 Day two of triple AS here we go. It's day two of triple AS. I think it's actually day three of the meeting But this is the second day. I'll be here Good yesterday We had a great session on exoplanets which included some of the biggest names that I know in the field Including my good friend Jada Arney and Courtney dressing longtime viewers this channel will remember sat right next to me at the test launch Really fantastic people but today we move into something that I've been very excited about lately And that is SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence There's gonna be a great session this morning on the search for life both techno signatures and biosignatures And I think it's going to be really exciting There are folks here from the SETI Institute and the breakthrough listen project and there's even a talk today by UW zone Victoria Meadows who's the leader of the virtual planetary lab hands down the best astrobiology institute In the world I think I've been surprised at how different this meeting is the breadth makes it really fun I've been learning lots of little things about a wide range of science But the difference in format is also really interesting the lack of a lot of traditional posters means There's not a ton of one-on-one interaction with like junior scientists unless you find them in the hallways I've been really impressed with the exhibition hall And I think there's some really cool things we could take away from the triple AS meetings and bring to the double AS meetings One of the other interesting differences about this meeting Is it was scheduled to run thursday friday saturday sunday today when i'm filming this this is saturday And since it's happening at home that means that my kids are home and i'm not spending time with my family So there's always attention about when you host conferences should you try to overlap the weekends so that people have them free Especially people who are teachers or teaching faculty But if you've got a family weekends are a really bad time to take off because that's the time you spend with your family And with your kids There's no perfect answer and no matter what you choose a weekend conference or a weekday conference There's going to be a lot of tension with a large portion of people no matter what So I kind of like that the triple AS split the difference and did two days on the weekdays and two days on the weekends Honestly, I think that's a pretty good compromise. All right coffee in a few minutes Let's go Started building rovers About 10 years or so ago last year we won the international Canadian Rover challenge and that was the second year in a row coming in first place Our rover is a smaller version of what you see going on bars We have a six-axis arm a full base chassis with a full e-box setup with full control And along with a full science machine going on board It doesn't matter what convention center you're at the staff are always very serious about timelines So the exhibition hall with the coffee doesn't open until 9 30 and they are not opening it a minute early It's okay. They're professionals that they're doing their job And 30 exactly I love the alien inside of the mech robot thing. That's awesome So behind me is the tech tangle area, which is like a battle robot arena Except for their mars rovers and they don't seem to be weaponized at all So I have seen very little robot carnage, which is probably a good thing What I saw was all the competing teams seemed to actually just be visiting with each other Repairing things and doing obstacles as much less battle robots and much more like what you expect to see at a science conference. It was cool Speaking of aliens the seddy session starts in 20 minutes time to go upstairs I also decided to leave my laptop at home today. So my backpack is Nice and light, but I feel weirdly vulnerable like I don't have my laptop. What if I need to do work? It's saturday. I don't need to do any work I like this format We don't use this usually at the double ass meetings with with the big tables in a big lecture hall It just kind of acknowledges that people are going to use their laptops Why make them stuff themselves into little rows just provide them tables. I like this One of the things about doing seddy with large surveys like lst And the big data kinds of data sets is that it emerges I think two of the biggest interests and strengths that the udup astronomy department has Astrobiology and data analysis and software What's going to be awesome about this session is it's got talks both from the traditional seddy side And the astrobiology side. I think it's very rare to see those camps come together in the same venue And as I said at absicon a few months ago I'll be really curious to see how this room fills up and what the dynamic from the community is if the community is interested In seddy as a as a scientific discipline. It's going to be interesting and ask themselves the question Are we alone here in the universe? It is an interesting question. It is a scientific question and you'll hear about some of that today It's been a quarter century Since we detected the first planet around a solar like star and since that time there's been amazing advances in technology and amazing results obtained We're at a point now where there are 4 000 also planets detected around nearby stars. There's exchange of material between planetary systems Just a couple of years ago. We detected the first interstellar object Oumuamua which got quite a lot of press For its possibility of being an alien spaceship We now don't don't think that it's an alien spaceship Our latest scientific results in a paper led by graduate student penn state, Sophia shake She performed a survey of stars in something called the earth transit zone The part of the sky where other stars could see our planet pass in front of the sun And that paper has just been submitted to the astrophysical journal and we'll show up on the archive I believe this afternoon We also announced a new partnership with our friends at the national radio astronomy observatory to bring the search for extraterrestrial intelligence To perhaps one of the telescopes that's most identified with the search But not used so much for it The Ganski very large array, which of course as many of you know featured Very heavily in the in the movie contact So i'm an astrobiologist We are not in this case in the talk i'm talking about we're not looking for little green men We'll keep a little green pond slime And so I will talk to you about how we might even be able to do that over distances of parsecs In our case what we're doing is focusing on the the impact of microbial life on the environment I mean in that case our access for increasing our probability is time Because microbial life dominated the environment of our planet for billions and billions of years Before we upstart humans appeared at this very last little slice here So so with our search for for we call biosignatures we are trying to look at An inhabited planet throughout all of its different Different types of biospheres and increase our chances that way instead of relying on the the probability Which may be rare that in fact technological civilization evolves Okay, so andrew mentioned carl sagan in his talk and Carl told us that extraordinary claims demand Extraordinary evidence and vicki has just told you about the ways that the Astrobiologists are planning to look for extraordinary evidence of biosignatures But what about technosignatures? What about intelligent life? There was just a huge Bus about these absolutely obviously hoaxed data and so we got ourselves together and we tried to Come up with something that would be like the Richter scale Develop something called the Rio scale and it's been modified the ones or twice even though it was in place It did not protect us from 2016 which is the year that the media discovered at right We had a claim that around voyage and star. There was perhaps the building of megastructures to block the light There was a claim in a paper that 234 alien civilizations were broadcasting Bright optical pulses very short. They all had exactly the same duration And lastly in that year We had a claim that From a large radio telescope in russia There was the detection of a signal. Look, that's how I spent 2016 But et was the wrong answer to these flames, right better answers for example for by asian star a warped thin disc of dust For the borea and trotier pulses Not alien transmitters, but the processing of taking the Fourier transform of a spectra Produced artifacts and lastly that russian signal where they saw it once when they looked at that star But not the other 38 times. They looked at that star A military satellite is is a better explanation As to be expected. It's been a very interesting day, but it's also been a little bit surprising So the morning started out with a great session on the search for life in the universe technosignatures biosignatures SETI one of my favorite topics in astronomy right now, and I'm really happy to report that the room was Was quite full the audience was great And I think like it seemed like 20 of the audience was science journalists So so there must have been like something exciting there Hopefully for the broader public and then my day has taken kind of a wonderfully unexpected turn Yesterday, I visited the uw booth. There's a big University of washington booth here at triple as And I asked the question We had the double s meeting here just over a year ago. Why didn't we have a great uw booth? And the answer seems to be that the uw press people people who would be responsible for putting that kind of booth together Uh, they didn't really know about the meeting until it was happening This led me into a conversation today with james urton who is the press information officer for science and astronomy At uw so I am now so much better off for having met some of these press and media people That work at my institution and then was able to have a chat with rebecca gurley Who is like the social media person like it's perfect like these are the people that i'm super excited to get to know In a general sense as an academic and as a scientist, we really like press and media coverage It's validating for our work And it's one of the most efficient ways to get the public Aware of what we're doing and it's also really good when you're trying to get jobs or go up for promotions or And so by extension knowing the media people the people who craft the public face of the university who worry about brand Guidelines and logos by knowing them and being on good terms with them That this will help my practice as a scientist and also as a science communicator And so i'm really hoping and they seem to open to the idea to bring in my camera to Their office and getting their take on what a scientist needs to know about interacting with the press office at their university So i think that'll be really cool content. Uh, and maybe they'll have some good tips for how to like Make my audio and my lighting better in these videos Okay, there's been a lot of good swag at the meeting But i think we've got a strong contender for the best or my favorite swag, which is the snap bracelet I do think actually it's for bicycling, but i'm definitely going to give it to my toddler to play with Very fun I love a friendly dinosaur