>> the committee on science, space and technology will come to order and welcome to today's hearing, astro biological and the search for life in the universe. a couple of preliminary announcements, one is ip want to thank c-span for covering this hearing today. that shows the importance of the hearing in a lot of respects and i want to thank the students from herndon high school who are here as well. i understand you had a choice of hearings to attend. in fact, you could attend almost any hearing wanted to and you chose this one because you thought it was the most interesting. and actually, that is one of the purposes of today's hearing. and that is to inspire students today to be the scientists of tomorrow. who knows, we may have some of

those scientists in the audience right now who will be inspired by what they hear to study astro biological or perhaps some of the other sciences as well. we appreciate your attendance. i will recognize myself for opening statement and ranking member as well. as we discover more planets around the stars in our own galaxy, it is natural to wonder if we may finally be on the brink of answering the question, are we alone in the universe? finding other life in the universe would be the most significant discovery in human history. scientists estimate that there are 80 billion stars in the milky way galaxy. to date more than 1,700 nearby planets have been found by the earth space telescope. last month astronomers discovered the first earth-like planet orbiting its star at a

distance where liquid water could be present, a condition thought essential to life. called kepper 186-f, it's only 10% larger than the earth and about 490 light-years away. the transiting survey satellite which will launch in 2017 and james webb telescope launching in 2018 will help scientists discover more planets with potential bio signatures. the united states has pioneered the field of astro biological and continues to lead the world in this type of research. the sample of professional papers pup lished in "science" magazine between 1995 and 2013 illustrates the significant growth and growing popularity of the field of astro biological. between 1995 and 2012, the number of papers published on astrobiological increased ten times and the number of scientific reports that cited astrobiological increased 25 times. astrobiological is a serious

subject studied by serious scientists around the world. reflecting this interest, next september the library of congress and glass will hold a two-day astrobiological symposium on what societal impacts could be of finding microbal, complex or intelligent life in the universe wlfment life exists on other planets continues to be a matter of debate among scientists. around the world a number of astronomers listen to naturally occurring radio frequencies. they try to filter out commozz koss mick noise and human made interfernings to find anomaly that's could be from civilizations elsewhere in the universe. the at many telescope, financed by microsoft cofounder paul allen and telescope in puerto rico are two well-known locations for conducting radio astronomy searches for life on the universe. recently they detected pulsed signals that last only a few

mill seakeds. these fast radio bursts as they're called have caused scientists to speculate as to their cause. some scientists have theer sized they could be from stars colliding or extraterrestrial intelligent source. others search for light pulses instead of radio waves. researchers run by the harvard smithsonian center of physics and university of california-berkeley aemergency others use optical telescopes to try to detect than joked pulses pulseshes -- nano second or other naturally occurring phenomenon. i hope today's hearing will enable us to learn more about how research on astrobiological continues to expand this fascinating frontier. the unknown and unexplored areas of space spark human curiosity. americans and others around the world look up at the stars and wonder if we are alone or is

there life on other planets? that concludes my opening statement. ranking member, gentle woman from texas, miss johnson, is recognized for hers. >> thank you very much, mr. chairman and good morning. in the interest of saving time, i forego making an opening statement insteadly simply want to welcome the doctors to this morning's hearing on the search for life, including intelligent life in outer space. you both are distinguished researchers and i know that you will have thoughtful testimony to present and this afternoon we will determine whether we have researchers to continue this. so thank you. i yield back. >> thank you, miss johnson. i would like to introduce our witnesses at this point. our first witness, dr. seth shostak, senior astronomer at the study institute in mountain view, california. he held his position since 2001. the doctor has spent much of his

career conducting radio astronomy research on galaxies. dr. shostak has written more than 400 published magazine and web articles on various topics of astronomy, technology, film and television and also edited and contributed to nearly a dozen scientific and popular astronomy books. he's authored four books including "sharing the universe: perspectives on extraterrestrial life" and "confessions of an alien hunter: a scientist's search for extraterrestrial intelligence." can you hear him each week as host of one-hour radio program entitled "big picture sinings." dr. shostak received bachelor of physics from princeton and ph.d. from the california institute of technology. our second witness, dr. dan wertheimer, worked at the space sciences laboratory at uc-berkeley since 1983. he's currently the director of several of the lab's centers including the center for astrong

mee signal processing and electronics research. additionally mr. wertheimer serves as chief scientist for the labs seci at home program and associate director of berkeley wireless research center. mr. wertheimer co-authored bio 20020 and editor of astronomy, molecules, microbes and extraterrestrial life and astronomical and biochemical origins and search for life in the universe. his research is featured in many broadcast stories such as abc and cbs and many major newspapers and magazines. his work has also reached a younger audience through scholastic weekly, a science magazine for kids. mr. wertheimer received his bachelor's and master's in physics and astrong mee from san francisco state university. i will recognize to start us off today dr. shostak and then we will go to mr. wertheimer. >> thank you, congressman for

the opportunity to be here. i will just give you a few big-picture thoughts on thoughts for search for life and in particular intelligent life that can uphold its side of the conversation as opposed microbial sort of life. this is obviously a subject of great interest to many people. let me back up and say when you read in the paper about discovery of new planet or something water on mars, you're looking at one of three horses in a race to be the first to find some extraterrestrial biological. the first horse is simply to find it nearby. that's where the big money is. rovers on mars, moons of the outer solar system. at least a half a dozen other world that's might have life in our solar system. chances of finding it i think are good. if that happens, it will happen in the next 20 years, depending on the financing. second horse in that race is to build very large instruments that can sniff, if you will, the at moos fear of plan -- atmosphere around planets of other stars and find oxygen or methane, which as you know

produced by cows and pigs and things like that but biological in any case. so you can find pigs in space, i suppose. that is again a project, depending on funding that could yield results in the next two decades. the third horse in that race is seti, search for extraterrestrial intelligence and that idea if you have seen the movie "contact" you know what the idea is, eavesdrop on signals that are deliberately or accidentally leaked off somebody else's world. that makes sense because in fact even we, only 100 years after mar conian and invention of radio, we have technology that would allow us to send bits of information across lightyears of distance to reputed extraterrestrials. let me tell you why i think they're out there, by the way. it's unproven whether there's life on earth. that's the situation today. you heard me say twice now that i think that situation will change within everyone's lifetime in this room. and the reason is we're the

universe is very infectant with habitats for life. congressman smith mentioned the number of stars in our galaxy. with respect that number is larger. it's something like 200 to 400 billion stars. but we now know at least 70% of them have planets. recent results from nasa's keppler telescope, astoundingly successful instrument, suggests one in five stars may have planets that are cousins of the earth. what that means is in our own galaxy, tens of billions of other planets that are the kind you might want to build condos on and live. tens of billions. if that is inadequate for your requirement, let me point out there are 150 billion other galaxies we can see with our telescopes, even with similar complement of earth-like world. what that means is the numbers are so astounding if this is the only planet in which not only life but intelligent life arizin, we are extraordinarily

exceptional. it's like buying electricals of lottery -- trillions of lottery tickets none a winner. that would be very unusual. although everyone likes to think they're special, and i'm sure you all are, maybe we're not that special. certainly history after strong mee shows every time we thought we were special we were wrong. what is done so far? various kinds of radio searches. i won't detail technology. we looked at parts of the -- much of the sky as fairly low sensitivity over a limited range of radio wavelength. radio sections of the band. we have looked in particular directions at a few thousand star systems. in other words, we have just begun the search. the fact we haven't found anything means nothing. it's like looking for mega phone in africa and giving up after you only examined one city block. and the reason the search has been so cramped, so contradicted so far is simply, to be honest, the fact there's no funding for this. it's all privately funded. total number of people in the world that do seti for a living

is fewer than number of people in any row in the audience here behind me. that's the world total for this endeavor. when are we going to find them? you heard me suggest that may happen rather quickly. let me point twout other things, one, this is very interesting to the public because they have seen extraterrestrials on television and in the movie all the lives. that also give it's a giggle factor. very easy make fun of it. very easy make fun of ferdinand magellan's idea to sail around the earth or captain cook, exploration, that's what this is. consequences are always -- shall we say celebratory, there's life, intelligent life that calibrate our position in the universe. as congressman smith said probably be greatest discovery humankind could ever make and what's important is this is the first generation that has both the knowledge and technology to do that.

>> thank you for the opportunity to talk about this question. can you guys show the slides? i want to walk you through some of the seti experiments we and other people are doing. as seth mentioned this nasa keppler mission from that we learned there are a trillion planets in our milky way galaxy, lots of places for life and we learned a lot of these planets are what we call goldilocks planets, right distance where it's not too hot or cold. rocky planets, liquid water. there could be life out there. how are we getting in touch? one of the ideas is earthings are sending off radio, television signals in space. the early shows like "i love lucy" 10,000 stars. nearby stars have seen "the simpsons." turn that around and if we're broadcasting maybe other

civilizations are sending signals in our direction even leaking signals the way we unintentionally send signals or maybe deliberate signal. they could be sending laser signals and there are a number of projects looking for laser signals. this is a project at harvard university of very clever project. this is a project at lick observatory. also a project at the -- in hawaii looking for laser signals. people are also looking for radio signals. our group uses the world's largest radio antenna, we call it radio telescope. this is in puerto rico and it's 1,000 feet in diameter. it holds 10 billion bowls of corn flakes. we haven't actually tried that. [laughter] it's operated by national science foundation and moan astronomers would be lucky to use this telescope a day or two a year. we figured out a way to use the telescope at the same time other scientists are using it deloket data all year around and we're

checking data all year around as i talk to you. that is a problem. even though we get the world's largest telescope all year around it creates enormous amount of data. to analyze that data we asked volunteers for help. you can help us by running a program on your home computer or laptop or desktop computer. you install a program called seti at home. screensaver program. the way we take the data from the world's largest telescope and break it up into little pieces, everybody gets a different piece of the sky to analyze and install this program and it pops up when you go out for a cup of coffee and computer go through data looking for all of the different frequencies and data types. this is what it looks like when it's running on your computer at home. it takes a few days to analyze data looking for interesting signals. when finds interesting signals, sends them back to berkeley and then a new chunk of data, part of the sky to work on f you're the lucky one that finds that faint murmur from distant civilization, you might get the

nobel prize but there's a catch. nobel prize, you have to maybe share with a lot of people. there are millions of people who downloaded the seti at home screensaver. split over 200 countries. together volunteers have formed one of the most powerful uper computers on the planet enabled most sensitive search for extraterrestrial signals anybody's done so we're grateful for the volunteers. now we made that more general so you can participate in not just seti with your home computer but you can participate in a lot of projects. climate prediction projects, gravity weight project, protein folding, look for malaria drugs, h.i.v. drugs, cancer drugs and allocate how you want your spare computing cycles to be used on your home computers. one of the new projects we're working on is pan chromatic seti and we're asking observatories around the world to look at a lot of different wavelength bands, a lot of different frequencies, targeting the var

nearest stars and trying to cover all of the different bands that come through the earth's atmosphere. radio frequencies and infrared frequencies and wavelengths and also obstacle frequencies, laser signals and this will be extremely comprehensive search because we've got eight different telescopes we're using. and looking at all of these different bands but only targeting nearby stars. another project we're just launching this year is called interplanetary eavesdropping. the idea of this project is there may be signals going back and forth between two planets in a distant solar system. for instance maybe eventually we will have machines or people on mars went will have radio communication or laser communication on our two planets. put it the other way, distant civilization may have colonized a planet and there may be radio signals going back and forth between those two planets. now with the keppler spacecraft, we know exactly planets in

distant solar system are lined up with earth so we can schedule our observations and target that and see if we can intercept those signals back and forth between two distant planets. we are using green bang telescope in west vath to do that experiment. while swept found e.t.'s so far but we made a lot of interesting discoveries. discovered a planet made out of solid diamond. first maps of the black hole center of galaxy. they are used in all kinds of things, brain research that could eventually control prosthetic arms. we're just getting in the game. we only had radio 100 years. it's like alooking for a needle in a haystack but i'm optimistic in the long run. the reason i'm optimistic in the long run is seti is limited by competing technology, which is growing exponentially, limited by telescope technology. china's building a huge telescope bigger than arasibo and australians and south african and europeans working on

a huge telescope made out of thousands of dishes combined to make a giant telescope. i think i will stop there. i have a couple potentialsky read you from the volunteers but i'm out of time. thank you very much. >> thank you, mr. wertheimer. thank you both for your excellent testimony and actually you have anticipated my questions a little bit but would i still like to go forth with them and let me address the first question to both of you. starting with dr. shostak and it is this, a two-part question -- what do you think -- i can anticipate your answer a little bit on the basis of your statement -- but what do you think is the possibility of microbial life being found in the universe or intelligent life being found in the universe? so the first question goes to the possibility. second question would be what do you think is the likelihood of finding either microbial life or intelligent life in the universe. two different kinds of questions. dr. shostak? >> well, the probability of life, of course, it's hard to estimate because what we do know

now and something we didn't know evently even 10, 20 years ago we did not know were there habitat that's could support life? what amon industry has proven in the last -- astronomy has proven they're made out of the same stuff, distant galaxies same 92 elements on the wall in your ninth grade classroom. so this means if you have taken chemistry in school, you don't have to take it again if you move to another galaxy. it's all the same everywhere. we know building blocks are there. we know there will be plenty of planets where you have liquid water and atmosphere, the conditions you have in hyattsville, for example. so life could arrive on any of these places we also know life began on earth very very, quickly. it's only a sample of one so not entirely convincing but it does suggest it wasn't very difficult for life to get a foothold on this planet so maybe elsewhere. so life i think is maybe not so hard to get started. that's sort of the general impression among scientists. what they believe is not so

important is finding it's important. second part, what about intelligent life? that's a lot harder, right. the earth has had life we know for at least 3 1/2 billion, probably 4 billion years, almost since the beginning. this place has been carpeted with life. and almost all of that time required microscope to see it. it was all microbial. only in the last 500 million years did multicellular life, you know the whole story. that opens up the question, well, if i give you a million worlds with life, what fraction will ever cook up something as clever as you all? the answer to that is we don't know the answer to that. however, there are indirect suggestions that it will happen, given enough time, simply because we're not the only species that's gotten clever in the past 50 million years. if you have dogs and cats at home, they're cleverer than dinosaurs. intelligence does pay off 0. >> thank you, doctor. you mad a point i might emphasize and that is what 20 years ago we had not detected a single planet outside our solar

system and now we're up to lose to 2,000 so exponential growth in astrobiological research. mr. werth himer? >> i suspect the universe is teaming with microbial life. it would be bizarre if we're alone. but i don't know that for sure. the intelligence is going to be rarer but because there are a trillion planets, i believe it will happen often. it's happened several times on this planet and it's likely to arise elsewhere. >> as you would put it at 100% then? >> 99. >> 99.999, strung on out 0. ok, good. next question, mr. wertheimer, let me follow up with you, and by the way as far as seti at home screensaver goes, that would be something here for students here to take advantage of as well as members, i tried to adapt that to my laptop in my office several years ago and was not able to. so maybe we will talk some more. maybe the government needs to change its policy. i'm not sure which. let me ask you, what is the

advantages and disadvantages of radio seti versus optical seti? >> there are a lot of pros and cons. lasers are good for point-to-point communication and lots of bits pr second, lots of data. i think the best strategy is multiple strategy. we should be looking for all kinds of different signals and not put all of our money in one basket. it's hard to predict what other civilizations are doing. if you asked me 100 years ago what to look for, would i have said smoke signals. so we try to launch a new seti project and new idea every year. >> dr. shostak, anything to add to the advantages or disadvantage of radio versus optical seti? >> i should point out they're both sort of different colors of the same thing. in fact literally different colors. they're both electromagnetic means of communication and we use both in our telecommunications here on earth. i suspect aliens will as well. just about every week i get an e-mail from somebody who says you guise are looking for radio signals, that's so old school. extraterrestrials, assume ig

they're out there, will use something more sophisticated. i'm not sure what that is. that depends on physics we don't know. one shouldn't discount a technology simply because it's been around a while. we use the wheel every day. that's a pretty old technology. i suspect we will continue to use the wheel for a long time. >> thank you both for your aner my questions. ranking member, miss johnson, is recognized for her questions. >> thank you very much. i'm trying very hard to ask something that sounds sensible. so what is the status of the extraterrestrial intelligence and research now? >> i think we're just getting in the game. we're learning how to do this and i think we would be lucky to find, even though i'm optimistic about life and intelligent life in the universe and it's likely there's a whole galactic internet out there, i think we would be lucky to find them now but i'm optimistic in the long run. >> congressman johnson, moipt

out con ight point trar to popular impression, this experiment isn't the same from day to day. people think you're sitting around with earphones listening for commozzic status. anding of course, it's not. a lot of listening is done by computers. but at this point much of the experiment depends on digital technology computers, if you will. and there's something called more's law, whatever you can buy today for a dollar you can buy twice as much for a dollar two years from now. it's very rapid growth in the capabilities there. so in fact the search is speeding up and it's actually speeding up exponentially. a very heavily overused word, exponentially but in fact it applies. >> tell me this, i know that the or -- ment of technology are important and some of the

old technologies and techniques are also still in play. how do you predict your advancement based on what you have available to you for research tools? >> i will just say something i'm sure dan has torch add to this. in terms of what we can do in the near future, foreseeable future, what you really i think need to do if you want to have a decent chance of success, and remind you this has to remain speculative. this is like asking christopher columbus two weeks out, have you found any new continents lately? and his answer, there was only water around the ship and yesterday water around the ship and tomorrow it will be acquiesce in the vicinity of the ship, but -- so he can't predict when anything interesting is going to happen, nor can we. but if you look at what you are call euphemistically estimates, guesses, to what fraction of stars have somebody you might be able to pick up t. sounds like you have to look at a few

million star systems to have a reasonable chance of success. we can't do that today. we have not done that today. we have done less than 1% of that as of today. but given the predictable advancements in technology to look at a few million star systems is something that can be done within two dozen years iven the funding to do it. >> yes. >> captured it well. now, when we find the other life on on planets, what do you speculate we will find and what is the potential value? >> i think it's profound either way. this is not an expensive thing. in order of a million dollars a year we are funded by national science foundation, nasa, templeton foundation, some private donations. the reason i think it's profound either way. if we discover we are alone, we

better take really good care of life on this planet. it's very precious. and the other thing that's profound too if we find we're part of a galactic community and get on the galactic internet and learn all of their poetry, music, literature, science, we can learn a lot. >> and i will just add briefly, nobody know what's we will learn. if we can decode this signal, this is like hire owe gliffics, you might be able to figure them out. turns out hieroglyphics were written by humans so it made it easier and rosetta stone and whatever. so we may not every figure it out. if you could, you will be listening to data being sent by societies that far in advance of us because we're hearing them, not the other way around. so there are they are more advanced and may they teach you important stuff. imagine the incas find a barrel washed up on the shore maybe from europe filled with books. if they could ever figure out the books, they would learn a lot of interesting stuff.

i don't know we will ever figure out the books. but even if we don't, the important point has been made and that is we have calibrated our place not in the physical universe, we have sort of done that. but calibrated our place in the biological and even more, intellectual university. i think that's maybe good for our souls to know how we fit in. >> thank you very much. my time has expired. >> thank you, miss johnson. jat from ohio, mr. johnson, is recognized for his question. >> thank you, mr. chairman. gentlemen, for both of you, how has the recent discovery of over 1,700 planets by the keppler space telescope, how has that impacted seti research? >> if you asked astronomers 20 years ago are there planets growing on other stars, we would say we think so but we don't know. that all changed now and a lot is due to the nasa keppler mission. if you extrapolate on the planets, which are a few

thousand planets they discovered, extrapolate on that, there are a trillion planets in the milky way galaxy, three or four time planets than there are stars. a lot of places for life. >> i think it's also affected the experiments in the sense that in the past with we point the telescopes in the direction of certain kinds of stars, certain masses of stars, brightness of stars. those stars were the ones we thought these might have earth-like planet but we didn't know. we now know two things, one as stan mentioned, majority have planets. can you look at a random star and feel confident it has a planet. more than we are getting some information from keppler what fraction have planets that are sort of like the earth. that fraction is not 1 in a million or 1 in 1,000 or not 1 in 100. it may be 1 in 5. so you look at 50 star systems and you get 10 earth-like planets. in some sense it made the search much more straightforward. we look at all of the nearby

stars we can. >> ok. dr. shostak, would you please provide some examples of the technical contributions seti has made to astrong mee and other fields? for example, how as seti research benefited other areas of science? benefit lessat its so in terms of discovery. we haven't found e.t. if we had, we wouldn't be having this hearing. to my surprise i will say seti has not turned up astro physical fanom no that were unexpected as well. that's surprising. normally the history, precedent in astronomy is every time you build an instrument that exams a different, if you will, parameter in the phase-space of the universe you find something new. so that's instructive that it hasn't. the kind of technology that has been developed is certainly of interest to other fields in astronomy. but i think the real value of seti is not so much in terms of what it does to astronomy but what it does in terms of the

other efforts being made to find life in space. nasa has a big effort. the rovers on mars, yes, they're there to find hydrology, history of water on mars but why are you interested in the history of the water on mars? you're interested because want to know were there martians, mibecrobial most likely. are there still martians? that's what interests people the most. and seti was also, if you will, a punch line to this story that nasa had about finding, you know, traces of water on mars or burrowing through the ice on ue ropia and sell it as some of the moons in the outer solar system where there may be vast quantities of liquid water. seti said ok, we may find life but what about intelligent life? that would be more interesting and that's what missing in fact from the nasa program today. >> ok. you made a comment just a few minutes ago that kind of caught my attention. let me make sure i got it right. from id that if we hear

intelligent life out there somewhere that they must be more advanced than us because we're hearing from them and not the other way around. how can you draw that conclusion ? maybe they had been hearing from us for a long time and just don't like what we have to say. [laughter] >> i think it's entirely possible that we're on -- in their catalog. they have seen oxygen in our atmosphere and they know we're out here. i think that life in the universe is going to be a lot of different stages. some of it will be microbial. some trees, more sophisticated. the earth is 5 billion years ofmente some stars 10 billion years old. there could be a lot of advanced civilizations as well. just point out, you're not going to hear from any less advanced society because they're not building radio transmitters. >> for sure. i would say at least equal to, perhaps more advanced. but maybe they got their caller i.d. block turned on or

something. >> it could be. i wouldn't speculate on alien sociology and whether they like our television or not. i don't know about that. but chances if they are at least at our level that they're within 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years of our level is simply on statistical grounds highly uncertain. if you hear from somebody -- >> one final quick question for both of you, how would you define successful seti research? i mean, i know that's kind of a nebulous question but -- how would you define successful? >> if you found a signal and that could be corroborated. if you just find it once and can't find it again, it's not science. so if you find a signal that's moving across the sky the way the stars do because of the rotation of the earth, it's narrow band signal. not made by nature. it's made by transmater. that's success. >> all right. >> i think the most likely scenario is finding some sort of artifact of technology or radar signal or navigational beacon or something that

the gentleman from oregon is recognized. if the gentleman we just yield to me for 10 seconds. the likelihood is that if there were other intelligent civilizations, there would likely be more advanced than we are. we are a relatively junior galaxy. be 2 billion years older than we are. it is fascinating to think what form of life might be existent in a universe or parallel universe or another galaxy where they have had a 2 billion year head start. not even recognize them as scented beatings. i just am fascinated by the subject. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you for being here. , mr. wertheimer, that

can't think of a time and we have had a larger percentage of experts on our panel. thank you both so much for being here. by your am intrigued testimony on the public's interest, and how the idea of life in space is an idea that everyone grasps. it is an ideal hook for interesting young people in science. one of the statements that resonated with me is that it would be a cramped mind indeed if there'snot wonder anyone out there. you said that extraterrestrials are the unknown tribe over the hill. in any case, someone we would like to know more about. i recollect a similar hearing last year when one of my

said, the interesting question is, what do we do when we find life on another planet? you, aboutk, both of what the plan is? to we announced to the world? at dewey research more to determine if these are friendly or collaborative? what do you do when we make the discovery, assuming it is going to happen? that is a question of great interest to the public and great importance. again, there is no danger. you tune in your favorite dj anya car radio and there's no chance he going to jump in your car. if we pick up the signal, they don't know that. whether the question of we should reply. what happens?

it would be announced. the public has the idea that you all have a secret plan, that the government has a secret plan for what to do. there is no plan. and ie had false alarms have waited for my congressmen to call me up and say you guys are picking up a signal, what about that? nobody showed the slightest bit of interest, to be honest. the media started calling up, but the government is not so interested. what happened is that it would immediately be known that we had found a signal. it would be known even before it had been corroborated. there would be false alarms. you get somebody in another observatory to observe it. there are too many things that could go wrong. >> do you have anything to add to that? >> i think before you make a big announcement you want to make sure it is real. you ask a different telescope with different people and

software and equipment to verify it. and you can triangulate and make sure it is coming from something outside. you make sure it is not a graduate student playing a prank. once you have confidence that you have found something, you may have some new astrophysical phenomenon. when pulsars were discovered they thought they had found little green men. the point you are sure you have found something, you make all the information public. the coordinates in the sky, the frequency, anything you know about the signal. a lot of people will be working on that problem. 24 ceti scientists on the planet, to what extent are other nations involved? can you talk about where we are as a nation compared with the other countries in the world?

i is quite fragile. there are about two thirds of them in the u.s.. lot of the original ideas have come out of the u.s.. we are working with other scientists in other countries. we're trying to get able from other countries and other groups , because it is only a small number of institutions. the funding is fragile. it is fluctuating. the biggest telescopes on the planet are currently funded by the national science foundation, -- one may virginia have to be shut down and the others hanging by a thread. the chinese are building a bigger telescope. a new one will be built in south africa and australia. the u.s. may not continue to lead this work. >> i would find that disappointing if that happened. i yield back the balance of my time.

>> mr. collins is recognized for his questions. >> i think i might ask the question everyone in this room wants to ask. have you watched ancient aliens? and what is your comment about that series? >> i think i have been on it, actually. [laughter] once.han the public is fascinated with the idea that we may have been visited in the past or may yet be visited. i personally don't share the conviction that we are being visited. i don't think that would be something that all the govern secret. i don't believe that. the idea that maybe we were visited during the time of the ancient egyptians and so forth, keep in mind that in the 4.5 billion year history of the earth, the time of the ancient egyptians was yesterday. then? why were they there

what was it that brought them to earth? i have no idea and i don't find good evidence. the pyramids were built by egyptians. i know that is a radical idea for some people, but they were very clever and could certainly do that. i don't think there's any good evidence that convinces me that we were visited in historic times. >> how about you, mr. wertheimer? evidence that any of these sightings -- i think some of these sightings are real phenomenon. we got calls from the space taste goes over. some people embellish and say it has windows. some of these people's imagination, and we know that because it ties very closely to popular culture. when jules vern wrote about flying saucers, everybody started seeing them. before that, people saw angels. get people watch movies, we a lot of reports that are tied to what is in the movies.

some of it is actually deliberate hoaxes from people making money. i think that was my only question, mr. chairman. i yield back. marylandntlewoman from is recognized. >> i think i should have been earlier. so i apologize. i enjoyed to thus far. contact,te movie is right? every year it comes out, since 1997. i watch it. i dream, i think well, who knows? intriguing thing about this conversation is the idea that, and it is a little bit of hubris, right? we are waiting to find them instead of them waiting to find us. maybe that is just the nature of homo sapiens. that is what we do. .'m a little bit curious

dr. wertheimer, you discuss the city project which will use six telescopes to search nearby stars and stars most likely to host a planet system similar to the sun's. the project you describe would examine a large portion of the electromagnetic spectrum spanning from low frequencies of optical light to detect possible signals from advanced civilization. thatre the target stars you talked about identified, and how are you going to coordinate the use of the six telescopes? >> we're not trying to use the telescopes all at the same time. that is hard to do. we use a telescope and other groups we are working with at other universities. we are targeting, instead of targeting stars that we know have planets, it looks

like all stars have planets. we will target the nearest stars. that is our plan, target the nearby stars. >> you talked also about this of youthat there are 24 folks who are most interested academically. aren't there -- isn't there a whole network of people out in communities who feed or fuel some of the research that you are doing? to take that one? >> dan refers to me because i don't think we know the answer to that question. in order to do this, it would be like saying, sure, there are a forthousand people looking it, but without the instruments it is very hard to do that. us are stillt of really dreaming and pretending? i want to talk about security

issues and the time that we have left. i understand that early on there was an assessment of the softwares of the ceti to withstand malicious attack and penetration. in the earlier study, you found that there have been two noteworthy attacks and the web server was compromised. we also found later that exploding a design flaw in your server protocol, that hackers had stolen thousands of user e-mail addresses. can you give us an idea of the current state of security? i think in general, downloading software and installing it on your computer, you should be careful. we are one of the safest things to install on your computer. it has been running for a really long time. it is open source software.

of the volunteers help us write the software. we are now recording it to cell phone so you can run it on a cell phone. >> i guess some of the questions deal with open source. >> i think open source software is a little safer because so many eyeballs can look at it. done. ok, i'm i will go back to watching my movies. >> thank you, ms. edwards. mr. posey is recognized for his questions. for inviting these distinguished witnesses for this fascinating testimony. very enjoyable. the ceti facebook page

every day to get my little factoid. i learned something there every day. educational and very inspiring. obviously, very interesting. the graphics are always good, too. on your disclosure, i was really impressed with the number of agreements and grants. i am glad to know that nasa is so engaged with what you are re and stillan allow you a free hand to do what you do. thank you for that. obviously, there's some curiosity about your thoughts about such things as project bluebook. what do you think? >> first off, i want to thank you for noting. those grants are for astrobiology research at the

institute. there's no federal money going into the search for intelligent life. the majority of our scientists are doing astrobiology, so life on mars and the outer solar system. it is a very productive line of research as well. in terms of project bluebook and phenomenon, i am quite skeptical. one third of americans believe that we are being visited. that is the result of polls that are been taken since the 1960's. that number does not change. if you think this is an especially american opinion, this is wrong. i honestly don't think the evidence is very good. i think if we were being visited it would not be controversial. e years since0-som roswell.

i think if they were really here, everyone would know that. >> very good. stephen hawking made some comments about contact with extraterrestrials or other life. your thoughts about his comments. this is a controversial topic about whether we should transmit messages, that is called active messages to extraterrestrial intelligence. most people in the field think that we are an emerging civilization and the first experiment we should do is just listening, trying to receive signals and see what is out there. we think that advanced civilizations are going to be out there, but we don't know that. my feeling is that we should be just listening for now. maybe in a thousand or 10,000 years, if we don't hear anything, we should think about

transmitting signals. that is a question for all humanity. it shouldn't be up to just a few scientists. that is a big decision, about who should speak for earth. right now i think we should be listening. i believe that is what hawking would say, as well. >> i'm going to disagree a little bit with my colleague. i think there's very little danger in transmitting. if there is, we are already doing it. yes, we are not deliberately targeting stars in general, although we have done that in the past. 2008sent a beatles song in to the north star. that would take 450 years to get there and they may or may not like the beatles. they used a fairly powerful transmitter. the most powerful transmitters are coming off the airports for navigation and the dew line. these things are on their way into space. their party reached several thousand star systems. any society that has the technical competence to threaten you across dozens, hundreds of

thousands of light-years of space can pick up these signals. if you're going to worry about this you better shut down all the radars of the local airports. personally, i don't think that would be a very good idea. >> your thoughts on thorium. >> i'm not familiar with the topic. >> if you're talking about powering spacecraft this way, if you send spacecraft to some of the more interesting parts of our solar system, they are in the boondocks, out to jupiter and saturn. when you get to saturn, the amount of sunlight has dropped by a factor of 100. you can't use solar cells were effectively. you have to power the craft some way. i wouldn't worry too much about radioactivity in space because space is plenty of radioactivity. it is the nature of the cosmos.

if you're worried about the fact that these launches could go ony and land these things earth, that is a danger. people are aware of the danger and they try to mitigate it. to our witnesses, what have we learned so far? we have learned that there is a chance that aliens don't like the beatles, which i have trouble imagining. they don't like our television programming. oh yeah, and contact is the best movie, right? somehow i thought that would be funnier. a couple of mechanical questions i want to get my head around. let's walk through a scenario and you tell me if it is plausible or if this is current thought. an asteroid hits the world and

into thehrown out stars. it carries dna. does that dna survive? >> this idea known as panspermia , the idea that one world can infect another world, people have simulated the environment of space and put some of our earthly bacteria into iraq and put it in space to see how long he could survive. viablee dna still be when it got someplace interesting? the result, as i understand, suggest that yes, if you're talking about communicable system,within the solar the rock from mars have seeded the earth, that is possible. there's no evidence that that occurred, but it is possible. if you're talking about seeding

worlds in other solar systems, the problem is that space is a pretty harsh environment, even for a rock. there's a lot of radiation and it is incredibly dry. anything that is in there will be suffering desiccation for maybe hundreds of thousands and millions of years before it gets there. the general consensus that i have heard is that it won't be viable when it does. >> i think that is the current thought right now. as you know, asteroids have had tears many times. it will be a really interesting question if life is found in our own solar system, like for instance on europa which has a liquid ocean. it could be something swimming around down there. way, i talked to elementary schools and asked them how we will get through the eyes and see if there's something down there, the boys all say we should use machine guns and bombs and the girls say we should melt our way through using mirrors.

>> once again, proving there is something in our dna that is different. ouro if we do find life in own solar system, it would be really exciting to figure out if it is exactly the same kind of life with the same dna and amino nucleotides.me is it identical chemistry? that would mean that rocks are going back and forth between these moons and planets in our own solar system. it really happened in one place and was carried back and forth. interesting.ery what would be much more interesting would be discovering life that is different, with a different chemistry. if we do find something like that on europa or on another moon, or mars, that means that the universe is teeming with life. if we can find two different kinds of life and her solar system, that means there is a

lot of life out there. >> it makes one wonder. the chairman was trying to ask for percentage of life out there in existence. i remember doing this as a thought process with one of my professors many years ago. i guess one of the mechanisms from the beginning to today, earth has had 100 billion species and how many can do higher math? it gives you a -- we would use it as a benchmark to try to do those calculations. i guess our understanding was is unknowable. we see the world of large numbers, large planets, these huge numbers. >> intelligence has arisen several times independently.

we always use a higher math as an example. >> my guess is that on some planets, there will be selective pressures that select for different things. you could be successful in life if you are strong or fast, but you can also be successful in some evolutionary environments by being smart. i think there are going to be places in the universe where it is advantageous to be smart. the fun of this one is, how would you ever calculated? how would you build a baseline to build from? when you move from hope, which is a powerful thing, to put it into a calculator is quite a leap. >> is very difficult to estimate. we have this one example on earth. i think the only way we will find out is to do this search. is very akin to sitting around in the bars of europe in

1700 trying to estimate the probability that an expedition sent to the deep south would find a southern continent there. what is the probability? can you give me three figures before i find you? you can't. >> is a reasonable leap of faith. it is a reasonable hypothesis, that there's life to be found there, even intelligent life, and we can sit around and have a lot of drinks and talk about it, but in the end if you don't do the experiment you will continue to have the drinks. >> or may have been a lot of drinks going on. >> thank you, both, for a testimony. i also want to thank the high school students for being here today. you have a wonderful opportunity to hear about a fascinating subject and i hope this will spur you on to study not only

astrobiology but other scientific subjects, as well. in case someone has an interest or wants to follow up on the subject, you might go to our committee's website, which is .house.gov. thank you for wonderful hearing today and we stand adjourned. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> tomorrow on c-span, a look at the exploration of mars and the prospects for a manned mission

to the red planet. we will hear from one of the senior engineers who built the curiosity rover. that is at 4:00 p.m. eastern. >> astronaut steven swanson is commander of the international space station. in orbit 260 miles above the earth. we talked to him about nasa and the spaced nation in a 15 minute interview. >> if you wouldn't mind, tell us a bit about the current activities of the international space station. how many members of crew do have , and generally, what are you doing ech