How to Search for Aliens!

!How to Search for Aliens

Nothing ignore the human imagination quite like making contact with aliens fun for alien megastructures, light signals, and other signs of intelligent life in the universe I'm really excited to welcome Anne Marie Cody she is a research scientist and that's aims as well as at the study institute thanks so much for seeing us today I'm Marie thank you How close is that to what the research is actually like and what's the more day to day experience of being part of study So people who are essentially looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and certainly there are people that who do that but there are also astronomers to our researching and other areas exoplanets solar system objects planetary scientists even people who Do earth-based geology type projects but if you look at just those people at the settings who are trying to find intelligence elsewhere that again kind of involved into a range of activity. It could encompass astronomers. You are identifying exoplanets opening around other stars and who are looking for just molecular signs of life. They're not even using those radio telescope dishes that you may be familiar with. What I do, which is actually a different area. Looking for what we call techno And that's not looking for molecular base life. It's looking for a very advanced civilization. And we're actually doing that with an optical telescope. So how does the setting institute look for light? What does that sort of search look like? They have the Allen telescope array and then they're various projects with some studies going to start involved in With essentially share time on larger radio telescope dishes for example there's something called the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia and so some there are other telescopes around the world that are doing some astrophysical research and then in between. They're doing some studies. And then we have people who do sort of a lot of more philosophical thinking about just the possibilities of what could be out there. You know when you watch the movies and you see depictions of aliens. They're kind of like people. What would you like, you know, distorted facial features and whatnot? And in some sense, that's kind of expected because we don't have much imagination as human beings. We think anything might look like us. But what about artificial intelligence? You know, building powerful computer systems that can then just run over. Everything. Maybe we should be looking for something like that. It's just like, you know, numbers, computations, machines that are out there doing things. Then, there are folks like myself who are doing what could be classified as optical study, and one example is If somebody had and on another planet had a really powerful laser and they beamed it in our direction and then kind of blinked it on and off. That would be a very unique signal. And 4 microseconds or so it could actually overpower the light of the host star on those So you kinda filter out you know you gotta plan it you can't see you gotta start but you could if you do something quick enough and powerful enough you might see that and then I'm also working in the optical wave lank regime Looking for something completely different which would be what we call alien megastructures for short essentially an artificial structure built by an intelligence civilization or perhaps for energy harvesting purposes. Something is in orbit around the host star and doesn't completely cover it up. So, you're looking both for the sort of signal that would be flashed in the optical wavelength and then the blocking and the obstacle waving. That's really amazing. What kind of observatories and tools do you use to look for these types of possible signals? For me, I'm just looking for the light-blocking and it turns out this is sort of easily done because there are other things that are natural objects that block stars including planets and other stars there are space telescopes Keppler they operate exactly on this principle we look at thousands even millions of stars take image after image and then we translate those images into a sequence of Each star's brightness versus time. So, both eclipses by other stars and transit by planets. Have a particular signature like her whereas if you had an artificial megastructure, you could potentially cause a different signature that would be Unique and potentially also much deeper and we now have for our project upwards of 50 million stars that serve by the test satellite. I mean when you say 50 million Looking through you mentioned you have some of these tools that are is that as artificial intelligence so we're essentially using machine learning technology and the area of machine learning is called anomaly detection and it's actually very similar to the technology that your bank account Credit card company might use to find fraud. It's essentially looking at the sequence of something over time whether it be the star's brightness or your credit card purchases. And it's looking for something odd. It doesn't belong there. Have you found anything yet that doesn't have a clear explanation? Or is most I will admit we don't entirely know what we're looking for its kind of like you know as I mentioned the TV images of aliens were aliens really look like we don't know so like what kind of structures would they build yeah that's where the double edge sort of having Billions of star system dinner My team has a student from the University of California Barclay who's running software to simulate like what if you put some cake in orbit around the store what if you put a series of giant triangles how would we see that from Earth. So, there's no one signal that we're looking for and so, we do have to be careful to do not rule out things that if we don't understand them but for the most part, we are looking for stars where they have relatively constant brightness and then there's a different app right now kinda intermittently or periodically and So the more sort of weird undulating patterns as a stronger I may not immediately recognize what is causing that but I bet if I look further into it probably has enough physical explanation. You're an artist yourself certainly enough in terms of worlds and cool space To do enough. That's really fun. You should find that kind of help. When you know your scientific goals. People talk about how, you know, science and art. Some people think of them as very separate but both of them require harnessing your creative power to kind of explore what's out there and so they're There's actually something kinda fundamental and common and I like using the art to you know get that side on my brain going get the juices flowing and think about trying to just think I'll outside of the box I think it's very helpful and you know more scientists should probably recognize the value of art. For sure and I think Engaging people as well and you know on that note like Why do you think humans are a lot of time free disposed to a human that we're not alone? Well, if you look back at the history of astronomy, you know, originally, we thought we're the center of everything. You know, we didn't even think oh the sun's in the middle of the tower system right now. We're in the middle. Everything is over. We're not the middle and now we're probably not the smartest. We look at our sort of one of the fathers of study if you will. Frank Frank came up with the Drake equation Is sort of a way to estimate the possibility of intelligent life out there and it depends on the number of habitable planets which we now know is probably pretty high. It also depends on all the factors that we don't know how to constrain, like how long Longer than intelligent civilization actually lasts. We humans haven't been around for very long and we are struggling with things like sending carbon dioxide into our greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere and causing climate change and you know that could be the end of us relatively soon after the emergency. To that point like, is there, where to be? I am really compelling, unambiguity with megastructure signals, say, what would be the kind of steps that Nasa said he would take to inform the public about that. I think for a while, we would just be quietly going About our scientific research getting all the backup data possible. I mean, it's already happened to some extent when there was a discovery of a star that it's now known as Boy Argent Star. This is observed with the Keppler telescope and some citizen scientists who are actually involved in looking for planets in that data set. Just notice that this Star had kinda bizarre and deep fading events. So, is John Richard all this? Boy, I can start this. This is kind of strange. Could this be the megastructure? And that's the part of the motivation for our current search on initially, nobody knew what it was but they were very diligent and Tabitha Briagen The star was named after got time on other telescopes from the ground that looked at different wavelengths than what the Kettle Scope was observing at and it turned out that there are different structures that can be in orbit around stars an opaque mega structure Hey Facebook China what we'd expect from a civilization what caused the same amount of fading and delight her which is something that's kinda common out in space. Locking the starlight. You would expect the facing To be more extreme at Redwave Life it's similar to like when the sunset and the sunlight are coming through dust and other particles in our atmosphere and the sun appear to be more red than blue at that point something's really a smoking gun like we get a signal and it says hello earthlings What we would actually do and I'm not sure what the answer to that is. I would have to have some fun, some big conversations. Yeah, it's an eventuality that isn't mind-boggling. You know, we don't want science to be happening behind closed doors. We want the public to see it's a process it's not just like you discover something instantly and there it is you gotta follow up and you know test all hypothesis you know there's a division sort of between the astronomical study search and then a lot of the stuff that people talk about with UFOs and things like that We're looking at everything beyond earth. The fact is, when we don't have enough data, we just have a report of what I saw. There are so many possibilities that, you know, professionally, I would have no capability to evaluate but personally, I don't believe any of them are aliens. It just seems that things would zing around our atmosphere but never actually interact with us. For sure. And I wonder if you could just also just zoom out on the ultimate question like say we do learn that we are not alone. Even if it's just like we find past life on Mars. Just some I What would that mean in terms of the paradigm shift you think for our culture and society? I think if we had a global reminder of our own fragility and that you know we need to kinda do a better job but just like to survive. As a RON civilization, you know, if you see all there used to be life on Mars but it's gone, that's one reminder. Or likewise, you know, if we detect life elsewhere and find out we're not the only one, you know, that both of those caused people's minds to A band like, wait a minute, like, are all the things that I am thinking about, worrying about, actually kinda trivial, cuz sometimes I think they are. You know, we need to think about, what are, what are the big issues? You know, we need to take care of our planet and you know, do we have an example Being out there who didn't do that and you know, unfortunately, suffered a terrible fate or something, you know, be kind of it. Just think to see how humidity reacts. Thanks for reading.