Translator: Tijana Mihajlović Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good morning.
Are we alone?
Do we live in a Universe
that is populated with many, many intelligent species,
or are we, as human beings, just the only intelligent life
anywhere in the Universe?
The last couple of centuries have been a triumph of modern astronomy.
We can now trace back the history of the Universe
to just seconds after the Big Bang,
when our Universe began.
We can watch the Cosmic Microwave Background
and map out the structure of the very early Universe.
We can track the very first stars
that formed in the first few hundreds of millions of years
after the Universe was born.
We can track the formation of galaxies.
We understand nearly everything that there is to know
about the way that the Universe was born
and the way that the Universe continues to evolve,
except for one very glaring exception: life.
We know that in the very first few hundreds of millions of years
after the Earth formed,
life arose on our planet.
We know that from fossils like these, stromatolites,
that were formed by the very first organisms
that existed on our planet, cyanobacteria.
So very quickly, as soon as the Earth cooled off, after its formation,
we know that life began here.
And even more amazing than the fact
that a self-replicating organism somehow came forth,
amidst the laws of thermodynamics that govern our Universe,
that life evolved fantastic complexity,
and, in fact, eventually evolved intelligence.
Amazingly enough, we now know
that nearly every single star in our galaxy hosts a planet.
And something like one in five of those stars
hosts a planet something like the Earth,
at just the right distance from the star to have liquid water exist on the surface.
But on any of those planets did life arise?
Did something similar to what happened on our own planet
happened on those other planets?
We know that the galaxy is awash in water,
it's awash in organic molecules, and complex chemistry.
All of the things that we know
were necessary for life to begin on this planet
exist in abundance throughout the galaxy.
But did life ever arise on any of those planets?
And even more pressing of a question:
did that life - if it did arise -
did it ever go on to develop intelligence?
Is intelligence a common outcome of life?
Is intelligence a driven process?
Does life proceed towards intelligence
for some reason that we don't yet understand,
or is intelligence simply some evolutionary fluke
that only happened on one single planet that maybe did develop life?
And again, even more interesting,
if intelligence does arise commonly, how far can technology progress?
How advanced could very advance life become?
The Universe is nearly 14 billion years old,
and our Galaxy is something like 12 billion years old.
So there could be life out there if it evolved intelligence
that could be dramatically more advanced
than the life that we have here on this planet.
Now, we don't have any way of directly detecting intelligent life,
so we use technology or can use technology as a proxy for intelligence.
Here, on this planet, we have been producing technology
that has been emitting signals
that would be detectable at very, very large distances,
well out into the Galaxy for hundreds of years.
These are things like high-power TV and radio transmitters
that we use for communication systems here on Earth,
radars that we use to map other planets in our Solar System,
or asteroids that we have in our own Solar System,
and also laser technology.
We don't do this yet here on our planet,
but it's an amazing fact
that if you take our most powerful lasers and our largest mirrors,
and you pair them together,
for the fraction of a second
that our most powerful lasers can produce light,
they can outshine the Sun
by factors of a thousand and more than a thousand light years away.
We have just announced a brand new program
that we think is going to be humanity's best chance ever
to answer this question.
It's called "Breakthrough listen".
It's humanity's boldest attempt ever
to determine whether or not we are alone as intelligent beings.
It's a 100-million-dollar ten-year project that will use three telescopes
to conduct the most comprehensive, sensitive, and intensive search
for extraterrestrial intelligence in history.
We're going to use optical telescopes,
one called The Automated Planet Finder,
that is just about an hour away from here, near San Jose at Lick Observatory,
and two of the world's largest radio telescopes,
the Parkes Telescope in Australia, near Sidney,
and the Green Bank Telescope
in West Virginia, here in the United States.
The Green Bank Telescope
is one of the world's largest movable structures,
and it is, in fact, the largest fully steerable antenna
that we have here, on this planet.
With the telescope like the Green Bank Telescope,
we could detect a human-like technology nearly to the center of the Galaxy.
We're going to search a variety of different types of objects.
We're going to conduct a survey of a million stars,
about a thousand light years or so off the Earth.
We're going to conduct a comprehensive survey
of the entire plane of our Milky Way Galaxy,
and we're going to search a hundred nearby galaxies
to see if that very, very advanced life
might have developed the necessary technology
to transmit at truly extraordinary distances between galaxies.
Let's take a look at how that's going to work.
Here's an animation of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Imagine that somewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy
intelligent life arises and begins to transmit.
If they did so,
their transmissions would proceed at the speed of light out from their star,
for as long as that intelligent life existed.
And that would form a bubble of electromagnetic radiation
that we might be able to detect here on Earth.
But how long do these civilizations live?
They might develop life, intelligent life,
and then some technology, and a radio signal.
But that radio signal will only continue to emit
for as long as the civilization lives.
But these bubbles of electromagnetic radiation
continue out into the Galaxy at the speed of light.
And here, on Earth, we can potentially detect those
with our very large radio telescopes.
Here's the Earth itself transmitting electromagnetic radiation, radio signals,
and here are these bubbles of radiation from signals from other intelligences
that are sweeping across the Earth.
And we can detect those again
with the telescopes like the Green Bank Telescope here.
This is an animation of the signal
that we might expect to see from that civilization.
And also with the Parkes Telescope in Australia.
It's not just us that's going to be doing the data analysis.
With Breakthrough Listen,
there is a very key component of the program
that will make all of the data that we collect
available to the public immediately.
It will, in fact, when complete,
be the largest amount of scientific data
that's ever been made available to public for any experiment whatsoever.
This is one of the ways that you can get involved in that program
with an application developed here at Berkeley called SETI@home.
This is a program that you can download on your computer,
and when you're not using your computer,
when you're getting up to get a cup of coffee,
if you take long enough, your computer will wake up,
it'll download a little bit of the data
that we collected at these giant radio telescopes,
and use your computer
to do the very computationally intensive processing
that's required to detect these very weak signals
that we're looking for.
And your computer will join
with hundreds of thousands of other computers,
and will in fact form the largest supercomputer
on the entire planet Earth,
dedicated solely to hunting for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
And here's a video showing how this process works.
Here we see Berkeley, California, where we all are here.
All of the data that we collect from these telescopes
being sent out to hundreds of thousands of volunteers,
and then results of those computations being sent back to us at Berkeley.
And if one of those little blue dots comes from your computer
and happens to contain evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence,
you too will share in the Nobel Prize that we will surely win.
(Laughter)
But I warn you,
you have to share it with the hundreds of thousands of other volunteers
that participated in the project,
so you might only get a couple nickels.
But surely it would be one of the most remarkable discoveries
in the history of humanity.
So I wanted to take a minute to look back briefly
at one of the still images from the video that I showed you
to point out something very remarkable
about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
and something that we do in this science.
So here we see the bubbles of electromagnetic radiation
coming out from the civilizations
that may exist somewhere in our Milky Way Galaxy.
And these bubbles of electromagnetic radiation,
they have fixed widths;
they're not constant.
And that reflects the lifetime of the civilizations
that might be arising.
And this is something that's captured
in a very famous equation in this field, called the Drake Equation,
named after Frank Drake, one of the pioneers of this field.
I promise that this is the most complicated bit of mathematics
that I'll show you today,
but I think it's worthwhile to take a minute to walk through this.
So this equation here,
N is the number of civilizations that we might be able to detect.
And it's expressed as a product of all of the factors
that might go in to the emergence of intelligent life.
R*, the rate of star formation in our Galaxy.
Fp, the fraction of those stars that have planets.
Ne, the fraction of those that are something like the Earth.
Fl, the fraction of those that actually develop life.
Fi, the fraction of those that actually go on to develop intelligence.
Fc, the factor of those intelligent species
that go on to develop some kind of communication technology
that we might be able to detect.
But perhaps the most interesting factor in this equation is L,
the lifetime of the civilization.
How long can an intelligent, communicative civilization actually exist?
Now, if we look at our own technology and our own human society,
we might ask the question,
well, maybe not very long, maybe only a few hundred years.
Can a truly advanced technology exist for thousands and thousands of years
without destroying themselves?
This is something that we're able to probe directly in our experiments
to search for intelligent life.
We're now just beginning to explore the area around our own planet.
In a hundred years,
surely the area around our planet is going to be populated
with innumerable satellites, communication, technology,
perhaps we'll visit the Moon again,
perhaps we'll have a colony on Mars.
Maybe in a thousand years
we might actually have permanent colonies in space.
We can sort of imagine getting that far with our own current technology.
But where might we be in the far future?
Can we as humans being exist long enough
to actually travel between the stars?
Could our technology progress far enough
that we could actually become an interstellar civilization,
sailing between the stars on giant spacecraft?
This is the ultimate question
of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
We're searching for life beyond the Earth,
but truly what we're searching for is our own future.
We're asking the question:
what is the future of an intelligent civilization?
How long can they last?
This is something that a pioneer in this field, Phillip Morrison
called "the archeology of the future".
Because of the finite speed of light, we're studying civilizations
as they were a thousand, or maybe ten thousand years ago.
Our galaxy is a hundred thousand light years across.
So if we detect a signal from a civilization
that is on the other side of the Galaxy,
we're seeing that civilization as it was a hundred thousand years ago.
But because our Galaxy is so old, many billions of years,
it's likely that that civilization we detect
is much, much more advanced than we are,
and has been around much, much longer.
So although we're looking at that civilization's past,
we may be looking at our own civilization's future.
Thank you.
(Applause)