From the Vault: The Search For Alien Life, with Astrophysicist Adam Frank

know whatever, and those pictures. You know, every cover had a semi lurid illustration of dudes bouncing around on you know, alien worlds and michel entire space suits or rocket ships blasting through space, or bug eyed monsters and aliens. And

from that moment on, like, I've never had any other choice. So, you know, after thirty years of being an astronomer, of being an astrophysicist, including you know, a fair amount of time recently last decade or so focusing on astrobiology, I wrote the book because I really wanted people to see how close we were to scientists finding evidence one way or the other for alien life where they live on alien planets.

up as a kid Star Trek reruns. You had Lost in Space, which was terrible, right, and then there was all the bad science fiction movies from the fifties that would rerun on like Saturday morning at eleven thirty on what was called Chiller Theater, which was you know, on Channel eleven back in the days when you only had like five or six channels. So I devoured everything, and so the things, the highbrow stuff I loved were my dad. I remember one night my dad wakened me up and say,

come on, come on, you gotta watch this. And it was Forbidden Planet, right, which is this classic which is amazing because it's the embodiment of the nineteen fifties pulp science fiction. But it's really smart, right, It's really actually based on the Tempest and the key idea that it has in there, which I explore in the book quite a bit. I have a whole chapter on it, is the idea of dead ancient alien civilizations, right, the vision of the Krell machinery when they're down in the planet,

if anybody's ever seen there. So, you know, so all of Star Trek, all you know, movies like This Island Earth, you know, which wasn't so great, but so all of that really shaped my own on thinking about about aliens and about space. It really mattered quite a bit to me. There's also a show called UFOs, which do you know of that one? Have you ever seen that?

So pretty much anything I could get my hands on I watched endlessly, and of course Marvel Comics, because there was a whole space side of you know, star Lord. You know. When I when I, you know, I was the the science advisor for Doctor Strange and I got to meet Kevin Figi. We were, you know, in the room working on the script together, and he asked me, you know, what was your favorite star Marvel and I

got to like totally nerd out. And there's this like one, this little known edition of star Lord from the seventies, which was actually my favorite because it was a space opera, it was a space adventure. So all of that really shaped my pop culture understanding. And up until streaming, I think I could claim I'd seen every science fiction movie TV show ever made by stream. When streaming happened, it was I was overwhelmed.

optimistic views of what UFOs could consist of. So I can't help but wonder how many others were sort of fundamentally primed that way toward the possibility of alien life.

when I was coming up. When I was coming up as a graduate student in the eighties, the search for life was either a joke or it was considered a dead end because the Viking probes in the seventies to Mars hadn't really found anything, so it was a really sort of dead paer in the search for life. And then but now, you know, for reasons I'm sure we're going to talk about, and the reason they know that, which is what a lot of the book is about.

We're really you know, the next giant telescope is only is going to be built focusing on the detection of life. So you're right that the pop culture really shaped a lot of people's opinions about what we should think about with aliens and what life in the universe might be. Now, you know, as I discussed in the book, and I'm sure we're going to talk about, I'm very skeptical about that UFOs have anything to do with life outside the universe.

But again, as you say, the pop culture stuff, the UFOs and the TV and the movies, whether hybrow or lowbrow, shaped people's understanding of how we should be thinking about life in the universe. And the amazing thing about the science is the science takes us actually in a more imaginative and more amazing directions because you've got to really

try and think about it in a systematic way. But it's it's interesting to note, right, many people are afraid of aliens or feeling, you know, they're it's either one either the aliens are like these gods who are coming down to give us the cures for cancer, or they're coming to eat us or mate with us, you know, one of the others.

But really one of the reasons he got in trouble was he was advocating for this Pernican view that the Earth was just one planet of many, and many of those planets out among the stars would be inhabited. But what happens, actually the first pivotal decade is the fifties, because you get the Fermi paradox and you get the

Drake equation. You get these two things happening at the beginning of the end, which are the first sort of scientific the scientific questions, questions that you could ask a you could ask scientifically, you could pose a research problem and carry it out. And then Drake, Frank Drake carries out at the end of that nineteen sixty the first

astro biological experiment ever done. So he takes two radio telescopes and he points him at the sky and he looks for signals from you know, an intelligent civilization something like might be beaming off of Earth right now. And that is the first time anybody's been able to do any kind of experiment asking whether it's dumb life, you know,

microbial life, or smart life meaning that builds civilizations. So that launches SETI, that launches the scientific inquiry about a life the universe, and through most of the sixties it's now SETI becomes a field, but it's very marginal. It's still in the you know, there's a few brave scientists doing it, but it's still kind of seen to be

kind of out there. And then what happens is the UFOs and everything that's going on with UFOs, which is you know, tends to be the conspiracy theories and the hoaxes and the that starts to cloud the public's opinion about and the scientists even opinion about things like SETI. Now NASA is also at the same time conducting searches, is thinking about life on planets in the Solar System. So there's the Viking landers to Mars, which scoop up some soil and try and test for sort of earthlike microbes.

Those have inconclusive results, negative or inconclusive results. So by the time you coming into the eighties, the search for life in the universe is either you still have this sort of what we call the giggle factor that if you tried to mention the search for life in the universe, particularly the search for intelligent life meaning industrial technology life, yeah, eyebrows are going to raise Congress literally some congressmen make hay and that there's I talk about this the giggle

factor in the book and show people how this happened. Congress like doesn't even allow NASA to fund SETI because the congressmen are like, this is a waste of taxpayers dollars. You know. So by the time you're into the late eighties, when I'm a graduate student, SETI is just there's a few brave pioneers who are living on you know, private funds, not that SETI. SETI never really got a lot of funding, and that's an important part part of this, but it's

living on fumes. There really is barely any SETI going on, and people the thought about, you know, even dumb life on planets had stalled, and so by you know, when you're coming into the nineteen nineties, the idea of life in the universe is almost nobody cares. Nobody's paying except for you know, some pioneers. And certainly when I was a scientist, then there was a sense of like, don't even think about that. That's a dead end, you know,

or you're going to become a joke. Don't waste your career on that, which is amazing because again that's the point of the book is to show that right now, this is the this is the most important issue in astronomer or one of the most important issues in astronomy. If you're a young astronomer, good shot that you're going to aim your career at astrobiology. Quite a change, right.

Drake equation. So let's deal with Let's think about the Fermi paradox first. The Fermi paradox just asked the question if life is common, particularly intelligent life, then why aren't they everywhere? Right? And that can take two forms. One

is why aren't they here now? Right? But FORMI recognize very quickly he's he kind of did the calculation in his head and saw that a spacefaring race, even if it's going at it can only go at a tenth of the speed of light, which we believe is the limit for any and nothing can travel faster than light. That you would cross the galaxy and you could hop from star system to star system in a time that's

very short compared to the age of the galaxy. Long for us, it's on the order of six hundred thousand years. But in terms of the galaxy, the galaxy should be entirely populated. So one way of interpreting that is why aren't they here now? Right? And so there's various answers

to that. But there's an indirect version of that, which is more important because people often have this feeling that, oh, every night, astronomers like take their telescopes and look at the sky searching for evidence of alien intelligences, right, and nothing could be further from the truth. Right. That's a version what I call that the indirect Fermi paradoxes. Well, We've looked and we haven't found But as I've said, because of the giggle factor, we haven't looked, right, We

just we have not done those searches. There's never been any money funding to use telescopes to do that. So Jason Wright and colleagues did a study where they showed that if the sky was like the ocean, how much of the ocean have we searched and you know, and aliens were fish, how much of the ocean have we searched for? And answer is a hot tub? Right, that's how all you take all the steady searches and you combine them, and we've basically looked at a hot tubs

worth of ocean. Now, if you looked at a hot tubs worth of water and didn't find any fish, would you then say, up, there's no fish in the ocean. So the answer is we just haven't looked. But we are looking now, Like finally there's funding, right, Finally there's there's a community of scientists with the backing of you know, the government science agencies to really start this search for life. Whether it's whether it's again dumb life or smart life,

it doesn't matter. We're finally we finally know where to look. We finally know how to look, and we're looking. So that's the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation. What's important about it was in nineteen sixty after doing this his first search, he was asked by the Government of all People to lead a workshop on interstellar communications. And so they brought together a few people, the eight or nine researchers. And what Drake needed to do he needed an agenda for

the meeting, like what do we even talk about? And what he did is he took the problem the question is how many intelligence civilizations are there in the galaxy? And he broke it up into seven sub problems, which when you multiplied their answer together, you'd get the answer to the big question. And it turned out that those sub problems became so famous because he offered people a way of breaking this big problem up into smaller problems that you could actually do research on. For example, the

first sub problem is how many stars are there? Right, that's the first thing you want to know, and we already he already knew that, right. The second sub problem was how many planets are there? Or what's the fraction of stars with planets at the time, nobody knew what that was. It could have been that the universe was barren. You know, that our solar system was a freak and most stars don't have planets. And now we've answered that question thanks to the Drake equation, and people said, like, oh,

that's the next question we need to answer. We now know that every star in the sky hosts a family of worlds. That is that's one of the that happened in the nineties, the beginning of the nineties, and that was the beginning of this change. Right. That was a massive revolution in astrobiology because it told us that the place where life forms, which is planets, those are common,

those are as cheap as dirt. And then the next term in the Drake equation was for every star that has planets, how many planets are in the right place for life to form, which we think has to do with liquid water on the surface. What's the what's the you know, how many are in this this Goldilocks ban of orbits where it's not too hot, not too cold, so you can have liquid water on the surface. And the answer for that is one in five. So go

outside tonight, look up at the night sky. Every star you see has has worlds orbiting it, and every five of those has a planet that's sitting there where the experiment with life and civilizations even is being run by the universe.

of the star and blocks the light. But if the planet has an atmosphere, there's a little while when the light from the star passes through the atmosphere and reaches us. And when that happens, it leaves an imprint. There's some of the light is absorbed by chemicals, compounds, molecules in the atmosphere, and we can use that. Every one of those imprints is like a fingerprint of what's in that atmosphere. So we call that atmospheric characterization. And so what's in

that imprint it potentially are signatures of things like a biosphere. Right, so the Earth has a biosphere. It's the sum total of all the life on the planet, all the plants, all the planktin. It leaves a giant imprint in the light from Earth, and the same thing can happen in an alien world. So a biosignature would be something like oxygen right on Earth. The only reason oxygen is in the atmosphere is because life puts it there. If life

goes away, the oxygen goes away very quickly. So if you discover oxygen on a in an alien world, that's a good shot that that planet has life a robust biosphere. So oxygen dimethyl sulfide, that is a chemical which is in Earth's atmosphere. It's only there because all the plankton are kind of farting it out there. So we have a whole long list and that we're we're generating more and more lists of biosignatures which if we detect them, that will be and that will be evidence that there's

life on that planet. Techno signatures this is this is a newer field. And as you say, I'm the principal investigator on the first time NASA was willing to fund the search for intelligent life. Last NASA been funding the search for dumb life for a while, but because of that giggle factor, techno signatures or you know, intelligent life was not on the list. Now it is. So the group I'm part of we are looking for we're designing, we're coming up with the list of possible techno signatures.

So one, what are they? One, we just wrote a paper on this. Chemicals, industrial chemicals, So for example, chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs. These are the things that you know, we were using in air conditioners that got pumped into the atmosphere and we're destroying the ozone hole, right. Those things actually, so either by pollution or if you were trying to terraform mars, you would purposely pump them into an atmosphere

because they're great greenhouse gases. Actually, so we showed that even with the James Web Space Telescope, you could detect chloroflora carbons in the atmosphere of a world that was forty light years away and if it had levels close to our level even now. So those that's if we and chloroflora carbons cannot be there is just no way nature produces them. They're too complex and weird. Or so discover those you've discovered there's a technological civilization there on

that planet. If you discovered those in a planet's atmosphere, city lights, if you know, if a civilization is using artificial illumination, we may be able to detect the spectral signature, the signature in light of those cities. The large scale use of solar panels, you would be able to see the reflectants, all that light bouncing off the solar panels, you'd be able to see. And the list goes on

and on. We may be able to detect if you have a lot of satellites in orbit, in geosynchronous orbit, you might be able to detect They call that the Clark Belt after Arthur C. Clark. You might be able to detect that. So you know, the list goes on and these we're figuring out now exactly how to look for those, so once people start doing these observations, they'll be able to they'll be able to know exactly where

to look. So it's amazing we actually have the technology now so that over the next ten years, twenty years, thirty years, we're going to have actual data relevant to the question, whereas the last two than five hundred years have been people yelling at each other or burning each other at the stake.

still an ongoing concern. And you know, with one of the important pieces of the history that I talk about in the book is boujoyan star or Tabby Star people called him, and this was a. This was a star we were looking at with you know, the Kepler space telescope, which is a planet finder, and rather than the sort of smooth the clips that we expect when a planet passes in front of the star, what they were seeing

signals of like they couldn't understand it. It was like the light from the star was blotting out and then coming back and then blotting out again, blotting, blotting, not thing. And for you know, so when people were thinking about this, they made their list of possible you know what this was comets, clouds of dust, broken up planets, and at the bottom list was alien megastructures. And that was twenty fourteen,

twenty seventeen. That blew the doors off of the old The fact that they even mentioned this in the paper and that everyone was like, oh, yeah, okay, it could be kind of signaled that, you know, if you're doing this work, you can't laugh, you can't giggle about that possibility anymore. If you're going to stare at hundreds thousands of planets and you know, look for biosignatures, you can't ignore the possibility of that some of these are going

to have techno signatures. So that was really that was an art an apocryphal moment in this study where people were finally, you know, the giggle factor had was gone, and it's like, yeah, sure, okay, that's one of the things we have to consider. It's probably last on the list because you want to consider things you already know exist, but it's there, and then you know, at some point we may have a planet where you really are going to take that seriously.

since the nineteen nineties. Every week there's a new story

earth like planet found orbiting other stars. The fact that scientists have been so clearly been willing to take the search for life seriously on alien worlds, I think helped in some way smooth the ground for this, you know, explosion of interest in UAPs and the whole I document both the history of you know, UAP or UFOs going back to nineteen forty seven, the first the first sighting, and people really need to know that because that shapes

a lot of UFO culture to what's happening now. With that twenty seventeen New York Times article, right, that's what blew everything out of the water, with those three videos which have been you know, cycle endlessly over and over again, and people sort of think there's lots of videos, there's really only those three. But the important thing is, I think that for people to understand where we're at right and where we're going, and that's what I try and

give people in the book. So the first thing is that absolutely, for a scientists, there is no evidence, not even close, that would link anything about UFOs or UAPs to alien life to something non human. Right, and you actually and that's why I wanted people to you know, if you actually look even what has happened since twenty seventeen, that this that conclusion holds. You know, scientists are brutal.

We're really really mean to each other. You know about like trying to link a piece of data to a claim, right, and where we are brutal and nasty to each other, because that is how we can ensure that we're correct.

If we weren't brutal and nasty to each other, you and I wouldn't be using these amazing technologies, right, you know, quantum mechanics, electronics, you know, electromagnetism, all the technology, all the science that goes into the technology you and I are using right now was because scientists are so mean to each other. And the day for UFOs and UAPs

just isn't even close to that. It's either blurry photographs, which haven't changed over seventy years, right, I mean, there's still blurry photographs come on or personal testimony and personal testimony, it's it's not much science can do with that. So I think it's great that the pilots feel that they you know, pilots have the freedom to report what they're seeing because you know, they are seeing something. The question

is what are they seeing? So like Ryan Graves, you know, he's one of the pilots who's involved with this, and I was on his podcast. You know, I've had some really great conversations. So that's great, And I'm all for an open, transparent, you know, investigation by like they'd say, the NASA panel or Project Galileo. It's for to investigate this, right and let's just let's go where the data leads us.

But as of right now, that data does not lead us anywhere that would point to extraterrestrial So, for example, at the nat so, the NASA panel held a hearing and you know, they were talking about their results and the result of some of the other agencies, and you know, one of the things that was talked about there was, you know, of the of the thousand or eight hundred or so sightings, including those you know from the military that the government has and announced in that famous report

in twenty twenty one, only six percent couldn't be explained right, only six percent right, which means that the sky the other ninety four percent had reasonable explanations. The sky is not full of unexplainable stuff, which you know, the hype around UFOs and UAPs makes it seem like, oh my god. And then even that six percent, you know, some of those are unexplained because you don't even have you can't

even begin to make an explanation. Now. I will note, though, and I talk about this in the book, that some of the ones in the unexplained category are truly when you hear the stories, you know are truly freaky deeky right in the sense like a ghost story, it raises the hair on the back of your neck. But until you do the research, you know those ones are probably

we'll see, we'll just see where those go. But the is the vast overwhelming majority are either explainable or don't have enough data to explain, with a tiny minority that are like, wow, okay, that's interesting and then we're just

going to have to do the rea. But again, that's so even with that category, that's not a place that you're or that's not enough to be make this jump to this enormous conclusion that that that aliens are visiting us because you know, again, you need this very solid data chain, not just personal testimony, not that somebody said, oh, the radar operator said it was moving at this speed. I need to see the instrument. I need to know

how that instrument was built. I need to know every just like I would with the James Webspace telescope.

compared to every other physical system. So I'm involved. I have a part of a project from actually the PI on this other study where we're also just looking at the physics of life. We're trying to answer why is life so different from every other physical system? Right? So for example, you know, black holes are weird, black holes are crazy, right, But a black hole will never invent a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face,

which is a kangaroo. Right. Only evolution does that. Life is the only physical system which invents, which creates, which innovates, And right now, as far as we know, we're the only example of life in the entire universe. Like, you know, are we a one off? Are we an accident? Are we a mistake? Or is life with all of its creative capacity common? Because even if it's just life, even if it's just microbes, it means that we're part of

a community, a cosmic community of life. And because of life's innovative capacities, who knows, you know, if it's if life is common, who knows where it's gone. I don't need to find an alien civilization. I just need to find a microbe because then I know that evolution is something that the universe does more than just here, and evolution is unbounded. Evolution can do anything. So I don't think we would have riots in the street, you know,

I don't think that's going to be necessary. But I do think you know, if people want an example, the Copernican Revolution, right, you know, in fortune hundred, you went to bed and you were like, oh, the sun's going to rise tomorrow because the Earth is the center of the universe and the sun goes around the Earth. And then two hundred years later you went to bed and

you're like, oh, the sun doesn't come up. The horizon goes down because the Earth is spinning as it goes around the Sun. And that was just an astronomical discovery. And yet the Copernican Revolution figures in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation. It was, you know, it was a game changer. It actually rewired how all of humanity understood itself and what was possible. So you know, these astronomical discoveries don't just sit out there in some egghead's brain.

You know, they matter, and they always have mattered. So finding life in the universe one way or the other would change everything. Finding a civilization would that Now that outright, that takes us even further. And I think the most important thing there is, you know, we are so horrible

to each other. We're such a messed up species. And though we're capable of so much, and it's not clear whether or not, through nuclear war, climate change, or AI, whether we're going to still be around in one hundred years or five hundred years. Finding a civilization, as I discussed in the book, because we did research on this, would mean we would Finding a civilization means finding an

older civilization. That's what the probability tells you. Anything you find will be older, and that means somebody made it right. It would be It would be like an existence proof that long lived civilizations are possible, and without we don't have to have contact with them, we don't have to talk to them. Just knowing they were there would be proof that, yeah, you know what, it's possible to get through all of that evolutionary baggage and you know, make it last for a long time.

probably has to follow. So that means you can use those as kind of guide rails. You know, remember when you were bowling when you were a little kid and had those bumper rails that kept your ball. That's what science is, right, Science is constrained imagination. You want to use your imagination, but you also don't want to just write science fiction story, so you can use those three

principles physics, chemistry and Darwinian evolution. And the cool thing about that is is you see an evolution there are two forces. There's convergence. Physics and chemistry is going to give life problems. How do you move around? How do you find food? You know? Are you on a are you in a water world? Are you you know? Are you in a world that has a surface and then an atmosphere. Evolution will probably find the same kinds of

solutions to those problems, like, for example, wings right. If you have an atmosphere, then you know, passing air over a curved surface great way to get around, right wings. But it doesn't mean the wings look will look anything like what has happened here. Could be like some kind of weird bony frame with like mucus, a gooey mucus, you know, in between them. That was just something I have to think of some ideas. So, but evolution also

works by accidents, like a trillion accidents. So this battle between accidents and sort of the the you know physics and chemistry means that you know, legs well, you should expect to find legs being you know, evolved in lots of plays, but don't expect them to look anything like what we have here. And in fact, accidents are so important that Stephen J. Gould, the great evolutionary biologist, said that if you rewind the tape of life on Earth and allowed it to start over again, you wouldn't have

any species of the kind that we have today. Everything would be different. And this leads to a startling conclusion, which is that in spite of Star Trek and in spite of Star Wars, we are the only humans in the entire universe. We are the only humanoids in the entire universe. So we should not expect to find, you know, little grays, little green men. You know, the idea of a head on top of shoulders, with two arms and two legs, you know, maybe with an antenna on the forehead.

You know, I talk about the whole idea of prosthetic foreheads, in the prevalence of prosthetic foreheads in sci fi. That's just not going to happen, you know, the odds are you know, it's pretty remote. So when we think about life in the universe, we should expect to be surprised, and we might also expect to be grossed out by what we find. So that's the first point, and then

we can talk about alien ethics and alien minds. There's always this idea that, oh, you know, we're gonna be able to figure out a way to communicate because they'll, you know, like Carl Sagan thought, oh well, we'll teach them our math and then we'll translate our math to their math, and that will be the beginning, you know. And then very soon after you know, figuring out that pie you know is involved with circles, we'll be sharing knock knock jokes and cures for cancer. But that may

not be possible at all. And my favor one of my favorite science fiction movies is a Rival, right with that great you know, they send in aliens arrived, They send in a Carl Sagan kind of character and a linguist, and the Carl Sagan character, with his you know, using math to communicate fails spectacularly. And it's the linguist who

understands that language is not about mathematics. It's about the experience of being in a body and living, and she makes contact to find out that they actually have a very different kind of physics even they live or experience of physics. They live past, present and future at the same time. So I think, you know, the beautiful part about this study, the scientific study, is how we can

use science to systematically explore or imagine the unimaginable. Right O. What we have to do now is get beyond the terrestrial and imagine life as we don't know it. And there's a bunch of different projects by different people. You know, we're trying to do this in our own project, but to really break past the boundaries of Earth life. And that's really exciting because you know, it's great to go places where you know, you want to be surprised. The universe is much more imaginative than we are.

horizon on imagining what aliens could want. And then also of course just sort of brings us to a limit and realize, oh, there are all these other things we can't even imagine.

are my biases? What have I what have I been blinding myself to identify those, and then you can see like, oh oh, I got to go around those, you know, and begin to work on that. So, uh, you know,

the science fiction writers. I've always wanted to have a meeting between scientists and science fiction writers because I, you know, I'm a I read a lot of science fiction, and I find often a lot of my best ideas that I want to pursue in research come from you know, science fiction writers as storytellers have a kind of imaginative capacity that I think we lack in science because of

these biases that we've put on for ourselves. And so but then they're systematically doing it right in the sense that they have to write a story that has, you know, challenges and obstacles, et cetera. So I think that could be really fruitful. And that's part of this frontier that we're on. We're going to look for life, and as we look for life, we have to look for things that are not just replicas of life here on Earth.

Mind with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail, on Wednesdays we do a short form Artifa Monster Fact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. And yes, we have been meaning to discuss Forbidden Planned and maybe this islander for some time, so I don't know, Maybe this conversation will encourage us to go ahead and view one of those selections.

As always, you can follow us wherever you follow your various shows online where on. All of our social media accounts are now reactivated. I recommend you check them out. We are STBYM podcast on Instagram, so follow us there if you're not already following us, and if you want to get in touch with us, you can email us directly at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.