In this lecture, we look at how we use our powers of communication to see if there

are other intelligent entities like us out in space. The subject is called SETI or
the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In fact, astronomers have recognized
that SETI as an acronym is a misnomer because we don't actually detect
intelligence. Awhile back, I gave the example of dolphins and orcas, creatures on
this planet. They are undoubtedly intelligent and possibly sentient with which we
share the planet, and yet they cannot communicate by these means. So, really, it
should be the search for extraterrestrial technology, rather than the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence. With that in mind, let's look at how astronomers
approach this. Little history is instructive. In 1967, a young research student
called Jocelyn Bell was working in Cambridge at Radio Observatory when she saw a
striking thing on the strip chart of her radio detector, a pulse about every 1.3
seconds rising and falling sharply and repeating like a metronome. Quick inspection
showed that the pulse was as accurate or more accurate than the clock she was
using, an atomic clock. This was incredibly accurate timekeeping, and nobody, her,
nor her adviser, nor the head of the lab could think of any astronomical entity
that should pulse every second out in space. So, for a while, they were mystified.
In fact, as she found more of these pulsars, as they became cold, she started to
write on the strip chart, LGM1, LGM2, LGM3, was a joke, little green man one, two,
and three. But it said that at the time, astrophysics could provide no explanation
for these pulsing signals, and so you were left thinking perhaps these were
intelligent signals from aliens out in space. It's an illustrative story, of
course, because it was a natural astrophysical source of this radiation. It was the
collapsed remnant of a star, a massive star that dies with a core collapses to an
incredible density, such that the core is an entire atomic nucleus writ large.
These are, of course, neutron stars with radio hotspots that we detect as pulsars.
Now, neutron stars had been predicted in 1930s, but even the theorist who predicted
them didn't really expect they would ever be observable. So, when Jocelyn Bell and
Tony Hewish observed pulsars in 1967, it was a shock and a surprise, and so they
didn't know what to conclude. This is a Nobel Prize winning discovery, but it's
also a warning to us that when we think we know what a signal might be, we have to
be very skeptical, and we think we know how aliens might communicate to us, we also
have to be skeptical too. So, what can we say about SETI and its history, the
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence? Really, the dedicated efforts have only
been in the last century. In the 19th century, they were hypothetical ideas, such
as digging trenches in the Sahara desert, filling them with oil in geometric
patterns, and lighting them so they might be visible from far. Another idea, also
never executed, was cutting large sections of the Siberian forest into geometric
shapes like a Pythagoras right-angled triangle, as another way of representing the
presence of intelligent life on earth. These were just simple concepts. But as
radio technology evolved in the middle part of the 20th century, it became possible
to do an experiment. So, in 1960, we had the first SETI experiment, Project Ozma,
which was developed by Frank Drake about whom we'll hear later. In the mid-1980s,
an entire institute, originally government funded, now privately run, was developed
to do this activity. All these projects are essentially doing the same thing.
They're looking for radio signals from deep space that might be coming from
extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations. There have been a few attempts at
speaking or transmitting radio signals out into space to fix stellar targets. But
most of the experiments are listening experiments or passive experiments. Why do
they use radio? What's special about radio waves? We've already seen that
electromagnetic waves are the preferred mode of communicating in any situation in
space. Radio waves are particularly interesting, however, because interstellar gas
and dust is always out there in space among the stars. Optical light cannot
penetrate. If we try, for example, to look to the center of our galaxy in the
directive Sagittarius, we can't see it. Only one in a billion photons in the
galactic center reaches us at a distance of 30,000 light years. However, the center
of our galaxy is a compact radio source, easily detectable with a moderate size
radio telescope. So, radio waves and radio photons are unimpeded by gas and dust,
and they can travel large distances even through the densest parts of a galaxy and
then easily through intergalactic space. So, radio waves are preferred. Another
reason is they have relatively low energy and so in an energetic sense are cheap to
produce per photon. Radio wavelengths are unimpeded because they are much longer
than the size of any of the dust or gas particles they might encounter. With the
galaxy unimpeded for radio waves, we can see entirely across the galaxy and to the
heart of distant galaxies. In a practical way, most SETI is actually limited to the
Milky Way because we're simply bringing into view hundreds of thousands or millions
of stars around which there might be some civilizations. The SETI Institute, the
only entity developed just to do this type of science was founded in 1984 as a non-
profit, dedicated to researching the potential for life in the universe. It doesn't
just conduct radio experiments that does broadly based research that we would call
astrobiology in the nature and prevalence of life on Earth, its likely abundance in
space, the nature of life in the solar system, and how we might find it. In their
foundation statement, it says, "The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore,
understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe and the
evolution of intelligence." The steady activity, not just conducted by the SETI
Institute, whereby SETI operations in other countries and at other universities
uses radio telescopes around the world, and some SETI activities used are great
observatories in space. In the last few years, there's been a new project that was
originally launched by Stephen Hawking, who died last year, and Yuri Milner, a
Russian industrialist who has invested $100 million of private money into the SETI
activity. This is the most thorough and comprehensive SETI project yet underway and
still ongoing. It involves thousands of hours of observing time on dozens of radio
telescopes and has the goal of observing literally millions of stars to listen for
signals from civilizations on planets around those stars. In the last few decades,
a second mode of doing SETI has come into being and has developed quite quickly.
It's based on the fact that we can make pulse lasers of enormous power, terawatts,
even petawatts. Why does that matter? Because we imagine if other civilizations
might develop radio technology, then they might indeed develop lasers. Remember
that a laser is ubiquitous technology on the earth. Every home has several lasers,
even if you don't know which appliances have them. So, lasers are present, and they
are the most powerful. They can send pulses out into space that can reach far
through space to the nearest hundreds or millions of stars. The method of optical
SETI depends on the fact that if we pulse a laser, sufficiently powerful, for
sufficiently short period, that laser pulse in that instant can contain as much
power as the Sun emits in that instance. In other words, if there was a
civilization on an Earth-like planet around a sun-like star and that civilization
was pulsing lasers at us, then for those instance of time, that laser would out
shine or shine as brightly as their parents star. In other words, we can chunk up
the light signal from stars many of them in the sky and look for those additional
pulses from lasers pointed at us. So optical SETI is based on pulse communication
with optical light, just as radio SETI is based on pulse communication with radio
waves. It's the same idea. Two different methods to do the same goal. Every now and
then there's a surprise. We don't know what to expect in SETI. The pulsars were not
intelligent civilizations. But in 2015, the Citizen Science paper was published
describing a star with an unusual dimming pattern called Tabby Star. Tabby Star had
observed a brightness dip of 22 percent. Remember that a Jupiter-like planet
orbiting a sun-like star, only blocks one percent of its light. And planets don't
get much bigger than Jupiter. So a dip of 22 percent was a phenomenal sized
exoplanet. Furthermore, the dimming event was not regular as it would be with a
planetary orbit. It wasn't regular or periodic. It was a ragged a light pulse that
was inexplicable in terms of transit or eclipse idea. So, this became a puzzle, a
mystery, hypotheses are still on the table including orbiting desk cloud, planets
in the system that are evaporating and coming apart, a debris field of stuff that
never quite formed a planet. Of course, some people as with pulsars jumps to the
conclusion that alien technology might be behind it. The problem is it's hard to
rule out what's going on in any definitive sense. Because nature is abundant with
phenomena and we don't always know what the situation is in a distant part of
space. But we know what the implications of contact will be. ''We can listen to the
words of Stephen Hawking. We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent
life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.'' Hawking put out an
idea which was echoed by other scientists that the transmission experiments, the
speaking experiments as opposed to listening actually shouldn't be engaged in
because
we shouldn't advertise to aliens our existence in case they're malign. We can also
listen to the words of Jill Tarter one of the founder members of the SETI Institute
and in fact, who Ellie Arroway in the film Contact was modeled after. ''The search
for extraterrestrial intelligence as an endeavor may in fact need to be multi,
multi generational before we figure out the right thing to look for. This cosmic
perspective is really something we need to adopt.'' So we have to take the long
view with SETI. Human civilization is quite short. Our technological revolution is
barely a 100 years old involving computers and travel through space. So we can
imagine that communication with other entities will be a rapid thing. All of these
issues, particularly the large number of exoplanets projected through the galaxy,
raise a question framed by Fermi, famous physicist in 1950. In 1950, Fermi was
having lunch with several colleagues at the University of Chicago. Fermi was a
famous physicist who won the Nobel Prize for the fishing, he made demonstrated in a
Squash Court at the University of Chicago campus. He was known by his colleagues as
the Pope. Not because he was Catholic but because he was considered infallible on
issues of physics. They would just arguing and actually joking about articles in
the paper. One of which was Theft of Garbage Can Lids in a suburb of Chicago, and
the other on the next page was a sighting of UFOs, which was a common thing in
1950. Remember Roswell was a few years earlier. Having joked about that, Fermi
looked at his colleagues and said, "where are they?" Well he took the joke the fact
that the young people in these neighborhoods were tossing garbage can lids into the
sky and some other people were thinking the UFOs to make a serious point. His logic
was this, "Our civilization and technology is very young. Life forms with much more
advanced technology would have remarkable capabilities." He also knew that a very
modest extrapolation of our technology even in 1950, would let us mine asteroids
and moons and send probes that could create replicas of themselves and so
proliferate through the galaxy at significant speeds. He also knew, although the
data wasn't there for it at the time he said the statement, that there are many
likely sites for life and plenty of time for technology to develop on other planets
even billions of years before the Earth formed. So, he asked the question, "where
are they? Where is everyone?" The Voyager probe, which we talked about,
demonstrates an important point about interstellar communication. Communication is
limited by the finite speed of light. The Voyager probe is of course traveling at a
small fraction of the speed of light. So as mentioned it will take tens of
millennia to reach even the nearest star system. That's not a practical way to
communicate. But even at light speed, we have to wait a long time. The nearest star
is four and a bit light years away. So, round-trip signal takes nearly a decade. So
having round-trip communication of a conversation takes a decade for each exchange
of communication. Many of the exoplanets that have been found out in space are much
further away. Remember that the time we've had wireless communication and control
of electromagnetic radiation is only about a century. That's less time than we need
to communicate with many of the exoplanets and the Earth-like exoplanets we've
found so far. So the limitations on practical communication are quite extreme just
because of the richness of our capabilities. The activity to search for
counterparts of us, intelligent communicable civilizations is called SETI, the
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Although in truth it's the search for
extraterrestrial technology in particular it's a search for radio technology.
Because we are looking for pulse radio signals from distant stars emanating from
civilizations on their planets. Use radio waves because they travel freely through
space and penetrate large distances in space. So they also uses optical methods to
search for pulsed laser signals of the kind that we can produce with enormous
power. In order to receive and send and listen to signals and have real
communication, this activity has to be going on some time. It's very recent for
humans that have this capability. Setting may not succeed simply because humans are
too young with technology.