Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
Speaker 1: to the show. My name is Max, my name is
Speaker 1: they call me Ben. We are joined as always with
Speaker 1: our super producer Paul Michig. Controlled deconds. Most importantly, you
Speaker 1: are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff
Speaker 1: they don't want you to know. At the very end
Speaker 1: of a whirlwind week as we record this, so as
Speaker 1: we've been doing recently, we just want to check in
Speaker 1: with each other. Matt, how's it, how's it going? Let's
Speaker 1: go really well. Just finished an interview with John Douglas,
Speaker 1: the FBI profiler from mind Hunter, about Wayne Williams. It
Speaker 1: was awesome, nice, nice, looking forward to hearing that. Know,
Speaker 1: how are you doing? Okay? Um me and you had
Speaker 1: a little bit of a Chicago adventure doing stuff for
Speaker 1: ad sales and I just got back. I want to
Speaker 1: learn more about that. What we basically just present kind
Speaker 1: of a faux podcast for advertisers so they understand how
Speaker 1: add ads work and podcasting. Because you think it'd be obvious,
Speaker 1: but a lot of people don't really. You know, old
Speaker 1: school marketers are more into like radio and like television
Speaker 1: and more traditional forms of advertising. So we literally do
Speaker 1: a kind of pretend podcast with panelists who are executives
Speaker 1: in our company, and then you go and some are
Speaker 1: great on Mike, which is yeah. And you know, the
Speaker 1: week before that, I was in Texas, uh doing it,
Speaker 1: doing a similar thing. So we've been we've been on
Speaker 1: the road, and I think, well, I think all of
Speaker 1: us will end up traveling over the summer. But of
Speaker 1: course the best part of this crazy job is getting
Speaker 1: together to hang out with with you three in the
Speaker 1: studio and all of you listening to Day. But if
Speaker 1: you say I love listening show, I also love communicating
Speaker 1: in my own way. You know, I I have ears,
Speaker 1: but I also have a voice, and I have something
Speaker 1: to say. We have got your back. You can call
Speaker 1: us directly. We are one eight three three st d
Speaker 1: w y t K. Leave a message. You've got three minutes,
Speaker 1: and if it takes more than that, just call back
Speaker 1: and feel free to get weird with it. If you
Speaker 1: don't want us to use your name, make sure to
Speaker 1: say that in the message. Today's question are we alone?
Speaker 1: This is one of the most profound, disquietening, fundamental questions
Speaker 1: of the human species, and since before the dawn of
Speaker 1: recorded history, we have explored this question via stories, theories, myths,
Speaker 1: and legends about what could be out there on the
Speaker 1: edges of the map, or what could be out there
Speaker 1: in the stars, even before we understood exactly what uh
Speaker 1: galaxies and solar systems and stars are actually like. And
Speaker 1: it's an interesting it's an interesting evolution, right, because we've
Speaker 1: talked about this in the past and episodes on UFO
Speaker 1: abductions and fay culture, right, and the whole idea of changelings.
Speaker 1: The characters of our myths and our folklore are not
Speaker 1: set in stone, not near as much as we we
Speaker 1: sometimes think we had for thousands and thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of years legends about demons and angels and supernatural beings,
Speaker 1: and now we still have these same sorts of phenomena
Speaker 1: occurring in our oral traditions, but the stories have shifted
Speaker 1: from from the fay or the fair folk, true stories
Speaker 1: about extraterrestrials, extra dimensional entities and so on. And if
Speaker 1: you look back at those stories, the fascinating thing is
Speaker 1: the story of an alien abduction. Aside from the window dressing,
Speaker 1: it mirrors beat by beat the story of being abducted
Speaker 1: by the l or faith folk, you know, pulling a
Speaker 1: Van Winkle. But the the ideas, we were always looking
Speaker 1: for intelligent non human species, something very different from us,
Speaker 1: that shared one fundamental trait sapiens wisdom, sentience. This search
Speaker 1: continues today. Spoiler alert. You will run into many people
Speaker 1: who feel like they have cracked the case, but they're not.
Speaker 1: Everyone agrees with them. Yeah, it's true. And the search
Speaker 1: actually in real life continues today. And what is it now?
Speaker 1: Keep losing track? Yeah? Uh? And some people really thought
Speaker 1: that we'd found an answer to this question unequivocally, but
Speaker 1: then something happened. Well what happened? Here are the facts.
Speaker 1: So starting in two thousand seven, uh, there are these
Speaker 1: things called fast radio bursts that radio astronomers started to detect.
Speaker 1: It's a phenomena. It's different. It's very different from other
Speaker 1: types of radio waves that are intercepted by some of
Speaker 1: the instruments that we use, like the one you guys
Speaker 1: went out to the Green Bank out in West Virginia
Speaker 1: and the Radio Quiet Zone. Those things are always looking
Speaker 1: and they'll find things well. In particular, these are called
Speaker 1: fast radio bursts. Let's give you the story behind it.
Speaker 1: There's an astronomer named Duncan Lorimer and his student David Narkovic,
Speaker 1: and they found the first official fast radio burst when
Speaker 1: they were looking for pulsar data. So they're looking for
Speaker 1: that and they end up coming across this weird little thing,
Speaker 1: this quick little millisecond first. Uh, and they're like, man,
Speaker 1: what the heck is that stuff? Oh, And then Duncan says,
Speaker 1: let's call it a Lormer burst. They are They are
Speaker 1: commonly called Lormer burst, but we don't know how how
Speaker 1: it went down like that. You're right, Matt. It's it's
Speaker 1: typically gonna last one too, maybe maybe a few more milliseconds.
Speaker 1: And it's also a transient pulse. That's important because that
Speaker 1: means we cannot predict where these things will occur, which
Speaker 1: which comes into our story in a big way. Uh.
Speaker 1: And since we can't predict where they occur, we don't
Speaker 1: know when to look for them or where to look
Speaker 1: for them, And we also don't know what causes them.
Speaker 1: We just know that they are one of the largest
Speaker 1: discharges of energy that we have witnessed. And it's so
Speaker 1: weird to think that they're that large. But they only occur,
Speaker 1: or at least we only measure them in these tiny moments.
Speaker 1: It's literally like the blink of an eye. One of
Speaker 1: these objects can let loose as much energy as the
Speaker 1: Sun puts out in an entire year. Let's say that
Speaker 1: doesn't impress Let's just say that, but that would be
Speaker 1: weird if it didn't. But you know, if you're a
Speaker 1: really hard sell, it's also enough energy to run, Oh,
Speaker 1: a little thing called humanity. Ever heard of it? The
Speaker 1: human race, civilization as we know it's. Yeah, run humanity,
Speaker 1: not in ancient times, but run twenty nineteen uh, human
Speaker 1: life across the in it for ten trillion years uh,
Speaker 1: without any change in its strength or any variants over time,
Speaker 1: which is impressive. But that's that's also telling us that
Speaker 1: there's no gearing up to whatever is causing this, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. We don't see arise the peak
Speaker 1: that Matt's talking about there all over the sky. They're
Speaker 1: not concentrated on the plane of the Milky Way. They're
Speaker 1: also very very very very far away. And that's why,
Speaker 1: despite being so powerful, the strength of the signal reaching
Speaker 1: Earth is actually one thousand times less than the signal
Speaker 1: that would come from a mobile phone on the moon
Speaker 1: trying to call one eight three three S T D
Speaker 1: W Y t K. But feel free to give it
Speaker 1: a shot if you want. Just think about that. The
Speaker 1: moon is so far away half of us can't get
Speaker 1: service in like the airport, so that so it's amazing
Speaker 1: that's something like green Bank can sense a signal that's small,
Speaker 1: and the only reason we can, since this signal from
Speaker 1: billions of light years away, is because it is so powerful.
Speaker 1: On the CETI website, they describe the actual energy that's
Speaker 1: being measured by our instruments to detect one of these
Speaker 1: is less than the energy you would take for an
Speaker 1: ant to move its leg, basically the the amount of
Speaker 1: a TP that that would take. That's what they're detecting.
Speaker 1: It's smaller than that. And yet because it's so small,
Speaker 1: we can we understand because of the distance how strong
Speaker 1: it is. That that's mind blowing to me. So what
Speaker 1: could be doing this? These are happening now as you listen.
Speaker 1: These are happening now. We don't know how many are
Speaker 1: occurring because the way we end up finding them. People
Speaker 1: have proposed a number of possible explanations, and the big
Speaker 1: ones right now would be it's a black hole. It's
Speaker 1: it's just it's something with a black hole. And then
Speaker 1: someone else says, no, that's malarkey, that's space age malarkey.
Speaker 1: It's obviously rotating neutron stark, all right, And and more
Speaker 1: people come in, uh no hashtag no sukalos and say
Speaker 1: it's extraterrestrial life. Yeah, it sounds like a special dressing. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'll have the I'll have the cops salad six the sucalos.
Speaker 1: But this is pretty strange stuff, right. I mean, we
Speaker 1: have to stress that these are not live events because
Speaker 1: they're billions of light years away. That means, if we
Speaker 1: look at a timeline, this occurred a long, long, long
Speaker 1: long time ago and took the speed of light to travel.
Speaker 1: Here reminds me of that episode of the Adventures of
Speaker 1: Pete and Pete where there is an alien character that's
Speaker 1: in the school and um, they're obsessed throughout the episode
Speaker 1: about Johnny Unitis and this football game that gets transmitted
Speaker 1: and it takes like years for this alien kids civilization
Speaker 1: to see the broadcast because it's and so they're only
Speaker 1: just now seeing it. And they think Johnny Unitis is
Speaker 1: like this current. You know it's are because they're like
Speaker 1: seeing it because it takes that long for radio waves
Speaker 1: to travel through space. It also reminds me of this
Speaker 1: may be a deep cut to some of us, but
Speaker 1: I've recently rewatched this and the nostalgia made me love it.
Speaker 1: Do you guys remember that film Explorers. It's like those
Speaker 1: three kids build a spaceship. Yeah, Chuck, I mentioned it
Speaker 1: on movie Crashing. I've never seen it or even heard
Speaker 1: of it, and I looked it up briefly and it
Speaker 1: was sort of a contemporary with like flight of a
Speaker 1: navigator like kind of that. Also the main characters named Ben,
Speaker 1: but they get these dreams from what turns out to
Speaker 1: be a UFOs and I won't turns out to be aliens. Sorry.
Speaker 1: UFO could be anything, right, it can be a hot
Speaker 1: air balloon. But this, this is important for our purposes
Speaker 1: because just like you're talking about with that uh, that
Speaker 1: gap in time in transit of information, the aliens in
Speaker 1: that film are also fascinated with very old television and
Speaker 1: radio programs that made it out there in space, and
Speaker 1: it's an endearing story. Unfortunately, the science is a little
Speaker 1: tougher because as as those signals travel from Earth, they
Speaker 1: tend to dissipate and they can get lost in the background.
Speaker 1: Noise man, Are you're saying that Pete and Pete got
Speaker 1: it wrong? Then I'm saying that you know they're no
Speaker 1: Bill Nye. That's fair. I think it's unfair. I actually
Speaker 1: missed the Pete and Pete but one of uh, one
Speaker 1: of my friends, one of our mutual friends actually is
Speaker 1: uh still head over heels or I should say over
Speaker 1: the moon for this show for Pete and Pete's right,
Speaker 1: and let us know if you liked Pete and Pete,
Speaker 1: that's one where the one kid had the tattoo, right,
Speaker 1: yea Petunia, you can make a dance. It's also the
Speaker 1: first place I ever heard of who Iggy Pop was
Speaker 1: because he was in the show. He played none as
Speaker 1: Dad and he would just build in the credits as
Speaker 1: Iggy Pop. I'm like, what kind of name for a
Speaker 1: person is Iggy Pop? And then it turns out he's
Speaker 1: this total crazy anarchist punk rock guy. That's like that
Speaker 1: guy the main actor in Young Einstein. His name was
Speaker 1: Yahoo Serious And that was the breaking point for me
Speaker 1: as a child when I was like, hmmm, I think
Speaker 1: sometimes people in Hollywood don't use their real names, but
Speaker 1: but yes, this is this is strange stuff. It's not
Speaker 1: it's not live. We're we're getting these details way after
Speaker 1: they happened. And additionally, our searches were largely not live
Speaker 1: because we were, Matt, as you said, we were going
Speaker 1: through this archive data. So what Duncan Lormer found was
Speaker 1: information that he pulled from a survey of different pulsars,
Speaker 1: and it just happened to contain this information of what
Speaker 1: we now call f s B s. And the thing was,
Speaker 1: as soon as we found one back in oh seven,
Speaker 1: we started finding more and more by astronomers and places
Speaker 1: around the world had found sixteen. And as they were
Speaker 1: discovering more detecting more, scientists began to realize that there
Speaker 1: must be more to this fast radio burst thing than
Speaker 1: they originally thought. So by two thousand twelve, Victoria Caspy
Speaker 1: of McGill University figured that as many as ten thousand
Speaker 1: fast bursts occur every single day across the sky. And
Speaker 1: yes they're powerful, um but they're also incredibly short, and
Speaker 1: that's why they're very difficult to catch, except when they repeat.
Speaker 1: Oh and we'll learn about that right after a word
Speaker 1: from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. It's called
Speaker 1: this part of the episode. Don't call it a comeback
Speaker 1: just because that's a cool phrase. In November of astronomer
Speaker 1: named Paul Scholes at McGill University in Canada found ten
Speaker 1: and there's a quote here, non periodically repeated fast radio
Speaker 1: pulses in archival data gathered in May and June by
Speaker 1: their Cebo radio telescope. So these ten bursts that he
Speaker 1: discovered have dispersion measures and sky positions consistent with the
Speaker 1: original burst, which was called f RB one to one
Speaker 1: oh two that was detected back in two thousand and twelve.
Speaker 1: This means that this series of bursts, unlike any other
Speaker 1: radio burst discovered beforehand. It's repeating from the same place,
Speaker 1: the same massive discharge of energy is happening over and
Speaker 1: over again. And what they also figured out was that
Speaker 1: like the burst the original burst, in each of these
Speaker 1: emissions has a plasma dispersion measure that is a full
Speaker 1: three times larger than anything possible for any source within
Speaker 1: the Milky Way galaxy. That means that whatever this is
Speaker 1: is so far away it's not even in our galaxy
Speaker 1: and it's happening, Uh at least you know, ten or
Speaker 1: eleven times, probably more that we haven't caught this. This team,
Speaker 1: Schultz's team thinks that finding this rules out self destructive
Speaker 1: cataclysmic event, you know, like the kind of trick that
Speaker 1: can only happen once, like a magician actually sawing someone
Speaker 1: in half. Well, yeah, it's like it reminds me of
Speaker 1: just an explosion right when you're when you're thinking about
Speaker 1: that amount of energy that gets released. If you think
Speaker 1: about the the impact wave or the wave that gets
Speaker 1: sent out whenever there's a massive explosion here on Earth,
Speaker 1: like um, that wave is essentially what that radio burst
Speaker 1: would be once it reaches Earth. That's what we're what
Speaker 1: you're thinking. So you can only have that one time
Speaker 1: with the initial explosion or when when a stark lapses
Speaker 1: into a black hole, you get that initial burst of
Speaker 1: energy that would be sent out. But like you said,
Speaker 1: been it doesn't happen over and over and over and
Speaker 1: over again, at least not with those kinds of explosions
Speaker 1: that that happened out in the cosmos. Right, you explode
Speaker 1: a star, it's gone, and the thing is to other
Speaker 1: folks This meant that there might just be some intelligence
Speaker 1: um manipulating, directing actively causing these fast radio bursts, which
Speaker 1: is mind boggling and the implications. But this one burst
Speaker 1: is not or this one location burst is not the
Speaker 1: only example. Quite recently, this year January twenty nineteen, as
Speaker 1: we call it on this planet, astronomers discovered a second
Speaker 1: source of repeating fast radio bursts. They named this one,
Speaker 1: uh fast radio burst one eight zero eight one four.
Speaker 1: They're not being they're being super specific with the names,
Speaker 1: and they have a system, but it's not as anthropomorphological
Speaker 1: as naming hurricanes, right. And this was found at a
Speaker 1: place called the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment or CHIME,
Speaker 1: which is way better named than f RBO one four.
Speaker 1: So they found six bursts between August and October, consistent
Speaker 1: with origination from a single position in the sky. This
Speaker 1: meant that this discovery was still very very recent for
Speaker 1: our society. Uh. This meant that just in in less
Speaker 1: than in less than fifteen years, they had found things
Speaker 1: that were fundamentally changing their understanding of what these bursts were.
Speaker 1: Because when they detected this stuff, they said, well, we
Speaker 1: found one and we thought that might have been exceptional,
Speaker 1: But now we found two that are exhibiting the same traits.
Speaker 1: We think there may be a substantial population of points,
Speaker 1: specific points in the Uni verse that were billions of
Speaker 1: years ago omitting these massive bursts of energy for milliseconds
Speaker 1: at a time. And yeah, what in the heck could
Speaker 1: cause that? Get to the aliens. Get it's time for
Speaker 1: the aliens. We're all waiting for it. So some researchers
Speaker 1: have argued that the mysterious phenomena called fast radio burst
Speaker 1: could be evidence of advanced alien tech. Specifically, the argument
Speaker 1: is that the most um I would say, the most
Speaker 1: academic argument, the most sophisticated argument is that these bursts
Speaker 1: maybe energy leakage from planet sized transmitters that are powering
Speaker 1: interstellar probes. Yeah. This comes to us from a guy
Speaker 1: named Ave Loebe at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
Speaker 1: and he had to deal with we've we've talked about
Speaker 1: this before. He had to deal with some opprobrium and
Speaker 1: some uh some side, some side, I at the very
Speaker 1: least from his colleagues in this discipline. Because often in
Speaker 1: the volunted halls of ivory towers, certain types of research
Speaker 1: are considered off limits or fundamentally um wrongheaded. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: we go. Wrongheaded. Oh that's an old Bush administration quote.
Speaker 1: Wrong Headed hit the mainstream during the Bush administration as
Speaker 1: a way to say not that something was factually inaccurate,
Speaker 1: but that it was dumb to talk about it. So
Speaker 1: someone would say like, well, you know, it turned out
Speaker 1: there were no weapons best destruction in a rock, and
Speaker 1: someone else would go, you know, that is wrongheaded, because
Speaker 1: why don't just say wrong before dumb. It's like a
Speaker 1: very diplomatic, couched kind of term, right, And it's also
Speaker 1: removing removing response responsible from yes for the fact that
Speaker 1: whatever they're saying is true. You just don't think it's
Speaker 1: right headed. But no one ever said right headed either.
Speaker 1: It's just wrong headed. But yeah, so so obvious. Loop
Speaker 1: and team have to have to deal with some criticism,
Speaker 1: a little bit of controversy. But their defense for this was,
Speaker 1: you know, they said, look, we're not we're not crazy
Speaker 1: people anymore crazy or unstable than the average astrophysicist. We
Speaker 1: think there's nothing wrong with this question, and they explained it,
Speaker 1: uh the following way. We've got a great quotation from them.
Speaker 1: Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration
Speaker 1: and origin at great distances, and we haven't identified a
Speaker 1: possible natural source with any confidence, and artificial origin is
Speaker 1: worth contemplating and checking. That's it. It's just saying no, not,
Speaker 1: it's not a dumb question. It's worth looking into it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and in the article from the Smithsonian, the Harvard
Speaker 1: Smithsonian Center where they're talking about that, they you know,
Speaker 1: they make a great point of sciences about checking a
Speaker 1: hypothesis and deciding whether or not there's enough evidence to
Speaker 1: support that, and then can you repeat it right? And
Speaker 1: in this case, I think we do ourselves as humanity
Speaker 1: a disservice if we completely throw this out the window,
Speaker 1: rather than at least checking a box and saying, okay,
Speaker 1: well it's not this thing, but let's at least conceptualize
Speaker 1: what it could be if it were absolutely absolutely That's
Speaker 1: how investigations and research work. I was personally. You can
Speaker 1: find a paper online, read the full paper, and it's
Speaker 1: pretty fascinating. I was personally um persuaded by the possibility
Speaker 1: of this. They built a pretty defensible argument. So Loeb
Speaker 1: has a co author, a guy named u Monosity Lingham
Speaker 1: is from Harvard, and what they looked at was just
Speaker 1: the feasibility of something. Is it possible to build something
Speaker 1: that could do this, that could create this much energy?
Speaker 1: And keep in mind when you're learning about this, that
Speaker 1: this is within our understanding on this planet of how
Speaker 1: physics works overall, and exactly how the what the limits
Speaker 1: of technology are, right, because if someone were building something
Speaker 1: that could create uh fast radio burst, they would be
Speaker 1: on a way different position in the kardashianv scale. So
Speaker 1: here's what they found. They said, Okay, could you build
Speaker 1: a radio transmitter strong enough to give even that very
Speaker 1: very weak signal to us this far away? And they said,
Speaker 1: you know, if the transmitter were solar powered, it would
Speaker 1: have to be absorbing sunlight on an area of a
Speaker 1: planet twice the size of Earth. And if so, think
Speaker 1: about the total land massive Earth. Multiply that by two.
Speaker 1: If you took all the sunlight that was falling on
Speaker 1: that much land, you would generate enough Again, from my
Speaker 1: our understanding, you would generate enough power to uh to
Speaker 1: make this thing kind of happen. So you would have
Speaker 1: to construct it. That's the other thing. How would you
Speaker 1: construct something that is two Earth's worth of fully functioned
Speaker 1: solar power? Right? And I would I would just argue that,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm look, I'm no Harvard Smithsonian physicist here,
Speaker 1: but if you're talking about Kardashian scale, then maybe you're
Speaker 1: talking about, you know, something that could harness the entire
Speaker 1: power of a star. You know, what are those things
Speaker 1: called Dyson spheres? Uh? You know, it wouldn't have to
Speaker 1: be the planet that's absorbing the sunlight. It could be
Speaker 1: the thing that's absorbing the star. You just in general, right, right, anyway,
Speaker 1: cut out the middleman. Yeah, I'm just saying that's a
Speaker 1: very good argument. Well they so they said, okay, we
Speaker 1: know that our species can't build that yet, but according
Speaker 1: to the laws of physics as we understand them, it
Speaker 1: is possible to build that. And they also said, okay,
Speaker 1: well all right, we know energy wise it's possible. But
Speaker 1: if we built this transmitter, how how can we actually
Speaker 1: make it work? From an engineering perspective, which of people forget.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the most important things in any
Speaker 1: construction project, whether we're talking autonomous vehicles and space shuttles
Speaker 1: or a good a good paper clip, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. So, if you're an engineer out there listening,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. Thanks for saving the show clip.
Speaker 1: It's just such a perfect object. I'm a flexible straw fan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm easily We're talking about this earlier. I think I
Speaker 1: am so easily impressed by small, smart inventions. Um I
Speaker 1: feel about crazy straws. I love them too crazy for me,
Speaker 1: too crazy. They're definitely a statement. Yeah, they just make
Speaker 1: me uncomfortable. And someone who's like, I want all this
Speaker 1: soda eventually, but not all at once. I wanted to
Speaker 1: be a drink and a form of entertainment. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's like someone saw the board game mouse Trap and
Speaker 1: they said, what if I could put that between me
Speaker 1: and everything I drink? So let's talk about the transmitter.
Speaker 1: That was like, so, what happens if you can even
Speaker 1: build one of these things? If your harness that Yes,
Speaker 1: from the engineering perspective, how could you make something like
Speaker 1: this work without immediately burning itself up in a fiery inferno?
Speaker 1: You know you would be you would be capable of
Speaker 1: keeping it running from multiple uses. According to this paper,
Speaker 1: if you've created a water cooled device that was also
Speaker 1: twice the size of Earth, so we're four earths deep now,
Speaker 1: to make one location that could send uh f RB
Speaker 1: fast radio burst and then that's that's just the fact. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that's the crazy news. There's no proof that happened,
Speaker 1: but it is technically possible, right, that's technically correct. Someone
Speaker 1: say the best kind of correct to say that a
Speaker 1: civilization that was way better than us could could potentially
Speaker 1: build it. But it doesn't answer the biggest question, why
Speaker 1: would you build this? Yeah? Why the hell would you
Speaker 1: double size the Earth with all that water and all
Speaker 1: that just land mass to gather solar energy and then
Speaker 1: make a giant radio burs Why? Why the hell would
Speaker 1: you do that? How about powering interstellar light sales? There
Speaker 1: would go about that? What is that? Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: good question. Um. So the amount of power that it's
Speaker 1: involved in such a device would be enough to push
Speaker 1: a million tons of payload, or about twenty times the
Speaker 1: largest cruise ship on Earth. And uh, here's a quote
Speaker 1: from Lingham that's big enough to carry living passengers across
Speaker 1: interstellar or even inter galactic distances. So to power a
Speaker 1: light sale, um, the transmitter would need to focus a
Speaker 1: beam on it continuously. It would be like wireless transmission
Speaker 1: of this energy. Yeah, this this stuff is fascinating, Um,
Speaker 1: because there's there's some stuff we're gonna talk about a
Speaker 1: little later about attempting to use this kind of technology
Speaker 1: here on Earth, and some plans to make use of
Speaker 1: it there. And just to back check, really good, this
Speaker 1: is a completely um the a radical form of technology. Right,
Speaker 1: solar sales are at this time, they're they're in a
Speaker 1: drawing board phase. Uh. The idea is that you can
Speaker 1: propel a spacecraft or some object through through the ink,
Speaker 1: which I like to call space through through the ink,
Speaker 1: using the radiation pressure exerted by sunlight on large mirrors.
Speaker 1: So you're pushing it with light like you were saying, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's turning it into a space sailboat. And a
Speaker 1: good analogy would be like a sailboat, where the light
Speaker 1: is exerting the force on the mirrors in the same
Speaker 1: way that wind would be exerting force on a sail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And in this way, it's almost like a giant laser
Speaker 1: giant laser beam. Now, let's keep in mind that whatever
Speaker 1: speed an object like this would be traveling at, it
Speaker 1: would not be the speed of light. It would be
Speaker 1: much much, much much slower. And if there were people
Speaker 1: living on that thing to pay on where they were going,
Speaker 1: or there were entities living on a thing to pay
Speaker 1: on where they were going, then it would be um,
Speaker 1: it could very well be something like that sci fi
Speaker 1: concept of the arc, you know what I mean, where
Speaker 1: the people who actually are keep saying people, where the
Speaker 1: entities who actually arrive at the destination or the endpoint
Speaker 1: are generations removed from the people who began the journey.
Speaker 1: So back to how this power would work. To power
Speaker 1: such a thing, the transmitter would need to shoot the
Speaker 1: focused beam of this energy at the sale continuously, and
Speaker 1: to earthly observers this would appear in the form of
Speaker 1: a brief flash caused by the sale and its host planet,
Speaker 1: star or galaxy all moving in relation to us relative
Speaker 1: to us right, so we wouldn't have a consistent vantage point.
Speaker 1: I would also would also wonder if it's possible to
Speaker 1: pan on how how this will work out technologically speaking,
Speaker 1: I wonder if it's possible for them to just shoot
Speaker 1: beams not continually, not continuously, rather but shoot them in
Speaker 1: burst to give it, you know, and to give it
Speaker 1: a little more thrust, and then maybe even adjust the
Speaker 1: sales and hit a burst again if it needs to
Speaker 1: make a turn. So as a result of what you
Speaker 1: were saying, all that that beam is moving across the sky,
Speaker 1: but it only points at us for a for a moment,
Speaker 1: you know, like a flashlight in the dark, and repeated
Speaker 1: appearances of the beam which are have been observed, right,
Speaker 1: it can't really be explained through the normal things like
Speaker 1: the death of stars or or the collapse of black
Speaker 1: holes or something. These repeated appearances might give us clues
Speaker 1: about an artificial origin. Now in the paper they are
Speaker 1: very clear to say that this is all speculation, and
Speaker 1: other investigators pooh pooh and tut this all the livelong
Speaker 1: day and a tiske it they do, they tisk as well.
Speaker 1: There's a been a there's a lot of tiscree and
Speaker 1: topology going on, because the big question is, again, what
Speaker 1: could motivate any sort of society or civilization to produce
Speaker 1: signals that are so intense they can be seen from
Speaker 1: other galaxies. There was a great line on this, and
Speaker 1: I think it was maybe uh Space dot com or
Speaker 1: Science News where they said this would be like the
Speaker 1: sinking Titanic using a flare gun bright enough to be
Speaker 1: seen from Mars, Like what would you what would you do?
Speaker 1: And this also reminds me of that that old sci
Speaker 1: fi trope, which I think is possible. Uh, you know
Speaker 1: where we finally get a signal back from all the
Speaker 1: setty stuff we've been we've been sending out there and
Speaker 1: all these other radio signals and it's coming from inside
Speaker 1: the house. I was gonna say, Um, the actually, the
Speaker 1: way the story goes is they get a message back
Speaker 1: and it translates to s they'll hear you, which is
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the great filter. Right. But but okay,
Speaker 1: so we've got the aliens and the big news for
Speaker 1: today's episode is the aliens are actually possible? Is that
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial thing? From what we understand about physics and the
Speaker 1: nature of the universe, Uh, this extraterrestrial angle is possible.
Speaker 1: It's not proven, but more and more people are saying,
Speaker 1: maybe we are not the best qualified to search for
Speaker 1: signs of life. Let's ask our our new, uh quickly
Speaker 1: up and coming children of humanity for some help. Let's
Speaker 1: throw artificial intelligence into the mix. What are we talking about.
Speaker 1: We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor. So
Speaker 1: on August, astronomers with the Breakthrough Listen Project, which is
Speaker 1: a one hundred million dollar project to hunt for Science
Speaker 1: of Intelligent alien life. Uh, these folks spot at twenty
Speaker 1: one repeating light pulses. Uh, we've been referring to form
Speaker 1: this whole episode Fast Radio Bursts f RBS, and they
Speaker 1: were emanating from the dwarf galaxy f RB zero two. Um,
Speaker 1: and that was all within an hour's time. Right, So
Speaker 1: let's talk about Breakthrough Listen for just a second to
Speaker 1: to establish what they are. Breakthrough Listen is, according to
Speaker 1: its own website, Breakthrough Initiatives dot org, the largest ever
Speaker 1: scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth. Uh.
Speaker 1: They are searching on a scale that's unprecedented in any
Speaker 1: other publicly available uh forums. So they're also being aided
Speaker 1: by CETI. They are all in general, Yes, yeah, they are. Uh.
Speaker 1: They have been surveying the one million closest stars to Earth,
Speaker 1: the center of the galaxy, the galactic plane, and they
Speaker 1: listen to they listen for at least messages or signals
Speaker 1: from the one galaxies closest to our own, closest to
Speaker 1: the Milky Way. So they are not messing around, and
Speaker 1: they have they have another program that was a particular
Speaker 1: interest to us, Right, Yeah, there's one called breakthrough star
Speaker 1: Shot that is actually exactly what we were talking about
Speaker 1: in the last section about solar sales and using some
Speaker 1: type of light beam like a laser of sorts of
Speaker 1: focused energy beam too to send these very tiny, very
Speaker 1: very very tiny probes out through space with a solar sale,
Speaker 1: um by shooting, by shooting this thing at them. And
Speaker 1: it's another thing. Um, this star shot project, just like
Speaker 1: the one we talked about before Breakthrough listen is again
Speaker 1: a hundred million dollars and maybe it's combined funding. We
Speaker 1: haven't actually seen their books, but um, they got a
Speaker 1: lot of money from that Uri Milner character, this Russian
Speaker 1: born billionaire, and they're talking about you would only have
Speaker 1: to aim this beam because of the energy you would
Speaker 1: produce at the solar sale for nine minutes. And once
Speaker 1: you've done that, then you get this thing up to
Speaker 1: roughly twenty of the speed of light and it's just
Speaker 1: going to travel out through to some other star system,
Speaker 1: maybe to Alpha Centauri, maybe somewhere else like that, um,
Speaker 1: just to see what's out there. Proximate B that they're
Speaker 1: just gonna send out probes, these tiny little baby probes,
Speaker 1: and they're thinking it will take about thirty years roughly
Speaker 1: to make this kind of thing happen. And by the way,
Speaker 1: billions and billions and billions of dollars, billions and billions
Speaker 1: and billions and billions and billions and billions for with
Speaker 1: our current technology. They're saying, it's roughly eight point four
Speaker 1: billion is what it will be to actually make this
Speaker 1: laser beam thing happen. Um in the out dude. The uh,
Speaker 1: the area that they would need is roughly a kilometer wide,
Speaker 1: um thing to to actually hold this laser to transmit
Speaker 1: the light. Yeah. Yeah, And so this this is a
Speaker 1: fascinating project. No, like a lot of these ambitious projects,
Speaker 1: they're probably if they get to it, they're probably going
Speaker 1: to run over their deadline. That's probably not gonna be
Speaker 1: in the next thirty years, or at least if it
Speaker 1: happens the next thirty years, it'll probably be them working
Speaker 1: with someone else. Future historians will rightly think that it's
Speaker 1: ridiculous that so many great ideas that are feasible were
Speaker 1: held back because of our obsession with generating money. Uh
Speaker 1: not the you know, the economy is not the best
Speaker 1: plan we've had, but I guess it's got us where
Speaker 1: we are so far, right so best of luck to listen,
Speaker 1: star Shot and all the folks that break Through. If
Speaker 1: you happen to be listening today, would love to interview
Speaker 1: you about some of this stuff. So when when I
Speaker 1: read about star Shot, one of the things that I
Speaker 1: noticed that we should definitely point out is again, this
Speaker 1: would be an ARC scenario, you know, like depending on
Speaker 1: where they fly to. Yeah, yeah, it's a one way shot.
Speaker 1: So these researchers applied machine learning techniques to a data
Speaker 1: set from August of the researchers a Breakthrough Listen, led
Speaker 1: by a doctoral student named Jerry Young. They wanted to
Speaker 1: train this algorithm, which they called a convolutional neural network,
Speaker 1: to spot f rbs out of four hundred terabytes of data.
Speaker 1: This thing essentially guide intern job look through this and
Speaker 1: see if it meets the parameters of this. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like the strategy that I T companies used to
Speaker 1: optimize search results. You know, if you Google something and
Speaker 1: they dug up just from using this approach. An additional
Speaker 1: seventy two light flashes. Uh So that brought the total
Speaker 1: number of f rbs detected on that day from that
Speaker 1: single source to nine three. And it looks like We're
Speaker 1: going to see more and more of this sort of
Speaker 1: partnership between humans and algorithms. We're gonna have more sophisticated algorithms,
Speaker 1: maybe ultimately machine consciousness. Whatever you feel best describes AI
Speaker 1: helping us, and it will be significant. However, one thing
Speaker 1: that no machine consciousness, no algorithm can tell us yet
Speaker 1: is why this would happen, Why why these things would exist.
Speaker 1: So the most exciting part of the stories that it
Speaker 1: actually could be aliens. We can only say that here's
Speaker 1: the tricky part, because no one knows what causes these
Speaker 1: fast radio burst The vast majority of people looking into
Speaker 1: this are almost certain it is caused by something mundane,
Speaker 1: by nature, not technology, like a magnetar, which is something
Speaker 1: you'll have to well, a magnetar is cool. Magnetar sounds
Speaker 1: it sounds like metal bands, it sounds like it sounds
Speaker 1: like it could be a villain. In the seventies kids cartoons,
Speaker 1: I am magnetar, yeah, or it sounds like a really
Speaker 1: really weird uh here and gone scent instrument from the eighties,
Speaker 1: it was like, all right, and we've got you know,
Speaker 1: Derek Jeter on magnetar. Well, see, yes, exactly. But a
Speaker 1: magnetar is actually just a highly magnetized neutron star magnet
Speaker 1: And the thing is this giant star spins on a
Speaker 1: millisecond scale, like is spinning so fast that the way
Speaker 1: the radiation comes off of it, it could explain why
Speaker 1: you'd get this quick burst essentially that then occurs like
Speaker 1: nine do something times in a certain span in a
Speaker 1: single twenty four hour period. Um, I don't know. It's
Speaker 1: just it's really interesting. It's something that could be out there.
Speaker 1: It's not exciting, but it would you be okay with
Speaker 1: the nicknamed magnetar. Sure, Mac, I want to get a
Speaker 1: pow man, all right, to photoshop. I've got to get
Speaker 1: some magnets. Are pictures of Matt up, Matt the Magnetar
Speaker 1: Frederick So okay, I'll take workshopping. So people are betting
Speaker 1: on this mundane explanation. Why is it because they're being
Speaker 1: funny duddies sticks in the proverbial mud and sort of,
Speaker 1: but not not, that's not the entire reason. See, these
Speaker 1: bursts are seeing all across the sky, and that means
Speaker 1: that if they're coming from all these different, multiple locations
Speaker 1: all the time, that if someone were to build this,
Speaker 1: some entity were to build this, they would have been
Speaker 1: building tons of them. Like It's like it would be
Speaker 1: the universe equivalent of quick trips or mattress firms. You know,
Speaker 1: our Starbucks is a better analogy. It's just so much
Speaker 1: stuff to build. That's for Earth's worth of just land,
Speaker 1: for everything, and for every single one. So how could
Speaker 1: if these are aliens, how could they build a network
Speaker 1: that size that again is billions of years old and
Speaker 1: these are billions of light years apart. How could they
Speaker 1: build this sort of thing? Uh? Really, when if you
Speaker 1: look at their timeline, they there hasn't been very much
Speaker 1: time since the Big Bang from what we know at
Speaker 1: this point when these would have had to be constructed,
Speaker 1: assuming that they were constructed very very quickly. So even
Speaker 1: if you think of a reason for doing this, it's
Speaker 1: hard to think of the organization this would be. This
Speaker 1: would literally be something spanning the known universe. And also,
Speaker 1: we have to look at ourselves. The search for alien
Speaker 1: is really at this point kind of a search for ourselves.
Speaker 1: Were very narcissistic outfit. You know, we're desperate not to
Speaker 1: be alone in the universe, and we have an m O,
Speaker 1: we have a pattern, we have a type, we have
Speaker 1: historically attributed tons of new new astronomical mysteries to extraterrestrials.
Speaker 1: They're multiple examples. Yeah, it's true. A half century ago,
Speaker 1: Soviet scientists thought they were pretty sure that quasars were
Speaker 1: actually signals being broadcast by advanced societies, uh, in a
Speaker 1: galaxy far far away. Well, yeah, because as soon as
Speaker 1: we first can detect something on you know, on Earth here,
Speaker 1: and it's some kind of strange signal that's repeating, especially
Speaker 1: or a signal you know, that appears to come from
Speaker 1: a very specific place and and and doesn't stop, then
Speaker 1: we we hope it's that it's the thing you're talking about, Ben,
Speaker 1: We it's our m o. We we need it so
Speaker 1: badly to be something else that we truly thought that's
Speaker 1: what quasars were. They were somebody's sending out radio signals.
Speaker 1: And in the nineteen sixties they even like referred to
Speaker 1: them as little green men, right, And that's I mean,
Speaker 1: in in a hope that maybe we'll get to meet them.
Speaker 1: I know this is something that's been discussed, but I
Speaker 1: think it's so funny that historically we always expect that
Speaker 1: aliens from another galaxy far far away are gonna like
Speaker 1: communicate with us on our terms in some way, you know,
Speaker 1: or like through methods that we can understand. I think
Speaker 1: that's always a funny misnowmen, where we think we're kind
Speaker 1: of at the center of the university and they're they're great. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're great and truly mean this noble uh. Research initiatives
Speaker 1: going on to to figure out how best to communicate
Speaker 1: with a non human entity. And one of the one
Speaker 1: of the weirdest analogs we have now is communication with
Speaker 1: maritime invertebrates, you know, the octopus, the swid, the cuttle fish.
Speaker 1: In the octopus case especially, there's some of the most
Speaker 1: intelligent non mammals that we know of the the closest
Speaker 1: thing we have two aliens that are intelligent and they're great.
Speaker 1: Thank god they don't have spines and they don't really
Speaker 1: live very long, because otherwise we we would be eventually
Speaker 1: possibly sharing sharing the planet with the sapient species. Oh,
Speaker 1: by the way, there is a I think a European
Speaker 1: country maybe Germany, recently granted legal personhood to chimpanzees dolphins. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we talked about that years ago, but so maybe those
Speaker 1: are sapients as well. So now we know ave Lobe
Speaker 1: and his team are correct and that it is possible,
Speaker 1: uh to be is possible that some civilization who had
Speaker 1: its ducks in way better rows than our civilization could
Speaker 1: have built something that would propel spacecraft to travel between
Speaker 1: the stars into the ink, kind of like a space
Speaker 1: age version of Noah's Ark. But possible is not always plausible.
Speaker 1: And the big question here is one of motivation. So
Speaker 1: so what do you think? Let us know? Also, while
Speaker 1: we're at it, should we be encouraging the attention of
Speaker 1: extra terrestrials? That's the big question. The late Stephen Hawkins
Speaker 1: was very much against the idea of encountering extraterrestrials on
Speaker 1: our home turf. Also, yeah, we're biased because we communicate
Speaker 1: through sound and sight, right, what about an entity that
Speaker 1: just communicates through senses we don't have or senses they're
Speaker 1: less important to us, like smell, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: The feeling that the best job of exploring that is arrival,
Speaker 1: because there was like the language barrier with those aliens
Speaker 1: and it was much more of a visual language than
Speaker 1: it was And I mean, I can't remember exactly, but
Speaker 1: that was a good one in terms of like this
Speaker 1: expectation of being able to communicate one to one with
Speaker 1: the aliens, and they were like yeah, yeah, yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: and read the book to read this story. Ted Chang
Speaker 1: wrote that he is man, he has great I've been
Speaker 1: reading a lot of Um. I've been writing or reading
Speaker 1: a lot more sci fi recently, I even more than usual.
Speaker 1: I recently read one called The Three Body Problem. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's hard science fiction by a Chinese writer. Highly recommend it.
Speaker 1: If you're interested part of a trilogy those watch out,
Speaker 1: you'll get sucked in. So tell us aliens as we
Speaker 1: stay here in the south, or your firum ery gain
Speaker 1: um and uh, let's see. They're all sorts of ways
Speaker 1: that you can tell us you are opinion. You can
Speaker 1: give us a phone call, Yeah we are one three
Speaker 1: three std w y t K, leave a message you
Speaker 1: might get on the show. You can also do the
Speaker 1: old Facebook internetty thing with our Facebook group, which is
Speaker 1: what we kind of pitch is the best way to
Speaker 1: get ahold of us and the amazing community of listeners
Speaker 1: that you guys are a part of by very nature.
Speaker 1: Just listening this show right now, you can find that
Speaker 1: at here. It's where it gets crazy. All you have
Speaker 1: to do is. I think answer a simple question, which
Speaker 1: is like when name one of our names, or if
Speaker 1: you get really clever and creative, are awesome? Mods tend
Speaker 1: to screenshot those and send them to us, and you're
Speaker 1: gonna get in if you just say something creative and
Speaker 1: do a nod in a way to something from the show,
Speaker 1: and we love that. Make us laugh. We're a pushovers.
Speaker 1: We're an easy crowd. You should see us at comedy shows.
Speaker 1: We do a lot for stand up comics. Uh confidence, yes, hey,
Speaker 1: and everyone prepare yourselves. Black Mirror has a new season
Speaker 1: coming out really soon on Netflix. Serious. Yeah, the inside
Speaker 1: scoop on this. I know what's coming to June. I
Speaker 1: think that's awesome. I can't wait. Nice. I hope we
Speaker 1: do some more choose your own adventure stuff, which is
Speaker 1: brilliant for Netflix's algorithms, So you can find us there.
Speaker 1: You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter, and
Speaker 1: if none of that quite bags or badgers, you can
Speaker 1: email us directly. We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com.
Speaker 1: M H. Stuff They Don't Want You to Know is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i heart radio, app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.