 It's a special lamp that has a cool down cycle and a fire up cycle. Okay. I'll see your problem. Yeah, maybe take a piece of paper or fashion something. Ladies and gentlemen, here to introduce our afternoon speaker is my colleague from the faculty of English in this college. He does Shakespeare and he does Chaucer and he's very popular. Eric Eliasson. In 1977, Timothy Ferris sent out into space on the Voyager spacecraft a phonograph record communicating to the inhabitants of the cosmos some of the wonders of this planet. Since then, while presumably awaiting the results of that project he has engaged himself in communicating to us earthlings the wonders of the cosmos. The results of this project are already in. Two of his books, Coming of Age in the Milky Way and the Red Limit have won the American Institute of Physics prize making him the first journalist to win that prize twice. Coming of Age in the Milky Way also garnered him a Pulitzer Prize nomination. His book Galaxy was nominated for a National Book Award. A number of other books and scores of articles and reviews have made Professor Ferris a prominent figure in the world of writing about science but his efforts to make accessible the fascinating world of the late 20th century science have not been limited to the print media alone. In 1986 he was nominated for an Emmy for his work on the PBS television special The Creation of the Universe. He has been a commentator on National Public Radio an advisor on a number of film and theatrical productions. He has lectured widely in this country and in China and Japan. The prospect of his following his record into space arose in 1986 when he was selected as a finalist for NASA's Journalist in Space program. Professor Ferris has taught at a number of universities. He is currently professor in the Graduate School of Journalism University of California Berkeley where he has also taught a course in astronomy. It is a pleasure to introduce to you Professor Timothy Ferris who will speak on the evolution of interstellar communications systems. Professor Ferris. Thank you Eric for that generous introduction and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our hosts for putting on this fine conference which I'm happy just to be able to attend and I'm honored to be able to address. I've often thought that the reason there was however briefly a journalist in space program was that it amused President Reagan to shoot a journalist into space. He probably would have liked to send a lot of us. When I was sitting outside before Phil Morrison's talk a ladybug landed on the copy of my speech and I brought her, one always calls ladybugs, her I guess. I don't actually know the sex of the ladybug. I brought the ladybug in because I wanted to show her to you because it's such a beautiful piece of design. It makes a Porsche look crude by comparison. But she flew away, she got out of my pocket and flew away and if someone has my ladybug, not my ladybug, but this particular ladybug or indeed any other, please bring her up and I will show her to the rest of you. The talk I'm going to give today begins and ends with the subject of information. The point I wanted to make about the ladybug is that all the wonderful, all the information it takes to, everything it takes to make a beautiful thing like a ladybug or human being is contained in the genetic sequence in that each creature's DNA. As you may know there is a project now to sequence as it's called the human genome. That is to determine all the information that makes up the DNA of a human being and it will take many years to do that great deal of effort. But ultimately one will have some piece of information that could be put on a computer disk which is the recipe for making a human being. At that point we will have digitized the human genome. Technically we'll have turned that information into a series of zeros and ones that a computer can read. We live in an information age and I'm starting to get the sense that something very important is happening in our epoch that has to do with information and that I think will have wide reaching consequences in science and elsewhere. Much as technology and science have interacted in the past in the age of Galileo or of Archimedes. So what I'm going to talk with you about today will end up being about that. However, my subject is not a particularly scientific one and certainly is not scientific by comparison with the two fine talks that you've already heard today. This is a speculative talk about what is called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or CETI, which I believe I heard Phil Morrison some years ago describe as being more akin to exploration than to science. It certainly is an exploration sort of endeavor. And I'm going to say a little bit about this CETI business which was originally proposed in I think 1959, if I remember correctly, by Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Caconi. And then I'm going to use the assumption that there is something to this. That is that they're, I'm going to assume that there are intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe and that it's possible to communicate with some of them by radio technology. And I'm going to make a speculative argument based on that. Now the subject, if I can take a look at this first view graph here. Can you hear me okay on this microphone? Can you see this? Hmm, okay. The subject of extraterrestrial intelligence has become part of our culture since Morrison and Caconi published that original paper. And this is a couple of cartoons just from the last few issues of The New Yorker. This one shows an alien on another planet is captioned, after traveling across the universe for thousands of years, an episode of Leave it to Beaver is received by an inhabitant of a distant. And it should there say planet or star, not a distant galaxy. It is true that the world has been, we've been broadcasting inadvertently into space for something like what, 80 years now. And so there is a sphere with an 80 light year radius within which it is theoretically possible that one could receive these weak, inadvertent emanations coming from our radio and television transmitters, military radar installations and so on. And in this case, the message is, jeez, Wally, don't tell dad, I blew up the lawn more, okay. And this does make the point that we've sort of announced our presence in some sense, but we have no way, of course, of knowing if there's anyone to hear it, or if they're listening, or where they might be. And this is another cartoon from a recent New Yorker. I can't see this at all, I hope you can. A flying saucer visiting Earth and leaving just as quickly, having had a look at what goes on here. The point being here, as the caption says, intelligent beings from outer space. We hypothesize that there is something called intelligence, that we have some of it, and that other beings might have some of it too. And the usual assumption is they might have more, and the reason is that we've only gotten into the radio business in the last century if we were to hear a signal from another world, that world presumably would be more than a hundred light years away, for statistical reasons I'll explain in a moment. And so therefore they've been in the radio business longer, so they're smarter than us. I don't actually think much of this line of argument. I don't think that there's one thing called intelligence, I don't think that we have some measure of it. I think we have many kinds of intelligence. I've just written a book about that. But in any case it's one way of looking at the situation. Now having ideas about SETI is not a new thing, and here's a quote from Tom Carlisle. I don't know how I got on a nickname basis with Tom, who said of the stars, a sad spectacle if they be inhabited what a scope for misery, and folly if they not be inhabited what a waste of space. And then if I could have the first slide I'll show you one last cartoon, because I think it's a profound cartoon by one of the two indubitable comic geniuses of his generation, Gary Larson, the other being Mark Simpson cartoonist, what's life in hell, what's his name? Matt Groening, yes thank you. I don't see anything, do we have a slide up or not? This is the depths of interstellar space, which we hope to illuminate with some understanding of extraterrestrial life, yes. Oh I have to start it, I see. This is a cartoon about the potential culture shock of extraterrestrial contact. This is a dog saying to its owner, well they finally came, you see these are flying saucers full of dogs, but before I go let's see you roll over a couple of times, and if we could now, maybe if I can just take this backward then we will lose the cartoon more rapidly than we found it. Cultural impact is an interesting subject, I won't go into it today, but the potential of what would happen if we were to be contacted by a superior civilization is something to think about. Now what I want to talk to you about first is the business of SETI, now well since 59, a going concern, some radio telescope time amounting to something like I guess a few thousand hours now has been devoted to listening for signals. Nobody has heard anything yet and nor is there any other evidence, evidence of spaceships or anything else to suggest that there is any life anywhere in the universe other than on earth, much less intelligent life. So everything I'm talking about is speculation. Let me start by showing you some of the basis of this speculation. I'll go back to the slides here passing Mr. Larson. One of the reasons for thinking that there might be life elsewhere is that there's a tremendous variety of conditions, potential abodes for life in the universe. We sometimes get discouraged because there aren't other planets just like Earth, but I think in the long run we're going to find that this wealth of variety is actually more interesting. This is the planet Mercury which has little atmosphere, no atmosphere to speak of and consequently its surface preserves a record of the way that the bombardment that took place when late in the formation of the planets and the surfaces allow us to piece together the history of how the planets formed, the very active area of astronomy. This is the planet Venus, the surface of which has been now digitized, more than 99% of it I believe, has now been imaged by radar and one can now put on a computer headset of the sort that I'll show you in a bit and actually do the equivalent of flying a Cessna over the surface of this planet. Here's the Earth, very much like Venus and yet very different. The surface of Venus is hot inhospitable to life, no one really thinks that there's life on Venus and yet here life is and one of the questions that Ceti obliges us to think about is, is life rare or is it fairly common? There may not be any life elsewhere in the solar system, we just don't know. Here's Mars, not a very hospitable place these days, cold, thin atmosphere and yet once in its history a warmer and much more Earth-like planet. I suggest that if we're going to keep altering the environment on Earth, we maybe we should slow down or stop doing that until we figure out what happened to Mars. Something happened fairly suddenly and Mars has not been a fit place to vacation ever since. The giant outer planets which still retain the primordial material from which they formed so that there's not a solid surface in there as you go if you dropped a probe in, which would be a good idea, to the surface of Saturn, you would go down through cloud layers of increasing density and you'd go quite a long way before you reached anything like a solid surface. Are conditions in these gas giant planets perhaps suitable for life? No one really knows. Here is Neptune, currently the outermost planet, another gas giant and then the satellites of all these planets. Here is a satellite of the Jovian planet which may have liquid water under an icy exterior. Here is the surface of Jupiter's moon Io, that's a volcano in the process of erupting. I should get the pointer here and show you. This is a volcano and it's actually erupting as we're looking at it. This is the plume and it's splashing back here into what appears to be an ocean of liquid sulfur. Quite a planet. This Io is pretty much just a bag of lava with a thin skin over, it's like a grape. Nobody looks for life here very much either. The surface of Triton, the coldest known place among the planets. But a fascinating thing, these appear to be geysers of some sort, possibly nitrogen geysers, so like an old faithful made of nitrogen. And here is the Sun which contains most of the mass in the solar system. Now as we look around the solar system then we find one planet with life on it and it's an obvious life anywhere else. There are people working hard on trying to find the best sites on Mars, for instance to look for fossils in case life got started on Mars and then stopped. But so far as we know no life here. What makes us think therefore there might be life elsewhere? Well, mainly the numbers. There are just so many stars out there and so many of them are thought to have planets that you end up with huge numbers of potential abodes so that even if life is fairly rare, we would expect to, even if it only occurs rarely, you'd still expect to get a fairly large number of life bearing planets. This is a young star cluster. This is not the sort of place you look for life. These stars are probably too young for a lot of biological evolution to have taken place on their planets although we don't really know about that either. Having only one example, this is a globular star cluster with many old stars. The reddish color of the photograph is meant to indicate that they are older metal poor stars. That means poor and heavier elements. These are probably not the best places to look for technologically developed civilizations because maybe they are poor in metals. But no matter how many stars you lop off this way, there are still just so many. This is sort of like the slide that Phil showed you with that dark, obscuring matter running all through it and some of the stars in the Milky Way. There are something like 100 billion stars, something over 100 billion in our galaxy alone. That's a lot of stars. If we ordered 100 billion grains of sand, I haven't done the calculation, but I'm sure that they would more than fill this room. There would be more sand than you could get in this hall, probably a lot more. And so even if only one in a million of those grains of sand had life, you'd still have a lot of life there in places. We live in a fertile galaxy. New stars are continuing to be formed. This is a star-forming region and inside that three-dimensional thing are young stars that have recently formed and they're lighting up the surrounding gas. Here's another one in Orion. There's a star in the Orion Nebula that formed only something like 4,000 years ago, certainly very recently in cosmic time. You can see it at infrared wavelengths to see that. However, the biggest, brightest stars are probably not the best place to look, and the reason is that big stars tend to go through their careers quickly and then they blow up. This is an unstable star in Ada Carina, if I have the right slide. I don't quite recognize this region. It was this star in the previous century. The 19th century was bright enough to see in the skies of Earth. It's now only visible with telescopes. It's fluctuating wildly in brightness and is due to blow up anytime. It may have already blown up something like 4,000 light years away or so. The light could be on its way to us from this star if it had already exploded. That's far enough a way to be safe for us. We wouldn't want to be close to a star like this. If a star like this blew up right next door a couple of light years away, the first thing you'd notice is that your TV would go on the blink. So at the same instant with every other TV and electronic device in the world, except for a few nuclear-proof military black boxes, and everybody would pour out in the streets to see what happened and talk about the fact that we all had maybe a couple of weeks to live. So there are some hostile environments out there, and this is a photo of a star that did explode in the nearest galaxy. Two hours or a second nearest, I forget which, the Large Magellanic Cloud. And this photo does illustrate the fact that these young stars are formed. This is an active star-forming region. This whole area you can see is full of gas. Stars have been manufactured here for the past few million years. And one of those new stars has already gone through its career and blown up with such force that we could see it from here on Earth. Supernovae like those are also quite useful for life because they give us, for instance, any of you are wearing gold. All that gold was made inside a supernovae. We inherited it from stars that blew up before the Earth was formed. So they're not an unmixed threat, but you don't want to get too close to them. Here's the Milky Way showing you lots of stars, and I'd better get moving here or I could be able to tell you anything about the top subject of my talk. And here are some galaxies to make the point that even though 100 billion stars is a lot of stars, there are something like 100 billion galaxies out there. So there's plenty of territory and plenty of possible sites for life. Here's a giant galaxy in a nearby cluster. And here's a cluster of galaxies. I think the center of the Virgo cluster, which in turn belongs to the same super cluster to which our galaxy belongs. Now, that'll be enough of the slides for now. I don't know if we can turn them off or not. So there's a lot of stuff out there. You can throw a lot of numbers at it. And then finally, as Phil Morrison was discussing, they're all made of the same kind of stuff. The same chemical elements make up these other stars and planets. So you can have chemistry just like we have here on Earth in these other places potentially. And all life is a fancy form of chemistry, so we assume that we may not be the only place that this thing happened. You can't find anywhere in the history of the, what we know, the history of the Earth and the solar system, you can't find any place to insert a knife blade and say, here something miraculous happened and prior to that everything was natural and then there was this spark of life. In fact, the Earth got started with life quite early in its history. It seems to have the planets formed quickly and then one of them at least made life quickly. Well, Frank Drake, who conducted the first radio search for extraterrestrial artificial signals, let's see, I'll go back this up so you can see the slide. Can you see all that now? Is it in focus? Frank Drake conducted that search quite early on. I think it was 1960 and if I remember correctly, may have done so even without knowing of the Morrison-Cocconi paper. And is the author of what is called the Drake equation, which is an attempt to think about a lot of numbers that we don't really know what values to assign very well, but it's a way of coming up with a number N of places where we might find intelligent life. And this just says, at first you take the number of stars, we're just going to confine this search to our own galaxy. Then you ask what fraction of them have planets, maybe about half. What fraction of those planets are suitable for life? Who knows. On how many do life actually develop? Well, if we take the solar system as the only example we know of, we've got about one in ten. On how many of those does intelligence evolve? Completely unknown number, but you try to assign some number to it. And how many of those places does radio communication get going? You have to have the ability to do it and you also have to, if we're going to hear a signal from you, you've got to transmit. So you've got to have at least a ham radio club or something that is sending signals into space. And it's got to be a pretty powerful signal for people like us to get it. And then this very interesting value, L, how long do they stay on the air compared to the age of the galaxy? And that's what my talk is going to be about. Provided that I don't keep this preface going so long, I don't have time to give my time. I'll come back to that. Now the conventional seti scenario has been that we listened for a while, probably quite a while. Probably, oh, you know, if there are 10,000 civilizations, all beaming signals are a way that we can pick up with existing technology, you still have to figure something like a generation or two of steady listening before you happen to aim your antenna at a star that's sending you, a planet that's sending you a signal. So it's a long-term business. The basic scenario is we listen for a while and finally we hear from a planet that's transmitting. I call this the lonely hearts scenario because the assumption is that some planet, some species out there is so lonely that they're sending a message out, you know, waiting for somebody, maybe not somebody like us, but somebody to respond. Lonesome, technically proficient species seek same object communication. Now this seems like a reasonable scenario, but it does have some problems, and I'll show you a few of them that I can think of. The trouble with this scenario is, first of all, paranoia about broadcasting. Although we have, as the cartoon indicated, inadvertently sent some transmissions into space, we have done very little intentional sending of signals. And one reason that there have been very few such attempts is fear of the unknown, and it's not necessarily an unjustified fear. After all, we don't know what's out there. Do we really want to start saying, here we are, here we are, over here, before we get some idea? So it's setty programs listen, they don't transmit. Secondly, there is the question of expense. If you want to send a signal omnidirectionally out in all directions at a power sufficient so that species no more technically proficient than we are would have a decent chance of hearing it, that takes a lot of power, it turns out. So we're asking another civilization to keep not, you know, the ham radio club has got to be spending billions of dollars a year to keep this thing going. Pretty affluent civilization. And then finally, the problem of long Q&A times. The most optimistic setty scenarios, the ones that have a lot of, you know, something like 10,000 civilizations right now in the Milky Way Galaxy alone still end up saying that the distance to the very nearest one is something like 500 or 1,000 light years. That means that if you get a message and you send a reply instantly, it's something over 500 years for the message to have reached you and your message to go back another 500 years to come back and so forth. And that means that you're not talking about conversations, at least not if you have a lifetime anywhere similar to a human. If you go back something like that kind of Q&A time, you hear for instance from the mathematician and poet Omar Kayam. The reason I put this quotation on a view graph is that Omar was known as a mathematician for having solved the general cubic equation of the third degree, which I don't know what that is. But that's his main fame as a mathematician. And he's also more widely known for this poem. In the classic setty scenario, we talk about sending, since it's mostly scientists, they tend to talk about sending scientific messages, which makes sense, but I wonder how much of a market there's going to be for purely scientific messages. I mean, if you had your choice of you could only get one message from Omar, would you rather it was this poem or his solution to the general cubic equation of the third degree, which of course was solved by other people? In fact, it's not widely known that Omar Kayam solved it because somebody else solved it later and for many centuries they named it after him. There's paradox that Professor Harrison was telling about, was not thought up originally by Olbers. So the kind of traffic I think we would eventually see going between stars would be cultural as well as scientific, if only because it ages better. This is still a good poem. The solution is still good too, but it's kind of irrelevant if you already knew it. And presumably we're talking to people who already know a lot. Okay. How then do we... Well, let me move quickly ahead and skip that point and go back to the Drake equation and talk about this question of lifetime. This is the great imponderable or desponderable, but the great unknown in SETI. All these other numbers end up telling you that there ought to be, you know, I don't know how good the numbers are, but they tend telling you there ought to be intelligent life out there. But we don't know this value. The amount of time we've been on the air is only about the order of a hundred years. If we blow up the world or stumble into some kind of terrible problem or another within the next century, then our example will indicate that the average on the air lifetime of a technological civilization is only something like a century or so. If that's true, then there's nobody else in the Milky Way. It's true of other civilizations because they don't last long enough. If you look at a galaxy, intelligent life just would be something that scintillates into existence for a very brief time and goes away again. If technologically developed civilizations typically last longer, then there are more of them. For instance, if L is 10 million years, if you're so on top of things that you can keep your world running on a technological level for 10 million years, then there are probably, according to the usual other assumptions, a thousand civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy today. But in any case, even if you think of such an optimistic value as that, then if you compare that to the age of the galaxy, you will find that most of the civilizations that have existed in the Milky Way galaxy, assuming that they've more or less been there coming up at the same rate since the early days, and that's a fairly reasonable assumption, I think, most of them are already gone. Even if they last a million years, even if they last 10 million years, most of them are gone. A typical set of SETI numbers will give you 300 generations of civilizations already arisen and perished in this galaxy before we came along. Now that's a lot of information to have lost, and most of it would be lost, you know, because even if the ruins of such a civilization remained on the planet, or if it went off the air but continued to thrive in silence, the distances between the stars are so great that you're not going to be able to go there and find out about that place. The only way you're really going to find out about it is through interstellar, radio and television communication. So what do you do if you are a civilization and you know this? Let's say that there are 100 or something like that, civilizations at a given time in the Milky Way, and you want to communicate with one another, and you have an interest in preserving your history. You don't want it just to be hostage to your one civilization. The answer, it seems to me, is that you network it, and this is the idea that I'm going to discuss with you in concluding this talk. Here's a few hypothetical inhabited planets scattered around the Milky Way. If they're all here, they're all here at the same time, in my example, and they want to communicate with one another. According to the lonely-heart scenario, the way they do that is they aim and tenee at one another, and they send questions and answers back and forth, so you get a picture that looks something like this. Everybody has to keep transmitting and receiving with everybody else. That's expensive. It's time and energy consuming. It's inefficient. And whenever a world goes off the air for any reason, you lose them. All you know about them is what you knew until the moment they... what you garnered until the moment they went off the air. Nobody actually handles communications this way. We don't do it on Earth. You don't have a telephone line that goes... a different line that goes from your house to every friend you ever phone. It's too inefficient. Instead, you network it, and here's a schematic of an interstellar network, and it's much more efficient. Each world only has to keep in touch with one local terminal. The way you establish such a network is... does not, oddly enough, cost a lot of money. In fact, in the long run, it's cheaper than engaging in long-term SETI projects. You build an interstellar probe. It doesn't have to be very big. Study at JPL indicated that you can put a whole lot of fancy electronics, everything you'd need to set up a network terminal, in an object about the size of a grapefruit. That's important because interstellar distance is huge, and you want to keep the payload light. You send it off to another star. You can set one up in your own star system, too, but in the long run, you want to get it to another star. You need some fuel for that, but not too much fuel, because it can go slowly. A probe that went only 100 times faster than the Voyager spacecraft, which is very slow. The Voyager spacecraft takes 60,000 years to reach the nearest star. A probe only 100 times faster than that can get to an average neighboring star in less than a thousand years. Now, why would you want to make an investment like that? Because you're starting up something interesting. The probe goes off, arrives at another star system, finds a metal-rich asteroid, sets up housekeeping on the asteroid, mines the metals, uses them to build antennas and other heavy stuff that you didn't want to send all that distance, calls home, sets up communication with you, and then goes about carrying on the business of interstellar communication. I had a view graph that told you what it does, but now I can't find it, so I'll have to tell you verbally. The charter for this probe is the following. First, start searching for more worlds. That is to say broadcast. Gee, I'm missing a whole bunch of view graphs. Darn, this would have been a much more interesting talk, had you seen my additional view graphs. Once it's in operation, the probe starts handling interstellar communication. It only makes sense to send out such a probe if you are already in contact with some other worlds, but it's the beginning of a network and I would propose that since this is so easy to do, if there has been life in the galaxy for many billions of years, one kind or another, they've already done it. It relays information from one world to another. It takes all that time and expense away from you. Most importantly, it stores a copy of everything it relays, and a single asteroid by my calculations will suffice to do that for the indefinite future. Studied by Richard Feynman of the Technical Limits of Data Storage, indicates that the contents of all the encyclopedias on Earth, our entire cultural memory in other words, can in theory be stored in an object the size of a period at the end of a sentence. Tip of a pencil, if you like. So an asteroid the size of a moving van be sufficient to contain a record of everything communicated on an interstellar network for a very long period of time. So the charter says relay data, store data, search for emergent worlds, and finally go forth and multiply, but be reasonable about it. You don't want to send a cancerous probe endlessly duplicating itself, but if it does make a couple of copies and send them out to other stars strategically located around the galaxy, it can keep building itself so that it meets whatever demands of traffic you have. If you find an emergent world on the other side of the galaxy, the network itself takes care of setting up a terminal in that vicinity and searching for more planets in that area. Well, why am I telling you about all this? Because an interstellar network solves the lonely-hearts problems that I mentioned earlier. You'll recall I was saying that in the lonely-hearts scenario you have a problem with fear of transmitting, and that's because you don't know what's out there, and so you lead to a possible scenario in which everybody's listening and no one's sending. The network doesn't have that problem. It can transmit and it can get itself in touch with the most violent homicidal world in the galaxy, and that'll be of interest to the network, but the network doesn't have to fear it. The worst that happens is the world sends an infernal device to destroy the local terminal. That doesn't hurt the network because all of that data has been distributed to all the other terminals. Every terminal on the network holds all the knowledge in the network. It's a holographic kind of a system, and this then takes care of your problem of long Q&A times, because what you're accessing is a library of cosmic history, and its distance is only the distance to the nearest terminal, which might be of order a couple of hundred light-years. In that terminal is information hopefully covering a great deal of time and covering broadcasts from worlds on the other side of the galaxy and perhaps beyond. And expense isn't a problem because automated network can go on. The network also doesn't get bored. If we carry on a steady search for centuries and we don't hear anything, we may get tired of it and it can quit. It may not take that long, unfortunately, to get tired of it, but the network doesn't have that problem. Now if such a network existed, what would the traffic on it be like? We're inclined to think of messages as simple dot and dash kind of messages, but once you start to think about hundreds of civilizations over billions of years of the history of the galaxy in broadband with communication with one another, dot and dash messages don't really make it. And in fact, Q&A messages aren't really the way to go either as we've seen. What I think you would see in part are things more like computer programs. That is, a set of data that when downloaded to your computer can create an environment that could be, for instance, an environment on the world that sent the program. Interactive programs you know are inherently unpredictable so that the experience of immersing yourself in such a program would be a lot like real life. It's not more like real life than like watching a movie. If we could have the slides again, I'll show you very quickly an emerging technology that you've all heard of that is like this and that is what's called virtual reality where I come from in California and it's called artificial reality on the east coast. So here you can choose either one. Here is an intrepid journalist trying on a virtual reality helmet and one sees in here is a three-dimensional replication of an environment in color and in this case it's the west end of Mariner Valley, a large canyon, huge canyon of Mars. And as you move your head around you see different parts of it just as you would in real life. You look down, you see the ground at your feet and so on. This is a crude representation of the Mariner data that one is seeing through the helmet. This is for display purposes they hold down the number of pixels but the actual view through the device looks better than this already even though it's very primitive technology so far. And here's someone demonstrating a glove that you can wear and the glove appears and he is seeing the glove in his virtual reality world and can manipulate objects using that glove. Here are two people in VR for two. They can see each other and they can take on any form that they like. You can play handball games and the imagination runs wild and it has. And here is a body suit which reads into the computer everything that you're doing for sports and so on. So you're immersed in a virtual reality environment. I should think that a popular form of interstellar communication would be something like this. It's never going to be practical for anybody to travel a lot to other stars. It's very expensive, it's very time consuming. Getting frozen for a thousand years and waking up is probably not all that much fun. So I assume it's limited but in a sense you don't have to go to other planets because we can see in the future a technology that will essentially put you in different environments. What you have to have is a message from that world or have sent a probe. This technology, incidentally, to get back to something less speculative has great potential for the unmanned space program because it democratizes it. It means if you send a probe to digitize Mars, you can load that program into your computer and go anyplace that that probe ever went. You're not limited to going the way the probe went. You can explore it, you can look at it in different levels of resolution. It's going to open up literally whole worlds to high school classrooms and so on. It's very interesting technology. And here's the last slide is a cluster of galaxies and in my last... How much time do I have? Five minutes? Okay. In my last five minutes, I want to talk a little bit about the potential of this idea of sending data across vast spaces. What are we really doing when we spend taxpayers' money as the U.S. will for the first time start to do this next year on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's, quote, discovery of the New World. NASA will launch its first SETI program of listening for signals. Up until now, the efforts have all been privately or semi-private in various ways. We have a... One of my colleagues at Berkeley has been conducting a SETI search funded in part by a grant from his mom. There was a guy in a retired electronics engineer moved up for two years to an abandoned due line station. I don't know, many of you probably fortunately don't remember what those were, but the U.S. used to have these remote radar stations for watching for Soviet planes and missiles coming over the pole. And it was called Distant Early Warning, a due line. And he lived in an abandoned due line station and used the old antennae to listen for signals using a receiver he'd built out of radio shack parts and so forth. There have been hundreds of these searches. Most of them hard scrabble searches like the ones I'm describing. Why? What are we actually doing here? All the explanations I have heard with a few exceptions, and Phil Morris hasn't been quite eloquent on this subject, but most of them are not very convincing. Things like, oh, they'll have a cure for cancer for us, or they'll teach us how to live together in peace and harmony. Well, we already know how to live together in peace and harmony. We just don't do it. We don't need somebody in another world to tell us how. It's not like we're going to get some message and go be like the joke that kills. You go through the streets yelling out this extraterrestrial message and everyone will change. So what are we doing? I'm beginning to think that we're engaged in something that's much deeper and more of a genetic imperative, and this view graph, which I regard as one of the great philosophical utterings of the 20th century, has to do with what that might be. What Wittgenstein means, the world is the totality of facts, not of things, is that none of us has any direct experience of a thing. This doesn't mean that things don't exist. It means that things is a derivative concept made out of facts. What we have is the sense data of our perceptions and the scientific instruments and so forth that extend those perceptions, and the processing of that data that goes on in the brain, from which we deduce the existence of objects and space and time and so forth. But those are all concepts based upon what? Information, information which can be reduced to zeros and ones, digitized, handled by computer and sent among worlds in the universe across great distances. In quantum physics, we say that for something to exist, as Nils Bohr used to say, no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon. They say in physics that means, first of all, you've got to have something exist, you've got to collect information about it, you have to then amplify or communicate that information, then it constitutes an observation. And I don't have time to justify that argument, but to take it as a hypothetical for the moment, and then pull back your frame of reference and look at the whole totality of everything we've ever done as a human species. If we perish, and we will perish sooner or later, I don't know what our charter is, but we've been on Earth for about 2 million years out of 4.5 billion and we're not going to be here forever, we'll either become extinct or we'll change into something eventually unrecognizable. If we go through our careers and never make contact with another civilization, or as I suspect with a network which may be entirely artificial intelligence, but which has been set up by someone who preceded us, if we never make such contact, then by the terms of our own philosophy of science, we never existed. It all amounted to nothing. As a matter of point of information, we are an unobserved phenomenon. We're like the supernova that was recorded by one telescope and the astronomer went up and saw the evidence and went to the phone to call and at that moment an avalanche buried the observatory and killed the astronomer and wiped out the information. No observation according to quantum mechanics. It didn't happen in some sense. The world is made of facts, not of things. So in conclusion, the reason I'm sort of harping on this strange argument about interstellar networks and everything is that I have come to feel that what's really going on with us has to do somehow with information and that our attempts to communicate with other living species has some sort of deep biological imperative behind it. And therefore, networks or no networks, it's probably worth doing. Well, I'm out of time. I'll stop now. Thank you very much. There's a group. Let that group get out. I guess I'll put it here. Thank you. Sure. It's Phil. Thank you. Third of mine. Do you graphs are missing? No. You have them. Yes, I have them. Oh, it's fine. Give them up in the gap. In the gap. Okay. If you have questions, please get them to the aisle, to the ushers. They will bring the questions forward. Thank you. We will start with questions and comments from the panel. Professor Morrison. I'm told to play her in this interesting and so far baffling game. I'm delighted to hear Tim Ferriss has good ideas. Look at it from a still wider perspective. I would like to ask him a question because I'm interested in practical assistance at the moment. Any new entrant is likely to be asked to help. In the communications world, there is usually a division of the effort to communicate anew with another information source. That is, not a continuing conversation, but I call up somebody. The best example is on your computer. You start punching the telephone numbers in, and the modem will ring somebody up. And before anything happens, there's an acquisition period. It's called period of acquisition, in which an exchange is made. Of course it's easy for us, but in any case it would have to be some kind of a search adjustment to see what kind of message was coming. It's called position of acquisition. If you don't hear the signal, there's no way to go any further with the whole thing. So in the business, since we've never heard any signal, since we don't propose to send any for a time like the transit time, we feel we should occupy a guest, typical one transit time, in trying to acquire for the first time a signal from anything, be it network, artificial, natural, anywhere, and we don't really want to do it the way we're doing it. Do you differ with that? I think you were looking forward into a more asymptotic period when there are dozens of acquisitions have occurred and people are trying to see how best to handle the embryonic network thus formed. Do I understand you correctly, or am I wrong? If I understand the question that I agree that the... Are you asking if the acquisition, the strategy for detecting a signal is altered if you consider the network possible? Not very much. I thought about that and the only real difference is that it does tend to argue against searching too narrowly on the basis of too many assumptions, but as you know, most people have said they try not to do that anyway. It's like research in a library. If you're working hard doing research, about once every hour or so, you should get up for five or ten minutes and just walk around and look randomly at the shelves. You'll often find something more interesting that way anyhow. In SETI, you want to have at least part of your search be not loaded up with assumptions about you're looking for earth-like planets and they've got to be its sun-like stars and everything. And that's the only impact I can see of this kind of argument. The only other is that it suggests that signal acquisition might be a little easier than otherwise if there are, you know, a border of a hundred terminals broadcasting in the galaxy and trying to make themselves conspicuous. You know, they would be sitting there running on the power of their local soul and it would not be expensive for them to be conspicuous. You know, I think the ideal case that I would like you to consider is the one that we've been talking about some, but it's daunting to the investigator. And that is, here we are looking face-on practically 30 degrees away from the Andromeda Galaxy M31, which has got to be as close as you can come to another Milky Way. It's got a hundred billion stars. It's got all the FG stars you watch. It's got all the possibilities. If your hundred at a time are there, they're all there or their network is sending and surely they're not ignoring this place. Which they can see also face-on. They say this themselves, there must be, and so on. But there's this terrible disaster that there's a two-million-year, a four-million-year round-trip time which we can't face calculating about. We just don't know how to take our human activities and human equipment and ask what could we do to imagine somebody sending to us who isn't expecting anything to come back, but cannot, in the nature of things, get anything back before four million years of elapsed. A biological being probably will not have any reason to do that, but a network itself could. Yeah, it could. I assume that as the neurophysiologist... It has to last a long time. It's not the question of biology. Even electronics doesn't last four million years. Well, we don't know. Well, it hasn't. The only fact I have is it certainly hasn't. There's no four-million-year-old piece of electronics going. It could be, though. One could imagine an intelligent network engaging in intergalactic communication precisely because it can afford to wait that long. But it might not be the kind of signal path it would use to communicate with another network in another galaxy would not be the sort of thing that's easy to eavesdrop on. You'd have to be riding a path, probably. No, I think it would be very easy to use. Why would it not be just as interested as I am in getting an easy answer? It might be. I know exactly what signal it would send. What I can't figure out is how it manages to live for four million years to do it. It has to keep regenerating itself. It has to be biological in nature. I'm strongly of the opinion that artificial, virtual intelligence is enormously exaggerated in its impact because biology has shown the way. Biologicalism is far more complicated, far more enduring, far more diverse, far more adaptive than any of these programs which only mimic biology at a very small rate. And I think that biology is the way, man. I don't think that anything Southern California except the biology can beat it. There's a lot of artificial intelligence is better than biology for the kind of things that I'm talking about a network doing. The network doesn't get bored, it doesn't get solipsistic, and it doesn't require this kind of support systems that biology requires. It's an archival function largely and it's a good idea to get it out of biological hands. I wonder if that's true. It has to have a hell of a transmitter. It was not archival at all. Just the power to send a narrow band signal from the Andromeda here to a very small region in our galaxy is a huge amount of power which is nothing like archival. It's definitely, it calls for an ambitious network. It calls for a very ambitious library. But what's the network going to do otherwise during those long drive spells if it doesn't try to get in touch with others? I don't pretend to know its intentions but I do know of no barrier between, I know of no barrier that prevents an artificial system from becoming intelligent. No, no, of course not. I entirely accept that. I just don't think, I'm not so sure it's advantageous. Your argument somewhat depends upon the fact that it's a lot easier to imagine this than a human-like or a post-human-like society continuing. I'm highly skeptical of that. There might be some relic thing that sends out, yes we were here, it sends out the first ten chapters of its constitution. But who's going to listen to that? Unless there are many of them, they're going to be very dull too. An archival thing that has this great cube of all information which died four million years ago is not going to be very interesting to the people who get it. It's not interesting if it dies. But it has to die all over the galaxy at every station. It's hard to find a way to kill it, really. The danger is more on the other side. Well then it was said, okay. Professor Fowler. Is there a frequency band which we would not be able to receive if it was sent by someone? Is there anything, do we cover everything with our radio or TV? Well Phil can answer that better than I. Of course the atmosphere blocks some frequencies but you'd better answer that. Well, the principle that most people have worked on is you look for the place where the signal-to-noise ratio is advantageous. And there's a lot of you can plot signal-to-noise over all frequencies you can imagine. And then you see which ones will come through and which ones the media failed to attenuate. And that gives you a fairly narrow band as a 10 dB better than anywhere else, the microwave band, and that's where we look between 1 and 10 gigahertz roughly. Within that band you then, you know, there's a lot of frequencies. And you imagine shifts in frequencies induced by Doppler shifting of a rotary plan. But you're not answering my question. Is there a band that some other civilization might be using that we would not be able to detect and don't say that it hits the atmosphere because we can get above the atmosphere? No, of course. Neutrinos, for example. Well, an electromagnetic signal, though, you're speaking of. No, I'm speaking of an electromagnetic, yes. Neutrinos, of course. Sure. But we don't patrol all frequencies adequately. We can't afford it. But we patrol the best. And what is the best? We'll gradually spread as we get better and more afterward. There's a kind of a brute force approach, you know, and the real SETI searches use these multi-million channel and more receivers to try to cut down the... But you still are making guesses, as Phil, in case as to where you ought to be listening. Professor McMullan. In the early part of your presentation, you mentioned Drake's extraterrestrial civilization equation and you're, I think, properly skeptical. But at one time in more optimistic days, a number of people, Carl Sagan among them, used that equation even though it had seven unknowns to compute that the likely number of inhabited places in our own galaxy inhabited by communicating intelligence was of the order of 100 million. That was the figure that he came up with. Now, I think people are much less... People who work in this area are much less optimistic today. And I guess I just have a general question. If one looks... If one would want to make a very rough estimate of the likely number of such centers of possible communication in our own galaxy, I take it it could be anywhere between zero and 10 billion, anywhere. There's no reason to prefer one figure over another. Well, I don't know if there's no, you know, the mandala of the Drake equation is, I think it's best use is to try to make you think of what the best numbers are you can come up with. But as you say, those numbers vary very widely. An argument that I think is not well-founded has been used against SETI recently and that is to look at human evolution, all the twists and turns of human evolution, and say how likely is it that this is all going to happen on another planet? And of course the odds are that it's so astronomically small that it shouldn't have happened anywhere in the universe. We can do that same thing in the panel. The odds that all this particular group of people will find themselves at this table at this particular time are so small that it shouldn't have happened anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy. Things always look that way if you turn the odds around. On the other hand, the opposite danger is to take the theory of evolution as predictive, which in fact Sagan did, and that of course is wrong too. I think that was an error that what one used to hear in SETI circles was intelligence has great adaptive value. It has great survival value. So as soon as it shows up, it wins. We see now that the counter argument is quite good there. It's, well, if it's of such great value, how come it didn't show up sooner? How come it took four and a half billion years before any quote intelligent creatures came out? And you have made a rather persuasive kiss to say that it might not last long. Well, our example by definition, we just don't know and that's what the most poignant symbol I know of is that L because it's a mirror, you know. It's how long are we going to carry on this experiment of running a technologically advanced and advancing world without screwing up the world so badly that we can't live here anymore? The issue is not the Earth, which we'll get along fine. It's our own survival on the Earth. If we're so repugnant that we offend the organism to the point that it rejects us, then we're the ones who get rejected. It's a perfectly honest, fair situation. I'm less inclined to, you know, there are no biologists here so I can't really engage in the argument very much on a technical basis, but you say, well, okay, it took four and a half billion years, but it really only took half a billion years maximum. It's tenfold better than that because surely it requires a multi-cellar metazoans and they didn't appear for a very long time. And I would say that you could well argue from the same argument that it's much more difficult to have life at all times, biochemical bacteria than it is to have intelligent life. It took 10% of the time to go from bacteria to radio astronomers, so I would argue, okay. And our argument was never that it was an inevitable thing, but that if you stretch the timescale, there's no synchronization system that we can see. So if you stretch the timescale, even stars in the sun's generation have probably spent somewhere between, let me imagine, two and a half billion and five billion in this evolutionary phase, and if they've spent two and a half, not much chance they've spent five billion, it's a billion years ahead of us, so there's a huge spread. It was the low chain, it was the insensitivity of the result to the timescale that is, I think, the basis of this argument, not so much the inevitability of the development. Maybe people use that. It is adaptive. But the thing is, the biologists always say, well, you know, it would never happen, the lumpfish might have missed a boat or whatever, but wait another 200 million years and what other species will come? If you look back at the whole thing, I'm not so clear that evolution is not predictive. I think it is predictive. It's only probabilistically predictive. It's not in any way a certainty. But I find it very unlikely to look at the systematic growth of the mass and number of organisms and even at the biomass, given all kinds of catastrophes that have happened and still it does have a very strong monotone appearance. Life fills up land and there was nothing whatever on land until early Devonian or a little before. That's quite a big change. I mean, the real problem with all of this is that it's very difficult to do science when you only have one example. That's right. We only have one living planet. That's right. You can't conclude that. So we just don't know. There's some wonderful, the optimistic setting scenarios make fascinating reading because you get wonderful ideas. For instance, some people in the field would say, don't disregard those young hot stars that I was talking about earlier because you could have accelerated evolution. Maybe in this flood of energy, it all goes on a hundred times faster than the Earth. You get it in a matter of days, eons worth of evolution take place. It's a lovely idea. I have no idea if it's possible. Professor? Am I on the other side? Professor? Yeah. So it took three or more billion years to put the cell together. And then less than the billion years for unicellular life to become multicellular. And now the hominids have evolved into human beings in less than a million years. And once intelligence emerges, things are changing rapidly. And I therefore wonder whether this whole discussion is on a sufficiently imaginative level. If there is light out there, it is probably on the evolutionary timescale as intelligent life is going to be millions of years different from our level. And we cannot conceive what human beings will be like in a thousand years. We are discussing this whole subject in the context of primitive science of primitive intelligence, which is what we have. And creatures that are a million years more evolved in intelligence will not be looking at the universe in the way we do, constrained by what we call the laws of nature. The situation will be totally different. In fact, life out there may have forms that we cannot recognize as living. And they are, if there is extraterrestrial light out there, it's what the ancients worshipped as the gods of the universe. They are so unimaginatively advanced in intelligence that they're not little green men. The one setty question that arises is whether such advanced species have any interest in contacting just one more emerging world and the suburbs of the Milky Way Galaxy. If they aren't interested, then our only chance would be to see some evidence. And there has been discussion of looking for signs of huge engineering projects. If someone's building something by melting down 100 stars near the galactic core or something, we ought to be able to see signs of the mess that's being made at the construction site. But that is the kind of extrapolation that we're making. A bigger core of engineers, you see? But they're still building dams on a bigger scale and this kind of thing. But how do you evolve intelligence may not think or work that way. No, the longer you look at information theory, the less big physical things like interstellar spaceflight make sense as a main occupation for society. It doesn't look like Star Wars, the original Star Wars, not the political Star Wars. That gets us to a question from the audience which says, what would constitute an intelligent signal from outer space? Do the city scientists have that well defined? What would convince us that we have received such a signal? Well, it's the... all pretty much all the radio noise that radio astronomers study comes from recognized sources. Someone who is intentionally broadcasting a signal would not be well advised to make the signal look just like, let's say a 21 centimeter hydrogen noise, which is mostly what you get in a radio telescope. So you start with the assumption that it ought to be made distinct and there are a lot of ways to do that. One of the tormenting questions in the field is what if there's an obvious way to do it that we didn't think of it or we discounted it? Is it polarized? Presumably it's pulsating. How fast is it pulsating? What if it's too fast? They're all the same kind of headaches. But the answer basically is that natural radio noises of a few varieties and all you've got to do is make it different from that. Maybe to add a more technical constraint. It seems to always quite interesting. It's of course not the only way, but it's the way which most people are now considering for the present. We modified. You do two things if you send a narrow band signal. You distinguish it from all known natural signals which are never narrow band. And you save energy. And this dual purpose does seem to make it an attractive acquisition signal. You put all your energy in one frequency basket or a few and you use a lucky, as they say, a guest frequency to send it on. And it gives you a very attractive feeling. Rather, 300 watts will reach nearby stars. And one more question from the audience. Do you regard so-called sightings of UFOs as any evidence of extraterrestrial life? No. I was very interested in UFOs when I was a kid and looked into the field very closely because obviously if you're interested in extraterrestrial life and there's evidence that they're here, then you should take that very seriously. A journalist in Florida once told me that he believed a story that actually, I think comes from an old science fiction story, that the remains of an alien in a crash saucer were being held in an Air Force hangar in Nebraska. And I said, why are you here and not in Nebraska? You're a journalist and you think that there's an alien sitting in a hangar. That's the story of your life. Of course, he didn't really believe it. And all UFO stories are like that when you get down to them. They all fall apart one way or another. It's not to say that there are... I've seen unexplained sightings myself. But every time you see unexplained lights, this guy doesn't mean that there are alien spaceships there. There's no evidence at all for alien spaceships. Incidentally, if I could just say one other thing about that, an interesting counter-example occurred now about 10 years ago. If you ask the question, if UFO really turned up, what kind of evidence would you get? There was a, I guess it was a meteor that skipped through the upper atmosphere. It started down Central America and across the Western United States and exited again over Canada. It happened in midday and it glowed brightly enough that it made a perfect sort of a UFO and went across the sky. So you had no one expected it, of course. So you have a question, how good was the recording of that event? The answer is much better than any UFO sighting. It's not one grainy garbage can lid photo. It scores of people shooting video, well, I think it was before video, motion picture cameras and stills, good enough descriptions by hundreds of people that they were able to determine what the object was quite quickly. So it's an excellent counter-example. It shows you a picture from Rio that purports to be a... And military radar, too, with velocities and courses for 2,000 miles. Yeah. There's no such UFO. Thank you. I have some announcements to make for this evening. I want to remind you of the Nobel concert in Christchapel at 7.30 p.m., featuring the planets by holds. Following the Nobel conference, there will be firing lines outlined in your program in Olin Hall 220, Professor Harrison and Professor McMullen, in Olin Hall 103, Professor Ferris and Professor Geller, and Leonard Lounge, Professor Morrison and Professor Fowler. Following the firing lines at 9.45 p.m., the observatory will be open on the top of Olin Hall for observing it until 11 o'clock. That's just a sort of...