Adam Frank
speaker
594 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Frank’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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You can actually, the glint off of solar panels will produce a, the way the light is reflected off of solar panels, whether, no matter what it's made out of, actually. There was a paper that Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb did in I think it was 2017. We've just followed up on it. That actually could act as a techno signature.
You'd be able to see in the reflected light, this sort of big jump that would occur because of city lights, city, artificial illumination. If the, if there's really like, you know, large scale cities like, you know, Coruscant and Star Wars or Trent or in the foundation, those city lights would be detectable, you know, the spectral imprint of those across the, 20, 30 light years.
So, you know, our job in this grant is to develop the first ever library of techno signatures. Nobody's really ever thought about this before. So we're trying to come up with all the possible ideas for what a civilization might produce that could be visible across, you know, interstellar distances. And are these good ones or is these ones going to be hard to detect or such?
Yeah. If you looked at Earth at night from a distance where, you know, looked at its spectra and you had sensitive enough instruments, you'd be able to see all the sodium lights and the reflected light off of, you know, they...
bounce off the ground right that the light bounces off the ground so you'd convolve the the sodium lamps with the reflected spectra from the ground and yeah you'd be able to see that there's city lights now increase that by a factor of a thousand you know if you had a a trantor and you'd be able to detect that across interstellar distances thomas beady did this work who's now working with us what do you think is the most detectable thing about earth
Wow, this is fun. We just have a Sophia Schiff, who's part of our collaboration, just did a paper. We did Earth from Earth. If you were looking at Earth with Earth technology for a bunch of different technosignatures, how close would you have to be to be able to detect them? And most of them turn out to be, you'd have to be pretty close, at least out to the Oort cloud.
But actually, it is our radio signatures still that is still most detectable.
Interstellar distance. Because the real question, you know, we really want to know is like, I'm sitting here on Earth. I'm looking at these exoplanets. The nearest star is four light years away. So that's like the minimum distance. So what can, if I'm looking at exoplanets, what kind of signals could I see?
Oh my God, there's all kinds of stuff. Well, like the chlorofluorocarbons, you can see Earth's pollution. And I think city lights, you had to be within the solar system.
They're going to need much more powerful. But let me tell you what things, let's talk about direct imaging for a moment because I just have to go on. This is such a cool idea, right? So what we really want and the next generation of space telescopes and such is we're trying to do direct imaging.
We're trying to get, you know, an image of a planet separated from its star to be able to see the reflected light or the actual emission from the planet itself.
A picture. But the problem is, is that even with the thing that's going to come after JWST, it's going to be a pixel, right? You're not going to get any kind of resolution. You'll be able to get the light from it, which you'll be able to pass through a spectrograph, but you're not going to be able to take a picture. But there is this idea called the Solar Gravity Lens Telescope.
I think that's what it is. And the idea is insane, right? So their general relativity says, look, massive bodies distort space. They actually curve spacetime. So the sun is a massive body. And so that means that the light passing through the sun gets focused like a lens, right?
So the idea is to send a bunch of telescopes out kind of into the Oort cloud and then look back towards the sun, towards an exoplanet that is behind, not directly behind the sun, but is, you know, in the direction of the sun. And then let the sun act like a lens and collect, focus the light onto the telescope. And you would be able to get, and they've done, it's amazing.
Like they've already, this idea is insane. They'd be able to get, if everything works out, 24 kilometer resolution. You'd be able to see Manhattan on a exoplanet. And this thing, it sounds insane, but actually, you know, NASA, they've already got, the team has already gotten through like sort of three levels of NASA. You know, there's the NASA program for like, give us your wackiest idea.
right and then the ones that survive that are like okay tell us whether that wacky idea you know is even feasible and then and they're marching along and the idea is that like you know and they even have plans for how you'd be able to get these probes out into the oort cloud on relatively fast time scales you need to be about 500 times as far from the sun as earth is um but right now everything looks like the idea seems to hold together so probably when i'll be dead but
But when you're an old man, it's possible that something like this, could you imagine having like, yeah, that kind of resolution, a picture of an exoplanet down to, you know, kilometers. So I'm very excited about that.
We can't get there. But, you know, I mean, again, this is the thing about being long lived. We've got to get to the point where we're long lived enough that. So let's say we found like this is what I always like to let's imagine that we find, say, 10 light years away. We find a planet that looks like it's got techno signatures, right? It doesn't end there.
Like that would be the most important discovery in the history of humanity. And it wouldn't be like, well, okay, we're done. The first thing we do is we dig bigger telescopes to try and do those imaging, right? And then the next thing after that, we plan a mission there, right?
We would figure out, like with Breakthrough Starshot, there was this idea of trying to use giant lasers to propel small spacecrafts, light sails, almost to the speed of light. So they would get there in 10 years and take pictures. And So, well, you know, if we actually made this discovery, there would be the impulse. There would be the effort to actually try and send something to get there.
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