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“This month, tune into a special series featuring guests on the Science of Raising Kids,”
listen to Ted Health wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to shortwave. From NPR. When I was a teenager in the late 90s, I downloaded a special screen saber it had lots of pretty colors and grabs, but that's not why I wanted it.
My goal was to humbly contribute to humankind's search for intelligent life in the universe, aka aliens. This effort is officially called the search for extra-trusual intelligence or setting. The screen saber I downloaded, called setting at home, was part of a large-scale community project to use people's everyday PCs
to comb through radio signals that hit Earth from space, mostly from stars. These signals have particular patterns. So if astronomers find a signal that doesn't quite fit those patterns,
“it could mean some intelligent life is sending them.”
Within a few years, the city at home project recruited 3.8 million people.
I hijacked my parents' little gateway 2000, and I absolutely cooked it, trying to contribute to it seemed like the thing, right, seemed like the opportunity living in the middle of nowhere and sort of like rural eastern Washington, like, oh, I can be part of this journey that humankind is on. It was amazing.
That's my friend James Davenporty. He is an astronomer at the University of Washington and his focus is on stars. And I talked to him recently because, importantly, for this episode, he's a collaborator with the city institute, a nonprofit research organization that comes through astronomical data in search of signs of life outside of Earth. It's a search that goes way back, way before James and I took control of our family's
computers in 1924. When many researchers were excited about Mars and Mars's orbit was close to Earth, making it a prime time to listen to signals from the planet. And so, an unconventional astronomer named David Todd convinced multiple radio stations in the US and won a South America to go silent. So for five minutes, on the hour for several days, they would blackout all radio transmissions in the US. And they would listen. They would point the radio telescopes or the radio transmitters
they had at Mars. And they would listen for signs of, you know, Martian and PR. David Todd even convinced the US Army and Navy to listen for anything unusual in radio signals. Spoiler, they didn't find anything. There was no Martian and PR. But humans have continued to look for signs of intelligent life in the universe. And James says, we've barely scratched the surface.
If the thing we were looking for was the size of the ocean, so far as of about 2000, we had looked at a pint glass of water, compared to the volume of the ocean. And that's where a scientific efforts have mostly been. Looking at radio transmissions from outer space, city has looked for spikes, chirps, and unusual things from radio telescopes for about 60 years. But James and others think there's so much more data to sift
through outside of these radio signals. So today on the show, a legitimate look at the search for intelligent life in space. The ways we look and how scientists are taking the search to the next level. I'm Regina Barber and you're listening to Shorway, the Science Podcast from NPR. Okay, James, let's just like get into it. There's this equation that people throw around. It's an equation that tells us the likelihood that there's alien life that could send us the
signal. It's called the Drake equation. Can you break that down for us? So the Drake equation is the number of stars times the fraction of those stars that should have intelligent life. It's capable of sending us signals. In a simplest form, it's the number of stars times the fraction of stars that have NPR.
“Or something like that. Now what goes into that NPR term? Well, you have to have a planet.”
It has to be at that Goldilocks distance from its parent star. It has to have water. It has to have all the ingredients that we know and many of the ingredients we don't know. And there's a lot we don't know about what drives life. So the last 25 years there has been a really big surge in this field called astrobiology. And they've tried to answer the parts of that equation. Like, well, how many stars have planets? Is it every star? Is it only stars like
our son? So now we know that on average every star roughly has at least one planet. Wow. At least one rocky type planet on average. Wow. That means there's so many. That means that
for a galaxy of more than a hundred billion stars, that means we have at least a hundred billion
planets to search. And even still, even after 25 years of astrobiology,
We still don't know.
know the answer still. So there's a lot of work to be done. And the the drag equation doesn't
“take into account time. I personally was like, okay, the universe is like 13.8 billion years old.”
Our son is like around 4.6 billion years old. I feel like there could have been civilizations
that were of coming on. I mean, that point. But that equation doesn't take that into account. You can write it in a way that does, right? You can write it in such a way that how many civilizations arise and what's the likelihood that they live long enough to develop radio telescopes and astronomy and space travel, perhaps. So you can write the equation in sort of in different ways. It's not a strict equation in the same way as Einstein's theory of relativity. It's an equation that
gives us kind of an outline for how to frame the problem. It's more of a illustration. Okay, so this illustration, this equation comes from man who kind of began what led to like modern study. So really, we consider the beginning of modern study as 1960. So Frank Drake, who some people know from the Drake equation, which tries to quantify what's the likelihood that we're alone
“in the universe. He was actually the pioneer where he had time on a radio telescope for good”
bread and butter astronomy reasons. At this point in 1960s, people are looking at galaxies and gas and dust in the interstellar medium and radio telescopes are a new technology still and he decides the point at a couple of nearby stars to quote unquote listen with the intent of looking for, again, chirps or pulses or some kind of transmission, he doesn't find anything, but he starts what he calls project Osma named after the Wizard of Oz. Oh my gosh, okay, cool.
And he starts to look for signs of, you know, transmissions and pensional transmissions from technology. And this is really the beginning of what we call "setty the search for extraterrestrial intelligence." Okay, and since "setty" has like been officially operational, that's like 1985, we haven't found anything, right? But you mentioned that analogy that like we've only searched like the equivalent of a pint glass of water versus like the ocean that is the entire sky.
We've done a lot of work since. So my estimate a couple of years ago was we've pushed that from a pint glass of water to maybe a hot tub. Okay, there's no bad. That's that's massive progress, right? There's a lot of pint glasses and a hot tub. Yeah, yeah. And but you're an astronomer, right? That looks at stars, not radio signals. But you're working with studies. So like how are we going to search more of the sky? Like get more than a hot tub in an ocean of water. Right. So
I am an optical astronomer. By training I'm a stellar astronomer. I look at stars with sort of classical optical telescopes that you would look through with your eyes and we attach digital cameras too. This is not the area that studies worked on for like 60 years. But we have put a lot of effort into it for lots of other astrophysics and astronomy reasons because stars are bright and
“there's fun physics, there's lots to learn there in the cosmos. And that's what I spent 20 years”
doing. And then this realization that we're putting on this money into optical astronomy, why aren't we looking for maybe the most interesting thing, looking for life, looking to answer these questions about whether or not we're alone. My inner, eight-year-old, my inner Star Trek nerd started putting this together that we should use the data that we have and try to figure out how to pull the knowledge from 60 years of radio astronomy and apply it into this
optical visible light astronomy. My hope in pushing this from the radio into the visible light into the infrared and other domains of astronomy, they're so active, is that we can actually push this from a, from a hot tub to maybe an Olympic swimming pool. Okay, so there's even better technology on the horizon to make the search like even more comprehensive. I'm thinking of the massive Vera Rubin telescope being built in Chile right now. How do you see this telescope
impacting like how we look for life outside of Earth? So just yesterday, the very first life.
Today being January 14th. Right. The very first like commissioning image from the telescope from like their engineering camera was shown and it's beautiful and it's early days but like the telescope is now being tested and everything is being aligned. So it is it is gone from 20 years of development to a reality. This telescope, it's going to sit in Chile and for 10 years create this mosaic movie of the sky and it's going to watch the sky every night with the world's
largest digital camera built in California shipped all the way to Chile. This camera is the size of a small car. Right. It's massive powerful camera attached to an eight and a half meter telescope. Right. So an enormous piece of glass one of the 10 biggest pieces of glass ever built.
It's incredibly powerful and what you get for all that is a sample of more than 10 billion stars.
The best samples of stars so far are one to two billion. We're going to push that up to 10 maybe 15 or 20 billion stars in our galaxy. Wow. That's a total transformational shift.
It's going to be something that really is a tide that raises all the sort of ...
We're going to see we're going to see the binary stars in the supernova. We're going to double
“the known number of asteroids and comets and the solar system important in the first year.”
You're you're getting me excited. Good. But James all these decades of searching. We really haven't found anything. How are you this patient? How do you? How do you keep yourself inspired
that this is going to be like this new era of setty? Because success doesn't depend on finding
“something. Right. The search itself is like the journey is the thing that we're after. Wow.”
It may take this is what I tell my students. It may take a thousand years to know the answer to this question. We've only just begun looking. 1960 was not that long ago. Right.
And even if we do all of our work and we get it up to a swing pool as compared to the ocean,
“that's only one swing pool against the very big ocean of possible parameter space that we're looking.”
It is going to take a long time to put this story together and to be sure that we have found something where we haven't the word alone or that we're not. That's okay. The advent of photography and computers means that our data is forever. So a star that doesn't do anything. It was seemed boring to us for 10 years, 25 years from now. It might do something interesting. And if we don't have that record, if we don't do our work, then they don't stand a chance to find anything.
James, thank you so much for coming here and really making me excited about searching for life in space. If we all pitch in, if we all do a little bit, like we did. Like we did with the screen savers. With the screen savers when we were kids, if our entire community of astronomers and scientists and the public come along with us, we're going to make a dent. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and edited by a showrunner of Beck Romeras,
Tyler Jones checked the facts. Quasily was the audio engineer. Bet Donovan is a senior director and Colin Campbell is a senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave. From regular old MPR, not Martian NPR.
