We are somewhere very special for this week's episode. Check it out. It's the planet Earth!
It's the only known world in the universe with life. Come closer. You can see this.
The rich biosphere you're seeing actually reads the entire planet including a staggering variety of living organisms
Just recently, one of those organisms actually figured out that it's riding a rock hurtling through the vast solar system
did it learn mastery over matter and the forces of nature and built cities and spaceships? and
this thing, it's the tip of an enormous machine built to map the universe beyond and to
search for other technological organisms out there and to send the messages. It's the Arecibo Observatory
And today, we've bought a 180 camera to check out this incredible radio telescope. Let's go.
We're right near the edge of the dish
In a second, Arecibo is gonna fool your entire field of view.
This is literally an entire valley filled with a radio telescope and let me get out of your way so you can see this
That dish is 305 metres in diameter. It's impossible to build a steerable telescope this size
So Arecibo relies on some incredible ingenuity to allow it to point at different locations on the sky
most telescopes radio or optical use parabolic dishes which bring light to a sharp focus
But only light from the direction they are pointing
Our receivers giant dish is spherical which means that it reflects light from every spot on the sky in a symmetric way
the round structure the Gregorian dome contains two reflectors that correct the blurred focus of the spherical dish and transmit the signal into a
sophisticated suite of receivers and that long thing
Well, it's all that Hurricane Maria left of one of the transmitting antennas. Yeah
Transmitting Arecibo is also a space radar that can bounce rate of pulses off planets and asteroids as far as Jupiter
Or send messages to the stars. Let's check out the dish below
We're now directly beneath the dish at the base of that sinkhole above our heads and nearly
40,000 aluminium panels
Perfectly aligned to create that spherical surface as I said it's over 300 meters in diameter
That's a surface area of 26 football fields
And no you can't play football on the dish or skateboard. I asked next. Let's get up on that platform
Okay, this is crazy
We're 450 feet above the dish itself on the catwalk that leads to the platform holding all of the secondary
Antennas the receivers that decode the message from above we're gonna go all the way up there, but you know what?
Well, you guys go first. Make sure you look all around below you. The telescope is everywhere
Well, this is only slightly terrifying we're standing at the top of Arecibo Observatory on a
900 ton structure supported only by
these cables suspended from giant concrete towers, but really anchored into the hills of Puerto Rico behind and
I'm kind of at a loss for words. So why don't you just check out a couple of the views?
This is the catwalk that you just climbed it's 50 years old, but hey, it survived 50 years of hurricanes. I wasn't scared
Look below that's the azimuth arm
It can maneuver on two axes to position the receiver within one millimeter precision of whatever
Astronomical wonder Arecibo is looking at right now
Okay, hold on to something and look straight down that giant sphere is the Gregorian dome
It's like a six storey high building that contains all of the secondary antennas the receivers
In fact Arecibo found the very first planet beyond our solar system and it's been central to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
Over the years actually not just the search it blasted out the Arecibo signal in
1974 and a new signal is currently being planned we spoke to dr
bill Mendes director of the planet habitability laboratory about finding exoplanets talking to aliens and
Arecibo role in all of that. You can follow this link for that conversation
Let me tell you a secret
the Arecibo Observatory was originally conceived as a
Military facility in the 1950s the height of the Cold War the arms race and the space race made it
Strategically important to really understand the ionosphere
It was conceived for war but built for science to me
Arecibo is our most powerful symbol about emergence as a technological civilization
It's our most sensitive ear to the universe and the most powerful voice
If we choose to user it may one day answer the question. Are we alone and
It would change the world to learn whether or not we are the only living rock in all of space-time