Selects: How SETI Works

What is that? What was that? That was my instation? That was burgess, Meredith. Okay, thank you, that's pretty good. Thanks. It's a good Burgess Meredith. Chuck, you're in the mood for alien talk. Sure, this is the second time we've done something like this. Almost a year later, right at it? We did? Uh how UFOs work live in Austin, Yeah, last March. So yeah, I guess once a year we do aliens aliens? Yea um. But hey, before we get started,

may I take a second. Yeah, I want to just say special high to my wife Umi, right, who made me the happiest guy in February. Yeah, I could just call her on February when we got married. Indeed, Yeah, any dats Are you just gonna no, that's all all right. I was just wanting ever, I wanted to share my happiness with everybody out there. Very well done, thank you very much. Hey Umi, So let's get back to aliens. Okay, yes, okay. So we are doing this in honor of Are We Alone?

Month on Science Channel? Right, So the month of March is are We Alone? Month? And Science Channel Every Tuesday, I believe at Tan is having a premiere of, um some new show that has something to do with the search for extraterrestrial life. Yeah, it's gonna be very cool. And I mean there's some like all shows are gonna be awesome, but there's some that are clearly going to be really awesome, like Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.

I mean that in the context of an are We Alone? Month? Yeah, it's big news. Also, um uh the Alien Encounters with Nick Sagan got to be related to Carl Carl Pilkington, yes uh. And then if you're in the mood for a contest, what would a month be without one? There is a set live contest where the prize is to go visit cet no Way, go to the California to the institute. Yes, pretty sweet. Yes, So this is all

going on on Science Channel all month long. And if you want more details watch Science Channel pal yeah, or hit him up on Facebook. I bet they have info there. Yeah. And in honor of this month is very special month, we are doing how study works, which is an acronym study if you don't know, for to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Yes, and I joked before we did this, are we Alone? Month will be followed by yes We're Alone Day sort of a joke. But they haven't really found a lot

of stuff yet. Well, I don't know. Let me let me give you an example of something. Have you heard of the wild signal? Yeah, we talked about this before we did when I think it might have been one of the webcasts. It definitely rang a bell that had your stank on it. No, we talked about the Yosemite Sam signal. I know, but I think we talked about a couple of years ago. Okay, well, old webcast, let me tell you again. Let me refresh your memory, because

you clearly don't remember. August fifty seven, a guy who's now known as Dr Jerry or Aman e h m A N I keep wanting to call him ermine. Yeah he uh. He was manning the Big Year Radio telescope at Ohio State University UM and was analyzing some data from it, and so basically saw, this is what it looks like. It's a it's a bunch of numbers and letters. It looks like the matrix scroll very much. So, yes, Um.

But what that is is a burst of radio activity transmitted on the one four, two oh point four or five six mega hurts frequency for seventy two seconds W A L N right right um. And it was basically the closest thing we've ever gotten to hard evidence of a radio transmission from an alien civilization. It meant like all of the criteria that set he follows, which will talk about later UM for um radio transmissions from intelligent life. Right Um. The problem is is after searching for for

like fifty times, specifically, it's never been found again. And the reason it's called the wow Um transmission is because Jerry Ahman Um circled it and wrote wow with an exclamation point, and that's that's why it's called that. So although since that time, nothing else has come up in that same area and we haven't had anything even remotely close to it. Set still continues, right, Yeah, and CT is both a a movement and a group of people.

It's an institute. Yeah, well there's the SETI Institute and there's just independent Set Operations. Yeah. I mean you can use SET as a would that be an down because it is a search? Yeah, yeah, you're right, just a funky nown right, But let's talk about it, Chuck, let's

talk about set the challenges that has. Uh. Well, first of all, if you've seen the movie Contact I have apparently it's not two and accurate from the writer of this article who was Freud and Lake, wasn't it, He said that that movie, if you want to watch that one, is fairly accurate and on track. Well, it was based on a book written by Carl Sagan and he definitely knew his stuff. Yeah, he was like, the Sagan Institute is one of the parts of CET Institute, very nice

or the second Research Center, I think. So go ahead, and you're saying, oh, well, so let's talk a little bit about the origin of it. Um SET came about in a time when there was a large intellectual push towards searching for alien life. A lot of very very smart people suddenly started postulating that there's probably other people out there. Yeah, there's gotta be two guys, um Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cony I wrote wrote a paper in Nature and they basically said, look, if we look, we

may very well not find anything. But if we don't look, we're definitely not going to find anything. Point. And that came at a time when a guy named Frank Drake, an astrophysicist an astronomer, was um trying to start his own search, and he eventually founded CET I think in nineteen sixty founded the ct Institute or just set said

he well, he conducted the first st search. Yeah, Frank Drake did, and it was based on something called the Drake equation, which I find just utterly fascinating and refreshingly understandable as far as like theoretical math equations go. Yeah, and and is the number of civilizations in the Milky

Way whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable. So in equals are times FP times in A, times FL times five times FC times L. And then there's the R is the rate of formation of ours over the lifetime of the galaxy. And that's anywhere from like ten to forty a year. Yea stars suitable for development of intelligent life. That narrows it down. Um. Then there's the fraction of those stars

with planets. Then there's the average number of those planets that are Earth type, meaning suitable for life as we understand it. An, that's about of the fifty of stars with planets, but we're starting to whittle down pretty quickly. Um. And then there's the fraction of those planets where life develops that's estimated at and as much as a dent. And then there's the fraction of life that develops intelligence. So it's not just enough to be in am but

you have to be an amiba capable of creating a radio. Right. Um, that's pretty low as well, um about ten percent um, and then another ten percent as the fraction of planets where intelligent life develops technologies such as radio. Okay, So you've got life and then l intelligent life and then technology, and then you have the lifetime of that communicative civilization

in years. So boom, multiply that on out. You got your Drake equation and you have as little as one as much as billions, well plus it's it's as little as one or billions because it you know those are it depends on what value put in there, and everyone's gonna put in different values, So the Drake equation is going to have a wide swath. Yes, it makes sense. Um, so you've got this. This is the framework. Then, the Drake equation created by Frank Drake, the founder of CT.

This is the framework that CD conducts its research with. Like one of the things they do is try to figure out exactly how many stars out there have planets with that are suitable for life. Um, to really kind of plug in the best possible data into the Drake equation and to help them figure out where to look. Because there's three main challenges for SET that they face just as a concept and an organization, and they are, Um, you have a really big sky out there, right, you

have a lot of frequencies that could that. You have a lot of radio frequencies, and um, you have a limited amount of telescopes, not much equipment. No, Because it's very expensively and while CT is funded to a large degree, it's not funded to a large degree compared to like like when it was part of NASA. I think it's only like one percent of their budget. Even still, that was like the most money cet He has ever had. But they're they're pretty well funded, the SETI Institute is.

So as far as private funding goes, they're doing okay. Yeah, I mean they're nonprofit obviously, so they're not getting rich, you know what I mean. No, they're they're kind of hurting right now. All thought they were doing all right. No, the they also received federal funds and that's all but dried up right now because of the economic downturn. Yes, said, he's the first to go, isn't it all right? So you proposed the three problems. Um here a couple of

approaches for the large sky problem. A lot of area

out there, so they have two approaches there. The wide field search basically casting a wide, non specific net over uh, you know, a low resolution over a long period I'm sorry, a short period of time over a wide area could get you some nibbles if you were fishing, let's say, but it's going to be difficult to find out exactly like where this stuff is coming from, right, Or a targeted search, which is what my money would be on, which are limited to sun like stars like they basically

factor in more of Drake's equation in this one, say, let's look at places where we might find uh, you know, target these things where we might find E. T. S. UM. And they do both of those depending They have various projects going on ongoing UM. And some are targeted, some are wide field search. UM. So they're kind of covering

their bases as much as possible. UM. The next challenge was you know what frequency to listen for to listen to you know, like it's not a radio no, but even with a radio, even with like a walkie talkie, Like if you've ever used one of those, if you're not on the right frequency, you are going to miss everything that's being told to you. So there's like you said, it's not a radio dial. It doesn't go from like eight eight point five all the way to one or

seven point five. They're billions from alternative to country exactly. Um, there are billions of radio frequencies and they UM, I mean, which one are you gonna listen to? You? You can listen to them all, but again you're cycling through them. Uh, You're not able to spend a lot of time as much like the same dilemma with the sky you have with the radio. Frequencies plus are full of noise. Yep,

that's another problem occurring stuff right. Um, But there is a window in the radio frequency that's called the water hole, which is pretty cool. UM. It's a natural place in the radio frequency spectrum. UM. And by the way, radio is their light waves. It's a type of light wave UM, but they're very specific. They exist on a specific frequency.

But UM, in this the spectrum, the band, there's this thing called the water hole UM, which goes from the one to tend giga hurts range and it has very little UM natural background noise, like very few things you know broadcast on this frequency. And the reason being, UM, they these frequencies are caused by hydrogen atoms and hydroxyl ions, both of which are constituents of water, which is why

it's called the water hole. And they suspect that for a couple of reasons, alien civilizations would be aware of this one, that it's just so profoundly unique in the radio spectrum that if you had any kind of awareness of the radio spectrum, you would stumble upon this, and that you would intentionally broadcast in a low noise frequency exactly because you want to be heard. Yeah, I mean anybody who broadcast on the radio wants to be heard,

right um. And then the other reason they think that alien civilizations would know about it is because water, with which it's associated um, is considered a an essential to life and therefore universal among intelligent life. It's not geocentric. The concept of water is so aliens would be familiar with water and would thus be familiar with the water hole in the frequency spectrum as well, So that this is probably where they're putting most of their research or

their effort into this waterhole band of frequencies. Yeah, I mean they search all over, but pretty much all set operation will search the water hole as part of their problem, as part of their ops. Then there's magical frequencies to like basically, they're saying, like, where on this band of billions of frequencies is there some sort of universal pattern.

And one of the things that they figured out is prime numbers might be a good place to look because prime numbers are part of math and their universal constant. So an advanced civilization might be aware of prime numbers, and if they're trying to communicate to another advanced civilization, they may be broadcasting on prime number channels. That's a magical frequency. I wonder if they've searched pie the Pie station. So so far we've got to We've got two of

the big problems tackled. Yes, generally. The third one is the most down to earth problem. Yeah. No, no equipment. Basically, these radio telescopes are expensive to build and so there's not a whole lot of them. So they said, you know, there's a few ways we can handle this. We can UH conduct limited runs on ones that are already out there,

basically rent space from other dudes. Uh. We can conduct analysis of data are already acquired by other dudes, so like, hey, you've been listening in on all these frequencies, let us see your data and we'll just work from that. Or we can build SETI dedicated radio telescopes, which is clearly the least popular because it's so expensive and it's the most popular but least feasible. Yeah, and like the UM, like the projects that they have ongoing for wide target

search UM or wide field search or targeted search. They have different projects dedicated different types of radio use, like UM Project Phoenix. UH rents time at some of the better radio telescopes around the world, Australia, Aricibo, Yeah, in Puerto Rico, U. The one in West Virginia, Green Bank, West Virginia has a huge radio telescope. But that's where the first city conference was held over teen sixty, I believe. Yeah. Um. And then there's the serendip project, which piggybacks cracks me

up for some reason. Why serendip I don't know, just because it's short for serendipity. It sounds like your friend Adam that shortens everything, like he would say, yeah, we met up. It was a bit of serendip Yeah, he would say that, total serendip um. Yeah. So they piggyback by basically saying like hey, like you said, let me see your dad, and once you're done with it, we want to go over it too. Yeah. It's like, hey man,

it's like the hippie rob version of Astronomy Boy. He had made an appearance in a while, he just did. I didn't expect him to pop up in set if he didn't pop up in Magic Mushrooms, you know. Uh So Project serendip like you said, it takes um, takes advantage of a lot of telescope time, but they don't have the control to say, hey, pointed over there, So they have a lot of hours, but they're just basically that's the wide search being cast. And then you said,

like the most desirable one was having their own telescope. Well, yeah, that'd be great, staid he figured out something. Rather than making a huge or paying for a huge radio telescope. Um, they figured out that they can take a bunch of backyard satellite dishes, which I'm sure are really easy to come by these days. Um, you know the kind like from the eighties. Oh yeah, put a bunch of those together.

They're like eight eat wide right. Yeah, you put a bunch of those together and connect their signals using a process called interferometry. Nice, thank you dude, well done. First try and uh, you can basically simulate a huge, large telescope for a fraction of the cost. Yeah, it's like linking a network of computers, which, um is actually something also being done. We might as well get into that the cet at symbol at home project and uh, that's

actually the SETI Institute, isn't it. Yeah, So they decided that hey, instead of building a couple of supercomputers to analyze this data, because that's one of the big problems is there's so much data. It's not like you can just plug it into your laptop. But you can plug a tiny chunk into a laptop and network a bunch of laptops together to do the power of the supercomputers. And that is what they've done, and you can participate. Yeah,

it's pretty ingenious UM. And there's there's other things that I think Seti at home started it and now there's things like folding at home really to UM simulate protein folding for cancer research. Same thing UM. And I'm sure there's other ones that I didn't get a chance to look,

but Setty at home started it. Where you it's a screen saver UM, but it's also a program and while it's running, it's it downloads a chunk of UM data from the air CBO radio telescope and that's like your little assignment And it's like a hundred second chunk maybe something like that. It doesn't seem like much, but it takes like ten to twenty hours for the normal UM computer to process it. But like you said, if it's if you have thousands of computers doing this, you have

a thousand times the processing power. All of a sudden for free. Pretty cool. Uh, And while your computers analyzing it, it's making notes of all this stuff using studies algorithms, and then it uploads the results to set and then downloads another chunk for an analysis. And dude, I bet this is a very popular thing to do for stargazers, for stargazing nerds of the world. There's a guy I remember, um who was in Arizona I think, and he uh was fired from his job as like the i T

head for the Department of Education in this one community. Um, because he he booted, said he at home onto all the computers without asking. But I mean it's not a big deal. It doesn't take that much processing power and it just kind of runs in the background. Um. Well, he was made a mockery of by the local news like that he was fired because of his search for aliens. Yeah it was pretty bad. But yeah, some poor guy got fired for that. Said he at home got him fired.

I bet he got a job with STI or something, though, I'm I don't bet that, you don't think so they just said sorry thanks anyway pretty much. Um, well, you talked about building your own and the alien telescope array. I'm sorry the Allen Telescope Array. Yeah. I kept taking it like that until I found out it's named after Paul Allen, the co founder of Microsoft, who donated all

of the money for it. Well, that is still underway. UM. As far as its construction, I think they they were down for a little while because of a lack of funding, and it's a twenty six million dollar deal. But I think as of two thousand eleven they were up and running again and part of it is complete to the extent I think where they can use it for for things right, But they're still not finished with them. No,

they're not. They have enough money to construct it, but they didn't have enough money to run it, so they have like a skeleton crew on it right now. But it is operational. I think it is UM. They're hoping that they're they're going to be able to fund it by UM releasing some time on it to the Air Force who was interested in using it. They should try a bake sale. I don't know, you know, you know, it'll be a great day when schools have all the funding they need and the Air Force has to hold

a bake sale to buy a stealth bomber. That'll be the day, somebody should put that on like a bump or stick or something that's we could shorten it. But yeah, agreed, Uh, should we mention the Fermi paradox? Yes, as good a time as any. I mean. One of the things that happens to set is that they're constantly pummeled by critics

and a lot of them cite the Fermi paradox too. Well, here's what SETI Institute says, because I dug into their f a Q a little bit on one of the questions is why do we think that there might be life out there? Quote? And SETI said, you should keep in mind that we are one planet around a very ordinary star, and they're roughly four hundred billion other stars and nearly one billion other galaxies, and they think it would be extraordinary if we were the only thinking beings

in all these enormous realms. Faremi Enrico Faremi said that, Uh, if it takes life billions of years to develop intelligence and signal or travel to the stars, and there are billions of the worlds in the universe, and the universe is thirteen billion years old plus, then why haven't we been visited yet? Yeah, when you look at it, like that the odds are makes sense. They just increase exponentially. It's kind of like a perverted version of the Drake

equation used to disprove the existence of life, the anti drake. Yeah, interesting, anti Drake. So what happens if we get a signal? What happens if they're sitting around one day and they your phone home come over the radio waves. Well, they have a a strict set of protocols that start with, you know, the first person who finds it, to the um the you know who gets told first, what what agencies learn of it? And um, it's pretty cool. Apparently

contact follows the course of it pretty pretty um accurately. Yeah. But so it signals detected, right, And the first thing they do is they move the radio telescope away from the signal, and then they move it back. I bet that's nerve wracking. I'll bet too, because you probably just want to stay locked on it, you know, right, you're gonna lose your signal. But you can't do that because

you gotta prove that's genuinely coming from there, right. Um, So if you move it and then move it back and the signal wanes and then comes back, you know that you have an extraterrestrial signal. Right, that's a big one. The next step then is to figure out whether you're getting it from like a satellite or from elsewhere on Earth. Right after that, you're starting to shake, your palms are sweaty um, and you start to rule out extraterrestrial sources

like pulsars, quasars, other things that broadcast radio frequencies. By this time you may have tinkled a little bit in your pants, um, and you are on the phone with another radio telescope, hopefully one on another continent, saying, hey, can you go check these coordinates and see if you're getting this frequency? Point your little machine that way, what do you see or here? And if they come back and say yep, you say, well, it's time to announce it to the world. Now I gotta get out my book.

The SETI Institute, the Declaration of Principles concerning Activities following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence and SETI Institute says, no one's keeping anything a secret. No, they wanted disseminated quickly and widely, but they want you to follow the proper channels first and all the astronomical community gets first DIBs

on learning of it. Then after that you go to the u N. Oh, yeah, the u N a lot of other international bodies, and you say, hey, guys, we have confirmed extraterrestrial contact and um they say awesome, and the astronomer goes along and says, okay, we're moving on in the next people. Eventually you get to the public and the person who discovered it UM is meant to have the honor of announcing it to the world, according

to the protocols. Jodie Foster uh and CETI is on record, by the way, the SETI Institute is saying that they don't think that there are aliens that we've been hiding in Roswell, New Mexico. They said that, you know, the presence that would be like the biggest discovery in the history of science and a you wouldn't want to keep it a secret and be there would be thousands and thousands of people working on it, and they said it

would just be impossible. So they're not, you know, they're not these crackpots that think, oh, we've got aliens hidden away working on a farm in the desert of New Mexico harvesting on water farms. That's where we got our microwaves from exactly. Uh. And I also looked at their f a Q under the are we sending signals? Because I thought that was kind of interesting because obviously close encounters they sent messages out and they said they are

completely passive experiment. They're only looking, they are not sending. However, we have been sending signals ah, unintentionally for fifty years or more. Yes, it's the thirties, since we started broadcasting on the radio. Yeah, in television. Uh, this is the early TV broadcast reached out about to about one thousand nearby stars and uh. But they said it's very unlikely that any any alien civilization could have picked up on that.

But we are inadvertently broadcasting probably in the water hole too, I would think. And the other reason we don't send out signals is because if the nearest civilization they said, is a hundred light years away, it would be two hundred years to get a reply, and it's just not a very good way to spend your time. Well. Plus also it's in the protocols that UM we decide through like the u N and other international bodies, whether or not to respond to a signal. That's like one of

the last steps. Well, they said that we've sent UM symbolic messages before, like, hey, here's what our solar system is like, here the compounds important for life. Here's the structure of our DNA in the form of a human. They say it's symbolic, but I think they're like, oh, you never know, you know, so they're liars. Then when they say they're passive, well, they are passive. They have done that in the past. They said it was like

the seventies. They're passive as far as astronomy goes, active as far as lying on their f a Q go. Now they they I think it was Sniking seventy four was the last time they sent out a message. There was what the Viking or some I can't remember, the spaceship we sent into orbit or into outer space that had like UM gold records containing all sorts of information like the world's great information and knowledge on them. Oh yeah, do you remember that sort of Viking? Yeah, yeah, yeah,

I think it's let's probably get that wrong though. So what's in the future for CET right now? Uh, well, the future with the programs like SETI at home could uh get more people active and that they're interested in their home. The future could be good there. They said they might be UM sending are looking for light at some point because it may not come via radio, it may come via light. Uh you know, you never know. Yeah.

Frank Drake is all about that one now. He says that this is like the hot new field for study is optical UM astronomy, and of course finishing up things like the Allen telescope array is important. And then they're city at home. I mean, if you want to go do that, it's pretty easy to go download UM folding at home. I've never had steady at home. You did folding, uh huh cool? Uh? And then my computer crash and I was just like, maybe that crashed it. I don't know.

Maybe I could tell the difference when it was processing UM and that's steady. So if this kind of piqued your interest, there's plenty more information out there. UM. You can also check out sets stuff on Science Channel UM during are We Alone Month in March, premiers come on I think Tuesdays at ten starting March six, every Tuesday. Yep, like Moonlighting, UM was it was that on Tuesday? I think so I seem to remember being drawn to the

television on Tuesdays. I think it was Moonlighting and eighteen nice Or was it Moonlighting and love Boat? Now it was love Boat Fantasy Island. Yeah, yeah, those two were definitely together. Let's see recap. Everyone else is at the beginning, I'm married? Do you mean and I are married? Um? And I guess that's it. If you want to read set, you can type that word into the search bar how stuffwork dot com s E T I and that will bring up this very nice article including cool graphs and

screenshots from CETI at home for some reason. Um. And since I said search bar, I think I said handy search bar even Um, it's time for a listener and mail. All right, Josh, I'm gonna call this uh Luca Libra slash American wrestling from Zack uh Chuck. You suggested that wrestlers carry fake blood packs. Not quite true, or at least usually not true. Instead, most wrestlers carry a razor

blade in order to blade their foreheads. I've heard this actually into that they'll cut, make a little cut and bleed uh right around the hairline after being hit in the head of a chair or a cage or another hard weapon. You were also talking about the big companies in America. The w w E is the biggest right now, with ten as the second biggest, and Ring of Honor is the third. W w E and t n A are on big TV networks, while the Ring of Honor is only on the air in certain markets, and there

are many many independent leagues, including Smashing Pumpkins, Billy Corgan's Resistance. Bro. Did you know that? No, I guess so, dude, he's got his own wrestling league. I wonder if he's still on the dope. I don't think so. I saw him one day. He's really tall, which surprised me for some reason. I think I noticed that when the Cubs were in the World Series and he's saying the uh, the national anthem. You know, he's saying the taking out to the ball game,

it's stretch. Yeah, he's all those guys. Uh. So Zack says, when talking about the rules, you're saying that weapons are not allowed. And I think I might have said that it's different with American wrestling, but not true. He said. The chair was just really popular in the late nineties because they book matches specifically to be more violent. So they would knock the ref down and people would use the chair when the ref wasn't watching, but you would still get de Q if the ref was to see that.

And he also said Raymond would get dairy queen. Oh man, that'd be great. Uh. And then he said, ray mystereo is out with injury, but there's a good chance he we'll be back soon, so he's still kicking it. That was a heck of a dispatch from the wrestling world, and dude, I redacted about half of it. Thanks Zack. That is Zack from I don't know where he's from. He's from Billy Corgan's basement. Well, wow, if you have some supplementary information, not even necessarily correction. I think Zach

handled that very well. Sure. Um, we like to hear that stuff all the time and we frequently read them as listener mail. So please feel free to go ahead and send us something. Um. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can send us a note or a message on Facebook at facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know, or you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at how Stuff Works dot com.

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