gas and radiation earth look slowly hung up in the middle of lifeless space dozens of billions of earth like planets potentially out there are determined to find extraterrestrial life how likely are we to garner a response to messages would be mounted to space. aliens to get our signals who's to say they will be a danger to earth and could first contact the opening of a new era for the planet or the beginning of a. dr douglas welcome to the show great to have you on our program so your organization mattie's focus on sending out signals aimed specifically at aliens and you say that extra terrestrials need to know where ready to communicate but are we really ready to communicate i mean look at us we can hardly communicate with each other. it's true communication is one of the big challenges but it does also a defining feature of our species that we are the intelligent creatures who

love to talk with one another so our work in many is a natural extension of that desire to communicate but instead of talking with other human beings we're reaching out to life in the universe your colleague from they search for extraterrestrial intelligence is huge sas shostak predicts that we will find intelligent alien life within the next twenty years you said that it will happen by approximately twenty thirty five watts in this next twenty years exactly well one of the things that we see in our research is the need for computing power we gather tremendous amounts of data from space and we sift through all of that cosmic static looking for radio signals that stand out as distinctly artificial and that requires tremendous computing in the great advantage that we're having right now is increases of technology so as we look at the advances of computing power you

know you can get a personal computer that's twice as powerful as the one you bought a year and a half ago for the same price when that accelerates over the course of year after year after year that gives us a huge advantage today as searches are over a trillion times more powerful than the first search conducted in one nine hundred sixty and we can continue to see that acceleration so within the next twenty years we will have looked at maybe a million stars that's a reasonable number to look at in order to actually find a signal if they're out there trying to make contact could be that we still haven't found any aliens up because technology holding us back but simply that other life forms don't want their presence to be known i mean we've been looking at the possibility of not being alone in the universe for a long time why have fun allianz in time i mean if they're out there we could have found them already know. you are raising the question that the tally and physicist

in rico for me asked in one thousand nine hundred fifty when he said where are they and so it's become known as the fermi paradox well one possibility as you say is that other civilizations are out there but they're not talking so maybe everyone is waiting for the other civilization to take the initiative and that's why mattie sends intentional messages just in case other worlds there are scientists searching for signals but they're waiting for someone else to say hello. you know they were renowned. physicist stephen hawking has warned us about mating allianz comparing it to christopher columbus meeting native americans which as we know didn't turn out so well why don't you believe him and why should we ignore professor hawking's views what we shouldn't ignore his views whenever anyone is brilliant as stephen hawking says watch out be careful you have to take it seriously but what he really

has not taken into account is that the aliens that we're afraid of the ones that can travel between the stars could already pick up our t.v. and radio signals that we have been sending out the past seventy or eighty years so there is no increased danger of an alien invasion by sending intentional signals to let the extra terrestrials know that we want to make contact now assesses scientists who actually don't like you sending signals to ellen say that an initiating contact isn't science but rather diplomacy to using good doing it is what they majority of people actually want. well i think that in fact sending signals to other worlds and listening for response is a much more traditional type of science than simply observing astronomers are in an unusual position among scientists because they can do experiments usually you go to your laboratory you make some changes you see what happens but astronomers and seti

scientists have to passively wait for signals to come in see if they detect them we're actually doing what's called a true experiment where we send a signal and then wait for a response back now it's true that there are seventy scientists who have said this is a very long term project most seti scientists want to focus on a search that could pay off tonight but in addition to those seti strategies which our organization also does we also have observatories in panama in the united states that were looking for signals from extraterrestrial but in addition to this potentially short term payoff of detecting the signal we're also making a long term investment by sending the signal and then waiting for a reply that could come in many years from now for instance nasa says voyager it with just recently fired up its thrusters for the first time in thirty seven years floating outside the solar system with a bunch of cultural messages that brought to extraterrestrials is what you were

doing more dangerous than that. no it really isn't more dangerous but the voyager recording is an excellent example of how we want to make contact with another civilization so this golden record has greetings in fifty five languages it has music from around the world and it has a scientific tutorial along with over one hundred pictures of life on earth so it's an attempt to give a snapshot of earth to another world there's one big problem though of the voyager recording that it travels so slowly so that it's going to be seventy thousand years before the spacecraft comes even close to another star but by sending radio signals the travel at the speed of light we can reach the nearest star in just over four years so there is a tremendous time advantage of sending in electromagnetic signals whether they be radio signals or laser pulses as opposed to trying to make contact by

a spacecraft so how do you make sure that extra terrestrials will interpret our signals as an invitation to communicate rather than a challenge. well the most important thing about sending the message out is simply being clear and any civilization that has been through this process know that there's going to be some ambiguity so we can expect a certain amount of reservation on the part of the extra terrestrials that they will see what patterns we're sending and try to make sense of them and so that's why we start our messages the first messages we've sent by a focus on simple mathematical and scientific principles to make it as unambiguous as possible that we're talking about what we and the extra terrestrials have in common an understanding of our physical universe all right so he's you are saying that our radio interview signals are ready in space could there be like ellie is watching jerry springer reruns out there somewhere right now like light years away

i mean if they base their understanding of us on our t.v. man i mean we're in deep trouble. exactly i couldn't agree with you more that in fact we do expect if there is a civilization just a tiny bit more advanced than we are that they can already pick up jerry springer or any other sit coms interview shows the nightly news they see what we're doing to our planet you know it isn't really a very pretty picture and so in addition to sending in this chaotic messages that we use to communicate with one another we want to send a clear signal to the extraterrestrial that there's also some rationality on our world so flaky have sat. this speed with which to signal us are sent out is very slow as so the closest to about eight layer light years away so there's a reply it will come in what sixteen years so we're looking at decades if any aliens are out there so. is your whole work just sending messages in

a bottle i mean hoping that future generations will get an answer because our civilization will be completely different by that time will they even remember your role. excellent point and that i think has been the greatest obstacle within the seti community to send an intentional signal because some of said we're not ready for something that requires that long term perspective our position it may be is that we need to get ready for a long term perspective as a species in fact a lot of the problems that we encounter in our world today is because we're always looking for immediate gratification we want results by the end of the week or if we're really thinking long term the end of the next quarter but some good things take time so you're absolutely right that when we're sending our messages in a bottle we're sending many of them to many stars and it's critical that we keep track of where we've sent those and what the messages were so that if we do get

a reply back we will know what the reply was in response to how do you figure out what the aliens will understand what they won't i mean do you think human culture has something that transcends this boundary mathematical equations i don't know maybe music. you know i wish that when we're communicating with the aliens they would know english or russian or spanish or arabic but there's no reason to think they would have that in common so we have to say what do we and the aliens have in common simply by virtue of being able to make contact well if they receive our radio signals we know that they can build radio antennas that requires a technical sophistication and you've got to be a good engineer you're not going to be a good engineer on any planet if you don't know something as fundamental as two plus two equals four so that's what we begin with in our message simply explaining to the extraterrestrials here's how we count here's how we do arithmetic the

interesting thing is by taking very gradual steps upward soon we can talk about the nature of the radio signal itself and that's what the aliens have in their hands or that they pick up on their machines and so we focus on communicating some very basic concepts very clearly because that's the essential starting point once we have something that they understand that could open the floodgates to tremendous understanding where we can go beyond just math and science to talk about something as you suggest like music the beauty of music is that at its core it can be described in terms of mathematical ratios between no it's it can be described by the same terms physicists use an amplitude frequency duration and so by starting with basic scientific and mathematical principles we can begin to give extraterrestrial a peek into what it means to be human all right we're going to take

a short break right now when we're back we'll continue talking to dr douglas in fact president of massey organization discussing what it's going to do like to hear back from l.a. and civilization states. you mean you don't see. the. two are. there they could be. two at the most through only ten. maybe.

twenty and what will see are central banks adding bit coy to their strategic reserves alongside gold so the big gold buyers like china and russia will be adding big oil to their strategic reserves some banks possibly in venezuela they could completely change their fortunes in the global economy by switching over to crypto switching over to bitcoin and then that will set a precedent for other countries of policy.

and we're back with dr douglas fact president of messy organization discussing their prospect of finding intelligent life on other planets so dr i coach when you think about extraterrestrial what do you personally imagine there are like. well the ones that we can contact are going to be scientists because that's the only way we can exchange a radio signal or a laser pulses if they also have an ability to create the instruments that allow us to exchange information but beyond that i don't expect that they're going to look like us you know they're not necessarily even going to have the same way of encountering the world that we do we rely very heavily on our vision vision has

evolved forty times independently on earth so it's been very affective here but what happens if you're a civilization on a planet where there is a murky cover over the atmosphere and you need to get around through a sense of hearing or a sense of touch or a sense of smell you could still be a scientist still discovering your universe but your way of encountering the day to day could be very different and so that's why we always need to be open to new possibilities for creating messages so that if they are detected they'll be understood jill tarter from seti told me once that we tend to think about aliens ass earthlings on steroids is it likely that we will be similar in appearance and how do you how do we wait thinking about it this way. you know there are some aspects of our bodies that we might find in other species for example we're bilaterally symmetrical the left in the right hand side of us looks pretty much the

same but why would we expect the extraterrestrial to have say only two hands you know we see very intelligent creatures on our own planet with very different body types the octopus has more of a radial symmetry there's more of a circular symmetry to it and there is also the possibility of having multiple appendages so i don't think we can count on the extra terrestrials looking like us i think jill is right that we we tend to think of aliens as humans on steroids because that's frankly what it's cheapest for hollywood to make but instead we may even encounter intelligence that is not biological at all but created by the biological intelligence on another world you know our first contact may not be with carbon based life but silicon based life computers artificial intelligence is we project our own development of artificial intelligence on this world some are

saying within the next century will have very intelligent computers so those may be the nature of the extra terrestrials we make first contact with here is a point earlier can we study what other species might be like based based on where they might leave for instance what would allianz from venus look like if life was possible there longer and i would say it's huge chad's or no no it is seen as is a plant vs they would need anyone living on venus would need to almost have an especially as covering this incredibly hot on venus but one of the basic things that we can think about is how big is the planet the bigger the planet the greater the gravitational force and so that's going to favor as. species that's really going to be sturdy maybe shorter squader very solid in stocky on a planet that is much smaller than our earth it's similar to being on the moon

which is much smaller it's a much smaller gravity and so there would be a selection through evolution for creatures that are maybe taller and thinner so that's one of the fundamentals that you can consider but then as you point out maybe it's the different environment so maybe there is aquatic life that's intelligent we know that whales and dolphins are highly intelligent on our world but there's one problem i mean there may be extraterrestrial whales creating wonderful symphonies that they send to one another but if they never build a renia detector if they never send us radio signals we simply won't know about them so in some sense that narrows the kind of intelligence that we will make contact with in intelligence that can create a technology similar to ours so it's our planet that you are specifically concentrating on right now when looking for alan life a planet that you have the most hopes for. yes in october two thousand and

seventeen mattie sent its first messages to a nearby star called lojban star this was in cooperation with the sonar music festival a project called sonar calling g.j. two seventy three b. and this is the closest star that has a known exoplanet within the habitable zone so it's at just the right distance from its star that it could support liquid water now the fact that it is twelve point four light years from earth means that a round trip exchange would take just under twenty five years so those are some of the best timescales that we can hope for so that's why we focus on stars that are in our own galactic backyard rather than much further away stars how do you imagine our earth will react to actually making contact will there be panic emergences security council meetings crises i mean what sort of reaction do you expect well if

you believe hollywood you're going to see a tremendous upheaval but when we do surveys psychologists ask people how would you respond they say you know i think other people are going to be upset but i'll be fine but if everyone is saying that it it maybe there really won't be a big chaos i think over the last decades people have become more familiar with the idea that there may well be intelligent life out there and so actually getting confirmation i think for a lot of people would be no big deal they're going to want to know when's the next football game that'll be the next thing in their attention and the world's major religions stress god special concern for the earth and humans what would that mean for religion as a whole once we know we're not alone in the universe. well it could have profound religious implications and for many years people said christians or monotheistic religions would have special trouble because of the idea that there is something

special about life on earth but in fact theologians from christianity other religious traditions have said there's really no in compatibility if in fact the universe was created by god then god could have populated it with as many creatures as he or she wants and so i think even those religions that people have said will have a hard time absorbing that are really pretty comfortable with it and other religious traditions like buddhism or hinduism already have a notion of multiple gods and incarnations throughout the universe so i think there'd be no difficulty at all there let me ask you this what do you think of people like former canadian defense minister paul hellyer he says that ellie is already contacting humans very discreetly and there are other people who think like him what do you make of it have we had contact already without knowing it. i think whenever anyone says the aliens have been very discrete and various or

a petition is you've got a question that. many and seti scientists need evidence we need proof we need something that you and i can look at together and say is this really from an extraterrestrial you can have as many conspiracy theories as you want about the aliens having arrived but unless someone can give me a piece of their spacecraft i'm not going to be impressed so we need to be incredibly skeptical that's built into the way we detect signals in seti and we have to be just as skeptical about any claims that the aliens have come to earth so no i have never seen evidence any evidence to suggest the extra terrestrials have already arrived now there are so many who follow just out there who claim that aliens built the pyramids that alley and still are water are oxygen i mean it seems this people are a bit wacky but only other hand they believe in las just like you believe in aliens and perhaps you guys are in that different. well i would make

a distinction because you say i believe in aliens i think it's possible they're out there and certainly devoted my life to trying to make contact but as a scientist i also have to be open to the possibility that humankind is the only intelligence in the universe now when people say that the aliens are going to come here to steal our oxygen or our water that just doesn't make economic sense but again the bottom line is that you can claim and believe whatever you want i mean who am i to question but then the big question the science asks is what kind of evidence can you give so that someone else can share your belief that's what's lacking from the u.f.o. community you said it yourself there is no hard evidence that elin's exist it is just a possibility and sorry as we know without speculating the earth is the sole planet where a laugh exists surrounded by the vast freezing black space of dust and gas so could our obsession with aliens be just a way to cope with enormous costs make loneliness. i do think some people

want to reach out they want to make contact because they feel like their lives are empty on this world my advice to them would be get a friend on this planet because an alien is never going to be our friend an extraterrestrial if we ever do make contact will be so different from us that we cannot expect them to solve all of our problems we can't expect self ation from the stars i think the best that we can hope for in contacting the other civilization is to learn how another species understand this universe in a sense it's holding a mirror up to ourselves because what we know from contacting people on other cultures on our own world gives us a new perspective on ourselves it's not that we want to give up our culture and take on theirs but we have a better appreciation for ourselves. golden more doctor back get a friend from this planet don't rely on aliens thanks

a lot for this interview when talking to dr douglas exactly the president of the messaging extraterrestrial intelligence organization discussing our chances of finding intelligent and we in life and whether we should be trying to in the first place this holiday season. i wish you and list love and peace let's hope that what's you made in us will always prevail over evil stay close and kind of each other a peaceful sky about our hads is worth much more than riches of the world happy holidays to you that's it for this edition of so think oh i'll see you next.

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