 Good morning internet and welcome back to my office the past few days. I've been thinking a lot about motivation Is this picture crooked really like the heart of motivation? Like why am I getting up in the morning and coming and doing this job? Where do I want to go with this job? What's next? What do I what's the next paper? I want to write and like these are real important questions The life of an academic means you have to decide for yourself. What's the next paper? I don't have a boss or a CEO or a mission statement telling me this is the next paper I have to write. I'm just making things up as I'm going and trying to do what seems cool and right and What I can get funded like spoiler everybody in this building is just making it up all the time And I think like a lot of people I get bored of what I'm doing I'm very motivated by a new project that is shiny and exciting and we're just getting into it And we're not worried about the details yet We're just making the first plots and seeing what's out there that part is easy Getting started is super easy finishing is very difficult and yet It's also so vital writing is when you do the real thinking about a project I really like writing when it's going well the process of sitting and writing and putting my thoughts together and Organizing and editing is really enjoyable for me. I'm not saying I'm good at it. Can I be honest with you internet? I feel like I can be honest with you internet. We feel like we've known each other for a long time now I'm starting to get bored of a lot of the work that I'm doing to use the parlance of our time a lot of The science that I'm best known for isn't bringing me a lot of joy part of this I think is I'm not sure what the next part of the story is I have lots of good projects that I'd like to do But I'm not sure I have something inside of me right now that I want to write about for that topic That's okay. There's lots of science out there. So this is sort of idea salad But let me tie this all together. I have a short trip coming up to Tucson Which is actually for the upcoming Cialog meeting I went to one last year It was really cool and then I'm going on leave for three months We have a new baby and it's awesome And I'm looking forward to spending time with him and getting to know who he is So for the past two weeks the science that I've been super excited about is SETI and it's an idea that I've mentioned a couple times in this vlog So it's using next-generation telescope and survey mission like our old friends tests and An LSS T here and it's trying to lay the groundwork to start doing SETI work Searchers for intelligent life out there in the universe using these surveys This is an idea that's been in me that I've wanted to talk about for for like 10 years And I'm not sure that it's so profound that I'm the only one who's ever thought of this But it's something that I'm excited about it's something that I really think is important in the spectrum of things that are important about doing Astrophysics research. I think this is important I think this is something that matters and we should do and I want to do and it's not just like I want to be Jodi Foster in contact, which I would love to be that would be awesome Jodi Hit me up if you want to do coffee sometime But I think there's a real opportunity here these surveys are developing new Kinds of ways of doing astronomy these allow us to do astronomy on a much larger scale using huge data sets So a traditional SETI like what a lot of people at breakthrough or the SETI Institute are doing does targeted radio Surveys of like nearby stars looking for interesting signals these surveys are covering huge portions of the sky looking for Anything exoplanets or supernova or all kinds of cool stuff And so the point is these new surveys offer a unique opportunity to do SETI research at almost zero cost Like if you can frame your SETI research questions in terms of database queries and like systems and architectures that Programs like LSST are developing then these signals can be detected every night And when we come up with new ideas and new signals to search for we can even go back in the archives and search for signals in existing data So I think there's two different main approaches for this problem One is you could try to identify every single object that you observe out there and figure out what it is and everything that you Can't figure out or can't identify those are your SETI candidates, and I think that's a really important way forward We should try to catalog and characterize everything we find But the other way forward is to just pose Observations that should not exist like beacons or lighthouses or runway landing strips or something things that we would Plazably observe in these surveys that nature shouldn't otherwise produce so a good example of this might be looking for otherwise Normal pulses or variations from star that trace out the digits of pi or something I don't know There's a million of these kinds of ideas and if we can write them down as like Database queries or little bits of code then we can package them up and run them on any kind of survey that comes down So these are jumbled thoughts the point is I had a few weeks with nothing else going on getting ready for this leave And I thought to myself. This is a time. This is an opportunity I should write this paper now so it's almost done I'm in the last section of writing and honestly I haven't had more fun writing a paper in at least a year and I'm trying to listen to that little voice in my head That's saying this is awesome. This is viable and this is fun when you enjoy what you're working on Astronomy is a great job and for the past couple of weeks working on this SETI paper This has been a great job. So hopefully this paper will be submitted in the next week or so So if you have thoughts about this idea about looking for aliens and big data sets Put them in the comments below or tweet at me or whatever this is something I'm excited about and I don't think anybody else is really doing right now So I want to start a conversation And of course if you like this video and any of the other content that I'm making and you want to support me as a Scientist it means a lot if you can subscribe to my channel or share the video or like it or you know Do all the little things