Alien Hunting: SETI Scientists on the Search for Life Beyond Earth | WIRED25

(funky music)

My name is Jason Kehe, I'm an editor at Wired.

and I think you're at Alien Hunting,

yes, the best named panel at this event, I think.

And I'm particularly excited to be moderating

my very first story I ever wrote for Wired six years ago.

I think exactly it was about SETI,

the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

And with us today is Jill Tarter

who is one of the most significant influential figures

in the history of SETI.

She co-founded the SETI Institute in 1984

and ran its research center for many years

and was also the inspiration

for the main character in Contact, the '97 movie,

Dr. Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster.

And so for Wired 25,

we asked some of our heroes, Jill being one,

to nominate the next generation of icons

and she chose Maggie Turnbull.

And so I would love it if Jill could say a few words

about Maggie by way of introduction.

Well, back in 1998,

I gave a talk at University of Arizona

and at the end of the talk,

people asked me how they could come and work on SETI.

And I said well, you need to prove to me

that I can't get through the next summer without you.

Maggie did that in flying colors and she helped.

It didn't get done in the summer

but over the next year and a half,

she helped build a catalog of good stellar targets

that we should look at if we're looking for someone else's

technological civilization.

And the HabCat was all we had.

We didn't know about exoplanets back then.

They had not yet begun to surface.

So Maggie helped me build this catalog,

particularly for use with the Allen Telescope Array,

in Northern California.

Well, she actually had a difficult time

of creating her own PhD program in astrobiology,

because it was a new thing back then

and it was a bit of a struggle

to get people to be able to accept

the molecular biology classes that she wanted to take

and the astronomy classes.

But she she did it.

She forged her way through,

went on to do a postdoc at Carnegie

and then went to the Space Sciences Telescope Institute

for a little while

and then she did her entrepreneurial thing.

She went off and formed the, is it World Science Center?

Global. Global Science Center.

Sorry, Maggie.

(audience laughs) In Wisconsin.

Same thing (laughs).

Sorry, Sorry.

So Maggie is one of the very first

of the entrepreneurial astrobiologists

and now she is involved in some very big projects

to hopefully launch, after JWST, the next big telescope

that is going to be able to try and image exoplanets

around nearby stars and help us begin

to really make this quest for life beyond Earth.

Maggie, what's your version of meeting,

that story of meeting Jill?

My version of that whole thing (giggles).

Actually, no, that was great.

But yeah, so the movie Contact, my version of this

is that the movie Contact came out

when I was a junior in college.

And I was in Boston at the time at Harvard

doing a summer program.

And I went to that movie thinking, I'm very smart,

I know all of these things about astrobiology,

I'm 20.

Therefore, I know everything there is pretty much to know.

So I went to that movie thinking,

and having no idea even who Jill was,

I didn't know about the SETI Institute.

I'd heard of SETI, of course,

but the movie I went to prepared

to just see all of the things that were incorrect

and within the first 30 seconds,

I was like there's no way

that those signals from the '50s

would just be getting to Saturn (laughs)

but then the rest of the movie really blew me away.

And by the end I was basically standing on my chair

in the theater saying like

that is what I'm supposed to do with my life.

And I still didn't know who Jill was.

I didn't know there was a real-life person

that Jodie Foster spent time with at the telescope

to make that movie.

And like six months later, I met Jill at a AAS meeting,

American Astronomical Society meeting.

She gave a talk.

One of the faculty said,

I'd like to take the first question from a grad student.

I was like how can I come work for you

and the answer that I remember was,

We're terrible advisers.

I'm not available, and I was like,

Done, I will see you this summer.

And so I went and Jill, when I could catch her,

had some ideas and I picked one of them

and it just kind of grew from there.

And I honestly it wasn't until the end of the summer,

when I noticed sitting on my own desk,

a picture of Jill and Jodie Foster

in front of the telescope.

I did not realize, and I've been at that point,

I was kind of complaining

that I didn't get to go to all of the conferences

that Jill was going to that whole summer.

And when I saw that, I was like all right,

no more complaining, this is pretty awesome.

So the idea that you picked up,

that's The Catalog of Habitable Planets?

That's the summer, yeah,

when it all started coming together.

It started with a simple idea of just a new target list,

like a refreshed target list,

because we need to know the distances of stars accurately

in order to tell what they're really like.

And without accurate distances, parallax measurements,

we have to kind of guess.

And a new mission had just flown

getting parallax data for 100,000 stars.

And so that was my first thing

that I wanted to put into the SETI target list,

just that information so we really understood the stars.

And that really just cascaded into an avalanche

of other kinds of data

that I thought could be thrown in as well.

So we really understand all the systems

that SETI was using its telescope time on.

And the final result was HabCat,

which actually then did include, as time went on,

exoplanet systems that were known

and making sure that the habitable zone was safe

for many big planets that might be orbiting.

Define the habitability

and what makes a star system potentially habitable.

There're a handful of characteristics

that we eventually came up with.

One is longevity.

So the brightest stars,

actually burn through their fuel the fastest

and they will be done

burning through their hydrogen reserves

and already swelling up into red giants

before they're even done forming planets.

So those kinds of stars, not on the target list (chuckles).

Other ones, planets are made out of heavy metals.

So if you can look at a star

and see that it does not contain any heavy metals,

assuming the planets formed out of, the same material

that the star formed out of there is a lower probability

that there are planets in that system.

So very metal-poor, also bad.

So, basically what I did is I made a list of bad things

and then just took those stars out (chuckles).

Great.

And so Jill, we've talked a bit

about this sort of bifurcation in this space

between looking for bio signatures

and looking for techno signatures.

So can you sort of define what both of those are

and why they've kind of historically been apart

and maybe how they're coming back together?

Yes.

Bio signatures are either things you could find Institute,

you could imagine exploring the planets

and moons of our own solar system

in ways that you could collect data and look to see,

is there any extent or fossil life there?

And then also remotely,

with all of these wonderful exoplanets,

that we now know about orbiting nearby stars,

you can make an attempt to try an image, that exoplanet,

and tease out the chemical constituents of its atmosphere

looking for fingerprints of different molecules

that might indicate

the biology was necessary to produce them.

So that's sort of the scope of bio signatures

and that'll probably tell you about microbial life.

But some of us are actually interested

in the mathematicians.

And so. The alien mathematicians or?

The alien mathematicians, right.

The ones here on earth are okay,

but the alien ones would be better.

And so then what do we look for?

Well, we called it

the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,

though we had no way of understanding

how to detect intelligence directly.

So we took technology as our proxy and said,

is there some technology out there

that's modifying it's own environment

in ways that we can manage to detect

over interstellar distances?

And if we can find some kind of technological clue,

then we'll presume that at some point,

there were intelligent technologists that created it.

And so historically, we've been looking for signals

in the electromagnetic spectrum, that's what SETI is done.

And more recently,

as we begin to think about the new ground-based telescopes

that we're building

and the new space-based telescopes that we're building,

how can we use those to find something

that only a technology could do?

Signals is still a good idea,

but there may be many other things

that with these new observational characteristics

we can find.

And so the astrobiology community

was sort of schizophrenic for a while.

And it was okay to look for microbes

through kind of the beginning of complex life.

But they said, no SETI,

that's not part of astrobiology for a long time.

And we've just now seen a revisit of that

as the astronomers prepare for the next decadal review,

where we all sit down and we prioritize

what we wanna do for the next decade.

And there's been some National Academy of Sciences committee

that looked at an astrobiology strategy

and they are far more willing to treat level playing field.

The idea that both techno signatures

and bio signatures belong under a large umbrella

of astrobiology observations.

Is it fair to say

that most people think the search for techno signatures

for advanced alien civilizations, is that considered,

or has it been considered,

sort of more fringe or less mainstream, until maybe recently

is it sort of coming into, as you say,

this whole umbrella of the search for extraterrestrial life?

Well, I think the idea has been that on this planet,

where bacteria dominate literally,

microbial life is much more prolific than complex life,

and perhaps it will be that way elsewhere.

So we should expect to be able to find the microbes

perhaps before we find the complex life.

But on the other hand, if you go to technologies,

then whatever signals are there

can be amplified purposefully to make something visible.

So I think it's just a realization

that now we have some more technology

we can put on this problem.

[Jason] Can you give us some of your favorite examples

of possible alien technology

that is potentially detectable by our instruments?

Well, yes.

There's this fabulous star system,

or planetary system, called TRAPPIST-1 right.

We saw it above the fold in the New York Times,

a couple of years ago.

Seven planets orbiting a tiny dwarf star.

They're very closely packed.

All of their orbits would fit inside the orbit of mercury

if they were in our solar system.

And three of them are perhaps at the right distance

from their star, so that if they had an atmosphere,

they could have liquid water,

these sort of Goldilocks or habitable zone.

All right.

So now take those seven planets

at different distances from their star

and when we get an opportunity to actually explore them,

we find out they're all the same.

They aren't different temperatures,

they actually all look identical.

Well, that's not likely given nature,

but if some technological civilization arose at one of them

and decided they wanted more real estate,

they might in fact transform all the other systems,

all the other planets in their system to be the same thing.

It's going to take a lot of energy to do that,

to keep it stable,

but perhaps that would be a very interesting result

of our attempt to characterize exoplanets.

So Maggie, if Jill sort of on the techno signature,

and you're closer to the bio signature end,

of looking for sort of life on other planets,

tell us about the telescope you're working on

and what that can detect.

Yeah.

So right now my biggest project,

my biggest and most overwhelming project,

is with the WFIRST telescope.

That name is gonna change once we get into,

right now we just entered Phase B for the mission.

As we get closer to launch

it'll get a more fun name than that,

but it means the Wide Field Infrared Space Telescope.

Most of the observatory is designed for deep sky work

and looking at dark energy and dark matter,

two of the other most sexiest topics in an astrophysics.

But the first most sexiest topic in astrophysics,

is definitely exoplanets and life.

So as a technology demonstration,

we're including the first-ever spaceborne camera

to directly take pictures of the nearest planetary systems,

never been done before.

What we're gonna do is start

with a few of the planetary systems

that we know for sure exist.

We've detected them through the pull, the gravitational pull

that those planets have on their star.

So we've never seen them directly,

but we know for sure they're there.

And this will be our first chance

to take pictures of planets

that are a little more like Jupiter.

And then we're gonna do a blind search

of stars that we don't know what's there.

We were pretty sure there are no big planets there,

but maybe there are smaller planets there.

We might have a chance of actually seeing those.

So, with this camera we will be taking the first step

toward looking for signatures of habitability,

because water in the atmosphere

is a very strong absorption feature in our atmosphere.

Maybe like being able to model like cloud decks

and where they are.

And then also complex life on Earth

has one pretty big signal

that has been broadcast from Earth

for the last billion or more years, and that's plants.

So plants have a very distinct signature

where they're very dark in the optical.

We think of them as being green

because they reflect a little bit of green light.

But for the most part in the optical,

where the sun is shining they are very dark

because they're absorbing all of that light

and using it to build, as this energy source,

to build their bodies.

And then they get really reflective in the infrared

and there's a lot of theories as to why this might be.

Maybe it's a cooling mechanism, whatever.

The point is it's really visible.

It's a vegetation edge, it's very visible.

That's been a signal basically being broadcast

in reflected sunlight to the universe

for the last billion years from the Earth.

So that's something that we could potentially see

for an earth-like planet.

I should've added at the top

that there will be about 15 minutes for audience questions.

So if you have any sit on them for another 15 or so.

But Maggie you're also running for governor of Wisconsin,

is that right? Yeah, then there is that.

Almost forgot (laughs).

Tell us about that decision.

There's been a number of scientists

and that sort of last year,

maybe more visibly running for public office.

Is that sort of a bandwagon you decided

to hit yourself to or?

Not really.

I don't have any close colleagues that are running.

I've served in public office before.

I served on city council for four years

so I kind of know what it's like to be on the receiving end

of state policies from a smaller municipality.

But I'm a native Wisconsinite and I'm happy to be back

in my state running my own science program

and then being remotely affiliated with SETI as support.

But there's so much going on environmentally

and with science education

and our policies with managing our natural resources

that are not being informed by science right now

that I just felt like somebody has to step up here.

And I don't know if it's like appropriate

to go down this path here,

but I will say I'm running as an independent.

I really thought about the two-party system

and how that's been affecting us socially and culturally,

especially in Wisconsin, it's very divided.

It's really vicious and it's very insider-y.

And the only way to get a woman on that ticket

and the only way to get a scientist on that ticket

was to go independent.

So I may not have a snowball's chance in hell,

of winning that,

but at least we're getting topics on the table,

for discussion like ranked choice voting,

automatic voter registration.

Voting rights is a really big issue for me

mainly because that is what's underneath,

all these other issues like having roads,

making good decisions about our roads, and our schools,

and our natural resources, and our health care.

All of that stuff requires consensus.

Otherwise we're just on this pendulum,

going back and forth between red and blue

and always undoing what we did four years earlier.

That gets me thinking a bit about the public role,

or the role of the public in SETI research.

And Jill you've obviously spent a lot of your career

talking to people.

What is the role of sort of us, for instance,

in promoting SETI or in learning about it?

Is there one?

Oh, I think there definitely is a point in fact,

that proves that is SETI@home.

So if I look out in the audience,

how many people have you have run SETI@home

on your computers?

It's been around now for more than a dozen years, yes?

I think it's the thing that put distributed computing

and citizen science on the table.

So they didn't invent distributed computing.

People have been using it to factor Mersenne primes

and break codes for a while.

But then this SETI@home application came up

and it went wild.

It was so sexy.

People love the fact that they could use their computer

to look through stored data and perhaps find a signal.

What would that look like if someone found a signal,

for instance?

Well, their computer would report back certain parameters

that they had detected.

At UC Berkeley, where this is being run,

they would put that into a great big filter,

along with everybody else's reports.

And they would start to build a case

of whether this signal actually appears

to be coming from a single point on the sky

and move the way the stars do.

Whether it

showed the beam shape of the antenna that detected it.

And then they would build, or they do build a candidate list

of the top 10 or 20 or 100 signals,

and they request time to go back to the telescope

and specifically re-observe at each of these places.

Now for that to work,

the signal has to persist for months or years.

And maybe there are signals that do.

Another aspect of things,

is trying to get to be able to recognize signals

that are much shorter in duration and transient.

I tried a program called setiQuest,

where we actually plug people's eyeballs

into looking for signals in near-real-time,

along with with our computer, and it was fun.

People seemed to enjoy it.

On the other hand, they got tired.

(laughs) The computer did a better job in the end.

We should allow computers to do the things

that they're really better at.

But I think this is,

for me, getting people involved with SETI

is incredibly important for another reason,

because it gives us an opportunity

to change everyone's point of view, their perspective.

So we talk to people, we get them involved in SETI

and it's like holding up a mirror and saying huh,

see all you.

All you down there on Earth,

you're all the same when compared to something else

that might be out there.

And by being able to try and build a global network

to solve and work on this problem,

I think it's a really good model

for dealing with the other challenges

that we have on this planet.

Challenges that don't respect national boundaries,

but that have to be addressed systemically

and we're not good at that at all.

All right.

So maybe SETI can be kind of baby steps,

of getting people to work together

to solve a bigger problem.

And I think that trivializing the differences among us,

is one of the best things that SETI can do

and the reason that we want to involve the world.

So this question is for both of you.

Any number of astronomers will tell you

that there are 100 billion galaxies,

each containing 100 billion, or whatever, stars.

So surely, mathematically, statistically,

they're a huge potential number of planets out there

that support life.

But then you have the other half of that,

is people who say life had to emerge on Earth

through a very specific series of events,

the possibility of that happening again,

is infinitesimally small.

So I guess the question is, are you ever discouraged

devoting your careers to looking for something

that you might never find?

I won't quite go far as to say that they might not exist

but that you might never find.

No.

I love when everything is wide open.

It's just totally unknown.

It could be anything.

Like you said, there's really strong arguments

for both possible answers.

And I think that, as a scientist,

you have to get comfortable

with sort of being of two possible mindsets

at the same time.

It's like a quantum state that hasn't been collapsed yet,

where you can simultaneously imagine

there's no way this happened more than one time

and it has to be everywhere.

Like it's somewhere in there, (laughs) in that continuum,

and we just don't know yet,

which leaves open so many possible lines of inquiry

and of the most vibrant, I think it has to be just about

the most vibrant scientific field on the planet right now.

It's so multidisciplinary,

because there are so many different lines of evidence

and inquiry that play into even just the search for it,

even just designing a search for it requires

like everything we know and could imagine,

in order to target our energy in an efficient way hopefully,

but it's wide open.

Yeah.

Long ago, when I was a young scientist like Maggie,

Philip Morrison, one of the very primary founders

of the SETI effort, said to me,

Any subject in which the error bars are in the exponent

so that we don't know within factors of 10 or a 100,

or a million, that's not a theoretical science.

That's a science that's going to make progress

due to observations.

And that's where SETI is.

We've been at it for a number of years, a number of decades,

and yet, if you try and say,

okay, the right thing to look for

is electromagnetic signals.

That's what you've been looking for.

So now there are nine different variables

that could describe such a signal.

So you have a nine dimensional search space.

So take that search space volume

and set the volume equal to the Earth's oceans.

How much have we searched?

Well, when I did that calculation a decade ago,

I came up with one glass of water,

out of all the Earth's oceans.

And last week some students of Jason Wright at Penn State,

published a re-examination of that

and they say now it's more like a hot tub,

or a small swimming pool.

There's a lot yet to go.

We've hardly begun to search.

And actually it may not be electromagnetic signals,

it may be something else.

In the in the movie Contact,

and I don't think this is much of a spoiler,

Jodie Foster's character does detect alien civilizations

and then she's sort of considered

as one of the people who could potentially go

and visit these aliens.

And when she's being interviewed for that job,

she's asked what be the first question.

If you only got one question,

what would be the question you would ask them?

So I guess I'm curious,

if one of you is chosen to be the representative of Earth

and to ask the aliens one question,

what would that question be?

Well, I actually have to admit a bias in this,

because I was part of that conversation with Carl

and the movie.

And then the question for me would be, how did you do it?

How did you manage to get through

the technological adolescent phase

that we at Earth are today

to become an old sustained technological civilization?

So many people discuss this question in terms of barriers

and is there failure in our future?

But that's how I would ask the question.

How about you Maggie?

When you asked question, just like a tear came to my eyes

because I thought about Jody for that line in the movie

and Jodie Foster asking that question

and how poignant that was.

But I guess for myself, just distill it down,

I would probably just ask, how many of us are there?

It's a beautiful note.

And now I think we have some time for audience questions.

Does anyone out there?

Yes, you.

And you will get a mic so hold until you do.

Make sure we get some questions from the women

in the audience to please,

because for some reason that's always more rare.

Go ahead, but I really wanna hear from you.

(audience laughs) I'm sorry.

I really want to hear from you too.

I'm so sorry. I'll do it fast.

So it was the thing that Jason mentioned

about there being like 10 to the 22nd stars

and a lot of planets.

I guess the Fermi paradox says that,

if there were so many habitable planets,

we probably would have gotten some evidence of it so far,

but we haven't because maybe the way in which they reach out

is when they just wanna pretty much destroy you.

And I think Carl Sagan had said like,

the messaging for extraterrestrial intelligence

was a bad idea for the reason that if we--

Stephen Hawking.

Oh, Stephen Hawking said if they came here

they'd colonize us like Columbus colonized the new world.

But yeah, exactly so what are your thoughts on that,

'cause you seem really excited about finding aliens

and I hope that you guys are right (laughs).

I'm not worried. Thank you.

Okay, so I have a couple thoughts.

One is that I don't know if we appreciate

just how far apart the stars really are.

Even those of us who study the stars,

I don't know if we really absorb

like how challenging that is

to actually travel to other star systems

and how energetically what that means

to survive a trip like that.

And so my thought is that for a civilization

to actually reach that point,

there is so much internal collaboration and cooperation

and stability that is required

that you have to basically be evolved

to the point where you really are a peaceful civilization

in order to travel between the stars,

or you will self-destruct before you ever get to that point.

And therefore, the fact that we haven't heard,

or been visited, to our knowledge,

isn't necessarily because they're not around.

It could just very well be that there are peaceful people

who know when is the right time for something like that.

So I would say to you that

if you were asking the question,

are there any fish in the ocean

and the experiment you did was to dip one glass of water

out of the oceans and look and didn't find any fish,

I don't think you'd be concluding that they weren't there,

that there weren't any fish.

And that's what the Fermi paradox requires you to conclude,

if you're going to draw any strong inferences from that.

We just haven't searched enough

to be able to say whether or not they're out there.

And then Maggie has stolen my favorite argument

against Stephen, which is, it's hard to become

an old long-lived technological civilization,

without outgrowing the aggression

that probably made you intelligent in the first part.

So if they can get here, I honestly don't think

that we have anything to worry about.

Yes, woman in the back.

[Woman] Thank you for that.

I am curious to know if there's been any work done,

kind of thinking about an ethics of engagement.

What happens if you do find

some kind of extraterrestrial life?

As humans, what are our ethical obligations

and is there any kind of framework

that's been developed to approach that?

We are actually.

We've had workshops for a long, long time.

But now, finally, I think we are beginning to engage

in a meaningful way with the social scientists

and asking these questions.

And so yeah, there're subfields developing,

about Astro-ethics, Astro-religion,

things about how would we understand their values

and how should we respect them?

And I hope that someday we'll have that problem.

Who else.

[Man] Yes.

With looking further in the stars, how about closer?

What happens when you look within our solar system

and what kinds of signatures and what kind of information

do you get within our solar system?

Well, for the bulk of the history of doing SETI,

it's true.

We've been saying that a good signal to be interested in

is something that moves, is a point source

that moves at side aerial distances.

That would rule out anything within our solar system.

However, we have begun to spend a little time

doing some radar studies of the Lagrangian points.

There's some very strange clouds there,

clouds of something that some people see

and some people don't.

We've had a lot of folks suggesting

that asteroids might be a good place to place an artifact.

And we're going to be visiting these worlds.

And so that's a part of the techno signature.

Let's keep our mind open for what we could find

and let's try and figure out,

what's in the Lagrange L4 and L5 points.

What are those Kordylewski clouds?

Jill can you tell the audience,

we were talking backstage about some mysterious signals

that could potentially mean something.

The ones you mentioned,

by way of telling us that we actually have detected things

right, that we can't quite account for.

I'm blanking Jason.

What were we talking about? It was the ten.

It was a continuous signal, oh gosh.

Yeah.

Did we have this conversation? We did.

Was I part of it?

Maybe the aliens wiped it from our brains.

Right. (audience laughs)

We're not supposed to know that.

But are there things that we've seen or detected out there

that potentially could very well represent?

We certainly have seen things and seen them only once

and never been able to verify that they were valid,

or had anything to do with an extraterrestrial technology

and not just our own technology.

So we are trying to open up this transient detection field.

And there are lots of reasons.

Oh, I know now what you were talking about.

There are lots of things

that we are discovering as astronomers

that are very short-lived.

We have this mystery in the radio astronomy field

about what Fast Radio Bursts are, FRBs.

We think that there may be as many as 10,000 of them

going off on the sky every day.

They last for a millisecond or less,

and we don't know what they are.

And they're not repeatable in the same location.

There's only one that is repeated in the same location.

So what Jason was talking about was,

I said oh well, gosh been 20 years.

Contact, we need a sequel.

What about if those 18 hours of recorded static right,

maybe these FRBs are just the transportation wormholes

opening and closing around the the sky?

So that was my idea.

But FRBs are a real mystery

and we're trying to build instrumentation

that can better illuminate what they are.

And in terms of interesting signals that have been seen

and then eventually ruled out, there have been.

I love the story of Frank Drake

who started SETI with two stars.

If you're gonna look at two stars and they point,

they do observations, see a signal.

It's like, is it that easy?

They have been broadcasting this whole time?

And eventually realized that they discovered Soviet's,

Viola spy satellite that nobody knew about.

But you know, (laughs)

And then there's a story, correct me if I'm wrong,

but that the telescope went into nodding mode

for like six days trying to figure out what the signal was

that apparently, was not local, was narrowband,

passed all the other tests,

only to figure out later that it was the European,

I think Solar Observatory.

SOHO. SOHO

that just wasn't in the database or something,

or it wasn't its orbit.

It wasn't.

No, it's not quite right.

We, always observed with two telescopes,

to help us solve this problem,

two widely-separated telescopes.

One of our telescopes got hit by lightning.

Oh, okay. So were left with one,

in which case all you can do, is look on and off

and on and off.

And by the end of the day, we realized that

as the target we were looking at was setting,

the changes we were seeing in the signal

indicated that the signal

was actually rising towards the meridian.

So we knew it wasn't what we had hoped it would be,

but we didn't know what it was

till we did some internet research.

Yeah.

And the really bad thing about that,

for which I still have to apologize to my colleagues,

is we were in West Virginia.

We went off to dinner,

figured out it wasn't what we were looking for,

went to bed didn't tell our colleagues in California,

who stayed up all night waiting for that star to rise again.

No (laughs). (audience laughing)

You'd probably write a book.

I hope you write a book of all these like little stories

because it's just so interesting

and we're gonna want to refer back to this someday,

when SETI is more like established and mature,

and we have a handful of civilizations that we know about.

The good old days, we're gonna want to know

about the good old days.

[Woman] I'm just curious.

Do you guys have favorite science fiction?

Good question?

I do. (audience laughs)

Yeah? Well, I have a few,

but I it's so cliche.

I love Star Trek so much.

Like especially The Next Generation.

I could just watch those over and over again.

Janeway. Yeah, and Janeway.

I love Janeway.

Anyway, what's yours?

Arthur Clarke and Asthma.

Those were the books that I grew up with.

Do you think sci-fi is good,

sort of unbalanced for SETI, or it's bad in some way?

Oh, no, I think it's fantastic

because you know we're actually trying

to conceive of things we can't conceive of.

And science fiction has given us a lot of examples of life

that was detected but not recognized as being alive.

And so that's a good way to stretch our minds

as we sit here and say, well, a bio signature will be this

or we need to find that.

And it's just imagination replacing,

or augmenting the data that we have.

I think it's great.

Do we have other questions?

One of the people in the back and I'll take to you as well.

[Woman] How do you get your best ideas?

Where, when?

Well,

that is a great question

because so recently I started working on something

totally brand-new and it all started

because of one of these crazy scavenger hunt things,

where they like make you,

maybe somebody knows even which one I'm talking about,

but it's like this worldwide thing

and they make you do all these crazy things

and a friend was doing it.

She emails me and she's like

I need to launch a traffic cone into space by Saturday.

Is there any way that you could help me out?

And I'm like, well, that's not really what I do,

but now that you mention it, I can't let it go.

So I'm thinking about how we could do this

and I finally was like you know what,

I can't get it into space by Saturday,

but we have a virtual reality cave

at the University of Wisconsin

and we could put my stars in there

and make a 3D virtual space and put a traffic cone in there.

And she was like well, I don't think that would fly,

but by then I had already contacted people at UW,

and I was like, I wanna put my stars

in the virtual reality cave

and I wanna create a whole universe

people can travel around from here and visit nearby planet.

We have all this data,

there's no reason why we couldn't all have access to that

and visit planetary systems and whatnot.

So the psychology faculty, who I contacted, loved the idea.

Now we're writing this huge NSF proposal to do this.

And we have the Children's Museum on board

and neighborhood centers and Girl Scouts

and gamers and all this stuff.

And it's like, how did these ideas come together, right?

And the SETI Institute will be supporting.

And it's like, I don't know what you call that,

but that's how my best ideas usually come around.

(everyone laughing)

And mine usually come from group interactions

where we're just brainstorming

and a little bit of competitiveness.

I wanna do something that's gonna be sexier

than what you're talking about.

How do we augment that?

Yeah, and just getting to know people

who do different things,

who have expertise in areas that I have no experience with.

And oh you mean really, you could do that?

It's sort of like Maggie said.

Oh well, then that means we could do this.

So yeah, a lot of collaboration,

a lot of interdisciplinary interactions, really good.

It's like taking one little thing

and just running with it.

Like how far can we push this little idea?

We have one minute.

I think someone has a mic back there already, I'm sorry.

[Man] Quick question.

Similar to the space program

where they use some of the technologies

and in the real world to create things that we can use here,

are any things that you're creating

have applications not out there, but here?

Well, some of the algorithms

that we are using for real-time signal detection

have applications other places.

Long ago, before Maggie joined our program,

we were looking at a particular type of transform,

called a radon transform

that actually turned out to be a really good way

of detecting micro calcifications in breast cancer screening

and mammograms and went to a first stage trial.

Turned out it was too expensive.

Did not get put into the commercial domain,

but yeah it's finding patterns and noise.

There are a lot of different applications for that.

And now we're hoping that what's come out of industry

and the university systems,

neural networks will help us interrogate data

without having to ask the computer

to find a particular pattern.

But let the neural networks tell us

if there's something there other than noise.

Please join me in thanking these two amazing women

and vote for Maggie.

(audience applause)

Thanks.