

Well, now we've got the hard problem.

So it's become, I always think that this was an astronomer's problem.

Now it's a biologist's problem.

It's like, you know, if we have these conditions, these initial conditions, where does life get started?

If it gets started, what are the the odds it evolves podcasts?

These are the questions that

we need to answer next.

I'm interested you went with podcasts before gin and tonic there, because I wasn't expecting you to do that.

Well, you know, there's research on the gin and tonics.

It's the podcasts that's the big unit.

You know, what's really cool too is like a friend of mine was actually trying to figure out if you could find signs of beer in the atmosphere of a planet because whenever you

beer, if you open the bottle, you know, there's always this tiny amount of gas that comes out.

And so that was a joke paper, but we were just basically trying to figure out how many people at the same time would have to open a bottle of beer to have a discernible signal.

And that's where

the British spacecraft would arrive at that one first.

Legends incoming?

No, we don't want to join with you.

We want to do a galexit.

But there's a lot of interest now in looking for sort of the technological signatures of life.

So I mentioned the most interesting star at the galaxy at the beginning of the program.

And that was a star star that was blinking not as if it had a planet getting in front of it but it was sort of randomly dipping and changing in brightness it was discovered by a bunch of citizen scientists volunteers on our planet hunters project and we put out a paper that called it the WTF star we didn't know what it was

the journal made us explain that WTF stood for where's the flux so we got away with that

which is the funniest joke that's ever been published in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society anyway what was flashing Well, this is the thing,

we said we didn't know, and then a bunch of people in the States, Jason Wright and friends, published this paper that said, well, what's clearly happening is this is an alien megastructure.

So these are solar panels in orbit around the star, and when a panel gets in front of the star, it causes it to dim.

And I find out about this because I got a phone call at 9 a.m.

from a journalist that said, hello, I hear you've discovered aliens.

And I'm not very good at 9 a.m.

And I said, I'll check my email.

And it turned out we sort of had.

Anyway, it turned out it's some sort of dust cloud.

There are still some mysteries.

But we went through this year of

every word there.

But here's the thing: we've now found a whole load of other stars that behave like this.

And we're going through the motions of trying to work out for each of them why they're misbehaving.

So we can look not just for life, but the effects of life.

And maybe even for this sort of artistic technological stuff.

On life stuff, on the causes of life.

The really cool thing about this, what Chris was just saying, is like once you have a one-off, and this comes back to Brian's question about the history of this search, right?

A one-off is always tangibleizing, right?

You're like, I've never seen this before, so then if you see the meme on social media, it always looks like, it has to be aliens, right?

If we don't understand what it is, it has to be aliens, that's the first thing that comes.

And unfortunately, it's never been.

But it's just when you find the second one, the third one, the first one, the fifth one, right?

Then when you start to see a pattern, then you start to figure out what's going on.

But what we're doing in in a search, and I think we should mention that, it's like, yes, we're looking for things that we know how to find, right?

And people say, oh, that's boring.

It's actually super hard and not boring.

But what we do is we keep our eyes open for anything else because a weird signal, I cannot tell you that that's definite life, right?

It's hard enough to say that under all these conditions that I understand on a rocky planet, that gas combination,

my only explanation is life, right?

And that's the oxygen, methane.

what started after about two billion years of life on the Earth before there was methane or CO2, what can also come out of geology and volcanoes, so it's not unique.

And so the problem is like a weird signal is always cool.

But you have to be careful.

Sorry, is there any chance that any of the life that is here didn't start here?

What I mean is in the initial event when the universe was created, some stuff that was headed for somewhere else stuck to our...

Oh, you're going to love that you probably know this word.

Oh, it evolved 3.7 years ago.

Well, maybe it didn't.

Maybe it was a bit of detritus

that was traveling.

I'm going to give you this word because you're going to enjoy it.

You're talking about panspermia.

Yes.

Well, it is absolutely.

That's what I've got.

I knew you were trying to goad that out,

my curtains at university.

I suppose it is

a good question.

If we don't understand the biology, the chemical processes by which life works,

it's often referred to, isn't it, as a shadow biosphere, or is it some other form of life here that we would not be able to detect using this.

This is where we feel the lack of a biologist here, I think.

But I think you're right.

You can only see, we come back to my original point where

we look for things that remind us of us.

And so, if there is something truly alien, then

we may be missing it in the cosmos or on Earth.

But I think, you know, our kind of life on Earth has filled all of the niches that we can find.

We're incredibly, as an ecosystem, incredibly diverse.

So I'm not sure there's much space here.

There is this idea, this panspermia idea, that we know the water and a lot of the raw ingredients for life came from comets or asteroids that hit the Earth early on.

So maybe you can have life coming in on those, or at least the building blocks.

And then

there are these grand...

Well, that's the panspermia.

But then there's this grander.

There's this

grander idea, which goes back to Fred Hoyle and co.

where stuff travels between star systems.

And there's no evidence for that but it is true we've been doing this calculation for for other reasons but stuff can travel through the galaxy quite quickly particularly if it can steer so if you are an alien civilization you build a probe to send life to other planets you can spread through the galaxy pretty quickly it's kind of funny if you just take our solar system and you take Punch Bermia right this idea somehow People want to be Martians.

But the chances are actually much more likely that if we found any Martian life, it's Earth's life.

Because here we had much longer water environment.

We've sent stuff out.

We've sent stuff out.

We sent stuff out too.

But somehow it doesn't seem half as sexy that actually the Martian life would be Earth life.

It's reverse spermia, is it?

Reverse spermia.

Intraspermia.

It's going on holiday and having fish and chips and lager instead of tapas.

So they're going to Mars to discover Earth life.

And the really cool thing about this too is like it's a really cool idea about the transpermia, but panspermia.

But the big problem is actually you don't don't just have to bring the life, you have to bring enough of an environment for it to be able to evolve for the new condition it finds, right?

And there is the problem because it will have to come through the atmosphere, it gets super hot on the outside, and so you'd have to have a big enough piece so that's cool on the inside, and the big enough piece is probably gonna smash into the Earth and heat everything up to a point where it doesn't work anymore.

I don't know, there are people in Canterbury who have a high-velocity gun where they're doing experiments where they fire samples of what cometary material might be like and they look at what survives the impact.

And you can get some complex chemistry to survive.

So but yeah, no, it's not.

I completely agree about the complex chemistry, but I think life is going to be a hard sell that you can't do it.

We're doing tiger cows with crash helmets.

With helmets.

Can I just ask on the scale, because we are basically playing in a big field, and I can't remember exactly, someone once told me, and you might know the statistics, but if you create a version of our solar system, which is one meter in diameter, how far would you have to walk to get on that scale to the next star?

It's like let's scale up from a cookie.

It's probably a few miles on that scale, I think.

So even here in the fields of Glastonry, it's an enormous space that we would not, if you walk from one end to the other, you are still not getting to the point where you're going to meet another star.

That's right.

Yeah, space is empty it turns out so so we've got some exciting missions obviously the surface of Mars we've got several the Mars sample return mission for example but also the spacecraft on the way are about to be launched to Europa so could you just give us a brief survey of the missions currently that are looking for life beyond earth in our solar system

so if we do our solar system we have Mars return we have Europa Clipper and the European versions just launched before that so two missions to Europa and on the drawing boards is something to go back to Saturn because it also has one of these icy moons that has an ocean underneath it.

And then when you go further afield to the billions of planets around other stars, you have currently the James Webb Space Telescope that for the first time is be able to do some atmospheres.

You have TESS that is looking for planets very close to us because those are the ones we get most light from.

We're building something that's called Ariel here in Europe.

And then there's also the Plato mission that's again going to try to find planets by them blocking out light from the stars so we can then zoom in.

And we are building on the ground the extremely large telescope in Chile in 2027.

Well, it's the European extremely large telescope.

But they dropped the E.

Have they?

Yes, they did.

Oh, well, thank you for the moment.

But yeah, but nonetheless,

we're heavily involved.

And this is an amazing thing.

It's a telescope that's so big that it sits inside a sports stadium, right?

And so the mirror's nearly 40 meters across.

And that will really help with the atmospheric stuff.

And then what Chris was saying before, you know, we're really good at naming.

So this is the extremely large telescope.

The next one we're building is the overwhelming large telescope, all.

And then naming the next telescope is not our problem anymore.

Yeah, we've really come

a long way from Big Ear, haven't we?

You're really.

Sorry.

This is, Russell, I've just got to ask you because we just want to, but we've been talking about sending out signals to other possible life.

We're here at the Glastonbury Festival.

I want to know, you know, if there's one set that's going to be sent, I would probably, between PJ Harvey, Janelle Minet and Cindy Lauper, I think Cindy Lauper would probably be the most promising signals to send out to get contact with extraterrestrial life.

What are you sending?

Either burps of methane.

Right.

Or I'll probably just send out some banging techno because I am biased here.

Now listen, I don't like songs and go, oh, my girlfriend left me and now I live in Shoreditch.

That's not my type of music.

I like the fact you see there as being only two genres of music.

My girlfriend's left me.

Why?

Because I kept playing banging techno.

Excuse me, Robin.

I'll ask the professors what are aliens more likely to be able to follow?

A series of rhythmic pulsing beats where we have it.

By the way, even the telescope dropped an E.

I don't know if you caught that.

So, what are you sending, Chris?

Well, I will go with techno, but I've just discovered a German band called Mute who played techno as a marching band.

And I think that shows human creativity at its best.

Thank you.

I'm not entirely sure.

On the Golden Disc, we sent up Kurt Voldheim's voice, and it turned out he was a full-on Nazi, but you're probably a mistake looking back.

Sending German marching music, I'm not sure, as is inviting as you might imagine.

Not into the Sudartan galaxy, are you?

Lisa, what about for you?

I would send a mix, like you said, from the golden record because we have so much amazing creativity and some of them here at Glossenburg, right?

Why not send lots of voices, thousands of voices, millions of voices?

If I can do that, I don't want to limit it down because who knows what's going to echo.

Well, there's nowhere better to record those voices than here, so thank you so much.

I'll tell you what, I would send things can only get better, but that's just me.

A man who left the band because of its failure to obey the laws of physics in its chart hits, now for the purposes of his own ego, will mislead the aliens about the laws of entropy.

Well, that has told us a lot as far as I'm concerned.

Thank you so much, my guests.

Lisa Calcanea, Chris Lincoln, and Russon Kay!

In the infinite monkey cage.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

From BBC Radio 4, Britain's biggest paranormal podcast is going on a road trip.

I thought in that moment, oh my god, we've summoned something from this board.

This is Uncanny USA.

He says, somebody's in the house, and I screamed.

Listen to Uncanny USA on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

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