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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One object.
right which is what if it's a swarm you'd expect like the light to be like blinking in and out as these things pass in front of you know if you've got thousands of these much of the time they'll be blotting out the star sometimes they won't be right and so you're going to get an irregular sort of uh signal uh transit signal yeah one you wouldn't expect from a star that doesn't have anything exactly or just a planet right or a couple of planets there'd be so many of these that it would be like beep beep beep
That's exactly what it is. Everything's coag, you know, in a stable solar system, you get a handful of planets, you know, 5, 10, that's it probably, and nothing else. So if now suddenly you see lots of these little microtransits, you're telling you there's something else that's big enough to create a transit, but...
too many of them, and also within a regular shape, the transit itself, that these could be megastructures.
Well, the main groups looking for megastructures are, again, Jason Wright at Penn State and collaborators. The way they're looking for it, though, is for infrared light. Because the second law of thermodynamics says, look, if you capture all of this starlight, you're going to warm up the, you know, your thing's going to warm up and emit an infrared.
It's going to be waste heat, waste heat and waste light from this. That feels like a louder, clearer way to detect it. Right. And that's actually, you know, Dyson, that's actually why Dyson proposed it. He wasn't really proposing it because like he was saying, this is what civilizations are going to do. He proposed it because he was like, oh, we want to start looking for alien civilizations.
Here's something that would have a detectable signature. Um, Um, so, uh, Jason and company have done, you know, pretty good searches. And recently they made news because, you know, they were able to eliminate a lot of places. No, these are not Dyson spheres, but they did have a couple that were like anomalous enough that they're like, well, this is kind of what it would look like.
It's not a detection. And they were saying they would never say it's a detection, but they were like, they were not non detections.
Potential candidates, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, there's something called the Clark Belt, right? So we have a bunch of satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit. Nothing naturally is going to end up in geosynchronous orbit, right? Geosynchronous orbit is one particular orbit that's really useful if you want to beam things straight down or if you want to put a space elevator up. Right.
So there's this idea that if, you know, a civilization becomes, you know, advanced enough that it's really using geosynchronous orbit, that you actually get a belt, something that would actually be detectable from a distance via a transit. There's been a couple of papers written about the possibility of these Clark belts, densely occupied Clark belts being a mega structure.
It's not as mega as a Dyson swarm, but it's, you know, kind of planetary scale.
It could be, I mean, like in our list of techno signatures, it would be down there. But it would be, again, if you had an advanced enough civilization that did enough of this, it would certainly, you'd have a Clark belt. And the question is whether or not it's detectable.
That's the go-to one.
Right. So the Kardashev scale was the same time. This is this golden age of SETI, like kind of like 60, 59 to 65 when it just starts. Like this is, you know, Frank Drake has done his first experiment. People are like, oh my God, this is even possible. And so people are just thrown out these ideas. And as I, you know, said in the book, science is conservative.
And what I mean by that is it holds onto its best ideas. So Kardashev comes up with this idea that look, if we're, again, it's always about detectability. If we're looking for civilizations, we should think about what are the state, what are the natural stages, natural in quotes, that a civilization goes through. And he was thinking in terms of energy use, which I like a good physicist.
So the, he said, look, the first thing hurdle in terms of energy or threshold that a civilization will go through is using all the starlight that falls onto a planet. He called that a type one civilization. In whatever way you're doing it, some large fraction of the starlight that falls on your planet, you're using for your own ends.
The next would be to use all the starlight there is from that star, right? So that's the Dyson sphere. So he actually, Dyson had already proposed his idea of the swarm and Kardashev was picking out. So that's a type two civilization. Type three is galactic scale, a civilization that could use all the starlight in a galaxy. Right. So we are now, where are we now?
Yeah. So this is a log scale. Yeah. So, uh,
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