The Infinite Monkey Cage USA Tour: San Francisco

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Hello, I'm Robin Ince.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio.

Enjoy it.

Ladies and gentlemen of San Francisco,

for the first time live in San Francisco, this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

So,

this is the question we're asking.

Could it really be possible that human beings are the most intelligent creatures in the universe?

Anyway, so

is it the duty of a sentient creature to go in search of living things beyond their own planet, or should we let them get on with their own lives and just leave them alone?

Is Stephen Hawking correct in his suspicion that making extraterrestrials aware of our existence may lead to our doom?

So, hope you enjoyed my reading of doom there.

So, we have a fantastic panel.

I think two of them have been on the show before, and two are the first time.

So, if you'd like to introduce our first guest, Carolyn Porco is a planetary scientist who's played a major part in creating some of the most beautiful and enlightening images of our solar system.

She leads the imaging team of the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn, and she's just been appointed as a distinguished scientist at both the California Academy of Sciences and UC Berkeley.

It's Carolyn Porco.

Carolyn, who last time we had on, we had a fantastic kind of argument, wasn't there, between the two planetary scientists.

One saying we need to go to the caves of Mars to find microbial life.

No, we don't.

We need to go.

It was a kind of Laurel and Hardy thing, I like to think.

You idiot, the caves of Mars.

Anyway, so

it's Enceladus.

It's Enceladus.

I told you.

Anyway, so our next guest, Paul Provenza, is an actor, stand-up director, writer, producer.

He wrote a wonderful book of interviews with stand-up comedians called Sataristas.

He was the MC of the Reason Rally in Washington and made his feature directorial debut with The Aristocrats, in which comedians told the filthiest version possible of a certain joke, which cannot be repeated here because this is BBC Radio 4 and we've never heard of those kind of words.

So...

He also, by the way, played a banana in the popular US sitcom Charles in Charge, which means that Kirk Cameron can use him to illustrate that creationism is true.

Please welcome to the stage, Paul Premender.

Seth Szostak is an astronomer and director of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

He's host of the big picture science radio show.

He was astrobiology advisor on the remake of The Day of the Earth Studies Still, and also made an appearance on How William Shatner Changed the World.

But his real claim to fame is that he appeared on the second ever episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage back on October 30th, 1938.

It is Seth Szostak.

And finally, a native of San Francisco, Greg Proups is one of the world's finest improvisers.

A multitude of appearances on the UK and USA versions of Whose Line Is It Anyway?

He's been the voice of Bob the Builder, one half of a two-headed pod race commentator in The Phantom Menace.

He was also Seymour the Fractal Cat and host of the Smartest Man in the World podcast.

Please welcome Greg Bruce.

Before we get started, Seth, because I've never seen this, can you just explain how did William Shatner change the world?

Actually, he portrayed this very optimistic view of our journey into space.

You know, space is a terrible place, but he made it, you know, filled with interesting aliens and a lot of rather attractive ones and and there was always something good happening in that show and the most important thing was when it came to the aliens he always insisted that you could see their eyes that was an insistence but that was Gene Roddenberry that was Gene Roddenberry yeah yeah except in the case of the tribals but they didn't have eyes

we had when we had Patrick Stewart on the show you remember there was a wonderful moment where we had one planetary scientist who had brought pieces of meteorite I mean incredible if you've ever held a piece of meteorite it's an incredible density this different kind of weight to it and and everyone just went oh yeah and then Patrick Stewart got got out his communicator badge, and everyone went, ooh,

they were made in Burbank.

Those have come from space.

Whatever, that's from the next generation.

So we'll start off because we were going to talk about extraterrestrials.

And I was thinking of Carl Sagan in Cosmos.

There was these wonderful images.

I think it was on Jupiter.

Do you remember the two types of creature that they imagined could be just a bit of conjecture, the possibility of these enormous kind of gas balls, I think they were.

Living in the clouds.

Living in the clouds.

And I wonder, just, I'll start with you, Karen, and we'll go around to everyone.

But when you imagine the possibility of extraterrestrial life with your own understanding of our own solar system and beyond, what are you currently imagining will be the possibilities of what we might find?

Well, of course, it depends where you're looking, but in looking in other places in our solar system, we're only hoping to find microbial life.

I mean, we know, well, it's questionable already if there's any intelligent life in our solar system to begin with.

Okay, and there's certainly none other than human life.

So

we're looking in those places where we might have microbes.

And so we are, in fact, even narrowing it even more to look for those places where we might have the kind of life that we have here on Earth, because that's the easiest that we know how to detect.

You know, based on water as a matrix, simple organic compounds, amino acids, maybe nucleic acids, and so on.

And that's common throughout the solar system.

All those, well, we don't know about nucleic acids, but amino acids are found in meteorites, and certainly the basic elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, they're everywhere.

Organic materials are everywhere.

I think we can start with that premise that there are organic materials everywhere.

So, what do you think the likelihood is that in our lifetimes we'll see microbes on either Mars or perhaps the moons of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter?

Well, that's, you know, it's hard to say.

I automatically make a fool out of myself if I put a number of...

Well, not in our lifetime, so so you'll be dead by the time you prove wrong.

Okay.

So I can say this with impunity.

Well, let's put it this way.

You guys know I'm a real promoter of going back to Enceladus, because Enceladus is the moon in our solar system that we know now, because we've been in orbit around Saturn for 11 years now, focused on this body.

It's one of our main targets because it's turned out to be so interesting.

It has geysers gushing forth from its south pole.

They have

fine particulates, you know, icy little particles that we know are salty.

And it has vapor that's suffused with organic compounds.

We know the pH of the ocean that it's coming from.

We know it's coming from an ocean.

And even just this week, there was an announcement of silica particles, which have been interpreted to come from hydrothermal springs on the sea floor of Enceladus.

So it has all the hallmarks that we have been saying now for 25, 30 years of a place to go in search of life.

And there are our geysers.

We should say, actually, because this is such a beautiful picture.

So that is a picture from Cassini.

That's a picture from Cassini that my group planned.

I'm all Enceladus here, so I'm very proud of this.

It's a beautiful picture.

It's our highest resolution.

It's only about 55 meters per little dot.

And those are coming from gashes in the ice that go 35 kilometers, so whatever that is, 25 miles below through the ice shell to an ocean underneath the ice.

That's also a beautiful picture of one of the plumes.

This is so good on the radio.

Well, I just want to show you.

Well, I've got a mirror picture.

This one's a kind of round.

I've got a mirror on my hand.

But that's a very good idea.

I find that a spectacularly beautiful picture.

And this one, of course, with this.

Yes, that's the south polar terrain where the gashes are, those ones that are blue.

This is a false color picture.

But it's a very unique geological province that we found on a moon that's no bigger than England.

Across, it's very small, but it's being tidally flexed in a resonance, and it's got liquid, it's got everything, and the thing that makes it the go-to place in our solar system is that its ocean is accessible by dint of its geysers.

All you have to do, I've been saying for years now, is land on the surface, look up, and stick your tongue out, and you've got everything you could possibly want.

And you don't even have to land.

All you have to do is fly through and sample the material with instruments that we don't have on the Cassini mission, which is in orbit around Saturn now, but instruments that could look for things like amino acids and look for those kinds of things that we feel could tell us whether or not biological activity is going on.

So, just very quickly, so it could be that we are looking at a world there that could be there's life on that world under the surface in the moon.

It could be snowing microbes or bits of microbes on the south pole of this moon.

And this moon creates a ring, a doughnut-sized ring of powder-sized icy particles.

The spray from this moon creates this big ring, and there could be bits of microbes in that thing, too.

So it's utterly, you know, I mean, you want to talk about science fiction.

We have it right here.

You know, it kind of looks like Bakersfield.

Yeah.

Bakersfield?

What are you smoking?

I want some.

For the Phidi audience.

You'll find some.

This is San Francisco.

It should be fine.

The Phi Audience.

No, no, no, no, no, it's Colorado.

That you have to go for that.

Clapham Junction.

Clapham Junction.

Go to reference points.

So.

Well, I was going to ask, because we mentioned science fiction, I know you're a big movie fan, and we've talked before about kind of B-grade movies.

And also, of course, as one of the voices of a two-headed Podres commentator, when you're- Makes me an incredible expert on science fiction.

Well, that's why one of the reasons

we had so many different people who asked them went, Well, none of these people, hang on a minute, and he's been a fractal cat.

This guy is a genius.

So I just want, when you imagine, when you think of the images of alien life forms, both kind and cruel, that you grew up on, which are the one where you think this is the one that I would like to imagine the possibility of its existence?

I was pretty hot on the green girl in the early Star Trek program, the one that Shatner dated.

I thought, if aliens are going to do a sexy dance and wear a little tunic and be green, it's on.

Let's go where no one has gone.

Specifically, specifically green.

If you want to go to a cold, inhospitable world where there's only protoplasmic microbes and no suggestion of intelligence or sensitivity, you can come to a meeting with me in Hollywood any day you like

and meet a room full of people who are so hateful that no life can exist around them

and no idea can escape their vacuum of inactivity and stasis.

If you come up with something creative in a meeting in LA, it is immediately covered with a permafrost that sends it back in to the center of the earth so that the same thing can be done over and over again.

I have an idea for a zombie program about vampires.

That meeting on Wednesday went terribly, didn't it?

Paul, there were two people who applauded the sexy green dancer from Star Trek.

Now, let's see if you can up the ante in terms of your growing up, your childhood, the images of extraterrestrial life.

I'm big on Ewoks.

I love me an Ewok.

What, in the same way that he likes.

Oh, that's got more.

The Ewoks him up.

That's good.

In the same way he likes the green girl.

Hey, I don't judge you.

This is San Francisco's.

You're going to have an alien.

Ewoks, they look like they could go in the cat box.

That looks like a manageable alien life form that I could have around the house and leave some food out.

Well, Seth, Ewoks are in the lead.

And though, of course, you are head of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and a man with a great grasp of some of the magnificent questions of science.

Let's first of all find an Ewok

Green Lady.

Can you top that?

Yeah, I think these guys are on the wrong track altogether.

I think it's the fallacy of your presumption, but go on.

You just confirm what I said there, Greg.

They're all expecting some sort of protoplasmic, soft, squishy aliens out there, because that's all they've seen in the movies and on television.

But think about it, right?

We're soft and squishy.

Most of the members of the audience are, right?

But we're busy developing artificial intelligence, which will probably make its appearance within 50 miles of where we're sitting here, down in the Silicon Valley, Valley, by 2050.

As soon as you have that, you change everything.

Darwin, that's kind of old school, because now you have thinking machines.

Well, the aliens have already done that.

So if you really want to talk about what Captain Kirk would find out there, yep, forget the protoplasm.

It's going to be a machine.

You've got me convinced.

That actually

didn't take long.

To pick up on that point, so one of the arguments against the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations is that we don't see such machines, they're they're called von Neumann probes.

The idea that if you get a sufficiently complex civilization that can build self-replicating intelligent machines, then you would expect them to send them out.

You expect us to do it, as you said.

Within the next thousand years, at most, you'd expect us to have that technology.

If we survived that long, we'd send our probes out into the galaxy.

You can colonize the galaxy or cover it very quickly.

So, do you find that to be a problem?

It's a problem called the Fermi paradox.

I don't see any

sense in what you're doing.

I think the Fermi paradox ruins my cocktail party experience more often than any other story.

A whole audience nodding in agreement there.

This is San Francisco.

These people know what the Fermi paradox is.

And in fact, yeah, many of them have dined there.

The Fermi paradox, in fact.

Yes, that could be a problem.

You know what?

That's a big extrapolation, Brian, from a very local observation, right?

You look

out the door here, you don't see any brown bears wandering around the Palace of Fine Arts.

They shot them all.

But they didn't shoot them all.

The facts are there's been plenty of time in the history of North America for those brown bears to get to the Palace of Fine Arts, and they're not there.

So what are you going to conclude?

There are no brown bears in North America.

Well, they don't put on shows that attract brown bears.

Maybe some from Berkeley.

So the Fermi paradox, the idea there's a lot of stars, a lot of planets, and crucially, there's been a lot of time for civilizations to arise.

You don't think that our non-observation of civilizations is meaningful, particularly?

No, no, no, no, I don't.

This is sometimes called the great silence.

At least it's great, right?

The fact that we haven't picked up any signal means nothing.

I think it means nothing.

We've looked at a few thousand star systems.

Something like 70% of all stars have planets.

60, 70, 80%.

It's in there.

And for an astronomer, 70% is as good as all, right?

For an astronomer, pi is equal to 1.

Don't have astronomers fill out your 1040 forms here.

Don't get it right within a factor two.

That's good enough.

Okay.

So all.

I'm just going to go golfing with you because evidently...

I got it in.

Well, close enough.

I'm on the 17th pole.

Greens, fairways.

It's under par within a factor two.

Okay.

So

and recent results from the Kepler spacecraft indicate that like one in five, maybe it's one in ten, what's the depth?

Of all stars have a planet that's somewhat like the Earth.

That is, is, it might have liquid oceans, might have an atmosphere of zero.

So it's about 20 billion, isn't it?

Or so many.

It could be 100 billion.

It could easily be 100 billion.

Within a fracture of five billion.

And you think we're the smartest things.

Exactly.

And you think we're the smartest things in the universe, or at least in this galaxy.

Brian, you believe in miracles.

And I've got to admire you for that.

Whoa, that sounded like a diss.

What is the fraction now?

Wait, wait, wait.

After you work out the Drake equation, what's the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy right now?

You know, if I knew that, I wouldn't be here.

I'd be in Stockholm collecting a prize.

No, but I mean, you know, you guys must be up on the.

I think, but that depends on other.

Now, you see, you got the guests arguing we want to know.

That's okay, this is common.

Oh, okay.

It always happens when Carrigan is.

I'm just telling you how much real estate is out there.

There's a lot of real estate.

But whether it is, in fact, inhabited, or inhabited by the kind of microbes you're looking for, or inhabited by something that's as clever as the average resident of Nilpitas or something, the facts are

that that we don't know because that depends on things like if I give you a million worlds with bacteria, like might be Enceladus, and you just let them sit there, how many of them are ever going to get clever enough to come to a show like this?

So this is basically you're making a mathematical argument.

A statistical probability probability argument.

Hand waving probability.

So the Drake equation, it was a framework to try and come up with a number for the number of intelligent civilizations that might be.

By the way, intelligence was defined, I think, by the radio astronomers there as a civilization intelligent enough to build a radio telescope.

That's the definition of.

But there's a good reason for that.

But that's wrong.

The correct definition is: are you clever enough to build a radio transmitter?

Because then we could hear them.

We don't care if they're doing radio astronomy, there's no money for it anyhow.

But if they're smart enough to

build a transmitter, then we might hear from them.

You're just starting to sound bitter.

Which is a good thing that brings us on, actually.

So I'll ask you, Greg, before I ask Carolyn.

Really, Mr.

Vitter, we get in the end.

Before I ask Carolyn about the, so there's a, Carolyn will describe in a moment the idea that we should

broadcast out,

we should send signals out into the universe in order that any aliens that are there with the radio telescopes will pick us up and then could in principle contact us, speak to us.

Would that be a good idea?

I think we're doing it all the time, aren't we?

Not powerfully enough.

Oh, not powerfully enough.

Well, I think my podcast is an awesome thing to send out because it's both funny and illuminating.

And I think it would give people a good idea that everyone on Earth is a lefty, homosexual, loving

Californian from the abortion, baby killing, swirling vertex of liberal thought that we come from here.

And

that's what I want everyone to think everyone on earth's like.

Let me put it this way.

If we're going to send messages out into space, please don't let Dick Cheney be the one to send them out into space.

Because

people who celebrate torture during Christmas time, that's not a good message for the universe.

universe.

Well, you know, do you know the golden record, which at the beginning of this show, when you were walking in, we were showing images, and there's a great thing, there was

hello in many different languages, there's greetings, the sounds of our own planet, images of our own planet, the music of Chuck Berry.

There is also, unfortunately, the greeting was from the UN General Secretary of the time,

who was Kurt Voldheim, who shortly afterwards was found out to be a reasonably ardent Nazi.

So it was one of those kind of errors that when you are welcoming extraterrestrial life, don't always get an ardent Nazi to do that I like how he was reasonably ardent as opposed to wildly enthusiastic do you know what I was actually doing that bit we're going I better be careful because if I say ardent he says I was only reasonably ardent there may well be litigation so

he was one of those kind of pretty ardent Nazis

but so so Carolyn you you you

have a project to repeat what was called the the Arecibo message.

So first of all could you describe what the Arecibo message was?

Well the Arecibo message was done in 1974 by Frank Drake and it was the first attempt to send something, a coherent message out to space and but it really wasn't that wasn't the purpose of it.

If you speak to Frank he'll tell you it was really just to demonstrate the power of the Arecibo telescope.

The Arecibo telescope for those of you who don't know is this big bowl thousand feet across radio telescope sitting in basically a karst or a crater or something in Puerto Rico.

But it was a crafted message.

You know, I forget forget how big it was.

It was pretty small.

And then of course came the Pioneer plaque, the plaque that Drake and Sagan and others put on the Pioneer spacecraft that toured the outer solar system and then left.

And then of course the Voyager stuff, the record and all its contents done by Sagan and others.

And so I just thought it would be great to do the Arecibo.

Those aren't going to be picked up for a long time, okay?

But, you know, I thought it would be great to do the Arecibo message again, because to me, this is like

it's more really for the inhabitants of Earth, right?

You know, just to give them a sense of their cosmic place and that, you know, to celebrate our coming of age as galactic citizens.

And if you actually spend any time trying to imagine how to communicate with aliens, it is a wonderful intellectual exercise to get to the point where you're thinking, what do we have in common?

You know, what is different?

What do we have to, what can't we assume they know, and what can we assume they know?

That's what comics do every night.

All right, maybe you should be on my advisory board.

I'm free.

I was just gonna, I don't know whether Paul or Seth, it's interesting.

When you bring up the Pioneer plaque and we think of also the Golden Record on Voyager, the Pioneer plaque had a naked man and a woman on it.

And as far as I know, Carl Sagan continued to receive hate mail for the rest of his life because we'd sent up this image of nudity.

And I think there was also an image of a naked man and a naked woman.

The woman's pregnant,

and that was meant to be on the golden record, and was then removed.

Well, I don't think she was pregnant, but I think one of the things that was...

Oh, she is.

Oh, God, that's how embarrassing when that happened, isn't it?

I don't know that.

God.

Because

in the book Murmurs of Earth, they show the silhouette, which did go on the record, and they show the real picture.

And you can tell the woman's pregnant record.

And look, the offensive thing about the Pioneer plaque was that the guy has his hand up.

The woman is looking at him.

It's a very deferential position.

He's holding his hand up like this.

and I am told by a reliable source at the University of Washington that that upraised hand is the universal symbol of war okay that wasn't that a bizarre thing where you had to have humans with the imagination to send something into space with the hope that it's going to be found by extraterrestrials go no nudie pictures or they're going to think it's an invitation to planet sex I mean that's an incredible kind of

isn't it isn't that part of the battle that we have in the why you know you know what the US is like now could you imagine what it was like in the 1970s I mean Paul I just want to, before we talk about the content of these messages,

is it a good idea?

I mean, because Stephen Hawking, amongst other people, has criticized this idea.

He said, well, you know, we don't know what these civilizations may be like.

Our record of going out and colonizing other places and meeting other cultures has been poor as an intelligent civilization on Earth.

There's been a lot of discussion about this.

This is a very, very controversial subject.

And it's controversial because in the past, nobody hesitated.

We broadcast, well, the Arecibo message 1974.

There's a guy in Russia who's used an antenna in the Crimea, he's brought, or the Ukraine, and he's broadcast the teenage message into space.

Nobody's worried about it.

In 2008, NASA broadcasts a Beatles song

to the North Star, to Polaris, right?

Everybody's okay with that.

Maybe they like it.

Just a year or two ago, Arecibo broadcast a bunch of tweets.

And there was the Ritos ad that went into space, okay?

So nobody was worried, except now they are.

I think we should send Miss Universe.

Yeah, but Miss Universe might be at the other end.

She's already been elected.

I get you.

And probably wants world peace.

Is that a bad message?

And who doesn't love a good baton twirling?

What do you think they should send out, Sam?

Me?

I think we shouldn't send any more greeting cards into space.

That's what we've been doing.

Very short messages.

The Arecibo message was 1,679 bits, I think, the product of two prime numbers.

It was all very clever.

But it was like a little greeting card.

You know, here's something about our DNA, and here's how big we are, and this is what we look like, and here's what the Arecibo antenna looks like, and here's our solar system.

Here's a map of where we are in case you want to incinerate the planet.

I mean, it was all there.

But it was very, very, very compact.

And I think that sending short messages into space is not really the best idea.

Because the nearest you know, aliens could be hundreds of light years away.

So they get this thing, and you know, they miss the first 90% of it, and then they send back a message.

It took 200 years to get there, 200 years for the response to come back, and then you hear, could you please repeat that?

That to me is kind of silly.

The best thing to do is send a light.

It's a lot like my Verizon stuff.

I was going to say.

It's an influx of rights.

Send a large corpus of information.

Send the internet.

That's my proposal.

Send the internet.

Because, look, you know, you're interested in something like

automobiles.

You find a picture of it.

You find text.

You find videos.

You find this, this, this.

You correlate everything in the thing.

You find so much about it that after a while you understand it.

It's like the hieroglyphics.

If you have enough material, you'll figure it out.

This is the interesting thing.

This planet is getting a lot of porn.

This is the cut.

This is the contact model you're talking about.

I was going to say, you know, we started with the Voyager message.

I just wanted to flick this.

this up.

These are the images that were on the Voyager Golden Record.

The one that fascinates me is the one on the top middle there.

There's a man eating a pizza, someone with an ice cream, and someone drinking wine from a carafe, as far as I can see.

What message is that supposed to deliver?

It's on like Donkey Kong is what that message is.

Throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't care is the message that does.

We're going to get contacted by a race of fat drunkard aliens

i would just like to imagine what they would be sending us hopefully not a 78 or whatever that we sent them

well that's part of the problem isn't it the technology's moved on so much that we're archaic already within 40 we're going to send them an eight track and then they have to wait a year while it changes tracks for the next message

we'd like to tell you that we're

bunk peaceful

you know when stephen hawking did suggest and others have suggested as well this this kind of the fear of sending out messages that should we be hiding from the as you mentioned also that great story about they're all me.

Should we be hiding from the universe, hiding from the, you know,

has anyone here got that level of paranoia?

Yeah, I don't think we should.

There are a lot of people who have that level of paranoia.

Look,

Carolyn's already pointed out that the signals that have been leaking off this planet since the Second World War, now you're talking FM radio, you're talking radar, you're talking television, those have all been leaking into space, okay?

They're never going to come, are they?

FM radio, if that's what hey, no, no, no, no, it's Friday, it's five o'clock it's we're not going there that's fine that's fine

back to back

but those are weak and a deliberate transmission would not be weak if you use the Arecibo telescope we could find that with our equipment from three or four hundred light years away you could do that but but but it's easy to see that this this doesn't make any sense to say that there's danger in doing something like what Carolyn's talking about because You can easily show that any society that's advanced enough to come here and ruin your whole whole day by destroying Earth, right, any society that's that far advanced over us has the equipment to pick up the signals we've been sending since the war.

So that horse has left the barn.

But then why would we then want to deliberately transmit?

I think that's a good question, but I think that the benefit to begin with is just step up to the plate and try it, because I think you will learn something about their problem at the other end, and that might help you in your SETI experiments.

Now Now you've tried both sides now, you know?

You mean just the intellectual activity of doing it?

And the technical challenge of doing it.

When I spoke to Frank Drake about a year ago now, and I asked him about when

with the Greenback meeting in the 60s, when the SETI, the proposal to listen actively for signals was first proposed.

And I asked him, by the 21st century, did you expect to have heard something?

And he said, yes.

I would have expected.

Yeah, I think within 25 years, that's very likely, because

the SETI experiments are not, you know, people think you go into work, you put on a pair of earphones, have a cup of coffee, and just wait for something.

I mean, that would be really tedious, right?

They say you have computers.

But what the public generally does not know is that the speed of the search, because of improvements in technology, is increasing following something called Moore's Law.

That's a local celebrated law here.

And that means that the speed of the search more or less doubles every 18 months.

So that means in the next 20 years, you can look at a few million star systems.

And personally I think that's the right number to succeed.

So you would put your money on the fact that if we do that search properly and systematically now with our technology, we'll hear something

within the next 20 years.

Within the lifetime of this audience, yes, yes.

Because if you don't hear something by 2050, say, or 2040, either that means that we really are the smartest things in the universe, something everybody likes to believe because their parents have been telling them that since they were kids, or we're doing the wrong experiment, which is also possible.

But that doesn't really give you any answers, though, because it could be the dark age of the middle ages for whatever civilization.

Those are not the guys you hear from.

I mean, there could be a lot of Neanderthals out of there.

There are undoubtedly a lot of microbes.

Carolyn's looking for microbes, right?

And all the big money is looking for microbes.

They don't even like bugs.

Right.

Well, it's because there are a lot more dumb critters than there are smart ones.

Prove that to yourself by walking around your neighborhood, right?

How many telescopes?

Are you talking about like the Allen array and pressing that into service?

How many telescopes will you you need to do something that you think will

produce

hearing a message by 2050?

Well, now you're talking the technical aspects and how much sensitivity do you want?

The more antenna area, collecting air you have, the better.

Well, yeah, but I'm sure.

So the Allen array is in Northern California, which is a lot of money.

The Allen array is 300 miles north of where we're sitting.

But Paul, what would be the implications of that?

I mean, let's imagine that we do detect a signal.

What does that mean to us as a civilization if we find out that we're definitively not alone?

Well, I'm sure we'll turn it into a war on something.

And somebody will profit from it and it'll become the next big threat or whatever.

I'm sure.

I mean, you know, I don't trust humankind to find aliens.

You don't think it'll have the opposite effect that, you know, whenever

factious groups are presented with an enemy, they bond together, you know, like ISIS and Al-Qaeda now or whatever, or maybe they're enemies, I don't know.

But, you know, that kind of thing, that phenomenon happens.

I've never seen anything like that happen in reality.

It's usually, you know, it's usually it's us and them.

It's always us and them.

So yeah, maybe it'll

band together some of humanity.

Say yay for the humans.

But

the thing is, though,

isn't it possible that there is something between microbial life and life that can build radio transmitters?

Yeah, but we're not going to hear from them.

I understand that, but just that's why your mathematical analysis, which I believe is what Stephen Hawking was basing his projections on, was just the sheer number of possibilities, just the magnitude of the universe beyond our galaxy.

So the counter-argument is you can look at the history of life on Earth, which is the only evidence we have, the only history we have of the evolution of life.

So it began 4 billion years ago, 3.8 billion, as soon as it could pretty much.

But you don't get complex life until the Cambrian explosion, which is 530 million years ago.

So over three billion years went by with nothing particularly complex.

There's some things, photosynthesis, but nothing you would call a complex organism for over three billion years.

So if you take that as an example, then the challenge from the biologists would be that yes, microbes may be everywhere, but you need a planet that's stable perhaps for billion-year time scales in order to get civilization.

Well, that's the most controversial aspect of the whole CETI enterprise, is indeed that.

The question boils down to this.

I give you a million worlds with bacteria, and you just let them cook for four or six billion years.

How many of them will ever produce that intelligent species?

And

nobody knows.

Obviously, it happened here.

If it didn't, we wouldn't be sitting here.

But on the other hand, Stephen Jay Gould, a rather famous evolutionary biologist, he said, rewind the tapes of Earth, play them again with slightly different thunderstorms or whatever, and you wouldn't be sitting here.

65 million years ago, rock slams into the Yucatan, wipes out the dinos and two-thirds of all other land-dwelling species.

If that rock had arrived, you know, 10 hours earlier, again, you wouldn't be here.

There'd be dinosaurs in San Francisco.

Oh, those giants clients.

And now over to Greg Kruppson, hey, Ashbury.

Well, the whole audience would have tails, and the chairs would have, you know,

divots in them for your tail to drape over the back.

Well, is there a possibility?

I mean, I wonder,

could it be this very melancholy vision where, in fact, the idea of civilizations existing at the same time in the universe means that every time they get a signal, you turn up and you go, oh, they died out millions of years ago.

And you end up with this constant melancholy trail to find out that the coincidence of two civilizations both with that endeavor at the same time.

So does it become a Beckett play?

That's the other big thing.

I mean, it's been likened to, you know, SETI, sort of like shooting a bullet in this direction and trying to hit a bullet being shot in the other direction.

Very unlikely.

But you will overlap if intelligence has a long run.

The average life of species on Earth is about a million years, right?

But some have beaten that rap.

I mean, sharks, you know, they've been around a lot longer.

But the earlier point, that you evolve away from the biology to the machinery, and then I think that the upper bound on how long you're around becomes very fuzzy.

So if we are at any point visited by aliens, there'll likely be some sort of cyborgian kind of thing.

Yeah.

Can I just ask you one thing?

One of the most interesting, the only potential signal we've ever detected, this controversial thing called the WOW signal, which was detected by the.

Where was that?

Was that the Ohio State?

The United States in 1977.

Could you just describe that a little bit and tell me what you think of it?

Because it's often spoken about as a

never repeated.

Well, indeed, it was our Arecibo message, you could say.

Yeah, it could very well have been.

I mean, look, Ohio State wasn't doing much radio astronomy in those days.

So they just set it up to sit there and let the sky rotate overhead and then they would record this stuff, right?

And they had two receivers on it.

So they would look at each patch of sky sequentially.

You'd look at it and then it would be looked at again 70 seconds, a little over a minute later.

And one morning, Jerry Amon in 1977, as Carolyn says, Jerry Amon, one of the astronomers, he walks in, he looks through the computer printout, because in those days it was computer printed out.

And he sees this signal that's perfectly in a tune with what you would expect from a constant source up in the sky.

And he's so impressed he writes WOW next to it.

This is the triumph of marketing over product because in fact in those days there were hundreds of such signals, but nobody thought to write something clever next to them.

So it isn't the only one.

But it wasn't seen 70 seconds later and there are people, there's a guy in Chicago who has spent years looking for the wow signal with better equipment, more sensitive equipment over a wider range of frequencies, never seen it again.

So what do you say?

It could have been exactly that.

It could have been them just saying, hey, we're just going to send you one ping, and if you don't respond too bad, you you lose out, you don't get to join our book club.

But, in fact, it could also be that, in fact, it was interference, and you won't know.

It's not science to say it was ET.

What do they think it was, or what did it come out as?

Some of the direct anomaly that wasn't just static?

If you talk to the astronomers at Ohio State, they usually say probably terrestrial interference.

What did they think it was?

A direct communication?

Well, terrestrial interference is usually direct communication.

Not in my experience, but

I go to different clubs than you.

Karen,

we're running out of time.

There was something that we talked about before this, which we did want to talk about, which is we talk a lot about looking out into

beyond, you know, further out into the universe.

But one of the most important images, and an image that you've recently had in your show, it's a pale blue dot, where we look back in on ourselves.

If those of you who have ever read Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, or indeed heard the talking book,

it's a beautiful image where we see.

Well, in fact, you can explain it.

What is the pale blue dot?

Well, okay, so I'll give you a little backdrop to this and maybe Brian will pull up some pictures.

When I was a youngster I had the privilege of being on the Voyager project and in that time I came to know Carl and

I actually was one of the people who worked with him in planning and executing the original pale blue dot picture of Earth taken from the Voyager spacecraft.

This was in February 1990 from beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Voyager had one, had done its thing, it had visited Jupiter, Saturn, and it was going to continue on.

And so the project managers at JPL allowed us to take the spacecraft and actually do this

observation.

They actually had to be convinced of its worth.

They didn't really want to spend the time or the effort to do it.

And it's not well known, but in a proposal that Carl wrote to the Voyager Project, the idea was to take a picture of the Earth, and I quote, a wash in a sea of stars.

Well, as you can see, the pale blue dot picture, and it's here, is not exactly that.

It shows the Earth, there's no stars in the picture.

And it shows the Earth sitting on top of a beam of light that was scattered in the optics of the camera.

But of course, none of that really mattered because it was what Carl had to say about this image.

And the way that he romanced it and turned it into an allegory on the human condition that has ever since made the phrase pale blue dot synonymous with an inspirational call to planetary brotherhood and protection of the planet and so on.

Well, ever since I became the leader of the imaging team on the Cassini mission, I have had it in my mind to do this picture over again, only make it better, and try to make it the kind of picture that Carl and those of us involved had originally had in mind.

And it occurred to me in planning it that,

and that was a bit of a thing because I had to find an opportunity where I could wedge into the very

abundant plans of all the Cassini scientists, the science plans, wedge in a picture that wasn't really for science.

And anyway, I found an opportunity.

that occurred July 2013, so a couple of years ago.

But it occurred to me as I was planning it, wouldn't it be great instead of taking a picture and then two weeks later telling the people of the world, hey world, here's, we took your picture two weeks ago, why don't we tell the people of the world ahead of time in two weeks' time or a month's time, your picture is going to be taken from a billion miles away from the orbit of Saturn.

And at the time the picture's taken,

why don't you, we should invite them, I'm thinking, we should invite them to

go out and appreciate at that moment the picture is taken, appreciate,

think about the Earth, you know, think about the uniqueness of the Earth, its life-sustaining beauty, and

dwell on and appreciate the magnificence of their own existence and of all of life on Earth.

And so that's what we did.

We sent out the message.

This was, you know, big NASA thing.

We sent out the message to people, you know, July 19th, 2013, on such and such a time.

Doesn't matter what side of of the earth you're on.

Go out as this picture is taken and think about the magnificent achievement that this interplanetary salute between robot and maker represents and smile.

And so that's what happened.

We took this picture.

And if do I have time to read just two messages that I got from people?

I love that it's like it's like a selfie of the whole world.

It's a kind of beautiful.

Do you want me to drum to show the picture?

Not yet.

I'll just say.

Jim Kardashian's not in this, is she?

I'm afraid she is.

We all are.

We're all in this picture.

Do you know where I was, actually?

I remember it because I was on the top of a library in Salt Lake City.

Can you imagine?

Well, you were in the middle of the day.

Jump in his underpants, screaming, burn the books, burn the books.

Whoa, those Mormons gave you a party.

Anyway,

we set up a website and people.

I can't even see, but is there anybody in the audience who participated in this?

Could you raise your hands?

One, two?

Okay, well, we didn't do a very good job advertising it that way.

We'll do this now for radio.

That's amazing to see 900 people in San Francisco.

What a beautiful image that is.

Carolyn, it's almost unanimous.

This is not the Google Earth thing.

It wasn't that one.

No, no, this was getting your picture taken from the Cassini spacecraft.

Anyway, Sam, this guy Sam writes, Phoebe, age 10, and I got the telescope out on the patio.

Under a beautiful clear southern British sky, we gazed upon Saturn, reveling in the fact that a spacecraft was looking back on us.

She asked lots of questions about Saturn, and at the appointed time, I raised a glass of fine red wine, she a glass of fizzy pop.

We said cheers to Saturn, to Cassini, to each other, and then we smiled and waved and cheered and took photos of ourselves, both beaming.

It was perfect.

And let's see.

Joe

Tess, Tess writes, at the appropriate time I left the table at a restaurant where I was eating and went to the parking lot.

I turned my face to the sky and spent a few minutes watching and listening to what life on earth was like right there, right at that moment.

What a feeling of connection and oneness with the miracle that is is life on earth.

This experience was beyond meaningful.

It was transcendent.

What a beautiful thing.

Thank you.

And then this is my favorite, Jolen.

I have been entranced by this project ever since I heard about it and was determined to join in the celebration.

However, I never anticipated how emotional I would feel.

I stood on the edge of Lake Ontario in upstate New York with my son and his girlfriend.

I forgot to bring my cell phone with its app that shows the location of Saturn so in the end we just spun in circles waving at the sky.

I mean can you imagine these three crazy people just...

Anyway the thought that a camera was taking pictures from so very far away was just incredible.

We may not be unique, we may be transient, we may be only flying along in a dust moat, but darn it, for 15 minutes we were there, we were aware, and we smiled.

And so it was a great success.

and here is the picture.

You've all seen it already by now.

I call it the day the earth smiled and it is a picture taken when

people on the earth all over were thinking about our cosmic existence and about how rare life is in our solar system and how beautiful our planet is.

And this is a ring.

We brightened it up.

The outer ring is the E ring that is in fact the result of the spray that comes from Enceladus.

Enceladus is that bright dot in the left in the middle of the ring.

That's it.

The one over here, Brian, is Tethys.

That's just a moon of Saturn.

The rings are illuminated.

The sun is behind Saturn, so the rings are kind of in silhouette.

And then the next picture focuses on a dot in the lower right, and it shows the Earth and the moon

seen from the outer solar system for the first time.

Karen, can I just ask, just because there are people who are listening who I think would like to look at that at the same time, what's the best website to see that image on?

Okay, cyclops.org, deliberately misspelled as C-I-C-L-O-P-S, and search on Day the Earth Smiled, and you'll get to it.

Hey,

I see you.

Let's go to the next one.

That's where I parked.

Just add one thing.

I just want to say that, you know, we,

in our exploration of the planets, have learned so, so much.

That was the point of it.

To learn about our cosmic neighborhood and to gain insights into how planetary processes work so that we could be better custodians of our own.

Okay, and yet I think that in the end the biggest gift that they give us is this perspective of ourselves, of where we are, how we really are.

And I think that will be Cassini's enduring legacy and the legacy of all our interplanetary missions over the last 50 years.

So, anyway, so that I think that our pride in this legacy is the greatest gift that our interplanetary missions have given us.

And I was going to ask Seth, just when you look at that,

for me, the most powerful thing about SETI, it's powerful whether we find anyone or not, because the longer that silence persists, the more valuable that spot surely looks.

It almost is remarkable either way.

The answer, I think Arthur C.

Clark used to say there are only two possibilities, either we're alone or we're not, and both terrify me.

Yes.

You know, if they had used a different kind of camera, a camera sensitive to radio waves, that would be the brightest thing around that dot.

We will end there.

Thank you very much for coming.

This is the first time we've been in San Francisco.

We've had an incredible panel.

Let's say all for Greg Bruce, Carolyn Porco,

Paul Provenza, Zeth Shustack.

Thank you.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now nice again.

This is Bethany Frankel from Just Be with Bethany Frankl.

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