Did Earth get a message from aliens?

00:00:06
Speaker 1: In many ways, it's a scientific dream come true, a fantasy even to be indulged during daydreams. Usually it goes something like this. You're sitting at your desk where you monitor some telescope or communications equipment. Suddenly you see something unusual, interrupting endless hours of monotony. It's some kind of signal, something you've never seen before, something that can't have come from any Earth source and isn't produced by any natural phenomenon. It's a signal from space. It's humanity's first interplanetary email. Of course, that's exciting, it's amazing, it's mind blowing, but you know it's actually just the first step. The existence of the signal says hey, aliens are here. But what is the message that's encoded inside? What does that alien email have to say? Does it say you killed my father, prepared to die? Does it say here's our alien unified theory of everything? Or is an interstellar version of a Nigerian oil scam? Of course we're dying to know. But how do we crack the message? How do we know what the alien code is? How do we figure it out? And hanging over the whole enterprise is the question What if we can't What if we never figure out what it means, and there's a growing sense of doubt that it actually means anything. What if it's not an alien email but some kind of weird universe electromagnetic purp. Now this scientific fantasy has turned into a kind of scientific nightmare. Today in the podcast, we're going to be digging into the true story of a message from the skies and what it might mean. We'll be answering the question did Earth get a message from aliens?

00:02:01
Speaker 2: Welcome to Daniel and Kelly is extraordinary universe. I'm Kelly Wiener Smith, and I think probably there are aliens out there. Daniel, how are you doing? What's your story?

00:02:13
Speaker 1: Hi? I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I wish I could say I was an alien.

00:02:19
Speaker 2: That is not what I expected you were going to go with today. Why do you wish you were an alien?

00:02:24
Speaker 1: Earth just seems like such a wonderful place to visit, And you know, there's so many friendly physicists and other scientists who want to know all of your secrets of the universe. I just imagine it would be a great experience to be an alien, arrive on Earth and get to hang out with a bunch of cool nerds.

00:02:40
Speaker 2: Okay, sweet, No, I'm down for that. Okay. So, if you were able to send a message that you knew aliens were going to get, what would you send out into space if you knew it would be received?

00:02:53
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, Kelly, Wow, the hardest question time.

00:02:58
Speaker 2: Oh Man, no balls here.

00:03:01
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, I pretty strongly believe that any message we send out into space will be undecipherable, untranslatable without us there to explain it or to interact with them or some kind of common context. I love the message that we did send out into space, but I think it's probably impossible for aliens to figure out what we meant by that, because I think there's so much of us in it, so much of our cultural context, and that it's hard for us to see that and to strip it away. But of course, if you gave me the opportunity, I would still send something, probably a picture of my kids.

00:03:33
Speaker 2: Aw, that's cute. I think if I was going to send a message out in a space, one thing that's kind of universal is music, especially instrumental music. So I think i'd send some like beautiful music out into space, because I agree. I think if you sent like we come in peace, they wouldn't know what that means. I mean, I can listen to music from a culture I know nothing about and still feel kind of choked up about it. I don't know. Maybe that's the closest we have to something universal.

00:03:58
Speaker 1: Maybe I mean it's the universe, maybe across humans. And I can appreciate music from other species like bird song can be quite nice. But I don't know if that means that it's universal beyond Earth right, other than just speculation and hope, do we have any solid evidence biologically for music being something that has to fundamentally be part of intelligence.

00:04:19
Speaker 2: No, absolutely not. But I think it's maybe one of our best chances at sending something that represents our whole species. Because almost all of us are excited about music.

00:04:28
Speaker 1: That means we have to send them Taylor Swift or like the Macarena or something.

00:04:32
Speaker 2: I think we could take a more historical perspective.

00:04:38
Speaker 1: What's more likely to get us invaded or nuked from orbit? O?

00:04:40
Speaker 2: God, let's withhold the makarena. Bleeps.

00:04:45
Speaker 1: But we don't just have to speculate about signals to send to aliens, because humanity has sent messages to the skies in the past, and we've done so in response to weird lips and bleeps we've heard from the cosmos.

00:04:57
Speaker 2: Do you think most people know about the weird blue in bleeps we've heard. I think we should ask our audience.

00:05:03
Speaker 1: One of the best candidates for a potential alien signal is something we're going to be talking about on the podcast today. It's called the Wow signal because someone wrote wow next to the computer print out when they first saw it. Was it Aliens? Was it the Russians? Was it just birds?

00:05:17
Speaker 2: I think the writing wow next to it thing is really cute, better than WTF or something a WTF signal?

00:05:24
Speaker 1: I love it, And so I asked folks what they thought the Wow signal might be. Was it a message from aliens? Or are we just fooling ourselves. Here's what people had to say.

00:05:33
Speaker 2: I'm not sure what calls the Wow signal.

00:05:36
Speaker 1: Maybe supernova, maybe maybe aquasa.

00:05:39
Speaker 2: Some sort of cosmic anomaly.

00:05:42
Speaker 1: I don't remember if there's been any resolution on its origin, so I'd love to hear progress on that.

00:05:48
Speaker 2: The Wow signal is a seventy two second narrow band high energy signal sent by the Santee, an alien race, in an attempt to find refuge from their failing three body problem.

00:05:57
Speaker 1: It must be very impressive to be called the WOW. That's the signal that was seen by SETTI for a brief time. I don't think it's known what caused it, no idea, It never never repeated.

00:06:08
Speaker 2: My guess is the WOW signal was a short transmission from a satellite that just happened to be in the beam of the Big Year at the time, something that they thought was alien. But they've recently done done some research to improved that it was actually a massive comet going between one planetary signal and US. I think it had something to do with hydrogen. I'm curious to hear.

00:06:29
Speaker 1: To find out the WOW signal was just a glitch, a random occurrence. Or who was written upside down and he was thinking about his mom mikes would be moving. Electrons burst from like a pulsar equasar that collided with the cloud of hydrogen, which then created the signal of sweatpast Earth. If you'd like to virtually answer these persons on the street questions, we'd love to have you participate please write to us two questions at danieland Kelly dot org. That's danieland Kelly dot O RG Kelly, is.

00:07:00
Speaker 2: K E l L Y not I E. That's the wrong way to spell it. Sorry to I E. Kelly's out there. Let's go ahead and alienate the audience for no reason. So I thought the answers that we got this time around were great. I really loved the person who was quick on their feet and had the upside down and it actually met mom answer, like, oh, message for mom, I got to call home.

00:07:23
Speaker 1: Maybe moms are the most universal thing in the universe, Kelly.

00:07:26
Speaker 2: I love that idea. I think that's probably right. Everyone everywhere loves their mom.

00:07:31
Speaker 1: I don't know. We have a running joke as a family whenever we watch a movie, either the dad or the mom is usually like a terrible character. And so you know, when you see a mom acting badly on the screen, my kids are like, moms are the worst. Oh you see a dad behaving terribly, and they're like, dads are the worst. Oh my gosh. But anyway, I hope aliens out there have really nice moms.

00:07:52
Speaker 2: I hope so too. Well. So another common guess was that this was just a like equipment problem or some you know, environmental phenomena. So let's get into where we collected the WOW signal, what it looked like, and let's jump in.

00:08:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Wow signal is a really exciting example something I think is really important, which is basically just listening to the universe and trying to hear messages. You know, we don't have a whole lot of ways of communicating with aliens because we're stuck on this rock. You know, space is vast and rockets are slow, and even photons don't go very fast compared to the huge distances between here and any other stars. So our best chance to discover life is not to land on some other planet or for other aliens to land here, but to hear from them, right, to get a message from space. And so the best way to figure out are we alone in the universe is to listen to hear if other people are basically sending us interplanetary emails.

00:08:48
Speaker 2: I feel like it's common for people to try to convince you that the question they work on is really important by prefacing it with one of the most important questions humankind will ever have to answer. And people often say whether or not we're alone one of the most important questions humankind will ever have to answer. And I think that's the one time that I believe it. I think that might actually be one of the most important questions. What do you think what do you think is the most important question humans could ever answer?

00:09:12
Speaker 1: Man, you are dropping the big questions kind of.

00:09:14
Speaker 2: Getting us off track.

00:09:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, I agree, And I think we know it's one of the most important questions because it's one of the oldest questions, and there's a question we've been asking since we've been asking questions. It's up there with like how big is the universe and where does it all come from? It changes the whole context of our experience, you know, in a way that like some question in organic chemistry, can you synthesize this polysaccharator or whatever? I don't even know enough chemistry to make that joke, you know, like the answer doesn't change what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, and how you should live your life. But if we know we're alone in the universe, we're the only thinking beings that really changes what it means to be human. And also if we're one in the zillion changes what it means to be human. So yeah, I agree this is one of the deep questions. I don't personally work on this question, which means I'm not like invested in it that same way, but I agree it's one of the most important questions basically anybody's ever asked.

00:10:09
Speaker 2: And I also don't work on this question, but I still think it would probably profoundly change the way I see everything. And I feel like, also over the course of my life, I've been more and more convinced that probably there's something else out there. During my lifetime, we've learned so much about other exoplanets and how much is out there, and I feel like, statistically it would be really surprising if we were alone. And so anyway, I'm more excited about listening.

00:10:32
Speaker 1: I think it's really interesting how scientists have hunches like that. I don't think that's widely enough understood that you know, we're scientists and we're doing science and we're trying to be objective, but also look where people we got feelings and guesses and emotions, and that's important because that drives how science is done. Like, if you believe in something, you're more likely to investigate it, And of course you can investigate it in a very scientific way and try to draw objective answers, but it changes the kind of things you do with your science, little places you spend your time. So these like scientific hunches, they're important. You know, these feelings that scientists have.

00:11:03
Speaker 2: Well, I think you need to be honest about them, because if you feel like something is right, then you need to be extra careful to make sure you're not tricking yourself into something. You know. I think people who are like, oh, scientists, they're always unbiased and they're just looking for the truth. It's like, no, we're humans. We like have a hunch that things are going to go one way or another, and you need to be honest about that and then try extra hard to prove yourself wrong if you know you're leaning in a certain direction exactly.

00:11:26
Speaker 1: And I feel just that way about the aliens question. People write to me about this because I'm very skeptical of all the videos that we've seen, you know, gimbal and the Tiktac video and all this stuff. And I talked to Mick West once about it and he helped us debunk them. And the reason I feel so skeptical about them is that the threshold is absolutely, very very high. And one reason for that is that I really want it to be true, Like I want there to be aliens, and I want them to be here on Earth visiting us. I would so love for that to be true that I have to be extra scrupulous about believing this stuff, right, It needs to be really, really rock solid, because I know I'm biased in fame of believing it, And.

00:12:01
Speaker 2: So I bet you want it to be true because you would love to know their physics theories and if they imagine with ours.

00:12:09
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I would love to talk to a theoretical physicists from another planet, if they even do theoretical physics. And you know, of course that I'm writing a book on that exact question, but also because it would instantly answer so many other questions about the prevalence of life, Like your hunch that there is life out there in the universe is informed, of course by science. You know, there are a lot more planets, a lot more stars, a lot more earth like planets and all that stuff, But there's still the question of how often life arises, and something we don't even understand here on Earth, right, And so that would help us understand that question, which I feel like is so deep and informs the context of our lives so profoundly that yeah, I'm desperate to know. And also because it's a question that has an answer, and the answer is out there. Yeah, like the aliens are either there or they're not. You know, it's just a fact about the universe and we just don't have the answer. It's like if somebody puts the answer in an envelope in front of you, you're going to be so desperate to open it, right. That's to me what science is is like ripping open the envelopes of the universe.

00:13:05
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I just started this book called The Zoologists Guide to the Galaxy, and the argument that he's making is that natural selection must be acting everywhere, and so there are some things you can predict about how animals will look and anyway, as a biologist, I would just love to know, like do they have something like DNA like we do? Are there other ways of encoding things? I mean, it does feel like they must be shaped by natural selection, but is that true? And what do they look like now? And I'm only about the first quarter of the way into the book and it's a very interesting argument. But okay, so we both agree.

00:13:39
Speaker 1: Well, I actually talk to Eric Kirshenbaum and interviewed him for the book that I'm writing. He's hilarious, and you know, I believe his arguments that like, basically critters or always going to munch on other critters, and that affects how aliens evolve. And you can learn a lot about how aliens might behave from the things that have happened here on Earth. But maybe he's totally wrong, and the only way to know he is to meet the aliens.

00:14:00
Speaker 2: That's right. Anyway, So we have spent way longer than we intended talking about why we should look you and I are convinced that we should be looking how do you look?

00:14:10
Speaker 1: Well, Basically, the right way to do it is to open every single technological eyeball or earball that you can right listen to the skies in every possible way, because we can't anticipate how are aliens going to try to connect with us? Now, Because we're scientists, the first thing we do is the easiest thing, Right, every time you try something in science, you always do the dumbest, simplest, cheapest thing first, because hey, that might just work something you're done right, and when that doesn't work, then you get more creative and more expensive. So the simplest, easiest thing to do is to just listen for radio waves. Like it's that simple. You know, we have these things that can send messages from one part of the Earth to the other by exciting the electromagnetic field. You know, that's how radio waves work. You have an antenna somewhere, electrons inside of it are oscillating because of the current that makes oscillating electromagnetic waves, which is then reach an antenna you have which wriggles the electrons in your antenna, which creates a current which feeds into your circuit and then gets translated into sound for your ears. Right, So the idea is, Look, you don't need air or anything to send radio waves. You can send them from here to the moon. You can send them from here to Mars. They go through space itself, just like light does. Right. Radio waves are fundamentally just another kind of light. Light exists in lots of different frequencies. We can see it from like red up to violet, but it exists in higher frequencies we can't see the ultraviolet and lower frequencies, we can't see the infrared and radio waves, and so this is basically like listen for radio waves from space because we have that technology.

00:15:42
Speaker 2: So we could also look for like photons from far away. Are there any kind of waves that would not travel through space and could not be used to send a message?

00:15:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, we can definitely look for signals from space, like if aliens are shining a laser beam at us and turn it on and off in Morse code or the alien equivalent, we could totally see that. The different frequencies have different strengths and weaknesses because the universe is transparent or opaque at different frequencies. Like the visible spectrum is nice because the universe is mostly transparent. Like if you shine a laser beam from here to Alpha Centauri, it's gonna make it and they can see that laser because visible light can go through space. It's transparent. And you know, it didn't always used to be that way. Earlier in the history of the universe, it was filled with a plasma and the universe was opaque. And so it's just like in our era of the universe that it's mostly transparent to this, but space is not actually empty right, there's lots of dust and gas and stuff, so some frequencies of light can penetrate that and some of them can't. So radio waves in infrared and ultraviolet and X rays, some of those things can make it through gas and dust and some of them can't. So the right thing they do is still listen on all the frequencies because we don't know where they're coming from and how they can transmit, So they might be invisible to us because they're behind gas and dust in the center of the galaxy or something else. But radio is sort of easy. We have lots of receivers for radio, We have large antenna, and we've been doing it a little while, so radio is sort of like the first place.

00:17:08
Speaker 2: To go, you know, there's lots of radio stations on Earth. Is everything that we transmit to each other by radio also making it out into space, Like have the aliens heard the Macarena or will they in many late years or whatever? Or does it depend on where we're aiming it, Like our radios aimed towards Earth, and so those messages aren't going out into deep space.

00:17:28
Speaker 1: No, we have definitely beamed the Macharina into deep space. Embarrassingly right now, or maybe they love it, you know, and maybe that's the reason they're going to come, which would be wonderful. Messages can be beamed, they can be aimed, but generally radio is not right. Radio is broadcast in every direction, so you can pick up your tailor switch in every direction, which means that it's also broadcast up right and out into space, and also with our TV signals, and so yes, our signals have left the planet though you know, we've only been transmitting for about one hundred years, and that means that there's like a bubble one hundred light years wide within which you can pick up signals from Earth. And one hundred light years seems like a long way because light travels really really fast, right, but the galaxy is one hundred thousand light years across, So the fraction of the Milky Way which is filled with Earth signals is really really small. And as you get further and further from Earth, those signals get weaker. If you're twice as far away, the signals get four times a week. If you're ten times further away, then they get one hundred times this week. So because they're not typically aimed, they get really pretty weak when you get to like the next star. So, for example, our radio telescopes couldn't pick up Earth like transmissions from the nearest star.

00:18:41
Speaker 2: Okay, so the nearest aliens living on a planet orbiting the nearest star wouldn't necessarily be able to eavesdrop on all of the communications we were sharing by radio during World War II, for example, so they might not know about those atrocities, and then don't have to be so insecure about how our species looks exactly.

00:18:58
Speaker 1: If we knew they were there, beam them a message, which they probably could receive, assuming they had technology similar to ours. But if we're just broadcasting into space, then by the time it gets there. Again, if they have technology similar to ours, they wouldn't be able to pick it up. If they're far advanced and their technology is much more powerful, then yeah, maybe they're listening to us right now and they watched every episode of I Love Lucy, in which case we got some splaining to do.

00:19:24
Speaker 2: I'm enjoying your choice of pop culture references, and I'm not sure if I'm getting some insights into your preferences here or not. So let's take a break for some commercials, and when we get back, we'll talk about Sagittarius A. All right, we're back. During the break, you told me something that I didn't know, which means I didn't read our outline very carefully, which is that Sagittarius A is a black hole discovered by radio waves. All right, tell me more about that.

00:20:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, we do radio to talk to each other, but astronomers do radio to listen to the skies. But not in the beginning. Radio astronomy has its origins in the radio industry. The first radio telescope was built by somebody at Bell Labs, essentially to listen to see like, hey, how much noise is there in the radio spectrum? How much do we have to worry about this if we want to transmit radio around the world. So this is like in the thirties, This is not somebody doing astronomy. This is just like, hey, this is a commercial, useful technology. Let's figure out how noisy it is. And then after World War Two there are a lot of advances in radar which then got applied to radio astronomy, and that's when it first took off and people started listening in depth to the skies and they immediately discovered something really really weird that there was a point in the sky where you couldn't really see anything interesting, but it was very, very loud in the radio. It wasn't loud or equivalently bright in the visible like if you look with a telescope, you couldn't really see anything there, but that point in the sky was extraordinarily loud in the radio.

00:21:10
Speaker 2: Why are black holes screaming in radio?

00:21:16
Speaker 1: Death metal? Of course? I mean what kind of music is a black hole going to make? You know? Soell Garden right, it's not John Denver for sure. Yeah. So why do things in the sky emit in radio? Well, all electromagnetic radiation that includes visible photons and X rays and everything are emitted by charged particles being accelerated. It's a fundamental piece of electromagnetism. Like you have an electron, you accelerate, it means you're giving it a kick in order to conserve momentum. It's going to shoot off a photon in the other direction, right, That's how charge particles get accelerated. Every time a charge particle is accelerated, it's going to give off a photon. So what's happening here is you have electrons moving at high speeds being bent by the strong magnetic fields around the black hole, and that corresponds to radio and it's fascinating because stars don't produce radio waves. If you listen to the sky in radio, you don't hear from the stars. They admit in the visible spectrum, they admit in the infrared, but they're pretty quiet in the radio. And so this is like another way to see what's out there in the universe. It's like, well, some stuff is loud in this frequency, some stuff is loud in that frequency. The sky looks very different at different frequencies.

00:22:23
Speaker 2: Okay, So we looked out and there was an area that was screaming sound garden. It was screaming at us in radio. We decided that was a black hole. We named it Sagittarius A.

00:22:34
Speaker 1: That's right, And that really kicked off the whole era of radio astronomy, and people started listening to the sky discovering all sorts of stuff, and of course people were wondering, like, hey, are we also going to get messages from non black holes? And you know, maybe aliens are sending messages to us. And there's one frequency in the radio which astronomers particularly think maybe aliens are going to use this channel to talk to us, and that's called the twenty one centimeters hydrogen line. A cloud of hydrogen will very naturally emit at this particular frequency because it corresponds to like an energy gap in hydrogen. You get hydrogen hot and excited, and then it cools back down and it emits a photon. When those electrons dek back down, it admits of this particular frequency. And because hydrogen is like the basic building block of the universe is hydrogen, everywhere, anybody who does radio astronomy is going to hear hydrogen and they're going to listen to hydrogen and use this to study the universe. So it's sort of like figuring out, Hey, anybody out there who's curious about the universe is probably paying attention to this channel. So let's spam this channel, or let's listen to this channel to see if this is what people using to talk to each other.

00:23:37
Speaker 2: Okay, that's very cool. And so once we think we Eves dropped on something, how long ago did this happen?

00:23:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, so people have been listening to this for a long long time, wondering if we're going to get a message, and then there was this fantastic moment. It was August fifteenth, nineteen seventy seven. This took place at Ohio State. They have a radio telescope they called the Big Ear. Love that name. And the way this telescope works is it's just a bunch of antennas. Right. You say telescope, and you imagine like a scientist using one eyeball to look through a glass or something. Right, But a telescope is a general word for anything that can listen to the skies, and so this telescope is just a bunch of radio antennas spread out across a cornfield somewhere. That's how they listen to these radio waves. You can also have like a big dish, you know, like the Green Bank Observatory and the Parks observatories. These are actually big dishes help focus it. But you can also just spread out a bunch of antennas on the ground, and that's what the Ohio State Big Ear was. And the way this thing worked is it scanned for ten seconds and then it processed it through a computer for two seconds and then summarized the strength of anything it saw. So it's like ten seconds of scanning, two seconds of analysis. And printing out. And when I say printing out, I mean literally this telescope feeds its data into an old fashioned computer and IBM eleven thirty, which is then printed out the data like onto one of those line printers, you know, like like this is the output of the telescope. Yeah, exactly. And so some human had to then go like literally sift through these pages to see, like, hey, was there anything interesting last night? You watch a movie of like Discovering Aliens, and there some guy like sifting through pages looking for something interesting, Like that's what really happened.

00:25:14
Speaker 2: So was there someone whose job was just to sit there constantly, so someone was always on shift. Presumably our eyes detect patterns, and so we'd look for things that look like a pattern or something different than what we were usually seeing.

00:25:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this had to be scanned visually, and they would transform the signal from the telescope into a code. And so if they saw basically nothing in this spectrum, it would be a space. If they would put a one or two or three. If it was a stronger signal, all the way up to nine. For a fairly strong signal, it got really strong, it would go into letters ABCDFG all the way up to you. You was the maximum signal that could detect that was saturating it. And so there was this morning August fifteenth, nineteen seventy seven, when they saw a signal that was seventy two seconds long, so six observing periods, which corresponds to six legs, and the signal was six E, the letter Q, the letter U J and five. Now this is very confusing because it makes it sound like, oh, the aliens sent us an email and it was these letters six EQUJ five. Like I said, a license plate. You should not use your decoding skills to try to understand what the aliens meant from these letters. These just correspond to the strength of the signal. If you translate this back from the particular code that this experiment used, it basically just means that the signal got stronger and then very very strong, and then quieter. So it's like a blip. It goes up and then comes down.

00:26:34
Speaker 2: But you're missing two seconds every ten seconds, that's right. So it could be even more complicated, that's right.

00:26:43
Speaker 1: Because the telescope can't sample constantly because the computer was slow, essentially, and so you're missing two seconds Also, the signal could have been longer. We only saw it for seventy seconds because that's how long it was visible for. This telescope can't be pointed. It's just like laying on a cornfield somewhere, and as the Earth rotates, it basically scans different parts of the sky, and so it just naturally scanned across this region for seventy seconds. It could have still been emitting. Right, you can't like turn the earth back and like hold on a second.

00:27:11
Speaker 2: That was great, go back.

00:27:14
Speaker 1: Also, they didn't see this until like you know, days later when they got to looking at this output. But still it was a very strong signal like the letter's Q and you in there tell you it's a very very powerful signal. It's very loud compared to like the average noise you expect in this spectrum. It's exactly the kind of thing at the twenty one centimeter line you might expect to get from aliens.

00:27:36
Speaker 2: So we've got this message that caught our attention, and so presumably, as you mentioned, you don't get things that are this loud most of the time. And so what do you do with it? Now? Yeah, how do you figure out what it was? From? Just this information.

00:27:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Well, the first thing you do is you're write wow on the piece of paper next to it, forever immortalizing yourself and your handwriting in the history of astronomy. Right, that's literally what it did, Like on that physical piece of paper, he wrote wow exclamation point because it was very unusual, and that really highlights the nature of the problem and also a hint to try to figure it out, Like, this is an unusual signal compared to what we typically see. That means that, like we listen to the sky in radio, we look around, we hear, we know the kind of things we expect to see, you know, black hole this and black hole that, and random electrones amid different clouds. We know typically what the sky does, and this is unusual. Unusual doesn't necessarily mean aliens, right, it means not the typical thing, quite rare, very weird. Again, not necessarily aliens. It means it's fascinating, It means we could learn something. It means it's definitely something you should pay attention to and look for more examples of. But how to interpret that is difficult. And this is like a classic thing in science. You know, we're always doing this two hypothesis test, where like, do we reject the current hypothesis do we accept the new hypothesis. You can't just reject the current one and be like, yeah, I have no explanation. You need some explanation, some way to describe this, some theory that says this is why we should see this particular weird thing and not some other weird thing. And that's very hard, you know. How do you look at this signal and say I'm convinced this is from aliens? It's very challenging. It's not an easy thing to do.

00:29:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially when you only see it once and you get no more extra information, and so you can't try to match it up with a natural phenomenon or something like that. And so what did they try doing?

00:29:25
Speaker 1: People try to do lots of stuff. Number one is like, look for other examples of this. Do we see this anywhere else? In this guy? Has anybody else ever seen one? And nobody's been able to repeat this like it didn't come back. You know. A classic possible explanation for this is like, oh, it's something out there that's emitting, but like a pulsar, right. Pulsars are neutron stars, which are remnants from stellar collapse. You have a star, it burns its life mostly at the end. It's very very bright, it burns out very quickly, it collapses. You're left with this very dense remnant. Sometimes those are spinning really really fast, and they're spinning off center, so they have like a b shooting up and down their poles, and that beam is now sweeping across the universe. And if you're in the path of that beam, you're not always in the path of the beam. It's like a lighthouse. It's sweeping past you regularly. So pulsar is cool. And actually, when pulsars were first discovered, people thought, oh, maybe this is aliens because they were regular it's like beep, beep, beep. But this was just one beep, so it's not a pulsar. This never came back again. Nobody's ever seen anything this strong from that direction in the sky. So they were able to like immediately filter out a bunch of possible explanations. And for me, there's sort of two simultaneous things you need to do. One is like, well, let's see if there are prosaic explanations, you know, just some natural phenomena we haven't seen before. And also let's actively try to figure out if it looks like an alien signal. And this is the challenge I was referring to earlier, like how do you do that? How do you decode an alien signal? And the challenge really is that you don't know what you're trying to decode it into. Like let's say the Aliens encode their message somehow, even if you could guess correctly how to decode it, how would you know that you've done it correctly? Right, you don't know what you're translating it back into. It's not like the Aliens have written in English, and once you figure out the puzzle, some message is going to pop out and be like, Hi, we're from Alpha Centauri. Right. You have to somehow not only know the system they're using to translate their ideas into radio waves and reverse that, but you have to be able to recognize the message when it's decoded, which we can't do because we have no idea how the aliens think or what they might be saying.

00:31:29
Speaker 2: So, like I imagine if they had been trying to communicate with us, maybe it would be something easier ish to figure out, like the prime numbers or you know, maybe we all would have converged on that, because I think that's the thing that's pitched often as some way to communicate our intelligence to other life forms. But if we only got it once for a little while, if it is an alien message, it would probably be eavesdropping, right, because otherwise it would have been pointed at us. Maybe this was a message for someone else, which I think makes it even less likely that we'd be able to figure it out. Anyway. It's a hard problem.

00:32:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right, and people often think, oh, well, if it's mathematics, it's probably simpler somehow to translate or easier to recognize, but that's not necessarily true. You know, we don't know how much of mathematics is human, and how much of mathematics is universal, how much it just reflects our thinking, and how much it reflects something deep in the universe. Even if you're going to start off with mathematics, you still have to use some kind of symbol, some kind of way to represent the number one or the number seven. Here's what eleven looks like. And so there's always going to be some sort of cultural influence because the way we communicate is through symbols, like right now, I'm translating my ideas into words, and because we agree on the meaning of those words, I imagine that my words are creating in your mind the ideas that are in my mind. Right, But that's because we've agreed in common on the meaning of those words. And every single kind of communication method that's not like directly brain to brain, we don't have telepathy, relies on this translation right where you go to symbols and then back to ideas, and those symbols fundamentally are arbitrary. The way we represent one or the way we represent like mathematical operations, all of those things are cultural symbols. And so we talked on the top of the episode about the messages we've sent into space, Like Carl Sagan and Francis Drake designed this pioneer plaque that they sent into space hoping maybe someday aliens would get it right. They got to actually answer the question that you posed to me, and they did their best. But if you look at what they did, like, man, there's so much humanity in that message. They tried to encode the structure of atoms and spin flip transitions, and they were really ambitious and frankly, I think it's impossible for aliens to get that message and actually understand what it means without already knowing a lot about us.

00:33:46
Speaker 2: The biologist in May, didn't it also include pictures of human bodies naked to be like, this is what we look like?

00:33:51
Speaker 1: Yeah? It did.

00:33:53
Speaker 2: I think that's kind of cool, but also could just be confusing. Is that what they eat?

00:34:00
Speaker 1: Here's how we look like when you eat us for dinner? Yeah, it could be a recipe. I actually talk to a philosopher about this, because you know, philosophers think deeply about like stripping away all of our assumptions and what does this really mean? And how do we know what we're doing here? I talk to Kareem Jabbari, a philosopher in Sweden who thinks a lot about this and game theory and should we communicate with aliens or are we likely to get misinterpreted? And here's his comment. He says, quote translation between speakers with no common language requires repeated interaction and a familiar context. This implies that translating a message conveyed to us by an encoded signal is not only very difficult, but practically impossible. What he means. Thereby, repeated interaction in a familiar context is basically like, Hey, if I point to a rock, I can say rock and you can look at it. And if I do that a few times, you're like, Okay, this symbol. He's telling me this word rock means this thing, and we can build up from that a common dictionary. If you just get a message, you have basically no hope of every decoding it because you don't the symbols, and you also can't recognize it if you have decoded it correctly.

00:35:04
Speaker 2: I don't communicate back to do a lingo. But it's teaching me Russian. It's working with me in my language. That's why it's different.

00:35:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's translating it for you. And also it's telling you when you're right and telling you when you're wrong.

00:35:20
Speaker 2: Okay, So like if someone just sent me a book in Russian, I would be screwed. But so like we translated the Rosetta Stone and that wasn't a back and forth. Oh but we knew one of the three languages, and we couldn't do it before then.

00:35:33
Speaker 1: The Rosetta Stone had one of the languages we already knew, and one of the languages we didn't, so that was helpful. Plus, did you know that after we discovered the Rosetta stone, it took us twenty years to decode that message on the Rosetta stone, And that's for like a message, We already knew what it said, right, And the reason is that we had all sorts of backwards ideas about what hieroglyphics were. People thought hieroglyphics were like pictorial. They're like, oh, look, the bird symbol must be something about birds, right. It turns out that was totally wrong. All hieroglyphics are actually phonetic, like the bird signal means a sound that a speaker would make. And so because they had this wrong cultural assumption about hieroglyphics, it took them twenty years to figure it out. And it wasn't until people use their cultural context from the other languages to figure this out. And there are lots of examples of languages here on Earth that other humans have written down that nobody's ever translated, like Etruscan. Nobody has ever figured out how to translate it. Trust can we be a bunch of examples of it and nobody's ever been able to translate it? So yeah, I think it's pretty much hopeless to translate a message from aliens unless the aliens show up and they like point at apples and donuts, and you know, we can have basically a duo lingo conversation with them.

00:36:42
Speaker 2: So I feel like I'm usually the pessimistic one. It's nice that the tables have turned. And on that note, let's take a little break, all right. So we've established that it's really hard to send messages and receive messages that anybody would have any hope of understanding, but that hasn't stopped humans from trying. Nothing stops us from trying. So we talked about the voyager plaques and what's on them. What have been some other methods or proposed methods for communicating with aliens.

00:37:23
Speaker 1: So there's been a bunch of really good ideas and also a bunch of really hilarious absurd attempts. One of my favorites is Austrian astronomer Joseph von Littrow. He proposed that we take huge trenches and write out math equations in them by filling them with water and then topping them with curosene and setting them on fire. He thought maybe Martians could see them from Mars and recognize that we're here and we're smart. Just look at our flaming math.

00:37:51
Speaker 2: So, I mean, that's epic. I guess this was back when we thought that there were canals ferrying water around on the Martian surface. Yeah, exactly, all right.

00:38:00
Speaker 1: Back before we really knew anything about Mars, you know, and it could have been there could have been intelligent life on Mars before we had the technology to look more carefully.

00:38:07
Speaker 2: Sure, all right, well, so that's how I would like to communicate with Zach from now on. I'm going to put aside a little part of our yard so that we can communicate with flaming mass.

00:38:16
Speaker 1: What else, So we actually sent a message in response to the wow signal. The WOW signal we know comes from the Sagittarius constellation. So the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, now sadly destroyed, sent a message in response. A bunch of humans sat down and decided, here's how we would encode a message, and includes things like you know, what our DNA looks like and what a human looks like, all encoded into this two D sort of pictogram, and we beamed it into space. Hoping that maybe somebody, if they had sent us the Wow signal, was going to get this as a reply, and.

00:38:49
Speaker 2: I assume our mail was left unresponded to.

00:38:53
Speaker 1: We haven't heard any response to the ARCIPA message. But you know, maybe there's a fleet of ships coming to destroy us or welcome into the galactic community. Guy who knows. And you know, there's a lot of responsibility there, like if you're going to broadcast from Earth on behalf of humanity, Like it's interesting. There should be some thought that goes into this, And I want to ask you about this. You thought a lot about like international law and what you can do in space. Are there any laws about you know, stepping up to the mic and speaking for humanity?

00:39:22
Speaker 2: No? No, I did look into this, and it's a topic that has come up at the United Nations, but no decision has actually been made, so there is no guideline. So I think as Americans, we want to believe that the message would come to us first. And if so, there's no rule that says we have to like consult the international community to say like, hey, we're gonna tell them where we are. Is that okay? Everyone? We could just do that. There's a group called SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and they do have a protocol that was informed by the International Astronautical Association.

00:39:59
Speaker 1: Is that right, sounds like a thing that could exist.

00:40:00
Speaker 2: Sure, Yeah, some like smart spacey people. They came up with a procedure for like what we should do, and it does involve like if you get a message, be careful deciphering it, share what you know, consult the United Nations, and try to get some input from everybody. And so like they've got some good procedures and they're probably one of the groups that's more likely to receive these messages. But no, there's no like specific international protocol for what we're supposed to do, so you could just get rogue messages. But I mean they've already like watched all of our TV shows and listened to the BBC, so like, you know, they probably know what we're about. The gig is up.

00:40:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's nothing left to hide. Well. I actually had a chance to talk to Jill Tartar. She was a director of SETI for a long time, and I asked her this question once. Here's what Jill had to say.

00:40:46
Speaker 3: Oh, we've thought about it and we've held workshops and basically should we respond and if so, who will speak first? And what will they say? And I think the disappointing thing for me at the moment is we've held a number of workshops. They haven't really involved very much of the world's diverse cultures. It's been sort of pretty waspy and pretty male. So we continue to think about this, and I continue to try and find a way to take this question globally and find appropriate venues to ask other cultures and other ways of being and thinking what they would do, how they feel. So it's a work in progress.

00:41:34
Speaker 2: You know.

00:41:35
Speaker 3: Freeman Dyson and here's alive and would listen to me talk and this is very very highbrow approach to doing things. He would just chuckle and he'd say, come on, Jill, if you ever make such an announcement, anybody anywhere on the planet that has access to a transmit will grab that trend and just start saying whatever the hell they please. And then he, you know, with a twinkle in his eye, and so he said, yeah, wouldn't that cacophony be about the best representation of the Earth today that we could make.

00:42:16
Speaker 2: I am feeling totally depressed because I think you're probably right. They're going to be getting like the dankest memes and all of the weirdest stuff that humans have to offer as soon as we get that message. So probably no hope of a concerted message set by all of us. They're just going to get like all of our spam all at once.

00:42:35
Speaker 1: All right, So we have no hope of really ever decoding this thing unless the aliens have somehow figured out English and write to us in our own language, which you know is not impossible and is the basis for a lot of good science fiction. But in the meantime, we haven't just been sitting idly by. We've been looking for other explanations for what the Wow signal could be, because again, it was very unusual, it's very weird. Doesn't mean as aliens, but it does mean it's an opportunity to potentially learning about what's out there in the universe, And so we ruled out things like pulsars and stellar flares. These things tend to be more periodic, they tend to repeat themselves. The people also look really really carefully for like more boring explanations. Is this just an Earth signal bouncing off of a satellite, and you know, Earth's stuff doesn't tend to broadcast in this regime is protected for astronomy. So for example, if you're a radio station, you should not be broadcasting in the twenty one centimeter line. If you're building like a drone, you should not be using this frequency to communicate between the controller and the drone. It's like protected, it's supposed to stay quiet. That doesn't mean that there isn't some like rogue station out there broadcasting. And maybe this like bounces a satellite or something, but again, it doesn't really look like it. They were able to triangulate it to a place in the sky who was fairly constant as the Earth moves, which suggested it doesn't come from an earth like place. For it to come off like a satellite in the sky, the satellite would have to like be very slowly moving and not be tumbling. It'd be very weird. And for a long time there was just really no good explanation for this guy who discovered it, Jerry Emon. He said, quote, I'm convinced that the WOW signal certainly has the potential of being the first signal from extraterrestrial intelligence. I'm like, all right, the guy's invested in it. He's the one who wrote wow on it. But you know he's also a serious astronomer. He's not just somebody who's going to make these claims. But as time goes on, we understand more and more about the universe and we're better at thinking about like rare things that could happen out there in the universe. And so pretty recently there was a paper that explained what might have caused the WOW signal.

00:44:32
Speaker 2: Well, don't keep me waiting. What do they think it is?

00:44:36
Speaker 1: Basically, they think it was a giant space laser, a random organization of events in the sky that happened to create this huge emission. This pulse of light pointed at Earth.

00:44:47
Speaker 2: So it wasn't like aliens pointing a laser at us hoping that we'd bet at it like a cat or something. This was like the universe accidentally makes lasers.

00:44:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly right now. Lasers are something we know very very we well here on Earth. Essentially, you have a population of gas, and the gas can go up and down on energy level, and if you pump energy into them, they go up the energy level, and then they relax, they go down an energy level they release a photon of a particular wavelength that corresponds to that energy level, and if you get a bunch of them in the right conditions and the right cavity, they can resonate. And that's what a laser is. It's like a little cavity filled with these special atoms that have energy pumped in just the right frequency, so they emit a very coherent beam of powerful light. And this we can make here on Earth, of course, but you could also randomly assemble the ingredients in space. If you have something which dumps a bunch of light into a pocket of gas that has the right conditions, it can absorb that and then they can emit it and they can generate a very bright, pulseive light. And in this case, it's not actually a space laser, but a space maser with an M like for mom, oh good, exactly. And a maser is not a laser that emits moms. It's a laser that emits microwave photons. So you know that your microwave in your kitchen is something that just beams light into your food at a particular wavelength. The wavelength of that light is what makes it called microwaves. It's fairly short wavelength compared to like radio waves.

00:46:10
Speaker 2: But so then why was the radio telescope picking up micro waves.

00:46:15
Speaker 1: Because microwaves are in the radio. There's so many terrible names here, like we didn't understand for a long time the connection between radio waves and visible light and all this kind of other stuff. So different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, which all should just be called light or should be called one thing, they all have different names, and they're all overlapping and historically inconsistent. Anyway, this thing in space emits light in the microwaves, So it's a maser, not a laser. And interestingly, maser's actually predated lasers. Humans invented masers before they invented lasers. Laser is much more famous, so the masers don't get the licensing fees or whatever. But if you have just the right stuff lined up in the sky, you have like a source like a magnetar or something, which emits a bunch of light and then it hits a cloud of hydrogen gas. That hydrogen gas acts like a mazer and creates a pulse of microwaves. And if it all lines up where you have like the source and then the gas and then the Earth. Then the Earth can get washed over in this sudden, rare, difficult to reproduce wash of radio waves at just the right frequency.

00:47:20
Speaker 2: So if we haven't seen this again, how do we know that that's what happened? Because I feel like, ideally what you'd want is to see it again at the same time as this maser thing has happened, you can be like, Bam, that's it.

00:47:34
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Because science shouldn't just be descriptive. So I'm like, hey, I can come up with a plausible explanation. You should be able to prove that this is what it is. And so what they did is they went back through the Aricibo data, the radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and they said, look, maybe this happens all the time, and this one WOW signal was just like the brightest one we've ever seen. So they went back and looked more carefully, and they found a bunch of examples of similar signals, not nearly as powerful as the Wow signal, but the same shape, the same features in the Aerocibo data. And this is exactly what you would expect, like if this happens sometimes in the universe, you would expect occasionally to be right in the center of the action when it's super bright, and you would expect more often to see weaker examples of it. So the brightest ones should be rarest and less bright ones should be more common. And they see a bunch of less bright versions of the WOW signal in the Aerocibo data, And that's pretty compelling, right. It suggests that there is a mechanism for generating these kinds of signals out there in the universe, and that we've seen them before. So if that's true, that means the WOW signal probably was this kind of thing, and it was rare. It wasn't usual, it was lucky right. Everything had to line up just right, especially powerful magnetar flare especially well lined up with Earth. Probably we're not going to see another one of these for a long time. That doesn't mean, necessarily, though, that it was aliens.

00:48:54
Speaker 2: Science ruins everything, although vaccines are nice. My field does good stuff.

00:49:03
Speaker 1: Or maybe this is how aliens communicate, you know, maybe there's like a galactic civilization out there and the way they talk to each other is by inducing magnetars to create masers in hydrogen gas and be messages and they'd sent us a blast, and we haven't responded. We've like left them on red for decades and.

00:49:19
Speaker 2: Decades we've responded, Oh no.

00:49:21
Speaker 1: You're right, we did respond, but we didn't respond in the same way. Right, we sent our own radio message, right, And maybe they're like, what's that. Yeah, And even if this message wasn't aliens, that doesn't mean aliens aren't out there, and it doesn't mean they aren't talking to us, and it doesn't mean that they can't hear our messages. And so there's actually a group out there. You talked about SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. There's another group that's more aggressive. They're called medi that wants to send messages to extraterrestrial intelligence. They think like Earth should be out there. We should be shouting that we exist, that we should be broadcasting our location. We should be inviting everybody to come and have dinner with us or of us, And so they've been sending messages Like twenty seventeen, they sent a message that was basically like a science and math Wikipedia page to a red dwarf star located fair only nearby.

00:50:09
Speaker 2: It feels to me like that is the kind of thing that should maybe have to go through the un first, like humanity should decide do we want to be like blasting our address out into the cosmos and letting people know that we're here. I guess technology gives people power that is good in bad.

00:50:25
Speaker 1: Yeah. Essentially, the Internet's comments section is getting broadcasted to the galaxy, and so let's hope that doesn't piss off the aliens.

00:50:32
Speaker 2: Well, if they're not going to attack us over the Macarina, maybe we're going to be okay.

00:50:37
Speaker 1: Or maybe it's the reason they come, right, Maybe something somebody says in the Internet comment section is the reason why aliens come and share with us all the secrets of the universe. Let's end on an optimistic note.

00:50:49
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, on a low probability optimistic note, but let's do it.

00:50:54
Speaker 1: And even if this isn't aliens, and even if we never meet aliens, the lesson here is that when you listen to this, when you look out into the universe, you always see something new, something weird, something fascinating. That does teach us about how the universe works. Even if the only thing we've learned from the Wow signal is like, hey, sometimes universe organizes massive astronomical masers that beams powerful messages through the universe. That's pretty cool, right, and understanding how that all works, and understanding the crazy things that are out there in the universe. It's worth doing. So we should be listening to the sky with all of our eyeballs and earballs.

00:51:29
Speaker 2: Agreed, we need a lot more big ears out there.

00:51:32
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And this is not my science, and this is not Kelly's science, so we're not like self invested here. But I definitely think we need more funding for this kind of work.

00:51:41
Speaker 2: I'm emotionally invested, but not professionally invested. Yes, I would like more answers, Yes, exactly.

00:51:46
Speaker 1: But you know, I believe in more funding for all kinds of science. Like you're studying duck mating rituals, Like, yes, that's funded. You never know what we're going to learn. I don't understand why we don't fund more science in general. It's such a great investment by humanity for humanity, about humanity. It's human scientists that are getting paid to do this stuff. It's just good all around.

00:52:05
Speaker 2: I don't understanding there's a fascinating woman who studies duck mating rituals who we should really have on the show so coming soon.

00:52:14
Speaker 1: So thanks very much everybody for listening to the messages from our brains to yours. We're not aliens. You're probably not an alien, but still we'd like to talk about aliens.

00:52:24
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