Adam Frank (physicist and astronomer)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts. on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padman.

Hello.

Hello.

Tis the season for aliens.

It sure is. That would be one of the many things we do that the aliens like.

Christmas and snowflakes and Hanukkah.

Yes, watching all the little primates gather around. Celebrate. They're like, oh, they've moved a tree inside. Yes. That's weird.

And Hanukkah, I mean, the, I guess, lighting of, like the ritual of lighting the menorah, they'd be like, what's going on there?

They would just think the power was out there. They'd be like, oh, these people, the power's out.

They've had to light candles. But the lights are on.

Are the lights on when you're lighting the menorah? Now. Nowadays, okay. But this is our first time having an alien expert on. Yeah.

It was really fun. I was really happy with the takeaway, like his takeaway.

Yes, me too. It jived with how I feel, which is I always enjoy.

Yeah, me too.

Okay, Adam Frank, that's who's here. Adam Frank is an astrophysicist and author and the principal investigator on NASA's first grant to study technosignatures, signs of advanced civilizations on other worlds. His books include Light of the Stars, About Time, The Constant Fire, and now his new book that we're here to talk about, The Little Book of Aliens. What a cute title. Great book.

You're gonna wanna hop on it because it's a very cute sweatshirt.

We only make 1,300 of them?

Okay, yeah, 1,300.. We added 300 to the hopefully less cranky folks.

And it won't come till January, but you can pre-order for the holidays.

Okay, it won't be in until Jan.

Give proof of it as a gift.

Print out a picture. Yeah. It's always fun.

Please enjoy, Adam, Frank.

He's an uncherished spirit.

What if it's poison?

Blue poison? Rat poison? Yeah. I think I just ate a little arsenic, but that's okay. You'll be fine, don't worry.

I've been training with white oleanders,

so this should be fine. Every day, take a little bit. Yes.

Because I know my wife will poison me at some point. How could she not?

Was it Rasputin every day was eating a little bit of arsenic or something, because he knew people were gonna try and kill him?

One of our many stories. You must feel this way, having been in academia so long.

That somebody's always trying to kill you. Oh, no.

I was thinking more of, like, you start getting a sense, or I do, that nearly everything I learned is apocryphal. Yeah. Even as the social sciences are beginning to unravel just a tiny bit under the pressure of Hendrick writing The Weirdest People.

Yeah, the weird stuff. That was one of the best results. You used college students for 50 years. What do you expect, right?

Yeah, all we know about is 20-year-old elite children. Our understanding of all of mankind is based on the most narrow. So then you just wonder, okay, so, that's our modern take on it. And we're doing pretty good, better than we ever have. And we're discovering so much of what we currently know is questionable.

Academia, like everything else, has got its. don't go outside the box. This is what everybody believes. You're a lunatic. And some of that stuff has turned out to be really dangerous.

Yes, and look, it's all over your book, which is. we're in this precarious situation where we're trying to understand something that we're trapped inside of. We can't get a bird's eye view of any of this. We can't put it on a table. We can't measure it.

Science is based on this idea that, oh, there's a third person view. Like when I play video games, right? I can choose between being third person or I can do first person. Third person view is a fantasy. It's a useful fantasy, but there is no such thing.

Yeah, well, can we start with New Jersey?

Jersey, sure.

We talked to a lot of experts. They're all smarter than us, but I need to know why someone's drawn to what they're drawn to, because I think it ends up impacting how you see everything. So New Jersey kids, 60s.

Yeah, I grew up in Belleville, New Jersey, which is right next to Newark. This is the 60s, early 70s. And, you know, the town I grew up in was working class Italian Irish. I was the entire Jewish population. Okay, great.

You were representing the ambassador.

Great people and everything, but there was a lot of prejudice. And my parents got divorced when I was three. Then the guy who kind of raised me, my dad, was the first black state legislature in Jersey, civil rights leader. Your stepfather. My stepfather.

That's a curious and weirdly romantic story.

My mom was a radical. My mom was a Holocaust survivor who was just super politically, not commie. My mom and my dad, my bio dad, recognized that. Stalin and everything was an asshole, but they were very much progressive in those days. This was the early 60s.

Okay.

So when I was growing up, I got my ass kicked pretty much every day for being Jewish. Kids would throw pennies at me, being like, pick up the penny, Jew. I've heard of this. Oh my God. This is like, yeah, this is because of my mom.

Yeah, that doesn't seem helpful on the playground, but thank you for arming me with that.

Exactly, mom. Thanks a lot. It was a rough early going. And then, the major thing, I lost my brother when I was nine. He was 16 and he was killed in a car accident.

A new driver situation?

No, I went to this great YMCA summer camp. Me and my sister and my brother went there from like five all the way up. And he was a counselor at this point, risen in the ranks. It was very much meatballs, you know, the love that movie. for that reason.

Oh my God. Yeah. I hope this has improved. It seems like it has, but when I grew up in Detroit in the seventies and then was in school in the eighties, someone died once every couple of months from a drunk driver.

It was so ever present. He lost his license. That was it. No jail time. Killed three kids.

Was dad in the picture, biological dad?

My dad lived in the city. He lived on the Upper West Side. And so I'd see him, it was a typical divorce thing. Every two weeks, weekend, Santa Claus kind of thing. My dad was a good guy, but he was a World War II vet who had post-traumatic stress syndrome, like nobody's business.

What line of work was he in?

He was a writer.

Oh, he was?

Yeah. And I had the best of both worlds. I had George, who was my black dad, who was a great guy, never even finished high school, but he was super smart, amazingly compassionate guy and just tough. He'd grown up on the streets of Newark. So really shrewd guy.

And five-year-older brother. I have that same dynamic. My brother's five years older than me. And I think he gives you a lot of little brother stuff.

Oh, that's the bummer about losing him. Because, especially, you know, I was getting my butt kicked every day and my brother was big and he was my protector. I remember one time, one of the bullies coming up to kick my ass up to my house and my brother stepped out. He just went like, stopped, turned around and walked away. My mom and my stepdad, George, they were involved in civil rights stuff and they were kind of checked out.

It was prerequisite in the movement, I think. Yeah. They drug tested you and if you were sober, you were kicked out.

That's right. Wonderful people, but not that functional. So when my brother was gone, there was nobody left paying attention. So my sister and I were in many ways just kind of on our own.

And did you retreat into reading and fantasy and isolation?

Totally. Especially in the early years. Science was everything. My dad had introduced me to science fiction early on. And so actually the apocryphal story, I got into astronomy because I remember he's gone, but his library is still there in the house.

Got any L. Ron Hubbard classics?

No, not L. Ron Hubbard. It was all Isaac Asimov. Amazing stories. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You think of sci-fi as this cute pastime, but it's shocking how many scientists it gave rise to. Oh, yeah. So many people entered it from the fantasy side, I think.

Science fiction still is for me. I'm still a huge reader, what I can get my hands on or watch. And when I was growing up, the reruns of Star Trek every day at four o'clock on Channel 5 and seven o'clock on Channel 11.. I just watched them over and over again. Anything that was available, that was my solace.

To get emotional about it, did you have some sense that that future world was going to value your offerings and be more meritocratic?

You wanna know? Yeah. My fantasy was that one day I'd be sitting outside and the ship would come over with the lights on and would land. They were gonna bring me back. I was obviously the heir to the galactic throne.

They made a great 80s movie, though, that too. It was like The Last Starship Fighter, or something. I think that was, he was playing in a video game, and that was the audition, basically.

That's right. You know, it's funny, I was the science advisor for Doctor Strange, which was like best week ever. We're in the writer's room and Kegham Fee comes out. I'm like, I'm a fan. And he said to me, oh really, what's your favorite?

And I would also imagine my own ego would be like, I'm a part of the next phase. I'm not fitting in because I'm actually kind of advanced. That's how I would comfort myself.

For me, it was more, there was this other world that I was part of. It wasn't so much the future. It was just that there was this other world already going on. I'd look at those pictures and was like, it's true. Look at these fricking pictures.

I kind of feel bad for the current generations because they've grown up in a world where space exploration is a given. I think like I'm on the tail end of it, being very thrilling. You were at the epicenter of it. Yeah, yeah.

You were what, four or five years old? When Apollo landed, I was five.

I think that's relevant in how passionate and romanticized the whole field is. But I think, for anyone else, we've been always going to the moon. We've been always out in outer space.

And the science fiction, where, in my day, you were like a serious nerd. There was me and there was like one other dude. he got beat up to and it was like this special thing that you had. It was the same thing with the comics.

But if you look at the kids that comics so appealed to, it's like special superpowers, right? Totally. Something could happen to them, and then they could fend off the bullies.

Gonna get bit by something.

Yeah, so walk by a radio leak.

I was always looking for the radioactive whatever to eat or stick my head in.

Volunteering to get bit by spiders.

I'll stick my hand in. I had a dream in seventh grade. I'll never forget this dream where I was Spider-Man and I was in my seventh grade biology class, walking around. Oh yeah. So I had a lot of those dreams.

The elevator on the Enterprise is called the turbovator?

I think it is. Oh, wow.

I'm sure you're right.

That might be nerdcore for the day. I'm sure somebody's gonna be like, no, it's not. It's the turbo lifter, okay?

That'll be one of Monica's many facts she has to find out, yeah, yeah. So yeah, you did everything. You read science fiction books and magazines. You watched docs. You were obsessed with Star Trek.

No, because of math, right? So I learned early on, my parents bought me a pretty nice telescope when I was 11 or something. And I put it in the backyard in New Jersey, right? In New Jersey, you can see like five stars. I was like, oh, this can't take very long.

So often, when you're hearing a theory explained to you in layman's terms, what you're hearing is someone trying to put math into English, and it's incomplete. There's no way to actually translate it. Someone's just doing their best metaphoring. So, of course, it's very hard to understand, because if you could speak the math language, you could actually understand it by looking at the math.

That's what it is. You'd write down the equation and be like, oh, I get it. It's the same thing with a poem. You know, there's a couple of examples of poetry in my life where it's like, oh, that's the perfect metaphor. where there's just this one, like, rather than words, comes the sun comprehending glass.

And in fact, even some of our most prominent and famous physicists were ones that weren't themselves great at the math, but were really good at the metaphor. Like Oppenheimer, they say, right? He was really eloquent in being able to relay what the math said in language.

Yeah, he was probably a better mathematician still than I was. But it is true that there's a lot of different ways to be valuable in this field. Technically, I'm not super great at solving integrals. You know, I mean, I'm good enough, but I'll often work with people.

Well, it's kind of like saying you could read Shakespeare. It's not to say you could write Shakespeare. Right. You do have the skills to read the math and understand it.

Exactly. And I'm good at asking questions. I'm good at being like, oh, this could be an interesting question to ask. And then I got to work with somebody who's much better technically than I am at solving the equation that will answer that question.

Yeah. So you get your PhD from U-Dub. Go Dawgs. Yeah. They're the Dawgs, right?

They're the Dawgs. That's what I followed.

I'm the Dawgs too.

Are you also the Dawgs? They're the Huskies.

The Huskies. Oh, yeah. But do we still call them Dawgs? You still say go Dawgs. I think, I don't know.

I was with a girl for nine years that went there.

The stadium collapsed while I was there. Oh. They just built it. It was like this new zillion dollar stadium. It was bad Canadian steel.

Oh, yeah.

Bad Canadian steel.

Of course what they said.

They blamed it on the Canadians.

Nefarious Canadians.

Poor Canadians.

I know.

You couldn't pick a group that's more comical.

Yeah, they'd also just say a sorry. Or the Swedes.

Like they won't even push back. It was, it was our steel. We're so sorry. Yeah. We'll do better next time.

So there you pick up a PhD and then now you start your professional life in this field. And what are some of the things you look at before we get to aliens, which we're gonna land on? I would imagine you have to earn your reputation before you're allowed to have a dalliance with aliens.

Well, it's very true. Part of the story in the book is how, even before I was coming up, but certainly in the late 80s and early 90s when I was in graduate school, if you were interested in life in the universe, there was only SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which was very marginal. There was only a few people doing SETI. There was zero funding for it. It was considered marginal.

Was it a government agent? Is it part of?

No, no, no. So that's why I try and tell the history of SETI in the book. SETI starts off in 1960, when Frank Drake, who's totally the pioneer, you know, he's a young guy. He is working at one of these government agencies that has a radio telescope and he convinces his colleagues, like, hey, I wanna listen. for, really, it's the first time in the history of humanity that anybody's done an actual experiment to say is there life in the universe of any kind, whether it's smart life or dumb, life, doesn't matter.

And what was their methodology? I know that they had radio telescopes and they're aiming them all over the place. Yeah. And what are they listening for? What are they trying to detect?

Yeah, the idea was, what Drake starts. is he's like, I'm gonna look at two nearby sun-like stars. Nobody knew there were any planets at all. As far as we knew, there were zero other planets out there other than the eight orbiting the sun.

Which is a very arrogant point of view.

Yeah, but there was reasons to think that planets were rare. Up until then, the way people thought planets formed was you had to get two stars to almost collide. And then stuff would squeeze out like taffy or gravity would pull it out. And that never happened. So people thought like, eh, planets are gonna be so rare that life is gonna be rare.

We also didn't, at that point, know the massive amount of stars we had quite yet.

We knew that the Milky Way galaxy is one galaxy out of almost an infinite number of galaxies. And there's 400 billion stars in the galaxy.

Was that known at that time? Yeah. Because that was a relatively, I thought, that was like a 90s.

No, no, we knew. Okay. But what we didn't know then was whether any of those 400 billion stars had planets. There was just no evidence. We didn't have the technology to detect planets orbiting other stars.

The closest stars, like Alpha Centauri,

about four light years away. Right.

A light year is what, six trillion miles? A trillion miles. 5.9 trillion miles.

I know, the distances between stars will just melt your brain.

It just can't, it all melts my brain. Infinite, already, I'm done.

And then you have-.

I'm outta here.

No, I love it, I'm so spastic.

And then they try to keep making it smaller. so you'll understand. So like an AU in astronomical units, like 3.1?.

Million, yeah, an AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun. I think it's a 93 million miles.

Oh, that's 93 million miles. Something like that. Yeah. Now there's billions of AUs in between. Right, you can count it.

It's just frickin' big. Okay, the distance between the stars, we can get around. We've sent stuff to everywhere in the solar system. But the solar system is like your house. And the nearest star is so far away that it would be like walking between LA and New York, or crawling between LA and New York.

Yeah, so if you were traveling at the speed of light, which is questionable whether you could, you'd be traveling for four years to get to the closest one.

The closest one, which is like the 7-Eleven.

Your mailbox, yeah. Okay, so Drake, what's his methodology?

Radio astronomy was a new idea. Before, that, astronomy meant like a telescope with a lens using what we call optical light. So radio telescopes were new. So he just says, look, I'm gonna take two sun-like stars nearby within 10 light years. I'm just gonna listen, and what I'm looking for is any kind of signal.

That was my assumption.

Everybody does that, because the movies, right? Yeah. And the people call that like the great silence. Well, we've listened, and we haven't heard anything, so therefore, there's nothing out there. And that is just not true, because there was never any money for it.

Because there's been some technological paradigm shifts, because Hubble's part of this?

It was before Hubble, there's three revolutions in what we call astrobiology. So when I was growing up, there was no astrobiology, right? But then, in 1995, the telescope technology, not Hubble, but ground-based telescopes, people designed detectors, and they find their first exoplanet. They find the first planet orbiting another star. And so 2,500 years of people yelling about planets, over.

And that was in what year?

95.. Oh, my God.

Oh, my goodness, the year I moved to California. That's so recent.

And then it just skyrocketed. Within 10 years, we'd found thousands. And now we've found so many that we can do statistics. And we now know that when you go out at night and look at the sky, every star you're looking at has a family of planets orbiting it. And there are places, every one of those planets, like you look at those pictures of Mars, there are places you can walk around.

But wait, what percentage of the stars are we saying have them? Because clearly we didn't see any.

Pretty much every one. We didn't have the technology.

So even with Alpha, Tauri, and Centauri, we can't see them.

Right, right, because you need a really special, you need like super sensitive.

This is too nerdy. Is this the telescope that had a bazillion different plates?

No, what's weird about this, it wasn't like having a bigger telescope. It was having the thing, the instrument, you hang on the telescope. Oh, the telescope. Because what you gotta do is you gotta take the light and you gotta beat the crap out of the light. You don't need a super huge telescope to do this.

Okay, so that breakthrough happened. And then we discover it's however many stars we have.

400 billion. Oh my gosh. In the galaxy, just in the galaxy.

But that's just in the galaxy.

400 billion in the galaxy and they all have a family of planets, and that's just in our galaxy.

And our galaxy is made up of what, super galaxies, then galaxy clusters, all these things keep ramping up. Each one has a billion, so it's like to the power of a billion, like six times. Yeah.

When I'm in graduate school, there's a professor, Woody Sullivan. He was the only one doing SETI. And back then, there's the giggle factor, we call it. Anybody doing SETI is kind of subject to, oh, he does SETI. You know, like the raised eyebrows.

Exactly.

I don't need this again. A bunch of astronomers now coming up.

Yeah, you joined the science community to not get bullied. And that's the one area you can still get pounced.

I knew as much as I was interested in it, I ended up doing more standard kind of astronomy. I studied how stars die. My advisor, Bruce Ballack, great scientist.

Is that who you dedicated the book to?

That's who I dedicated the book to.

Yeah, he has beautiful dedication.

Yeah, he's amazing. I haven't given him the book yet, so he doesn't know. Unless he's listening to this, he still doesn't know the book is dedicated to him. I start off, I'm studying how stars like the sun die, doing what's called astrophysical fluid dynamics, as the stars kind of blow themselves apart. Then I got into star formation, how giant clouds of gas collapse under their own weight to form stars.

You also start questioning the overall model of cosmology in general. That's before. you're now heading up this new program, right?

Carl Sagan was my hero, because his writing, he was a great scientist, and he was interested in science as a cultural phenomena. Where does science fit into everything else we do? And his books, you'd be learning about relativity, but he'd take you to like Renaissance Venice for some story about some guy. And I had a strong interest in philosophy even in high school. So I was the class clown, and my class clown picture is me with my cowboy hat, jersey, don't ask why, and a book of Spinoza, you know, in my pocket, like, you know, yeah.

Were the girls lined up around the corner?

I thought this was gonna help. I was clearly wrong.

Well, I mean, yeah, now.

Not then. Now, yeah. Now, not then. So I was always interested in where science touched philosophical issues. So I never studied cosmology scientifically, but I've always had an interest.

That you alter the thing you're observing.

Yeah, so that's also quantum mechanics comes in there. I have a huge interest in quantum mechanics interpretations. So while I'm doing my astronomy stuff, I'm also keeping this interest in philosophy. And as it connects also to human spirituality, because I've been doing contemplative practice since I was 30.. Right.

Yes, measuring and data computation. So I was shocked, I guess, to learn that, well, what's not shocking is Aristotle believed in the geocentric theory of the universe. We were at the center, everything revolved around us, and he was certain that there were no other planets. But I had no idea Epicurus.

Yeah, Epicurus and Democritus.

In 300 BC, they're already saying, no, no, there's other planets. Right. So that's kind of shocking. Intuitively, they're picking that up because there's nothing that would help you get there.

By reason alone, they're looking at the world, they're looking at bread, bread into breadcrumbs. Well, and you can break the breadcrumbs. You know, they're like, no, the whole world's made out of these invisible little specks of matter.

The atoms, Monica, in 300 BC. How could they?

They just worked it out. The Greeks were like, well.

Yes.

So what were the other two? You said there were three revolutions.

Oh, right, we only did one.

One exoplanet.

Right, one was exoplanet. So we discovered that there's planets everywhere. You look at the night sky, you count up five of the stars. Every one of those stars has planets, but one in five has a planet in the right orbit. It's just the right distance where you can have liquid water on the surface, which means life.

That's a side tangent. We still don't really know where life comes from.

Oh yeah, we don't.

We know it needs these building blocks and we know it needs carbon and oxygen or whatever we say it needs, but we don't really have that moment figured out.

No, we do not. How do you take a bunch of chemicals that are just like floating around, kind of bouncing into each other? Every now and then they combine to form something which maybe starts to replicate quickly. But how do you go from that to a cell that has agency, that can be like, oh, sugar gradient. I'm gonna go up the sugar gradient because that's where the food is.

Okay, so this is so arrogant, but I'm just gonna bring you up to speed on where I land on all this. I happen to really love astronomy. It was one of my favorite classes I took in college. I couldn't believe what we have learned from looking at white light coming from stars. Once you understand that, we know what's burning in there, we know if it's red or blue shifted, if it's approaching or retreating, the mass, these things we figured out by looking at light is so incredible and impressive and undeniable.

Like the bucket of magic.

We have a lot of it, but there's also a couple of major mysteries that I don't think we're anywhere close to.

Well, that's why I'm interested in where philosophy and science rub up. I talk about this in the book when it comes to life. What makes life so interesting is that bucket of magic. Right now, in the end, I think it's not gonna require magic. I'm very anti-reductionist.

Determinism. Right, right. We just had Sapolsky on, and I was so depressed.

I'm not a determinist, because what's happening in science right now, and astrobiology plays a role in this because what astrobiology forces you to do is to confront the biases that you have from just looking at earth life. Yeah. You have to imagine the unimaginable.

Your brain has been formatted in a way that's very hard to shake, right? Yeah. The way story works in a predictable way.

Yes.

And then, if you're watching a movie and it doesn't have a middle or the beginning or the end, you know intuitively, but you don't know why. You can't articulate that.

And what's weird is, even if they deviate from that, it's kind of only interesting. for so long. Free jazz was great for like 20 minutes. And it was like, no, actually, let's go back to the jazz. Yeah.

And, would you say, the most baseline bias we have is that we've never observed anything living that isn't born and then dies?

Yeah.

Or you don't have to say that's the biggest, but that's certainly one that I feel so locked into that.

What's interesting about this, especially for astrobiology, is, you know, and I have these chapters where I try and say, how can we use what we understand to ask what alien life might be like? I mean, there's a way in which to die is the definition of life. Any definition you're gonna come up with is gonna include this idea of precariousness. To be alive is to be alive in precarious situations. You're always one step away from it ending.

There's an incredible, I guess you'd call it a docu-series, it's out right now called Life on Planet Earth. Have you seen it?

I haven't seen it.

Spielberg produced it, I'm watching it with our kids. It does the most incredible job of examining what's happening in the oceans 400 million years ago. And then, because of these oceans and what's happening there, all of a sudden you get this birth of greenery and trees outside, but then that birth of greenery and trees ends up infiltrating the ocean. and then these plankton grow and then they rob all the ocean of the oxygen and there's a mass extinction under there. To your point, there's no borders to any of it.

What we've learned, so what are the other revolutions? The third one, we'll get to the second one. The third one is we now have unpacked the history of the earth. The important part is from maybe 4 billion years, or 3.8 billion years ago, life emerges. And very quickly, life takes over.

And there was a point in our history, I just learned this from the show, that these early land amphibians, they were breathing 60% oxygen. That's how high the oxygen level was at one point. I can't believe how much it's ebbed and flowed.

So around 2.5 billion, 2 billion years ago, you get the great oxidation event. But it's when suddenly the oxygen goes from none to about 20%. Takes a while, it does all these fluctuations. So the whole atmosphere is changed by having this life.

Well, did we even have an atmosphere before that?

No, we had an atmosphere. It was mostly nitrogen and CO2. earlier on. It's been changing. But once life puts oxygen in the atmosphere, it changes everything.

And it's not theoretical. We have all this evidence in the archeological record that all these huge mass extinctions have happened over and over and over again. And one causes the birth of another thing. That's right. They were saying, in this period of 100,000 years of volcanoes going off, the size of the United States, that it admitted all this carbon into the atmosphere and 90 plus percent of everything living on earth died.

Yeah, I think that's the Ermian-Permian great extinction.

Ermian-Permian?

Maybe, don't quote me on that. But there was this massive release of CO2, which then the whole planet changed. And then the oceans really acidified. The great oxidation event was a mass death as well, because oxygen is really bad, actually. Took life a while to figure out how to deal, because oxygen's a corrosive.

So how, maybe I'm jumping ahead too far, but what do we look for when we're trying to see if one of these exoplanets has oxygen present? What do we see?

So that's the link. What's amazing is this third revolution, which was knowing. the history of Earth and its life, tells us that on any planet where life forms, it's gonna change the whole functioning of the planet. And that's what we can see from a distance. We didn't have this capacity before.

See the change.

We can see the change. We can see things in the atmosphere of an alien planet. It's just amazing that we can do this. First, we had to know that there were alien planets. Now we know where to look.

And now you're gonna do it in 75 seconds. I'm gonna do it in 75 seconds.

So one of the ways we find planets is if the planet's orbiting the star, when it passes between us and the star, it's like a little eclipse. The light blots out for a second. And then we'll be like, oh, we saw the eclipse, there's a planet there. But also, if the planet's got an atmosphere, some of the light passes through the atmosphere, some of the starlight, to get to us, to our telescopes. And when it passes through the atmosphere, some of the light gets absorbed.

It's generally missing something.

Exactly. You'll see a bunch of light, and then you'll see places where there is no light. Those absences are the fingerprint. We've discovered methane, we've discovered carbon dioxide. We're waiting to discover oxygen.

It's bonkers. What are we waiting for? We know the fingerprint of oxygen and methane.

What we're waiting for is, this shit is hard to do. The James Webb is the first telescope that really is just on the hairy edge of being able to do this, so we're gonna try.

This is the telescope that's just descending into space. Beyond the moon, yeah.

It's already up there. It's just sitting there, orbiting with us and the moon, and it's big enough, and it's got the right instruments on it where it can collect enough light and break apart the light, where we have a chance of seeing a biosignature. Or we can talk also about the technosignatures if we're looking for intelligent light. That's what the NASA grant I'm part of is for. Is more looking for intelligent light, right?

chlorofluorocarbons. Oh yeah, that we outlawed. They were in hairspray.

Yeah, hairspray and air conditioners. So it turns out CFCs, as they call them, are a great technosignature, because either you put them into the atmosphere by accident, or maybe you put them in there for a reason, because chlorofluorocarbons are actually a great greenhouse gas. And let's say you want to live on Mars, and you're like, Mars sucks, let's make Mars warm. Let's pump it full of chlorofluorocarbons, and then you'd have a much warmer Mars. So we could see chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere of an alien world now with the James Webb Space Telescope.

We already have seen this. No, we haven't. Oh, we haven't, okay, but we could.

We could, right. It would take a lot of time. You'd need to give me a lot of James Webb, but we just wrote a paper that showed it's possible.

And we believe that CFCs cannot occur naturally.

That's what it is.

It's gonna require some chemistry to put those together.

You really need a bunch of steps that nature just isn't gonna do.

Now, is that dangerous, though, to assume that there's not a ideal condition for that to emerge?

That's a great point. And with the idea of what they call false positives. Same thing with oxygen, because for a long time we're like, oxygen, it's the best. We have figured out a few ways that oxygen can naturally be put in, but it's under conditions that are so special that we'd know. You'd have to have a special kind of planet to have natural oxygen.

This would be like spitballing, but lightning breaking the hydrogen and oxygen bond of water or something. That's pretty close, that's good.

Come on down. So this is the freaky thing. The sun is not an average star. The sun is actually pretty big as stars go. The average size star, which means the most common, is about half the size of the sun and it's teeny tiny.

So instead of 93 million miles away, there might be a million.

Think of it in terms of orbits. It takes 365 days for us to orbit the sun. That's one year. These planets around the M dwarf stars will orbit in a week.

You guys, this would be so fond of vacation there, because if it were on an axis, you'd experience all the seasons in a week probably.

Yeah.

They might not have any. Well, she's right, because actually, what happens is, just like the moon, you always see the same face of the moon. That's because the moon is what's called tidally locked. The moon's day and its year are the same thing in terms of how long it orbits. As it rotates, it's always showing us the same face.

On the opposite side.

It's always dark. And it's freezing. Perpetual night on one side, perpetual noon on the other side. Wow. Freaky, right?

Wouldn't that be so wild to live on that planet, because to venture into the dark side. Talk about the odds.

It doesn't sound fun. I have seasonal affective disorder. I would hate it. there. You do not.

This is not where you're going. Yeah. This is not your vacation spot.

No, you'd love it, because you'd be on the side facing the sun. You could, that's true. This would never go down. This is the actual cure for your-.

Oh, I see.

Oh yeah. When you think about us crossing oceans and stuff, we were getting somewhere that environmentally was nearly identical to where we left. But this notion of exploring on a planet where it's frozen and black on one side, and how could you go in there? Yeah, it's very exciting.

And the Terminator, the day-night edge,

would be sharp and permanent.

Would be sharp, and it would just be permanent. And so people talk about like, maybe that's where life forms. Nobody knows, though. This is the cool thing. You can do a lot of theoretical work now about what's the climate on a planet like this?

Yeah.

It's really fun.

Wait, what, sorry. What's the actual definition of intelligent life?

Yeah, that's good. That's another change. that's happened. So when SETI first started in 1960, and you get the first generation of people really interested in it, they were all basically a bunch of white dudes who were reading a lot of science fiction. And so the definition of intelligence was a very narrow range.

Human intelligence.

Human intelligence, that it was all about gleaming spaceships. So what's cool is now that there's finally funding, there's finally people. systematically, and that's our job, is to systematically approach this, not as science fiction stories, but to try and lay out all the options. And so the idea that intelligence can only happen if you got a brain, a big neural system, that's one of the things we're like, eh, maybe there's other ways to think about this. Here's a really cool idea.

Self-organizing complex systems.

Dude, that's it. This Templeton grant, that's where we're all about, self-organizing, complex systems. So the idea that you need some kind of creature with big eyes and a big old centralized brain, it may be very different. Forests, forests could be, there's some white webs. Mushrooms with the fungal networks.

Even octopi, right? They're kind of shaking up our understanding of intelligence.

That's my understanding, right? There's kind of a brain in every tentacle?

Yeah, it's like spread out over their entire body. They have all these neurons, but they're not consolidated. one. But maybe relatively equal number of neurons. Right.

Wow. So that's what I love about this field. The old view that we had that aliens were Mr. Spock or some dude with like an antenna on his forehead. We're past that.

But would a minimum requirement be that they're manufacturing things? I mean, if we're looking for CFCs.

For technology, right. Technology would just be things that you have to be complex enough to assemble, right? You have to be able to harvest energy and put it to work to assemble things which, at lower levels, would just not be possible.

Right, okay. This took a long time for me to get out there, but in the past, when I've had these debates about aliens, my position is they undoubtedly exist. mathematically. It's not possible that they don't. But I do not think they've ever been here.

So this story about why starts with Eric Von Donegan's Chariots of the Gods and growing up in New Jersey. So we're back to Jersey, as we always should be.

Yes, with the boss.

Totally. So. somehow I'm 10 or 12 and I get a copy of Chariots of the Gods, which is the first ancient astronaut book. And I'm reading this, I'm like, holy crap, man. Aliens built the pyramids.

Uh-huh, sure.

With those giant, enigmatic stone heads. It was like, there's no trees there. How did they move the stone heads around? It had to be aliens. And my poor bio dad, who I'm talking to, and he's just rolling his eyes.

Yes, yes.

And that pissed me off. I felt like I had been duped. I got lied to. I got duped. I'm from Jersey, right?

Well, it's a very human bias. we have too. We had an expert just talking solely about that, that, not to be made a fool of, is one of our primary bias.

And in Jersey, it's dangerous, right? The whole thing about Jersey is everybody's gotta hustle. You better learn really quickly when you're getting taken, right? And so the fact that this guy had written this whole book and it was full of lies. He never even bothered to talk to the anthropologist who'd been living there for 40 years, studying every little nook and cranny.

Look, we have found the bones of velociraptors that are a hundred million years old. We have the proof of it. We have proof of nearly everything that's been here in the last a hundred million years. We can't find one weird piece of metal. There's nothing in the archeological record.

Interesting thing is actually, I did a paper with Gavin Schmidt, who's the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a bunch of years back, which got a lot of attention, where we said, look, if there was an ancient civilization here, like, say, a hundred million years ago, would you be able to tell? Turns out, no, because after about two million years, the earth is almost entirely resurfaced. No buildings, like, there's not gonna be anything left. And most stuff doesn't get fossilized. So, in fact, actually, if somebody had set up shop here a hundred million years ago and was here for 10,000 years, you probably wouldn't have any evidence of it.

Well, what about the machines and the metals that they have? Yeah, it would all corrode. It would all oxidize and rust into nothing.

Yeah, it would get oxidized and get ripped up.

Back to oxygen being bad. Yeah, right. Okay, you put the brake on that.

I put the brake on that. The reason we were asking the question, it was just because it was just a great scientific question. Like, how would you know? And it turns out, well, the only way to look would be through isotopic anomalies and such, and nobody's ever really looked at that kind of evidence. So the point is, while one cannot say scientifically that we've never been visited, right?

Yeah, but that sounds a little bit like we have no scientific evidence that an elephant hasn't flown across a canyon. That's true. Right. We don't, but we're pretty, we can.

What about the video that went around?

Oh, we're gonna get into a whole chapter of UAPs.

Yeah, UAPs. So I would just say that when it comes to the ancient alien stuff, because really they're talking about the last 20,000 years, archeological history, not paleontological.

We're attempting to explain some of the early advanced civilizations.

Right, and that, I think, is just, because I've been asked on that show a bunch of times, ancient aliens? I was like, no. And the producer was like, why not? I was like, because your show's bullshit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Intuitively, I think. Well, I know the distances required to get here or for us to get anywhere else. So you're talking about most likely some carbon-based life form traveling at the speed of light for the duration of their whole life and then their children's whole life. So you're talking about dedicating four or five generations to going and observing something that would be so primitive,

That's a great way to put it, yeah.

I just intuitively don't think anyone would commit those resources and all that to come. look at us primitive primates. So I guess, then it opens up, okay, so I guess, maybe they would send an AI rover. I could buy that. But no one's claiming to see AI rovers, they're claiming to see aliens.

Right, if we're talking about UFOs and UAPs in general, I am glad that the pilots feel like they can say what they've seen.

Well, let's bring everyone up to speak, because I don't know that everyone would know. Recently, the government decided to declassify all these different sightings.

Well, there was only actually, okay, so let's just talk about it, because I want people to understand UFOs and UAPs from a scientist's perspective. And just like there's been a transition in what I call the giggle factor in the scientific study of life, that giggle factor's going away now. And scientists are all in, certainly on studying for biosignatures. Technosignatures, we're still having to do our work. This NASA grant that I got, that was the first NASA grant to study intelligent life.

Well, Congress heard about it for the first time.

So let's talk about how this happened. 2017, the New York Times publishes this story that has these three videos from the cameras of Navy jets seeing, which the government is now calling UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. And the fact that the New York Times covered it, the fact that New York Times is saying there's a Pentagon committee or Pentagon program to study these, that blew the doors off the wall. Everyone's like, oh my God, UFOs are real. The government's in on it.

Can I ask why it was necessary to go from unidentified flying object to phenomena?

Branding.

Oh, cause it was so stinky with pseudoscience.

Yeah, exactly. UFOs, I cover the history of UFOs from the first big sighting in 1947 to Roswell. Oh my God, what a shit show, Roswell. You know, it's been full of either really bad data, like just blurry photographs. Six, 70 years of blurry photographs, even though camera technology has gotten so much better.

They're still the same shitty.

The same shitty blah, but it's like, come on, my... All right, well, before we go down that road. So it's either been blurry photographs, people reporting things, it's great. I'll never tell somebody they didn't see what they thought they see. But I can't do science with that.

Well. Is it just a blur? I don't remember.

Have you seen them?

I don't remember if I saw them.

To me, I thought it was like one of the most wonderful examples of confirmation bias. Like if you already believed in it, this is obvious proof to you. And I even try to tap into that mindset to see how that could be so convincing. Because I heard first about the congressional committee that's gonna look at them and then the Pentagon coalition to study it. So then I'm thinking, well, this new crop of images is gonna be incredible.

There are these three videos. They each have names like Go Fast, Clear, and I forgot what the other one is. And they just get digested again and again. The actual videos, you've got a blob. In one case, the blob seems to rotate very quickly.

They had misdiagnosed the distance.

Once you just applied a little bit of scientist, it seemed much less weird. And then the one that rotates suddenly, that suddenly like nothing can do that. There's a guy named Mick West who's just run experiments in his garage to show these cameras rotate. So that's not the ship rotating or the spacecraft, the tic-tac. It's just the camera rotating.

Right. Let's also take half a second. If you're a believer, I also think it's the most beautiful part of human beings. I know. It truly is.

That's what it is.

I thought it was so dumb. People I kind of trust were getting very excited about this and were finally going to know. And I was like, oh, this must be really good stuff.

It's a blur. It's another blog.

I can't have the right video.

Yeah, they're all just blogs.

I've seen more impressive fucking Bigfoot videos.

When the Chinese spy balloon was up, there's a photograph of one of the pilots who's turning, whatever his jet is. I'm not sure if it is, but it looks like he's literally taking a selfie. And he's got a picture with his cell phone, I think, of the Chinese spy balloon. And you can see the rivets on the solar panels, on the payload beneath the balloon. And it's like, come on.

Yeah, what I would argue is like, you're right to believe that and stay excited, but just look elsewhere, which is the work you're doing. You should be excited.

You should be excited. We're on the verge. We're the last generation that doesn't know the answer to the question, are we alone? Which also means we may be the first generation to have an answer. And that is happening now.

Now, are you able to observe, and I guess this was more what SETI was looking for, or maybe not, but we're emitting all kinds of our own light. that's signature of technology. Is it that it's so low energy, it's hard to detect that far away? Or is that possible?

We started producing techno signatures, either cause we were emitting radio waves, or the night side of the planet started to get lit up, or we started dumping chemicals into the atmosphere. only a hundred years ago. So you'd have to be less than a hundred light years away to have gotten any of those signals.

Oh, right. Well, hold on. Let's think on that. That's worth thinking.

It is, it's pretty cool.

So anyone that's 105 light years away looking at earth right now.

Let's make it easy to say 500 light years away. You'd be looking at earth as it was 500 years ago. And you're not going to see Rome.

You would only be able to see the light, the radiation and all that.

The earth has had bio signatures for billions of years.

Yeah, I kind of went out of order. I'm saying you would need that for proof and it didn't exist. then. I think that's one of the funnest parts of astronomy is the time travel element.

Yeah, the delay.

The sun, right? It's like eight and a half minutes.

Even you and me, I'm not seeing you as you are. I'm seeing you as we're like a nanosecond ago. Like we're all kind of trapped in our own little. And so if I'm looking at that tree, that's like five nanoseconds ago, but I'm also seeing you, which is one nanosecond ago, right? So to me, it's the present, but none of it's the present.

That's so crazy. But that's why. Physics is fun. I think. when people hear that we're looking back at the beginning of the universe, that's so confusing, especially if they have some sense that the universe is five or six billion years old, or whatever, they're like, well, how is that the case?

And when you look out in space, because the speed of light is finite, you know, it doesn't instantly arrive. When you look out into space, you're also looking back in time. It's not just for galaxies. It's for you and me in the room. Whenever I'm looking around in the room, I'm always seeing things that are a little bit back in time.

I really like the thought of seeing things from two different or three different or five different times. Past. Yeah, past.

The overlapping past.

This is relativity, right?

Yeah, it's relativity. Things that you think are simultaneous. that happened at the same time. That's relative. If you're moving at some speed relative to me, what I thought happened at the same time, you'll see, no, that happened first, and then the other thing happened.

There is an order. There is. Depending on where you're standing.

Where you're standing, it's relative. The order is relative.

Oh, love it. Wow. What's the Fermi paradox? I probably should ask you that about an hour ago.

In the book, I talk about this amazing decade of the fifties because people have been arguing about are we alone for 2,500 years? It's the oldest question collectively. Maybe what happens after you die? Is there a God? But these questions have been around forever.

Yeah, tell me the Drake equation.

Yeah, so the Drake equation, Frank Drake does this experiment in 1960, and then he thinks everybody's making fun of him. Instead, he gets a call from the government. We want you to lead a panel on interstellar communications. He organizes this small meeting. The young Carl Sagan goes.

Yes, we've talked about this. Some of those scientists had sex with the dolphins.

I'm not sure if he had sex with the dolphins.

Okay, yeah, let's not say he did, but let's just say.

They lived, they brought the dolphin into the apartment or whatever.

They put dolphins in a fucking apartment. There is a documentary, and one of the female scientists is like, you just had to jerk the dolphin off the second you got in the water, or you couldn't study them. That's all they could think about.

He stumbled upon a topic that we have gotten into a lot.

We've had more conversations about humans having sex with dolphins than any other topic. Anyways, if you're giving dolphins acid, everything's happening.

Yeah, so anyway, Lily was one of them. So the interesting thing that happens is, Frank Drake, the meeting's coming up, and he's like, well, what are we gonna talk about? He needs an agenda for the meeting. What he does is, he says, okay, our question is, how many civilizations are out there? How do we talk about that?

Uh-huh, two of the seven.

We're looking now for the next one, which is the biosignatures, is the fraction of planets where life could form, where it does form. So we're on the verge of answering that one. And, of course, if we find technosignatures, game over, because we just answered the whole thing. Skipped all the other ones. We skipped all the other ones.

I hate when you physicists come in here and say billion trillion. I can't handle that.

Can I hit you with one other one that we were trying to wrap our head around watching this Life on Planet Earth nature show? They're showing the rise of insects and the proliferation of insects. And they said, for every human on earth, there's a billion insects. Ew. So eight billion times a billion.

In your apartment.

Isn't that insane?