 This week, I'm talking about aliens, essentially the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and some of the epically awesome people behind this endeavor. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, also known as SETI, is an endeavor to actually search the skies for radio waves and also optical light beams that could be created only by intelligent civilizations. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence actually started in 1960 with Frank Drake when he actually started searching for nearby solar systems that were sending us signals. The following year, in 1961, Frank Drake notably created the Drake equation, and the Drake equation is an equation that estimates the number of technological civilizations that exist in our galaxy. The thing that's really cool about the Drake equation is that the number changes based on when we learn more things about our galaxy. So for instance, the Kepler spacecraft a couple of years ago told us that the estimated number of habitable planets in our galaxy was somewhere on the order of 40 billion or so. And if you can imagine a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 40 billion, you're still left with quite a bit of real estate in our galaxy that could host potentially intelligent alien life. One really cool project that I recently came across at the Science Gallery in Dublin is actually someone created a physical rendering of the Drake equation so that you could play around with the different numbers and the different variables to create different estimates of how many alien civilizations might actually be out there in our galaxy, which is pretty exciting. Two other people involved in the SETI endeavor are Jill Tarder and Suss Jaws Tech. Both of them have notably spent decades of their life looking for extraterrestrial intelligence, which is really, really cool. Jill Tarder always likes to quote Phil Morrison on saying that SETI is actually the archaeology of our future by inherently searching for extraterrestrial intelligence and learning more about extraterrestrial intelligence and how it might take place in the universe. We can actually learn more about what our future might entail. You might also be familiar with Jill Tarder because she was the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, also Jodie Foster's character in the book and movie Contact. Suss Jaws Tech is a self-confessed alien hunter and has a lot of great thoughts around how when we actually find alien civilizations, that they'll actually be more akin to robots or AI or some sort of artificial life that we haven't even thought of yet. And this is because he thinks that squishy, biological, gray and green aliens like the emojis that you see on your iPhone aren't really that realistic when it comes to long time scales and actually the survivability of a species. But the person at the SETI Institute with the all-time coolest job title that I've ever heard of is Douglas Backoach, and he actually has the job title of being the director of interstellar message composition, which is the coolest job title possibly on Earth, possibly even in our entire galaxy for all we know. We'll hopefully one day find out. Douglas is the only social scientist at the SETI Institute and his whole job is to study how different civilizations communicate with each other and how we might be able to communicate and how aliens might be able to communicate either using words or nature or biology or music or mathematics. Another person with a really cool job at the SETI Institute is Lawrence Doyle. And Lawrence Doyle actually studies animal communication, and he's actually been studying the complexity of humpback whales and the different songs that they sing. What's been really cool about Lawrence's research is that he's actually discovered that dolphins and whales have syntaxes that are very similar to human syntaxes. What this means is if you're looking at a sentence and you scratch out a few words, a human might be able to put together what words might be in those blank spaces because we understand how language works. Similarly, dolphins and whales actually use language in a similar manner, and they might actually be able to understand words that are missing in what would be their sentences. Frank Drake, Jill Tarder, Seth Shostak, Doug Backoach, and Lawrence Doyle are actually only a handful of the people that are leading the way in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. There are many, many more, and hopefully there will be even more in the coming years as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence just received a hundred million dollars in funding from a very rich donor. So hopefully we can actually see even more careers and more searches taking place, and hopefully one day we'll even hear from E.T. Thanks for geeking out with me this week. This week, actually leave a comment with what message you would send to an alien civilization, and remember to subscribe on YouTube and donate to the Patreon campaign to support dorky awesome space pods like this one.