Are We Alone? When Will Earthlings Find ET? | Dan Werthimer | TEDxSFState

uh thank you thank you very much uh so I want to talk to you about this question: are we

alone

? Is there anyone out there? It's a question that humans have been asking for a few hundred thousand years and maybe in this century we

will

have the opportunity to answer the question, the field is called SEI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and there have been many ideas throughout the years about how we could contact ET. Some of the first ideas were that the mathematician suggested that we contact ET by making large geometric structures on the planet a right triangle maybe 3 four five miles on a side a large square of land a large square of water uh and a large square from Trigo and ET we would look down and see that we knew about the Pythagorean theorem and maybe they would get in touch uh it was a great idea at the time unfortunately it wasn't funded um and then Charles Crow suggested that we get in touch with the Martians no no sorry He suggests that we contact ET by digging a 20 mil wide circular trench and fill the trench with kerosene and then use this match not to scale to make a bright uh a bright circle of light a bright circle of fire and then again I would look down and see this glowing circle uh and maybe they would make contact and I think you could guess what happened to this, it had a similar fate and then Charles Crow suggested that we contact the Martians using large mirrors to reflect sunlight back to the Martians. actually, several mirrors, one where he lived in Paris and the others to outline the shape of the Big Dipper and I think you guess what happened here.

The first project funded at Seti was sending pornography into space. So this is a board you might have. I saw it on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft that left Earth in the early 7s and, uh, these are very controversial originally they were holding hands and NASA decided it wasn't a good idea because the ETs, if they found this plate , they would think it was a creature. so they're not holding hands right now um and here's the solar system and the Sun and Mercury Venus and here's the Earth and you can see the spacecraft leaving the Earth traveling at about 100,000 miles per hour heading to the stars uh and then these are addresses, this is a map so that if ET wants to know where we live and they want to come and eat us, they

will

know exactly where we live, so that was the first project funded, one of the big questions in Seti is are they there? .

There are good planets that revolve around other stars and if you had asked me 20 years ago if there are planets that orbit other stars, I would have said I don't know, no one knew 20 years ago, but that has all changed largely due to work here. at San Francisco State University pioneered how to

find

these small planets. Planets are difficult to

find

because they are small, they are very small. A million Earths could fit inside the Sun and they're right next to this really bright thing. they're really hard to find and that work was pioneering here and led to something called Kepler, which the way Kepler found planets was to look and see if a planet passes in front of a star, I don't know if.

You see this little black dot here, but it's a planet going in front of a star and you can't actually see the planet from the Kepler spacecraft, but what you can see is that the light dims a little bit as the planet gets closer. In front, the light dims, if you see a star that dims a little, say what's going on, that gives away the planet's presence, and if it rotates periodically every few months or every year, whatever, then you really know you found a. planet and Kepler found thousands of planets uh and here is an example of some of the planets orbiting their stars and you can see that many of the planets are in multiplet systems six seven eight planets and now we know that there are more planets than there are stars in the Milky Way, there are about 1 billion planets in our Milky Way and if you are not happy with a billion planets, there are about 100 billion other galaxies besides the Milky Way that we live in in many places. and many of those planets are small things like Earth, small rocky planets and we believe that many of them have liquid water, we call them Goldilocks planets, if this, if the planet is too far from the Star, it will be cold if so . too close it will be too hot if it's the right distance it's a goldilocks planet eh ok you have a lot of planets well what about life?

How often does life begin? We don't really know, we don't understand everything. the details of how chemistry turns into self-replicating molecules, but we are optimistic about primitive life and the reason we are optimistic is because life began on Earth very early, the oldest rocks that can be found have microfossils so soon as the Earth cooled. It seemed like there was life, so although we don't understand the details because it happened quickly here on Earth, we think it will also happen quickly on other planets, so there the universe is probably full of simple life that we don't know about.

I don't know how often it evolves to become intelligent and we could communicate, but it's probably becoming associated with simple life. There may even be life in our own solar system. This is a moon orbiting Jupiter called Europa. This is a cutaway view and you can see it. It has a liquid ocean. This blue thing is liquid water. It's heated by tidal forces and maybe there's something swimming down there in the ocean. The problem is, we can't tell. Because this white thing is ice. It's covered in ice. which is warm water is covered in ice it's about 30 miles thick of ice and we don't know how to get through the ice, so

when

I give talks at elementary schools I ask the kids how we're going to get through the ice and I tell them we really don't know what.

NASA doesn't know how to do it and boys have a different response than girls. Children say machine guns or bombs. They're kind of like Donald Trump. And the girls. a little bit smarter and uh and not as violent they want to melt through the ice like using mirrors to focus the sun's rays and heat the ice anyway it's interesting in elementary school there's already kind of a separation there unfortunately um it's well, then and there are many other moons. Even in our own solar system we could find primitive life. What about how we are going to find intelligent life?

So one of the ideas is that the Earth is sending a lot of radio and television into space and we have been transmitting television signals for about 70 years. Early shows like I Love Lucy and Ed Suen have been traveling. They are now 70 light years away. About 10,000 stars have passed by and nearby stars have seen The Simpsons. so you haven't seen Donald Trump yet so this is a plot of the power of television leaving the Earth 1940 1950 1960 and you can see that we are getting brighter and brighter and we are brighter than the sun now on the frequencies of television, uh, so if we are transmitting messages that travel at the speed of light much faster than our rockets, maybe ET does too and we have even sent messages intentionally.

This was a message transmitted in the 70s. We believe that images are a good way to communicate. They're not going to speak English or Portuguese, but we think the images could be that they will be able to perceive their surroundings in two or three dimensions, so this was an image with a person and a DNA molecule and the solar system maybe you can see the Sun and Mercury Venus and the Earth lean towards the radio telescope person anyway that's an example of how you can start a conversation math is another good way of prime numbers 2 plus 2 equals 4 things like that um Okay, so we're sending signals of radio to space.

We want to know if ET is doing it too. If they have television, radar or radio. To do this we need a large radio antenna. We call them radio telescope. one that we started using in the '70s, it's 85 feet wide and while we were using this telescope to search, this is what happened to it, this is the dish that used to be here on the pedestal, so we moved to a different telescope , we moved to this telescope, this is another radio telescope in West Virginia, it's 300 feet wide, one of the largest telescopes in the world and while we were using this telescope to look for radio signals from ET, this is what happened to that telescope and you You might ask why that happened to Dan, why the two telescopes he was using to search were destroyed.

Well, the answer according to the weekly world news is that the aliens did not want to be discovered and attacked the telescope. aliens so we're trying this idea the zap idea on this telescope this is the largest radio telescope in the world it's in Puerto Rico it's a thousand feet wide it's called the aasbo telescope it contains 10 billion toruses of cornflakes although we haven't actually done I tried it yet, um and um, so far it hasn't been attacked by hostile aliens, although it is a little harder to attack, you may have seen it in the James Bond movie, uh, golden eye, although in Golden Eye They say it is in Cuba, which is not the case. it comes out of the water, which it doesn't, but it also appeared in the movie Contact, which was a book written by Carl Sean, who used to work in our group anyway, so we collected a lot of data on this telescope, eh, pedabytes, many. pedabytes of data and the problem we have is that there is so much data that we cannot analyze it all ourselves with the computers we have, not even with the supercomputer we have in Berkeley, so we are asking for volunteers from all over the world to help us .

If you have a computer, laptop, desktop or Android phone, you can help us analyze the data and the way it works is that we send, we store the data and then we split it into small pieces so that you, if you want , help us. we analyze the data you run a small screen saver program called SEI atome screen saver program download this free program if you want to find it and help us search et Google SII seti and you will find SEI at home and you can download this program uh and you can volunteer to help us analyze the data and the way it works is everyone gets a different part of the sky, so you're going to get a part of the sky, you're going to get a different part, a different part of the sky. data and then

when

you go out to get a cup of coffee, the screensaver appears on your computer like a uh, but instead of just putting cute pictures of goldfish swimming on your screen, it's actually reviewing the data you've been given. assigned. looking for all the different frequencies and types of signals and when it's done, it may take a few days, it will send the results, whatever it finds, whatever your screen protector finds, whatever strong signal it finds, it sends the results to our computer in Berkeley and his name is attached to that data, so if you find ET you will get the Nobel Prize, although it's not really me who decides, but you might get it.

This is a small animation of the data being sent from Berkeley to all the volunteers around. the world the yellow dots are the data we are sending the blue dots are when they finish analyzing the data, then they send the results and form one of the largest supercomputers on the planet, there are around 8 million people. those who are helping us are spread across 226 countries and this has made the search incredibly responsive and much more powerful beyond our wildest dreams and we are very grateful to the SE volunteers at home and I hope that if they are not running C in home, you will go and download this and help us search and the software that we developed, the seti software, is open source software and is now used in many different scientific projects, so now you can do it at home instead of just doing seti you can search for anti-malaria drugs, anti-cancer drugs and anti-HIV drugs this is a program you can run to search for black holes this is climate prediction about global warming this is looking at pulsars and gravitational waves this is protein and you can assign how you want your computers to be used, you can say: I want 20% of my spare computing cycles to go to seti and 30% to malaria research, and you can participate in your favorite projects, so this is something completely new that What we are doing this year, we met with a billionaire and the Breakthrough Prize foundation and they gave us a lot of money to do a big SE program and we are just starting with three telescopes, in fact, one of the telescopes that we are using .

We're launching today, so we've started using this at Lick Observatory looking for laser signals. Lick Observatory, some of you may know, is near San Jose, to the east, on Mount Hamilton, and we're looking for laser signals there and then. We are using a telescope thatcollapsed in West Virginia, they built a new one and we're using this one in West Virginia and then what we're launching today that we're really excited about is a telescope in Australia called The Parks Telescope, the reason we're all excited about this thing we're starting today is that, if ET is lurking in the south, these other telescopes that we have been using are in the north, so if it is one of the southern ones.

We would have lost stars and this is very little work that has been done in Australia and looking at the southern stars, so we are very excited about the fact that we are going to look at a million stars and a thousand galaxies. It's a great novelty. powerful project that we are very excited about another thing we are excited about is a new telescope that is being built in China. This will be even bigger than the one in Puerto Rico, it is 500 meters wide and you can see that it is done. of little panels and now it's all finished and they are just starting to use it and we hope to work with the Chinese to make SE.

This is longer term. In 10 or 20 years we will learn to build instead of a big one. to build a telescope with many small dishes, perhaps thousands of small dishes, and this is being built in South Africa and Australia. Many countries are getting together and we think it will be a spectacular way to look for very weak signals that generate a giant telescope among many small telescopes. The other thing that excites us is that the computing power is getting better and better. Many of you know Moore's Law and right now this is a graph of computing power versus time and right. now computers are as smart as a lizard or a guppy um if this trend continues computers will be as smart as humans in about 30 years that's called The Singularity careful it could be good it could be bad but in any case we will be We can do some Very good SE experiments right now.

We're just getting into the game. We are learning how to do it. We cannot do all the frequencies and do an exhaustive search, but the computing power continues and the telescopes continue to increase. I better be a long-term optimist if there are radio signals that could be found maybe in your generation maybe in the next generation um it's okay if you've been asleep uh this is really the only slide you have to remember um no ET So far yet We are working on it. However, that's not the last slide I have. I have three more, so I wanted to tell you a little about the S volunteers at home.

The S volunteers at home have helped us. Hugely, they built one of the biggest computers on the planet, they made search very responsive, but they also help us write the software. It is a great open source project. They help it go faster. Porting it to new platforms. They just made it work on Android. get the bugs out um they also send us money the donations come from the volunteers which is great because it keeps the students working on the data analysis it keeps the students fed then they also send literature and music and some send Haus and thousands of the people has sent us feedback on SEI, but don't worry, I'm not going to read you thousands of Haus, uh, I'm just going to read you a couple of Haus, so, uh, the PA cook at Duke University looking for Life answers . they reveal themselves about ourselves and this is the last slide the last Haiku 1 million

earthlings

united by optimism leave your PCS on, thank you very much