What's up, Terrence?
Trace here.
And I've been thinking about aliens.
Not like little green aliens or little Scandinavian
named gray aliens, like in my favorite show, Stargate SG-1--
shoutout-- but rather the prospect of us answering
the question, are we alone with actual scientific certainty.
Here is Seth Shostak, chief astronomer
at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,
in his TED Talk, way, way back in 2012.
Because of the vast amount of habitable real estate
in the cosmos, I figure we're going
to pick up a signal within two dozen years.
And I feel strongly enough about that to make a bet with you.
Either we're going to find ET in the next two dozen years,
or I'll buy you a cup of coffee.
Dude, I totally agree.
Aliens are out there definitely.
The question is, how do we find them?
Do we look at interstellar objects flying
through our solar system?
Do we watch for radio signals up in the sky?
Maybe they're already here, and we have video of them
that the military has been suppressing our whole lives.
One of these things is not like the other.
So I have questions.
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So let's kick into this.
Aliens are so hot right now.
If you look, you're going to see three really
big stories out in the news.
Oumuamua, fast radio bursts, and of course, the US military.
So let me break each one down.
Oumuamua was an interstellar object
that flew through our solar system and made a hard right,
and accelerated away from us, like it
saw us and started running.
But one hypothesis was that it shouldn't accelerate away
from the sun, unless it wasn't an asteroid or a comet,
it was a spacecraft, and aliens were in there,
and they were running away really
fast maybe with a solar sail or some kind of other propulsion
system that we don't understand.
In fact, the most likely explanation
was solved by the Pioneer anomaly.
Pioneers 10 and 11 were launched to Jupiter and Saturn
in the 1970s to help us learn more about the solar system
before we launched the Voyage.
But for some unexplained NASA-files reason,
the Pioneers were flying out there,
and they were slowing down, like something was dragging on them,
and nobody knew why, because that shouldn't happen
unless Einstein was wrong, and space wasn't what
we thought it was.
And there are things that we don't understand out there.
And oh my gosh, what do we do?
This mystery stood for a long time.
Until in 2011, when scientists took
all of this decades of punch card and analog data
and they converted it to something
that modern computers could crunch.
Their calculations found that the Pioneers were emitting
more heat out of one side of the spacecraft than the other,
and that could cause the slowing.
It would slow them down just a little bit,
but over time, it would be significant.
In space, heating does matter because it gives off energy.
What if Oumuamua was being unevenly heated
by the sun due to its weird tumble.
That could cause speed increases.
So could any outgassing, or gas escaping the surface
because of solar heating.
The thing is you might think you know what Oumuamua looks like,
but that's an artist rendering.
The actual picture looks more like this.
So based on this evidence that it was accelerating,
Oumuamua was reclassified from a rockier
asteroid to an icier comet.
And that could have outgassing.
And it could have uneven heating that
would allow it to accelerate.
Ideally, we would be continuing to study this thing,
but we don't have that much more information
because it came and left our solar system so unexpectedly.
So it's not aliens, but it is intriguing.
Another place where we think we may have found aliens
was fast radio bursts.
They're bursts of radio waves coming from deep space.
These little bursts of radio energy last for milliseconds.
And they're so intense that they outshine radio producing
neutron stars called pulsars.
Electromagnetic communications can mean technology
and can mean intelligence, or like, hello!
But they come from all over the sky.
So while at first, some thought that they might be originating
from alien life, now the most popular hypothesis
is that they come from explosions in areas of space
where dense clouds of particles and magnetic fields are common.
So unfortunately for us all, it's not aliens.
It was just exotic star stuff that took some time to explain.
Like me.
And of course, the third big story
is the US military releasing those UFO videos
that we all knew that they had.
And they were hiding them from us.
The whole conspiracy theory shtick.
You get it.
These are super exciting to see, especially
after decades of knowing that the military had
stuff like this.
But the story doesn't hold extraordinary proof.
If you're not familiar, in 2007, the Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program was started.
It no longer exists, by the way.
And it was started because allegedly, a giant flying
Tic Tac was allegedly spotted off the coast of San Diego
with instruments, radar and such.
This was around the time we started
upgrading 1980s aircraft radar into modern systems.
In 2014-2015, when these new videos were captured,
the USS Theodore Roosevelt was getting its new radar.
And that's when these new pilots started to see things
on their instruments.
As more radar was updated on more of the jets,
more of the pilots were spotting these crafts
on their modern radar systems.
And now, one could say that the new radar could detect
the aliens and the old radar couldn't.
But the big problem with people saying
that they've seen a thing is the people saying it.
Not because they are individually not trustworthy,
but because humanity as a group doesn't have the best track
record in here.
Human testimony and memory isn't the best.
We don't like it in the court system.
We don't like it in science.
We don't, actually, like it for much of anything,
except for our own experience.
Unfortunately for the "truth is out there"
crowd, memory not a great measure of truth.
Hard data, on the other hand, awesome.
And unfortunately, we don't actually have any hard data.
We have some really compelling video.
And even in this case, one of the pilots
flew to within 1,000 feet of one of the radar blips
that allegedly was an alien and saw nothing.
Of course, the explanation was the aliens were invisible.
However, why would the aliens be invisible during the day, when
at night, all of these alien sightings
throughout the last 70 years have bright lights in the sky?
Why would you be invisible and also have bright lights?
A common debunking of alien technology
is that the technology seems to keep pace
with human technology.
It's always just out of reach, which is just another reason
why we shouldn't necessarily believe humans seeing things
and instead, should look for hard data.
Because most scientists agree that we're probably not alone
in the universe.
But proving that we have company is a huge challenge.
The average person, or excitable media figure,
might jump and conclude aliens.
But a thoughtful scholar would want
to exhaust literally every other possibility
before getting to aliens.
Like homeboy Carl Sagan said, quote,
"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
The most extraordinary evidence, the best chance
for finding aliens is not via human eyeballs,
unless, maybe, they stood on the White House lawn
and shook the hand of the president or something.
Although with the state of the internet today,
who would even believe that.
Instead, we need peer-reviewed radio and electromagnetic
signals directly attributable to a specific planet
or area in the sky.
We could also get proven artifacts leftover
from ancient civilizations.
And for the latter, think Tabby's Star.
It's a star that has this weird light pattern that we
haven't yet explained.
And some think that maybe if we can't explain it
in any other way, it's a Dyson sphere.
Right now they're modeling all sorts
of different asteroids and dust patterns,
all sorts of different lensing.
They're trying to figure out a different way to explain it.
If all of those ways fail, maybe it's aliens.
Of course, an even better artifact
would be like, if we go to Mars and we find something
that nature couldn't have made, right?
But until we do that, aliens are out there?
The main way we're going to know we're not alone
is electromagnetic transmission, which
is done mainly by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
So I called Dr. Seth Shostak at SETI to talk about it.
Check.
Hello.
Come in, Earth.
I'm Seth Shostak.
I'm senior astronomer here at the SETI Institute
in Mountain View, California.
And the intention of the researchers who work here--
and there about a hundred of them--
is to try and find some evidence that there is life in space
or has been life in space.
Well, how would we know if we detected an alien presence out
there?
Now, it's pretty tough to detect the aliens directly.
I mean, unless they're really big and really close.
If they were about the size of the moon
and they were within a million miles,
you'd see them in the night sky or maybe the daytime sky.
But we're looking for signals.
It turns out that radio signals, there's really
no limit to how far they go.
They just go out into space.
Even with the kind of technology we have today,
you could pick up radio signals halfway
across the universe if they were strong enough.
So that was worked out a long time ago,
60 years ago, that it might be possible for societies
to communicate with one another via radio and more recently,
using lasers and stuff like that.
So there are lots of ways you could
detect those intelligent aliens, the kind you really
want to meet.
Let's say kind of hypothetically that we
get a signal that we're like, oh, this
could be something important.
What kind of happens next?
What's the procedure?
A lot of people think that if we picked up a signal,
it would be kept secret from them, because people just
love the idea of secrecy, particularly
when it comes to aliens.
I think we know what would be next
if we were to pick up a signal.
Everybody in the world has a telescope--
and probably a lot of people who don't have telescopes--
would be looking up in the sky at that direction.
And the astronomers would be trying to figure out, OK,
how far away is this?
And are there any planets in that direction?
And of course, the SETI scientists
would suddenly have money.
Money is the big problem for SETI.
And they would build a much bigger instrument that might
allow you to get the message.
I mean, even if it's not intended for us.
Maybe it's only a navigation beacon.
Who knows what it is?
But there's some information on this signal.
Maybe they've made it easy for you to figure out.
And then suddenly, you're going to get information
from a very advanced society.
And people around the world with the right kind of equipment
can pick up the signal, and you've got a big story.
So that's what would happen immediately.
It would be a big news story.
After that, well, who knows?
I mean, people would build specialized equipment,
try and see if they could understand anything.
That sort of thing.
And the possibilities then at that point
become long-term and semi-endless, I would say.
What I keep coming back to is, let's say,
we found a cool signal.
We are pretty sure it's aliens and/or
some kind of intelligent life of some kind that's
transmitting something.
The state of the internet today, I
feel like they would just dismiss that and say
that's all fake.
That's all a fake thing.
How do we know beyond a shadow of a doubt?
Yeah, right.
How do you avoid fake news in this biz?
And the answer is you don't believe any single detection,
of course.
I mean, that's true in science in general.
You might not believe it until several people reported it.
And then you say, OK, these people
don't seem to be in cahoots with one another.
And we would ask people in different countries
with different kinds of equipment, can you pick it up?
Now, how would we know that it's really ET?
A signal coming from somebody's planet around another star
is going to move slowly across the sky at the speed
at which the stars do.
But at anytime you look up there,
they've got to be in that direction.
And then an hour later, they're in that direction.
Then an hour later, they're in that direction.
And that kind of test will tell you
very quickly this signal is moving
with the stars across the sky.
Yeah.
And it's coming from that spot or that region, or whatever.
It's coming-- and it's coming from that spot.
In the end, radio is the answer.
It's pretty amazing.
I mean, we've got already Planet Money and 99PI, and BackStory,
and More Perfect.
How much better can it get?
But it's the technology that allows
us to send a message through space and thus through time
into the future.
There are a lot of reasons why we may not
have seen aliens yet.
But like Dr. Shostak says, we should find them very soon.
And while my colleagues just say,
well, 10 years, 20 years, whatever, I've tried to
do better than that by looking at the speed of the search.
And you can predict how fast computers
are going to become for the maybe next 10 or 20 years.
If you just do that, then it looks like they within 20 years
we'll have looked for signals coming
from a million different star systems, maybe 2 million.
I have the feeling that if you look at 1 or 2 million start
systems, you might pick up something interesting.
You might finally trip across that signal.
So that's why I usually say, well, I don't know,
but my guess is that within 20 years or something like that,
we'll hear from the aliens.
Be prepared.
In 1991, we knew only nine planets, nine,
in the whole universe.
I mean, Pluto was still a planet then.
And that was the same year that Disney's Beauty and the Beast
was released in theaters.
The animated one, not the live action one.
(SINGING) Be our guest.
That's not that long ago.
Today, thanks to the work of many, many hundreds
of astronomers and experts around the world,
we know of around 4,000 exoplanets.
And of those, we think about 49 are
Earth-size inhabitable for Terrans, which is humongous.
So as the amount of data that we collect about the galaxy
grows and the amount of computing power
we have to churn through that data
and to isolate signals from the noise gets stronger and better,
eventually, we'll find aliens.
Simple as that.
We're looking for a needle in a haystack.
But that haystack isn't getting any smaller.
And we are getting exponentially better at looking.
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