 Okay Where's my beer It's probably my own fault. I've been buzzing around too much. I lost it. Okay. Is this one on? Yes Hi, everybody Welcome to astronomy on tap Well, welcome back to this beautiful beer garden Welcome to Bickersons brewing. This is our first after on tap at Bickersons But one of one of mini mini after on taps that we've had in this space We are going to start out with some trivia in just a moment So I'm gonna make some opening announcements first. We have two exciting talks today from Meredith Rawls talking about satellites in Earth orbit and from James Davenport talking about Looking for looking for aliens So our next meeting just to get this out of the way our next meeting is going to be June 22nd here again at Bickersons brewing So I hope that you're able to join us for that as well and with that we are going to get on to trivia That this is this is trivia about aliens if you can't tell Okay, so if you don't have a trivia sheet yet, there's a there's a person There's two people over there waving trivia sheets around so make sure you get one of those Make sure you get a pencil from them if you need one We're also we're doing something a little bit different with questions this time. So they're also handing out index cards If you have questions this this was inspired by climate science on tap because they had a really great system for questions just write your question on the index card and Hand that in to us at the end of the talk when you bring your trivia sheet up And that way we'll be able to read your question in the mic and all of the nice people who are watching on our live stream We'll hear your question And and we'll get all your questions answered that way and with no further ado Trivia we only have eight questions this time and so you know It's a short trivia, but I'm gonna I'm gonna get started rolling through these We're gonna do about one minute a question and then at the end we'll go back through in case you missed any of them the first time around And then we will have you bring those trivia sheets up to us at the front when you're done with them so that we can grade them and announce winners between the talks Question seven is question eight. It's a it's like a python thing. I'm so sorry Back in the day when we all used for trying it used to start at one, but we've transitioned All right, um And with that I'm gonna I'm gonna introduce our first speaker. Oh I'm so sorry. Okay, turn your cards in first. We've got two people waiting right there to collect your cards So I'll give you a few minutes to go ahead and get those up bring back your pencils, too We're incredibly underfunded. We can't even afford golf pencils. So bring back the golf pencils, please All right, has everybody turned in their trivia sheets We're gonna get those graded for you and at the intermission between talks. We are going to Announce the answers and then we're gonna announce the winners and then and then we're gonna let the winners choose prizes But with that, we're gonna get started with Meredith Rawls Meredith Rawls is a research scientist in the Department of Astronomy and the Durea Act Institute at the University of Washington She writes software and data pipelines handle terabytes of nightly images from the Vera Rubin Observatory's legacy survey of space and time also known as LSS team and I am just going to hand the mic over to her at this point and let her tell you about satellites This is a clicker. It's also a laser pointer if you need that Sorry real quickly, I'll get I'll get to your first slide Slide I am now double microphone and we can proceed with our evening entertainment. So Thank you very much for the introduction any invitation to speak to the evening. Um, I I'm an astronomer as you may have guessed and so astronomers use light to measure the universe That's probably not news to you But my my background is kind of stellar astrophysics and and you know figuring out how we can observe cool things with big Telescopes, which sometimes I like to describe telescopes as light buckets because they collect all of the light that happens to fall into them So if you want to see fainter things, then you need a bigger light bucket so that's why we make telescopes as big as possible and Observational astronomy is not so much going to the telescope and look at the IPs as fun as that is It's more sitting at my desk Well at my house nowadays, you know staring at a computer screen making sense of things I'm trying to piece together different different pieces of software it kind of makes sense of the data that I'm getting and I mostly work for this amazing Telescopes being built in Chile. It's called the Varicea Rubin Observatory and when it comes online It's it's going to revolutionize astrophysics. It's going to start in about two years And and go for a whole decade and make a high resolution movie of the night sky And it's it's going to seriously be amazing Every few nights it'll revisit the whole part of the sky that you can see And it's also going to share the data and all the software that we use to produce this with the wider communities not like, you know a secret that we're going to keep close to the belt This is for the whole the whole community And it's going to do lots and lots of really amazing science And I'm super excited to work on the team that's building the data pipelines to kind of make this a reality Just to give you kind of a sense of scale for what we work on You know without software you can't really handle 20 terabytes of data every single night. That's kind of what we're going to be dealing with when this thing turns on so it's like a fire hose And uh at every single night we're going to find something like 10 million things that have moved or changed They're like astrophysical interesting things like a supernova or an asteroid or Some other variable interesting thing that we maybe want to follow up on And uh and over the full 10 years We're going to get something like 20 billion galaxies 17 billion resolved stars and over 6 billion solar system orbits mass Which is just like I can't wrap my mind around that even though like I work for this telescope They have a huge camera, um And we find things by subtracting images and finding things to change that's kind of what that picture is showing So it's really exciting. I love it a lot. I could give you a whole talk about it But I'm not because instead I'm going to talk about small problems that we've been noticing recently That is maybe possibly going to affect a little bit of the science that we're trying to do this amazing telescope And that is of course all of these satellites that are starting to get lost in the low earth orbit So all of the streaks that you see here that I kind of comically put across the slide to show how it messes stuff up um are Well, the the artistic ones are my artistic choice, but the actual images here are real images that either um After photographers have taken or astronomers from telescopes have taken Um, and they were not intending I think in all of these cases maybe minus one or two They were not intending to take a picture of satellite streaks They were intending to take a picture of like the cool comet or a bunch of stars or some galaxies to do some science And instead they got kind of photo bombed with these surprise satellites Now the reason they're streaks is because satellite they're they're low earth orbit satellites So they're whizzing across the field of view of the telescope and even if you take a short exposure You get kind of a line because it moves really fast compared to anything else is the image And so that's why it's a streak So, okay, so what's going on satellites are new, right? Like they've been launching stuff into space since like the 50s with Sputnik and everything But what's new is the pace at which this is accelerating now that it's a lot cheaper to launch things into space A bunch of uh commercial companies are starting to build up these satellite constellations You've probably heard of uh SpaceX's starlings for example and uh Now this plot here really shows like the super recent uptake in the number of satellites that are going up in space Uh, if you look at the blue line on the bottom there, those are active satellites And the last three years that has just gone Which is you know, that's kind of a paradigm shift from what we were used to working with Um when when we're dealing with you know, what's in space and what are we going to have to work around And we're trying to take our data Um, the black line on the top is a sum of all the lines below it And so there's you can break it on the different categories like debris is a whole thing not not even going to talk about tonight But it's a big problem. Um, and then there's some leftover rocket parts and satellites that have stopped working or shown them there as well um, but the one that i'm Kind of the most immediately concerned about is that the rapidly increasing blue line of all the new Um, these satellites. So this is hopefully a video. Let's see if it plays excellent um This is a simulation Of well it starts off as like real it shows all the satellites In each year. So it's 2017 2018 2019 2020 And then somewhere in here it becomes a projection. I think this was made in like 2021 So if we're starting to say like okay, these are like based on um different satellite companies that have Intended to launch things. Um, this is like what it will look like if all of those come to fruition and so you can just kind of watch in awe and horror As um, low earth orbit space gets completely filled up with satellites from all these different companies and groups that all would like to launch things for various purposes So that's not not great for people who maybe want to look up at the sky and see anything as I think satellites Um, I'm not I'm not necessarily saying that every single thing on this simulation is a hundred percent going to launch Because they aren't right. Some of them won't have enough money some of them won't be able to get a permit like right This is maybe a little bit more like worst case scenario But it is what everyone would actually like to do If they have the resources to do it and there's currently really no regulation stopping that which is uh, Not great in my opinion so right so the the issue here is that um The the rate of these are really increasing all of a sudden with like nothing to really stop it And uh, they show up the most if you're looking at the sky you see the most around twilight So shortly after sunset or shortly before sunrise is when you see the most of these and that's because they they're reflecting sunlight They don't thankfully they don't have like lasers or billboards that are like shining out of some purpose to like be bright, right? The reason they show up yet not yet. Oh my god. Seriously though Uh, they they reflect sunlight because they happen to be up there and that turns out to be bright Um, and then they do emit radio Which is a problem potentially for radio astronomy that I also don't have much time to get into but that's a problem too. Um Generally speaking the impacts are worst for like from an astronomy perspective for large wide field facilities that are on the ground which spoiler that's ruben observatory And uh, and it also is a problem that uh, these companies want to maintain a large population of satellites Which means they're going to need to be constantly launching And constantly de-orbiting which you also see is like the brightest phase of uh, satellite's life cycle So, okay, so then break this down a little bit and um, like this this sounds not great But let me give you like a little bit slightly more concrete examples of the not greatness So, uh, I talked at the beginning about ruben observatory being amazing And some things that make it amazing are its wide field of view is sensitivity to change and changing things and um And the fact that I can like images really paint subtle structures because of these properties as well Turns out those same properties make it highly vulnerable To satellites so this um movie here Yes, it also plays um shows a projection of the whole sky From the ruben observatory site So the one on the left is like you're looking straight up and every little thingy in the satellite And right now we're in like the middle of the night like it's midnight So there's not too many right you could imagine taking a picture of some chunk of sky that didn't have a satellite in it Like in the middle of the night But then as the night draws to a close the eastern horizon starts to get a whole bunch of little swarmy things going Because sunrise is coming soon and more and more satellites Are coming out of Earth's shadow exactly because I said it better myself And this actually this is a simulation that was actually done Two years ago based on the existing satellite population at that time and the last two years We have greatly increased the number of satellites since the simulation was made. Um, so it's uh It's not not awesome So, okay, so there's a there's another telescope that actually exists already because ruben is still under construction and you know We can worry about how bad it will be though. We don't have data from it yet Um, this one is in in california and it's a lot smaller But it does a similar thing it surveys as a part of the sky that it can see and does cool science And they were like hey, we've noticed a whole bunch more starling satellites They specifically look for starlings because they're the most common ones right now But there are others Um, we've noticed a lot more starling satellites showing up in our data Looks like try to quantify it as a measure and write a paper about it So that's what the graph on the right shows is like the increase from january 2020 through september of 2021 Like they just counted and saw incidentally a bunch more satellites Um, however, what they wrote on the paper is that despite the increase in streaks that they see Um, the science that they're trying to do is not yet strongly effective Which is interesting because they're like yeah, we see more but it's like not ruining our ability to do stuff and what's interesting here is that It's well for one thing. It's not yet strongly effective like you know, they didn't talk about like if this trend continues for like five more years That's probably would be strongly effective. They didn't talk about that and uh, it's also it's a smaller telescope and a smaller mirror and um, uh different kind of camera, so it it's not as sensitive as Ruben observatory will be so it's not as severely effective in that way either It's kind of in a sweet spot of still able to observe big swaths of sky But not totally inundated with bright satellites So they lucked out in a lot of ways and the satellite population is like not too awful yet Um, so that's that's kind of a snapshot of one particular satisfaction This is one that i'm legitimately worried about so One of the goals of ruben observatory it has many but one of the goals is to find near-earth asteroids and It does this by looking at twilight to or near twilight to find little moving things and it actually like We have algorithms that will say hey I saw a little moving thing one night and then it moved the next night and then it moved the next night And then it'll link them together to be like hey, I could figure out the orbit because I observed it like three or four times However, if there happens to be a satellite in one of those images We won't know where the asteroid was in that Observation and we won't be able to get the fourth observation in this example And we won't be able to map its orbit at all and we won't know where it is And we won't know very much back in the earth and we can't even have a total cut movie So that's great There are other science impacts too And this is just like a short list because like to be honest this problem is relatively new in astronomy Like I've only been freaking out about this for about two years Because that's what star like star like only launched their first satellites three years ago And and we've kind of been playing catch up and like trying to figure out how bad the situation really is And it's constantly changing and there's not like a special pile of grant money for like dealing with satellites turns out Uh, so that's that's helpful So when people ask me like what are the biggest science impacts? I used to ask for an example But like this is a phd Level of work to really quantify all these different impacts as like a function of different satellite populations that could come to be So it's this is a summary of like the work in progress very much So but it affects um, particularly cosmology because you need to have like A good understanding of the statistics of a large chunk of sky to do certain kinds of cosmology called weak lensing And if you don't have that because your image is crisscrossed with streaks You don't have like a good sampling of the the small changes in the image in the background And then you can't do statistics on like the background level and you can't do that kind of cosmology Uh spectroscopy, which is a really cool technique that we use where we break up the light into different colors Is stone kind of in the upper right here. You've got like little wiggles for different elements different wavelengths of light And if a satellite happens to cross when you're taking a spectrum of a star It will subtly change Exactly what those wiggles look like And you might never know because you weren't taking a picture. You were taking a spectrum So you might analyze your data and it might have a little bit of bonus like Sublight in it because of the reflection from this satellite And you might not know that that was what it was and you might like make the wrong conclusions about your science So that's not good either Uh radio astronomy, I should invite radio colleague to give you like a whole talk about this because it's not great but um Basically, like they transmit in radio So you can wash out entire slots of sky really easily. Um, depending on what you're trying to study Now there is there is one good precedent in radio And that is that there are some regulations So there's a whole process for like licensing different chunks of electromagnetic spectrum for like your cell phones or You know, whatever everything transmits to the radio these days you wi-fi everything And there are little bands that are reserved for radio astronomy Which is great except that it turns out physics happens everywhere on the emc spectrum You can't just be like, oh, hey physics move to this tiny band that I have reserved Um, and even if the satellites are transmitting in that exact protective frequency The way that radio wavelengths work is you just like stop at exactly one hard cutoff They leak over a little bit And that can be problematic as well And another thing about this is The geographic isolation is like a technique that we use to avoid light pollution like in general in astronomy And that doesn't work here because satellites orbit the whole freaking planet You can't just say, I'll build my telescope in the middle of nowhere because everywhere is up in the sky Which has a satellite in it now Yep So, okay, so that's kind of like the the big picture issue So I want to address a couple common questions I get before I wrap this up And one is that but wait, I've heard that SpaceX is like actually making some of their satellites darker like doesn't that fix everything? uh, and Well, they are making their satellites darker and like astronomers legitimately appreciate this like when they notice that their stuff was bright They didn't say screw you. We hate this guy. They said, oh, that's surprising. Maybe we could engineer a way to make them darker We were like, yes, please. Thank you very much. That would be great So that's actually been really positive. Um, but there's some not dark enough Um, they've they've they've iterated and tried a few different things That made them a little bit darker and not as dark as you would like And all of that work is like a hundred percent voluntary like if I accidentally pissed off SpaceX people they might be like screw you. We're going to add mirrors now. Um, you know, probably But technically there's something stopping them. So that's terrifying. Um And the other thing is that it's it's all well and good that like SpaceX is listening to our needs and making these changes But there's no guarantee that other operators will follow suit, right? Like if some satellite operator It's like from a different country or just a different company in the u.s. Besides like We don't care about the sky. We want to launch our satellites There's like nothing forcing them to follow SpaceX's lead and at least trying to make the things less bright Um, okay, here's another one I get. I love this one. Can't you just use photoshop to make the streets go away? Like I need photoshop. You can do the like fine, right Well that that there are actually Um after photographers who have like little online webinars and teach other how to do that Um for their asset photography now They didn't used to have to do that. So they like teaching each other these techniques Which is kind of neat and kind of sad But that doesn't work for science. So Um, you know, you can't like magically recover. There's no zoom and enhance Right like an actual science imaging issues So the but but I'm showing you an example here that appears to be to the contrary And and so this is because in some special cases you can kind of do this And and what I'm showing in this example is kind of a precursor image That's like ruben observatory s because again, it's not built yet And they we've actually stacked up a bunch of images or added them together And one or two of those images maybe had a satellite street and we have an algorithm that can find that And say okay, well, don't use the pixels From the one image that you're adding in this big stack That happened to have a streak and it used the other pixels with the other images instead And then your stack looks fine And we do that already for other weird image feedback and stuff. So, you know, that's totally doable But if you're trying to find something that's moving or changing Um, and like, you know time domain work That's not going to work. You can't just uh, you can't just skip the observation that you need In that case. So that's why the answer is but mostly no Uh, I'm very greedy. Um, I want to actually like why are they doing this in the first place? so a lot of um The the nominal purpose behind of these some of the satellite constellations is to provide interest which, you know We can all agree that we need It's important for a lot of things and um But I think it's important to keep in mind that commercial satellite operators like They're not humanitarian missions. Like they didn't say like hey, we're gonna make sure we serve all the world populations Like at a affordable price point because we think this is important No, they want to make money and one way that they want to do that is to bunch of things in the space and sell internet to people and like that is not It's it's okay to a point But it's not um It shouldn't be at the expense of the night sky And so I wrote a little research note a couple years ago with some colleagues where we took a look at the um Nominal price point for starling at the time and we actually were conservative We we assumed it was um less expensive than it actually turned out to be And we concluded that there were only a handful of countries that show up in blue circles here that both could afford internet and actually needed internet um at that price point Offered by a service like starling. So It's not really this like panacea to the internet access problem that and this people claim it is um As best I can tell maybe that will change, but I don't think it's a binary thing I don't think this is like do you want the sky or do you want internet pick one now or get out like No, like we we got to be more creative than that So this is this is a situation All right, so like The impact of satellites on it depends a lot on the satellite population, which like I don't know how many they're actually going to launch not great to not be able to know um And so far the impacts are pretty increase of launching that is happening It's just really unsustainable and and kind of scary The darkening mitigations do show a little bit amount of success But it's all voluntary and and other operators around the world in total have filed for hundreds of thousands of satellites Now whether or not they'll go up. I don't know right now. There's like five thousand six thousand total satellites in operation around earth right now um And just this month like SpaceX launched like over a hundred. So It it's yeah, it's happening. Um Software helps to a bit, but doesn't fix everything Um, and you know in this all of this like work to quantify this and fix this really takes time and money away from the science We'd like to do Uh, which I find a little bit disappointing And for things like group and observatory There's going to be some stuff that we just don't see Because like we're trying to discover new and amazing astrophysical phenomena And we don't know what that's going to look like and if our data is covered in satellite We're just never going to find it and that just makes me sad so Zooming out very briefly like I've talked about astronomy equals on an astronomer and astronomy on that But this is like a kind of a bigger issue like astronomers aren't the only people that use the sky, right? So there's you know, the sky arguably belongs to everyone and should be like the global commons It's part of the environment You know orbital space really is part of the human environment I wrote a research note that argues that recently that I'd encourage you to take a look at It's more than just science waiting to happen and the choices that we're making like today are really setting precedence for the future Here's some of the takeaways from the paper that I mentioned Just came out last month in nature astronomy And we we write about how it is orbital space is a human environment that's in need of protection And in particular that there needs to be a framework for considering the cumulative impacts So if you like say I'm going to launch 50 satellites right now the fdc is like no problem Have a great time But if you say that like 500 times, that's a different situation. They're right now. They don't treat it as such So that's kind of what we argue about and then we also write briefly about how it affects public access in the sky How there are other environmental impacts some relating to atmospheric pollution possible collisions Possible impact on like animal ecosystems we have even begun to think about Um and also space weather that the solar cycle is heating up and then you know, that's fun And it's how like we'll start burning up and falling out of the sky and We asked some um, we asked the satellite operator at a recent conference Hey, what are your plans for when like the sun is super active and sending out solar flare all the time? We just couldn't happen like in the 2023 time frame. They were like what? So that was great So astronomy is changing and it's exciting because we're going to have amazing big telescopes doing really cool data pipelines um, but there's also this really big problem with This is citing like who owns and gets to use the next guy and you know Is a billion environment or just like a thing that we can send a bunch of stuff into like hope it's fine So, um, if you're interested talk more about all this, I'd love to connect with you Um, there's a lot of efforts going on at different community levels. It's kind of like mitigate the problem We have a new international center. It's the international International astronomical union center for the protection of the dark and white sky and satellite constellation interference Whoo All right, but you just gave Meredith a big round of applause because I don't know well to say give her another big round of applause All right, so now we're gonna do a few questions. So I I think we handed out index cards Are you like questions on do you all have those cards? And if you have questions, did you write them on those cards? A lot of directions We're we're just piloting this new question system. So if if you didn't get one of those cards That's fine. If you did get one of those cards, if you have a question on it, go ahead and just bring it up to me right now Seems like maybe the system did not work All right, that's perfectly all right. We're gonna do questions the old fact you can just repeat them You're gonna stand up and yell your question and and we'll repeat it into the microphone Okay, perfect. So we're gonna get ready for our second and last talk if you need me I'm gonna I'm gonna grab this introduction app. It's a little bit so that if you're getting your your beer at last call You can make your way back. I'm not gonna All right He's a research professional professor of astronomy at the university watching him and associate director of the direct institute His research focuses on small stars and large things that and in his spare time He likes to look for unique mid-century garage doors and it's true. I'm on instagram. That's true So Yeah, we can talk about astronomy astronomy is fine If you really want to talk about garage doors, though, let's meet afterwards and talk about garage doors They're really amazing. This is my pen that and growing my hair is my pandemic obsession I need a remote Okay, um, so I've got a money back guarantee here on this talk And this is the point where I my lawyer friends remind me that This is a free event. So there's no money back. You're not getting anything back from me. Um, I know it's so you can leave. That's fine We're gonna talk about et we're gonna go there. We're gonna talk about aliens Um, this is my preview of the whole talk here. My little, uh, pictographic representation We're gonna talk about so let me tell you what I'm gonna tell you so that after I tell you You'll remember that I told you The idea here We want to get people interested in this problem. In this case, you are people and so I want to get you interested in this problem Because we need support and in grown-up land support means well money, right? This is what grown-ups reference to be support If we have people and we have support Then we will be able to use fancy computers and algorithms To use telescopes to search for signals that might originate from aliens That's where we're going. Okay Before we go there I want to reflect for a minute. It seems like a good moment to reflect standing up here. Um, two and a half years ago Like exactly I was standing right Here and in this picture I had shorter hair. Um, and I gave a talk at a strong mount tap. It's been a while I hope you're all well. I'm doing great. I'm doing fine. We're here. It's good. It's fine. Um I I gave a talk about misinformation and science trust in science trust in media BS on twitter And I tried to end that talk on a hopeful note, you know, you don't want to bum people out While they're drinking beer I tried to end this talk on a hopeful note saying if we pitch in together We can restore trust. We can get rid of this spam that populates twitter We can you know get people to trust vaccines and trust the weathermen and uh, And uh, well that that killed my slide. That's good. Um, yeah, I'm good Yeah, so clearly I was wrong If anything the last two and a half years have shown me is this is a much larger problem than we Speculated together here at astronomy on tap. Um, I love this emoji. This is weary face Um, I use it more often than I thought I would Um So this is my bad I thought we had this under control. Obviously we did not Sorry about that, but instead tonight. I'm going to go on Totally I'm going to ride this success and I'm going to make an even better prediction here about aliens That seems like a safe bet So we're going to talk about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence This is not a topic that a lot of astronomers like to talk about. It's a topic that the internet really likes Uh, and that like the history channel really likes with people who say aliens So thank you for roasting me there tyler Um, this is known as seddie the search For extraterrestrial intelligence. You're all smart seddie seddie. We're going to talk about seddie And I'm going to make a bold prediction to you here and that's not that bold I'm going to make a bold prediction that in the next 10 years We're going to do more seddie more searching for aliens than we've done ever Certainly in the last 60 years, which we would call sort of the modern astronomy era We're going to do more in the next 10 than anybody has ever done In all of history. We're going to make the first serious attempt at this This is my bold prediction because I'm trying to will this to happen, right? I'm trying to sell this to you So you'll support us seddie is Not the search for little green men Not the search for martians. I mean it kind of is Or else we wouldn't be talking about it, but it's not seddie is a search for life seddie is Looking up and wondering seddie is what my inner eight year old reminds me of when I do this job It is a search for life Now astronomy loves the search for life. NASA loves the search for life totally sellable congress will fund it It's great. We launched jdb st. It's all about it. It's great Because they have this great branding Okay, they have this great branding of this thing called biosignatures the whole field of astrobiology is looking for biosignatures Signatures of life of biology This is like looking for cow farts in nearby planet atmospheres right methane things like that If you find methane or phosphine or whatever That must be biology going on and thus life and thus because of cow farts. We're not alone It's great branding seddie has a branding problem I think mainly i'm not the only one thinking this and about 10 years ago We got a little better at this and we invented our own term Called technosignatures and I love this term. We've already seen it. We've seen it today in the in the trivia Technosignatures signatures of life That originate from technology Now a ufo landing in the middle of downtown would be a really strong technosignature, right? We would obviously be like well, that's something Um, we would get that But there's a lot of other things right as the trivia alluded to The night sky glow from city lights cow farts Uh are not one of them But like if you could see the cows if you could see the ranches from space lights from cities and also emissions from airports. These are all technosignatures Here's the bummer part Seddie is almost totally unsupported in the united states And and whoo whoo cheered for that get out of here Almost totally unsupported In terms of topics that we again support for its grown-ups means money, right Topics that the u.s. Government the taxpayers are willing to fund seddie ranks very low Fair enough. It doesn't solve a lot of real-world problems, but it shouldn't be at the bottom. It shouldn't be zero Um, and so let's spend a minute to talk a little bit about history. Okay This guy Bill proxmire is a complicated figure in our history He was the longest-serving democrat from the great state of wisconsin um And he had he did a very uh He had a very like white guy thing you'd like to do which is he'd like to hand out awards that he invented and given to people Entropies. It's a very. Yeah, it's a very, uh self-aggrandizing thing to do and He handed out these awards. He called the golden fleece And the golden fleece awards were things that he thought were fleecing the u.s. taxpayer And we should get rid of and this became like you did not want to go that like military generals did not like bill proxmire's Golden fleece awards. You did not want one of these because you're funding but go to zero And he in the late 80s nasa was getting ready to fund a big mission a big radio survey that was going to be Dedicated towards seddie like we had done a bunch of work in the 60s and people said this is a good idea There's good ideas. There's good science. We can test this We can do this grand thing and look for a science of life And bill proxmire said not let's not do that. He said golden goose for you This is all going to go towards this quote here says This is the best argument for chopping nasa's funding to the bone Which is a major bummer if you're sitting here, there's better than even odds you like space zero nasa funding not so great um Not a penny for this nutty fantasy. He says um This is not great. Now again. He's a complicated guy. He Voted for the civil rights act. I'm pro civil rights act. That's great It's carl sagan got a meeting with him After this and managed to talk him off the proverbial clip about this and chilled him out and he said, okay, okay We'll uh, we'll relent you can have some of that funding back And nasa was able to move forward. I just broke their mouth. That's classic all right I just need to put it back together. There we go. There we go um This is the guy who watches, you know, neil armstrong land on the moon and says like, uh, that's a bit expensive, right like And then takes a big glass of like warm milk, you know, this is this is bill prox But he chills out carl sagan does his thing. Where's his turtleneck kind of sways him. Yeah, shout out to turtlenecks um shout out to carl sagan too So about 10 years later in the early 90s nasa's like great. Okay. We've got some money We're gonna do this setty thing. We're gonna do it. We're gonna look we're gonna use radio telescopes It's gonna be great and then Dick bryan from nevada says no and puts the big kibosh on it late in the game and kills this bill And says this hopefully is the end of martian hunting season at the taxpayers expense and this sucks Like this this effectively not only kills this specific project But this starts 20 years of nasa and the nsf and all the government agencies not funding setty This ruins setty funding for a generation And this is a major bummer from the dude who represents the state that gambles as their number one export like rolling dice is what they do But this this is too high risk. We can't we can't look up and wonder This bums me out And so as a result this is not entirely true But as a result setty has almost entirely survived on private funding And private initiative a lot of astronomers with professional funding i.e. nasa or nsf money Do it on the side. Maybe one paper every year gets published here and there There have been something like five phds ever In like the last 50 years five phds on setty as a result and maybe six this year Because there's no funding This is a bummer. Okay, so I've bummed everybody out great. Take a drink Because there's a little bit of hope. Okay, there's a little bit of hope on the funding on the support end And that is that there have started to be well richer Private funding people people who have more money than just, you know And like we could pass the hat around and if you want to give me 20 bucks to look for aliens That's great, but that's not going to go that far But people with a little bit deeper pockets have been getting interested in the game And nasa and the nsf have actually relented a little bit and people have talked a little sense into them saying This is a real thing We're trying to actually ask real science questions. And so we can measure that success By the number of logos that are showing up across the field Yeah, it's clearly a major success nasa nasa has its own astrobiology institute This is not just technosignatures. This is also biosignature. Okay, it's mostly biosignatures Because it has bio in the name, but the fact that nasa is making studying life. It's like number one thing going forward. That's awesome Biosignatures in nasa. This is good. This gives us a window to look for life through technology pen state of fine institution Has an entire institute now devoted to this berkeley just down the coast has an institute related to seddie the seddie institute which Evolved from private funding is it continues to be a thing And nasa itself held a technosignature workshop in 2018 like this is huge the workshop was sort of thrown together Quickly and actually there's a there's a wonderful paper that came out of it That's you know super dry and boring and that's what you want. You want the business of astronaut to be done You want a good boring report to come out so that we can all think about it This is good. The number of logos is increasing As meredith talked about a new era of astronomy is here. Here's a really cheesy logo from clip art The the the era of computer you've heard of And internet you've probably heard of These are a new era in astronomy, right? We just heard in the last talk this amazing Survey that's going to map the night sky all this work in the radio that's going on And all this being distributed by the internet This is amazing and here I think is a genuine opportunity And this is what I'm working on with some students and this is what I'm here to sell to you today So here's a review for the last talk The legacy survey of space and time a 10 year mission on the vira ribbon observatory this telescope Is eight and a half meters in diameter 20 almost 30 feet in diameter, right? This telescope would fill this tent just the telescope and then it's in a giant dome on top of a mountain This is an amazing enormous facility. This is a humongous telescope This puts it in the top five or so telescopes in the whole world. Maybe the top eight Telescopes in the whole world. It's a massive piece of glass Moving around robotic mapping the sky Okay, you've got six colors Astronomy images are black and white interesting fun fact and so we've got six colors We've got basically ultraviolet blue green Yellowish reddish and near infrared something like that six colors across most invisible spectrum It's a 10 year mission 17 billion stars mostly in the southern part of the sky Here's our sky map and 20 terabytes a night, right? So Meredith and her team are creating this fire hose that we're trying to sip out of That's going to give us this incredible wealth of data from the ruben observatory I am thrilled about this for every astronomy reason possible Specifically one area that really excites me is the so-called alerts That ruben will publish so one of the design specs for ruben Is within 60 seconds of every image being taken. So they've got this camera I don't know if you appreciated this in that last talk the camera the size of the camera Is like this is like as tall as I am like isn't a massive camera. It is like three feet across It's humongous camera the biggest camera in the world Every within 60 seconds of the shutter closing on that camera that image is downloaded Is processed is compared to an archival reference and anything that has moved or changed or in any way different than that archival image Is then cataloged compared to that catalog and then published to the internet within 60 seconds. This is nuts This is this is a true fire hose 10 1 to 10 million of these Things going bump in the night every night. This is wild Right and this is real time open to essentially everyone. You can drink from the fire hose yourself I like this image. I like the the this is from a workshop in Tucson a few years ago I like this like rainbow of data coming in and then beaming out to all the other telescopes the Broadcasting out it reminds me of like the rainbow bridge and Thor which I think is really cute And I just saw the new trailer for the Thor movie. So that looks cool So the alert pipeline in particular fascinating data set And so I go back to my prediction you talk about this massive data set SETI needs to learn how to use this SETI traditionally has been radio telescopes for lots of reasons We have a fire hose that's going to be broadcasting data every night We need to learn how to drink from it because this is where the action is happening the computers are here The data is here. We need to learn how to use it We're going to do more SETI with this data in the next 10 years and it's been done in the past 60 Okay, so what are we looking for how does SETI work in a modern astronomy context? Um, we're looking for outliers. We're looking for things that are unexplainable So the boring the boring description is that anything that can't be explained by natural astronomy This is things that stars do or natural physics processes. Um, and As a professional astronomer, let me tell you something about stars. They're super duper annoying Stars do all kinds of obnoxious things. This is super duper hard We're looking for lighthouses, right? It's easy to imagine. We're looking for A spaceship landing in the middle of the city. That's easy to picture But that's probably not what's going to happen but Think about a lighthouse think about if you were a bird and you saw a lighthouse You would be like, what is this thing that's blinking at me? I have no context for why it's blinking at me and yet it's blinking If you were a sailor if you just bought a boat today and when sailing and didn't know what a lighthouse was You'd be like, oh cool Somebody put a light a strobe light out and then you would crash into the rocks because you didn't have any frame of reference But you'd probably be able to intuit that like a person put it out there You know, if you had a similar level of intelligence technology as the people who built the lighthouse Think about lighthouses think about runway landing strips other things that we do that broadcast light and information A lighthouse does not contain an awful lot of information Right, it's not like your phone. It's not morris code, right? It just goes like blink on off On off that's all a lighthouse does it's very simple if you didn't know what a lighthouse does it's all it does It just it just blinks at you It's not a Credibly information dense signal You have to know what you're thinking when you're broadcasting like, huh? Why are they blinking a light at me? Do they want me to come towards them? No, the answer is no You need to go away from lighthouses Okay We're thinking about lighthouses that people might build around stars Pros and cons here. There's a lot of stars 17 billion stars is a lot. This is a lot to draw from I like this This is job security lots of stars to search good Again stars kind of screwballs Stars change their brightness Stars blink at us stars have other stars that go around them to make them do funny things stars age stars explode stars have dust Stars do a bunch of obnoxious things. They're very pesky. They're very obnoxious And they can fool us into thinking tricky things are happening So it's a pro and a con we got a lot of them, but they're really obnoxious We're looking for a needle in a haystack. This is another analogy, right? But it's not a needle in a haystack, right? It's a needle in a haystack made of needles Being dumped out of a truck On the highway and you're trying to search for the needle, right? Like it is a multi-dimensional Changing problem with time. It's a very difficult problem We don't know what this lighthouse is going to look like what this runway is going to look like We don't know how often we need to look at the space to see the light blink We don't know how much space we need to look to find the lighthouse We don't know how faint the lighthouse is or how far away it is or what color the lighthouse bulb is Is it blue? Is it red? Is it infrared? Is it radio? We don't know And there's all kinds of other things. There's something like Eight or nine dimensions to this haystack that we're searching and we don't know what we're looking for Jill Tartar Is the most famous and impactful study astronomer in the last 50 years Carl Sagan, good to Jill Tartar She likened this problem to studying the earth's oceans By sampling a cup of water like you hold up your pint glass and that's how much water you have And you're trying to understand the complexity of the earth's oceans and life within them That's how much we have searched so far. This is how much of the haystack we have searched of this whole volume This is an incredible volume to try to infer something from 12 ounces. This is a hard problem Now we've gotten better. That was 20 that was 2000. So 20 years later. We're doing a little better We have bigger radio telescopes. There's some more private money coming in. NASA's putting a little bit of money into this We have gotten to something like a hot tub compared to the earth's oceans hot tub good hot tub good um Like you could catch a fish in a hot tub And like oh, there's actually life in this thing got yeah I mean you could like learn a lot about the oceans with one hot tubs worth of ocean Um, if you were trying to study whales, you'd be in trouble right And so again, what i'm selling here is this idea that we're going to do An incredible amount of work. We're going to change. We're going to revolutionize this by studying a swimming pool is worth This is the revolution we're trying to build You could actually catch a whale in a swimming pool. I think this is the this is the selling point um With new surveys with new technology with software. We think we can get to something like The the volume of a swimming pool as compared to the volume of the earth's ocean This is still a bleak reality, right? This is a huge Haystack, we got to search and we only have a swimming pool or two is worth of water That's tough, but it's something it's the right direction So we could either be very lucky right we could be lucky our spaceship could show up and Steal a cow in the middle of a city and that could happen on the live stream And people could like it and the algorithm would promote it and then you would see it and maybe believe it Maybe believe it We could like we have to accept we could get lucky Maybe the the volcans show up It could happen But I don't know about you. I'm not feeling especially lucky the last couple years So instead my prediction is this is going to be really really hard and that's okay We're not afraid of hard problems, right the search for life the search for cow farts Around nearby stars That's a hard problem, but we like hard problems. That's what science is about. That's why we look up, right? This is a hard problem and it might take us A thousand years to do it But someday we could do it Okay So in the last act here, what are we looking for? I'm going to give you three examples These are not comprehensive examples These are three examples that I'm interested in because they're things that I'm working on There are many ways to search this haystack many Many hot tubs worth of water we could imagine sifting through Three real examples that we're working on the first I love because it's so simple and I like simple things um It's looking for disappearing stars So the idea as we saw on the trivia would be aliens Build a Dyson sphere or some kind of structure of solar panels or something around their star and thus the star appears to disappear it blinks out of existence This is good. I mean, I don't know if this is good for the star But this is good for us because it's an easy signal To search for it might be a preposterous scenario. I don't know I'm not an alien But I can search for this I can write software to go look at this image from 50 years ago And this image from 10 years ago and say are all those fuzzy circles in the old image Also in the new image. We're good at these kinds of problems We have algorithms that can tell if there's a cat in this image and in this image, right? So this is a solvable problem. We can do this in the cloud I love this because it's so simple and there are some candidates This is one of the candidates from this paper Uh by Beatrice Virolet And this star is not in this image And probably a very mundane thing Right probably the star has an eclipse or has is a distant star and had a flare There's a lot of reasons why you might find something like this But it's easy to look for and I like that we can write an algorithm that does this work for us And we can search through a century's worth of images This is a cool project All right, the second one It's a little more subtle But it's one that I've been enjoying because I've got a student in the last year working on this So it's really fun the idea is Using a coordinating event To synchronize your lighthouse So if somebody dropped a glass over here, don't drop a glass that'd be rude If you dropped a glass everybody would look right it would get your attention and you'd all look This is like the game Marco Polo I could yell Marco and you would yell polo and I would know where you are And then we would laugh and forget about the colonialism and it would be fine The idea is there's some noteworthy event that happens in the sky Somebody drops a glass and gets our attention We're astronomers. We're out here looking That signal that information propagates out into space and other astronomers Aliens other astronomers also notice this and say whoa And they yell polo or whatever and they say hey, maybe I'll see that and they send their own broadcast out Meanwhile, this broadcast continues to radiate out and we see it eventually we see this event and then eventually we see The transmission from the other star from the other civilization and we say whoa We say whoa What I like about this is it forms a triangle, right? There's a simple triangle. We're the only thing at work here All these signals travel at the speed of light And thank you nature for the speed of light. It's the same number no matter which way you go So this is the speed of light times the distance This is the speed of light this the distance is all that matters here And we know how to measure the distance to stars because we're astronomers see that's what we do Um, and so we know if we see a noteworthy event We can take this triangle and figure out which stars could possibly have seen it and transmitted a response This gives us a predictions of which stars of those 17 billion to look at and when So at any given time there's only a few hundred stars you need to monitor Maybe a few thousand depending on how far you go This gives you a prediction of which stars and when and so even if the signal even the lighthouse is really faint and really subtle You know when the lighthouse is going to blink because it's in coordination With this big coordinating signaling event It's kind of a convoluted model But again, it's good because we can write code to do this. I don't have to go out there and measure a triangle I don't remember how to measure triangles code does this. This is what we invented computers for So here's one real example Supernova 1987 a this is the closest supernova that happened in the last 400 years big deal happened in 1987 from our vantage point The information of that supernova reached us in 1987 when I was just a little kid um And here is a two-dimensional map a real map. This is the only real map I've got in this talk This is the position of 300 000 of the nearest stars Uh, it's in units of parsecs. Don't stress about that. You know the units of parsecs the kessel run did it uh into under 12 It's fine parsecs just distance like 300 light years. Okay. This is a little ball of stars 300 light years away The blue stars are ones that have seen supernova 1987 a the supernova happened this direction Like I'm the supernova and the supernova happened this direction So you can see this like curvature here as the light and the supernova is reaching these stars Something like 52 of the stars This doesn't add up to one somebody did the math wrong. It was me. Um It's like 58 not 41, uh, this should be 48 so something like half the stars in our neighborhood have seen the supernova Half have not there's still a lot of stars that haven't even seen this event, right? It was 35 years ago That's nothing for a star our galaxy is Over a hundred thousand light years across Something happened 35 years ago in our neck of the woods is nothing. We got to wait a little while We got to be patient. It's not fair to say we've looked we didn't see anything It's it's not the the news hasn't reached these people yet And if you draw the cone of people who could have sent a transmission, that's only seven percent That number is correct This yellow cone here These are the stars that could have seen the supernova and we could have received their signal And so we can only eliminate of this 300,000 just near us we can only eliminate seven percent of them The rest of these stars are fair game and we need to watch them. We need to be monitoring them Thank goodness. We're building an all-sky survey that monitors the whole night sky For other reasons but also for this There's a lot to search and a lot of opportunity space here The third example, which I think is so rad in 2017 we discovered the first Rock we call that a comet at the time. It's unclear. It might be a rock It might be a fragment of a planet This rock which was named omuomua Came from another star. This is not from our solar system. We call this the first interstellar visitor The first interstellar asteroid it came in on this hyperbolic orbit coming down From the plane of the solar system and then it pivoted out and we actually saw it here as it was leaving This is a really rad object and some people have speculated it could be a spaceship I don't think it is a spaceship But some people think it's a spaceship. I don't think it's a spaceship Um But it is the kind of thing that came from another star Right like if there was a spaceship coming it might take a trajectory like this Um, and one way to search well, we know how gravity works, right like We have that down. We figured that out a while ago So we know if this thing is just falling towards the sun If it's just falling and gravity is at work We know it'll fall towards the sun and then it'll bounce out and it'll head out on its merry way If the comet is going along following the path that gravity would take it and then it turns by 90 degrees That is a really interesting red flag, right? And one of the things that meredith talked about one of the reasons we're stressed about satellites is we want to find Comets like we would like an asteroid to not run into earth Preferably and so we'd like to find them. I don't know what we would do about it, but we'd like to find them to know um and We're watching we're modeling these orbits We're watching them if one of them takes a right turn That's a huge technician. That's a huge sign that something might be happening This is a cool opportunity and something that's really good for big computers to work on And so for the last time i'll say seddie in the next 10 years just these three ideas Are mapping parameter space that have never been tried. We've never tried anything like this We've never had the technology or the computational power or the resources to do anything like this We're building a telescopes for all the other reasons we build telescopes and we can do this too We have strategies that can use this so-called big data these strategies of changing stars Of coordinated signals of moving things that these telescopes are going to get us for free and we just need to go out there and look And so the search is just beginning technosignatures are coming I hope the search for them is definitely coming Thank you. Yeah, I'll ask you questions