James Davenport
Appearances
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
So for five minutes on the hour for several days, they would black out all radio transmissions in the U.S., and they would listen. They would point the radio telescopes or the radio transmitters they had at Mars, and they would listen for signs of, You know, Martian NPR.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
Spoiler, they didn't find anything. There was no Martian NPR.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
If the thing we were looking for was the size of the ocean, so far, as of about 2000, we had looked at a pint glass of water. compared to the volume of the ocean.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
So the Drake equation is the number of stars times the fraction of those stars that should have intelligent life. It's capable of sending us signals. In its simplest form, it's the number of stars times the fraction of stars that have NPR. Or something like that. Now, what goes into that NPR term? Well, you have to have a planet. It has to be at that Goldilocks distance from its parent star.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
It has to have water. It has to have all the ingredients that we know and many of the ingredients we don't know. And there's a lot we don't know about what drives life. So the last 25 years, there has been a really big surge in this field called astrobiology. And they've tried to answer the parts of that equation like, well, how many stars have planets? Is it every star?
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
Is it only stars like our sun? So now we know that on average, every star roughly has at least one planet. Wow. At least one rocky type planet on average. Wow. That's so many. That means there's so many. That means that for a galaxy of more than 100 billion stars, that means we have at least 100 billion planets to search. And even still, even after 25 years of astrobiology, we still don't know.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
There still is enough unknowns in that equation that we don't know the answer still. So there's a lot of work to be done.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
You can write it in a way that does. You can write it in such a way that. how many civilizations arise, and what's the likelihood that they live long enough to develop radio telescopes and astronomy and space travel perhaps. So you can write the equation sort of in different ways. It's not a strict equation in the same way as Einstein's theory of relativity.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
It's an equation that gives us kind of an outline for how to frame the problem. It's more of a illustration.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
So really what we consider the beginning of modern SETI is 1960. So Frank Drake, who some people know from the Drake equation, which tries to quantify what's the likelihood that we're alone in the universe. He was actually the pioneer where he had time on a radio telescope for good bread and butter astronomy reasons. At this point in the 1960s, people are looking at.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
galaxies and gas and dust in the sort of interstellar medium. And radio telescopes are a new technology still. And he decides to point it at a couple of nearby stars to quote unquote listen with the intent of looking for again, chirps or pulses or some kind of transmission, he doesn't find anything. But he starts what he calls Project Ozma, named after the Wizard of Oz.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
And he starts to look for signs of, you know, transmissions, intentional transmissions from technology. And this is really the beginning of what we call SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
We've done a lot of work since. So my estimate a couple of years ago was we've pushed that from a pint glass of water to maybe a hot tub.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
Yeah. That's massive progress, right? There's a lot of pint glasses in a hot tub.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
Right. So I am an optical astronomer. By training, I'm a stellar astronomer. I look at stars with sort of classical optical telescopes that you would look through with your eyes and we attach digital cameras to. This is not the area that SETI has worked on for like 60 years.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
But we have put a lot of effort into it for lots of other astrophysics and astronomy reasons because stars are bright and there's fun physics. There's lots to learn there in the cosmos. And that's what I spent 20 years doing. And then this realization that we're putting all this money into optical astronomy.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
Why aren't we looking for maybe the most interesting thing, looking for life, looking to answer these questions about whether or not we're alone?
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
My inner eight-year-old, my inner Star Trek nerd started putting this together that we should use the data that we have and try to figure out how to pull the knowledge from 60 years of radio astronomy and apply it into this optical visible light astronomy.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
My hope in pushing this from the radio into the visible light, into the infrared and other domains of astronomy that are so active is that we can actually push this from a hot tub to maybe an Olympic swimming pool.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
The very first like commissioning image from the telescope from like their engineering camera was shown. And it's beautiful and it's early days, but the telescope is now being tested and everything is being aligned. So it has gone from 20 years of development to a reality. This telescope, it's going to sit in Chile and for 10 years create this mosaic movie of the sky.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
And it's going to watch the sky every night with the world's largest digital camera built in California, shipped all the way to Chile. This camera is the size of a small car. It's a massive, powerful camera attached to an 8.5-meter telescope. So an enormous piece of glass, one of the 10 biggest pieces of glass ever built. It's incredibly powerful.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
And what you get for all that is a sample of more than 10 billion stars. The best samples of stars so far are 1 to 2 billion. We're going to push that up to 10, maybe 15 or 20 billion stars in our galaxy.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
I hijacked my parents' little Gateway 2000, and I absolutely cooked it trying to contribute. So it seemed like the thing, right? It seemed like the one opportunity living in the middle of nowhere and sort of like rural eastern Washington, like, oh, I can be part of this journey that humankind is on. It was amazing.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
That's a total transformational shift. It's going to be something that really is a tide that raises all the sort of astronomical boats. We're going to see the binary stars and the supernova. We're going to double the known number of asteroids and comets in the solar system. Important. In the first year.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
Because success doesn't depend on finding something, right? The search itself is like the journey is the thing that we're after. Wow. It may take, and this is what I tell my students, it may take a thousand years to know the answer to this question. We've only just begun looking. 1960 was not that long ago. Right.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
And even if we do all of our work and we get it up to a swimming pool as compared to the ocean, that's only one swimming pool against a very big ocean of possible parameter space that we're looking. It is going to take a long time to put this story together and to be sure that we have found something or that we haven't, that we're alone or that we're not. That's okay.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
The advent of photography and computers means that our data is forever. So a star that doesn't do anything, that seemed boring to us for 10 years, 25 years from now, it might do something interesting. And if we don't have that record, if we don't do our work, then they don't stand a chance of finding anything.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
If we all pitch in, if we all do a little bit like we did.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
With the screensavers when we were kids. If our entire community of astronomers and scientists and the public come along with us, we're going to make a dent.