Depends on the exposure. Scale from anecdotal evidence or whistleblowers leaking info to an alien ship in 50 major cities, comparing that to 'dont believe' - 'we are fkd'.
We have creatures on Earth that are almost as intelligent as Humans. (Dolphins and Great Apes for instance.) Humans are incapable of considering them to be intelligent. If we ever meet aliens, we will probably eat them.
Well, politicians' primary concern is always the next election, never more than a few years away. Which is a *bit* better than corporate chiefs, who look to the next quarterly report.
Well put! I think this is also the reason why we are so much behind in e.g. nuclear fusion. It is a huge monetary effort that has to be funded, but the results only show on the very long run of decades. This is far beyond most political careers.
You try talking to a mob of naked, starved constituents who are living under tarps that their immediate concerns are unimportant, instead you are going to spend their tax dollars on a project that may or may not bare fruit in a few hundred years.
I really want more people in science, especially astronomy, to know that SETI isn't just "'listening for aliens'" but is about how to manage the data from astronomic research. SETI does good work organizing data and being creative with how to screen noise or look for new perspectives on data. And that is done by finding natural explanations for findings in the data.
It literally stands for "Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence". I don't think anyone ever suggested they were searching for supernatural explanations.
When exoplanets were first confimed, it should have been a big deal, but the information just kinda inserted itself quite naturally into society, and in a matter of months it became "yeah, exoplanets are a thing, great", and it just became an accepted fact of life. I think the confirmation of the existence of other intelligent species will follow a similar pattern, no panic, no social disruption, just a "yeah, aliens are a thing, great" sort of event.
It will almost certainly never be discovered even if it exists which is dubious at best. For example, it would have to be land based intelligent life with radio. Sea life could not master electricity. They could not even have telescopes. Their signals could not have passed by the Earth before we started looking, which was like yesterday. It's funny you bring up exoplanets. Because this has been a giant disappointment to us everywhere we look. It's gas giants. Giant tidally locked gas giants.
Not only that the fact there's an average of 1.5 planets per star and about (10 to the power of 24) stars in the known universe, I have absolutely no doubt that life is out there. Let's not also forget that UFOs are real and no body seems care.
Why should it have been a big deal? There was never any significant evidence _against_ exoplanets. Everyone agreed they probably existed, they were just too small to see with available technology. There is plenty of evidence for the non-existence of any _technological_ civilizations within a relevant distance of the Earth. And establishing contact with any civilizations several thousands of light-years away would require major leaps in physics, whose discovery would probably be a major event in itself. We might find some microbes or some things that will fit a broad definition of "life" within the solar system or on passing asteroids / comets, though.
Id imagine exoplanets weren't that interesting because we already imagined that if our solar system had 8 of them, most other solar systems probably had them
Like the other "interviewees" on Brady's channels, I find Dr Chapman refreshingly real as well as informative. And these dark times, which Dr Chapman herself indicates being well aware of, these posts are very helpful. I hope to see more of Dr Chapman in future posts, as well as more posts in general. I love to see a post on what has been learned from JWST as well as containment of distortions better out there on what has been learned. Unlike with most posts out there on these topics (and sadly, with the internet in general), I trust the information I get from Brady's channels.
'If' a signal is detected, it will be kept under wraps until the contents are decoded--just in case said message contains information deemed 'too sensitive' for release. Chances are, however, that 'if' a signal was received, it would probably turn out to be some short, mundane comment which, after years of analysis, would probably amount to: 'Well, Bob's fixed the garbage compactor, but that meteor seems to have effected energy systems. This transfer signal is way stronger than it should be.'
even if there is life (and there is) so many stars have to align (forgive the pun) for us (or them) to actually receive a message, it's actually mind-boggling. time, distance, the vastness of space, the sheer number of planets & as mentioned here, length of actual civilisation, unlikely contact will ever happen.
The problem with the "quiet forest" analogy is the reason the forest gets quiet when you're there: it's you. The forest creatures are worried about *you.*
I was a backcountry ranger in Vermont (USA). One afternoon, a loud group showed up at my base of operations. They were talking about how there were no birds in the forest. My reply was: 1) birds sing more in the morning and evening and are quieter in the afternoon; 2) birds sing more to establish breeding territories and then less when they're raising young or finished raising young; 3) the birds were singing until you showed up. They didn't like my answer. After they left, the birds started singing again.
Like Emma Chapman, I’m more worried about climate change or that global warming will lead to a third world war and the collapse of civilization than finding a message from an advanced civilization 10 or 15 light-years from our solar system.
I know the Drake Equation is not meant to be a "serious mathematical thing" but it always bugged me that "Probability of Temporal Overlap" wasn't somehow in there. Because even if the probability is 1 that every single star has a planet that develops intelligent live that is sending out radio waves, the odds that those waves pass over us within even a span of 100,000 years seem extremely low to me. I wouldn't know how to start calculating those odds, mind you, but the universe is big and old. Take Alpha Centauri for example. Sure, they're only 4.5 ly away, which is great! But that means that life there would have to almost simultaneously evolve into intelligence with humanity. It took us a billion or so years to get here, and we've been "here" for all of 100 years. If they got their even just 500 years earlier than us, and blew themselves up or even (as we have) stopped propagating a constant wall of radio waves into space, then goodbye contact. Same if they are 500 years later. A mere blip in evolutionary timescales. Not that we should stop dedicating resources to looking. It is the ultimate dream of humanity, in my opinion, to meet another species we can truly communicate with. Unless we're around in a few hundred thousand years, I think we can rule out that happening with anything we've seen here on earth.
I think the "overlap" you're talking about is actually taken into account by the very first term : we're not talking about the total number of stars (it's a common simplification) but as was said in the video, the "number of stars being born in average in a reasonable radius each year". It doesn't mean intelligent life must be born at the same time as the star, but that what matters is the rate at which new opportunities appear, which is assumed to be rather constant.
One thing that amazes me about this is how humans just think the aliens will use our conventional numbers to communicate PI. They coukd send some random things we just dont kmow how to decode
We *ourselves* purposefully did NOT send 'random things' out - perhaps you missed that in the video. There are lots of ways to communicate without symbols; any countable number would do. Perhaps pi; perhaps (like in Contact) a sequence of prime numbers; the fine structure constant is another candidate that's been mentioned on this very channel (137 evenly-spaced pulses or dots would be understood by any sufficiently advanced listener). Any civilisation intelligent enough to send out a signal will already know whoever is listening might use different symbols and base system, and would use countable pulses or symbols and (possibly) a cipher to broadcast a universal number baked into physics or mathematics. They're not going to send out something 'random'. What would be the point?
The Drake equation is one of the most arbitrary things ever. When it comes to extraterrestrial, highly sapient life the current scientific assumptions all look for earth-like life elsewhere. It's just as plausible that life doesn't need to be water or carbon based, that's just an assumption based on those who believe abiogenesis occurred on earth through the use of liquid water and carbon compounds. The statistics for earth like life are so low based on our modern understanding of the universe that even if it existed, it would be so far away that neither of us would ever know of the other.
As far as I understood carbon and water based life is just statistically more plausible, both from how different atoms are formed in stars and how they chemically bound with one another. Other elements could technically replace carbon but they would be less/too stable and significantly less in quantity relative to carbon, meaning life would probably eventually replace it back with carbon anyway.
@@TheEnricoMicheliYup, OP is just incredibly ignorant on the subject. It's in no way "just as plausible that life doesn't need to be water or carbon based" nor is it "just an assumption based on those who believe abiogenesis occurred on earth...".
I think the Drake equation is _meant_ to be arbitrary, hence N=L As Dr Chapman says, it's not meant to give us an exact number, it's designed as a jumping-off point for discussion about extra terrestrial life.
23:23 About sending signals: I think it'd be an absolute travesty if we didn't make ourselves known. Even if we never get an answer before we collectively kick the bucket, our signals could show other beings that there are (or were) more cilizations out there. Which is pretty big, I think. If the forest is dark and quiet, maybe we're just the first to set up lights and music for a good party.
An intelligent enough species would likely not waste energy with radio. They would have a different techno signature that we likely wouldn't know to look for or wouldn't know we are seeing even if it's within our grasp. To me the most likely method would involve advanced control over producing gravitational waves that would require a deeper unification of GR and QM. Perhaps that is the reward for attaining that level of knowledge.
@@arnelilleseter4755 I think the point is you can't know if there is some way it could be. Maybe they have some way of hijacking celestial events that are already occurring to make them send out these waves in a regular pattern. The basic premise is that they are more advanced, we can't necessarily make judgments about how.
4:00 considering that there are about 30 stars within a 10 lightyear radius from us, I wouldn't be too optimistic about this. Gonna have to do a lot better than that
Our best trade would be art and culture. Either as a novelty (Earthling music! How quaint!) Or something that we think is mundane but they inexplicably become obsessed with.
What "art and culture"? What makes you think aliens even have the same senses that we do, that they see the same wavelengths we do, etc.? The odds of alien life forms being remotely human-like is infinitesimal. We don't even understand (or care much about) the "art and culture" of species that evolved on the same environment we live in.
Great vid. I believe the UN have protocols in place on how to communicate the finding that we are not alone. I suspect evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life will have a huge impact on society eg religious beliefs
There are several papers each year presenting updated Drake equations, full with probability distributions and not just a number for each factor. But in essence they do not really yield more than the original Drake equation so you can aswell just talk about that.
23:50 A game theoretical perspective keeps bothering me, though. Even though if they wouldn't _want_ to take over per se, they might want to make sure _we_ won't take over them. And if the concept of game theory or the thought of "attack is the best form of defence" ever comes upon them, we aren't necessarily dealing with a peaceful race.
fantastic upload, thanks dr Emma and great job again mr Brady as much as we love stories and heroes, our species loooves to freak out, it's our 'go to' default reaction to unknowns :)
Maybe Astronomers should look for a barren planet that shouldn't be barren as proof for (former) ETI ... that shouldn't be as hard as looking for suspicious radio waves 🙄
I can't understand why extra terrestrial life, which we will never meet or communicate with (at least in our lifetimes) would result in 1) existential crisis, or 2) chaos. The idea is very abstract and presented to us in many different media already, so is familiar to the average human in modern society. If they magically turned up on our front door, yes maybe. I can see some people behaving in very strange ways but just a confirmation? No.
There is already a deepening divide in the US and many parts of the world between a populist, anti-intellectual, religious majority, and academics. Something like this, I could really see it causing an escalation.
Imho if an alien civilization visited us then we won't be able to stop them. I mean if they managed to travel many light years to come here, then they probably gonna be prepared for combat.
Interesting topic. Taking under consideration, how old universe is - scale of time, with how big it is - scale of size, and how fast actual information can spread through it what is speed of light in a vacuum ~300K km/s it is so slow, I think that there is highly unlikely to get anything. Universe is so absurdly old a big that 99,999% of humans don't even imagine what is the scale of it, compare to what we understand as size and time. Plus, our level of technology and understanding of things might be impressive for us, but there is a chance that we could be very much a caveman in scale of other potential civilizations. If there is no other way of sending information trough spacetime than with speed of light, it is kind of pointless in the scale of the universe.
More technical question. I agree that π is very universal, even if the more real one that I would expect to see be the actual pi 6.28... not the half of it that we are using, and it will be another random numbers. What about π but in different systems, not in decimal, are we looking in that too? What if the "1" for them is not even a natural number from our perspective - probably not, but who knows. It can create such odd π in broadcast that it will look like noise I guess? And if you don't register that broadcast from the beginning, it can be even tricker. Let's say they are broadcasting π since 2 billion years 1 digit every one second, we would even don't know that it is a part of π, unless there is a just 1000 first signs on repeat?
Some people already expect that there is life out there. Some people can't believe it, because their scriptures say humans are what everything is about. There won't be just 1 reaction to the announcement.
Looking at how quickly humanity progressed technologically in just the last 50 years, I don't think you can say with full confidence that a radio signal 500 light years away isn't from a civilization that has since discovered FTL travel (or communication).
I'm kind of tired of the condescension about how "tut tut, we're too warlike. We'll never survive." that comes up in every discussion about this kind of thing. We're not THAT warlike and we're not THAT likely to destroy ourselves. Little skirmishes happening at different parts of the world at a given moment mean nothing on the scale we're talking about for communication of this type. Even during the Cold War, it wasn't all that likely that we were going to destroy life on Earth. The US and USSR weren't just sitting there salivating at the thought of killing everyone and just looking for an excuse to do it.
13:05 good to clarify you were using the Drake Equation to look for clothes, it reminded me of someone who was using the Drake Equation to look for a girlfriend, might have been in Big Bang Theory or maybe somewhere else.
I honestly believe if there is life elsewhere, it would have to be very close to how biology works here on Earth. The universe seems tuned for our existence, the Anthropic principle and all that. And this seems so extremely unlikely to me, that maybe there really isn't anyone else out there.
Amuamua was a ship here to visit us, but when they got here, it’s captain turned to his science officer and yelled. I thought you said there was intelligent life on this planet. 😁
I'll be honest, if I learned for a fact that there were intelligent aliens out there right now, I would only kind of care. Like, do they see the condition our planet and civilization is in? Help if you're so smart. Otherwise, get back to your rock.
It's entirely within the realm of possibilities that if we don't make noise now, we won't get another chance. This is likely all gone in 100 years. Hothouse Earth. Sorry to be a bummer, but 🤷🏻♀️ blame Exxon for being quiet
_"He was taking LSD and talking to dolphins, and people thought he was serious."_ - Well, he was real, LSD is real, dolphins are real and he did talk to them. And they probably talked to him, too. Now, it's unlikely the dolphins *understood* him (or vice-versa), but if we can't even achieve a basic level of communication with other species on Earth (species that seem reasonably able to communicate among themselves and share 90% of our biology and environmental references), maybe it's a _wee bit_ arrogant to think we'll be able to communicate with (or even identify the presence of) completely alien life forms on other star systems. But let's just laugh at the guy trying to communicate with real dolphins (or at Carl Sagan for thinking maybe his presence there was relevant). He didn't have expensive servers and brilliant algorithms and millions in funding from Russian oligarchs trying to buy a reputation. Ha-ha.
The fact that “intelligence” emerged only in humans but not in the other millions of animal species which also adapted to evolution and survived up to now tells you the odds of developing intelligence life. Intelligence seems to me the biggest dealbreaker
I agree. I think microscopic life might be fairly common as it developed on Earth almost as soon as the conditions permited. However intelligent life, not to mention technologically advanced civilizations, will be rare and far between. I doubt there are any other civilizations within our galaxy.
I believe, that we are not the only ones in the universe. But I think we are the only technological civilisation in the milky way. And if i'm wrong, and there are a few others on our level of intelligence, (there may be "many" planets with bacteria or similar liveforms) we will never meet them because the space between solar systems in our galaxy is just too big. A succsessfull, thousends of years lasting journey through interstellar space, is impossible in my opinion. So we will never meet, see or hear aliens from outer space. At least thats my opinion.
Here's a question though. How do the units of pi very indifferent base counts? We deal with a base 10 system, so how can we expect that aliens also use this base count?
@o930 I wasnt implying that anyone uses base 2 for everyday tasks; its painful. I meant simply that if you want to communicate numbers between two civilizations, the lowest possible common denominator is base 2, so use it. And yes, I am a programmer.
Aliens are super boring, because of Einstein. Basically we only get some useless alien microbes. Otherwise we may get a radio signal, which is only kind of a message. If Aliens would ever come, then it is just like canned food. -They take very long to get here. So yes none of the options are exiting. Even with unrealistic close to lightspeed travel, they cannot come from afar. It takes way too long. So even if aliens exists, just based on „C“ as lightspeed, aliens are the most boring thing ever.
Describing the digits of pi as 'universal' is truly dumb. Choose any base different than 10 and you'll not recognize it as pi. The only constant part is "3." afaik (except in base 2 and 3).
@@pacotaco1246That's beside my point, but ok. If you start checking other bases, the likelihood that you get a random match increases. At some point you're more likely to get a match than not.
It drives me nuts when academics flippantly remark how humans are boring, insignificant garbage and that aliens wouldn't bother visiting us or even be interested in us. The universe is almost 100% empty space and inert dust and rocks, thereby making any place with life, any life at all, one of the most interesting places in the entire universe. This woman is part of a team of people who are extremely interested in finding the existence of aliens, but her view of humanity is so warped by post modern nihilism that she can't see that obviously aliens would be interested in aliens (us) too. I bet if she were told that primitive aliens were discovered and she was asked if she would like to go study them, she would be ecstatic for the opportunity. But at the same time, she thinks that humanity is violent, ignorant, rapacious, semi-semtient pond scum that the noble enlightened aliens would turn their noses at. This is what happens in universities now. Your optimism and faith in humanity is ripped out of you and you're taught that the lower you think of humanity, the higher you can think of yourself.
I think they would still be curious and observe us. If we could discover alien life, even non intelligent ones. Who wouldn't want to observe them and study them?
@@MZYY We might be the most boring species out there. We might be the "religious data entry worker who likes watching TV and lives in a town", among all interesting kinds of aliens.
There won't be a moment of first contact with an ET but there will be a moment of realizing that there are already contacts with them, in the science world.
Don't get the 'talk to them' hope at all. "I Am Not A Scientist At All" but surely either they're in your back yard and you'd already know about them, or they are so far away that they all likely died before that signal got here?!
The public won't panic. They won't believe it, if they even pay attention. Brady is right, I think.
Depends on the exposure. Scale from anecdotal evidence or whistleblowers leaking info to an alien ship in 50 major cities, comparing that to 'dont believe' - 'we are fkd'.
after no-vaxxer the no-aliens.
We have creatures on Earth that are almost as intelligent as Humans. (Dolphins and Great Apes for instance.) Humans are incapable of considering them to be intelligent. If we ever meet aliens, we will probably eat them.
Aliens would just wait for us to destroy ourselves so they can invade without resistance.
@@davidschneide5422Lame but efficent. And probably doesnt take too long.
Love the part where she says politicians have problems with planting a tree they won't be able to sit under, great topic update
Well, politicians' primary concern is always the next election, never more than a few years away. Which is a *bit* better than corporate chiefs, who look to the next quarterly report.
Well put! I think this is also the reason why we are so much behind in e.g. nuclear fusion. It is a huge monetary effort that has to be funded, but the results only show on the very long run of decades. This is far beyond most political careers.
You try talking to a mob of naked, starved constituents who are living under tarps that their immediate concerns are unimportant, instead you are going to spend their tax dollars on a project that may or may not bare fruit in a few hundred years.
I really want more people in science, especially astronomy, to know that SETI isn't just "'listening for aliens'" but is about how to manage the data from astronomic research. SETI does good work organizing data and being creative with how to screen noise or look for new perspectives on data. And that is done by finding natural explanations for findings in the data.
Which is why we should get rid of it. The knowledge gained doing that is used to spy on us.
So they are listening for alien data then.
It literally stands for "Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence". I don't think anyone ever suggested they were searching for supernatural explanations.
@@RFC3514 Ganymede didn't suggest that either. You appear to be responding to an argument no one here was making.
@@KevinVanOrd - "that is done by finding *natural explanations* for findings in the data"
When exoplanets were first confimed, it should have been a big deal, but the information just kinda inserted itself quite naturally into society, and in a matter of months it became "yeah, exoplanets are a thing, great", and it just became an accepted fact of life. I think the confirmation of the existence of other intelligent species will follow a similar pattern, no panic, no social disruption, just a "yeah, aliens are a thing, great" sort of event.
Agree. The frog is probably already slowly being boiled.
It will almost certainly never be discovered even if it exists which is dubious at best. For example, it would have to be land based intelligent life with radio. Sea life could not master electricity. They could not even have telescopes. Their signals could not have passed by the Earth before we started looking, which was like yesterday.
It's funny you bring up exoplanets. Because this has been a giant disappointment to us everywhere we look. It's gas giants. Giant tidally locked gas giants.
Not only that the fact there's an average of 1.5 planets per star and about (10 to the power of 24) stars in the known universe, I have absolutely no doubt that life is out there.
Let's not also forget that UFOs are real and no body seems care.
Why should it have been a big deal? There was never any significant evidence _against_ exoplanets. Everyone agreed they probably existed, they were just too small to see with available technology.
There is plenty of evidence for the non-existence of any _technological_ civilizations within a relevant distance of the Earth. And establishing contact with any civilizations several thousands of light-years away would require major leaps in physics, whose discovery would probably be a major event in itself.
We might find some microbes or some things that will fit a broad definition of "life" within the solar system or on passing asteroids / comets, though.
Id imagine exoplanets weren't that interesting because we already imagined that if our solar system had 8 of them, most other solar systems probably had them
Like the other "interviewees" on Brady's channels, I find Dr Chapman refreshingly real as well as informative. And these dark times, which Dr Chapman herself indicates being well aware of, these posts are very helpful.
I hope to see more of Dr Chapman in future posts, as well as more posts in general. I love to see a post on what has been learned from JWST as well as containment of distortions better out there on what has been learned.
Unlike with most posts out there on these topics (and sadly, with the internet in general), I trust the information I get from Brady's channels.
I like the good taste shown by including Mork & Alf in the examples.
'If' a signal is detected, it will be kept under wraps until the contents are decoded--just in case said message contains information deemed 'too sensitive' for release. Chances are, however, that 'if' a signal was received, it would probably turn out to be some short, mundane comment which, after years of analysis, would probably amount to: 'Well, Bob's fixed the garbage compactor, but that meteor seems to have effected energy systems. This transfer signal is way stronger than it should be.'
even if there is life (and there is) so many stars have to align (forgive the pun) for us (or them) to actually receive a message, it's actually mind-boggling. time, distance, the vastness of space, the sheer number of planets & as mentioned here, length of actual civilisation, unlikely contact will ever happen.
The problem with the "quiet forest" analogy is the reason the forest gets quiet when you're there: it's you. The forest creatures are worried about *you.*
Me, specifically? Fair enough.
I was a backcountry ranger in Vermont (USA). One afternoon, a loud group showed up at my base of operations. They were talking about how there were no birds in the forest. My reply was: 1) birds sing more in the morning and evening and are quieter in the afternoon; 2) birds sing more to establish breeding territories and then less when they're raising young or finished raising young; 3) the birds were singing until you showed up. They didn't like my answer. After they left, the birds started singing again.
If we found out that there are aliens 100ly away, then I'd have to get kids...
Love the ending sounds. It was a very pleasant surprise.
One of the best hosts, guests or how you want to call it ever👍
I would love to see her become a regular 🙂
Like Emma Chapman, I’m more worried about climate change or that global warming will lead to a third world war and the collapse of civilization than finding a message from an advanced civilization 10 or 15 light-years from our solar system.
More of Dr Emma Chapman! ♥
We’ll try.
Due to how low speed light is the engineers searching for ET are actually intergalactic archeologists.
I know the Drake Equation is not meant to be a "serious mathematical thing" but it always bugged me that "Probability of Temporal Overlap" wasn't somehow in there. Because even if the probability is 1 that every single star has a planet that develops intelligent live that is sending out radio waves, the odds that those waves pass over us within even a span of 100,000 years seem extremely low to me. I wouldn't know how to start calculating those odds, mind you, but the universe is big and old.
Take Alpha Centauri for example. Sure, they're only 4.5 ly away, which is great! But that means that life there would have to almost simultaneously evolve into intelligence with humanity. It took us a billion or so years to get here, and we've been "here" for all of 100 years. If they got their even just 500 years earlier than us, and blew themselves up or even (as we have) stopped propagating a constant wall of radio waves into space, then goodbye contact. Same if they are 500 years later. A mere blip in evolutionary timescales.
Not that we should stop dedicating resources to looking. It is the ultimate dream of humanity, in my opinion, to meet another species we can truly communicate with. Unless we're around in a few hundred thousand years, I think we can rule out that happening with anything we've seen here on earth.
As the doctor said, it reduces to N=L.
I think the "overlap" you're talking about is actually taken into account by the very first term : we're not talking about the total number of stars (it's a common simplification) but as was said in the video, the "number of stars being born in average in a reasonable radius each year". It doesn't mean intelligent life must be born at the same time as the star, but that what matters is the rate at which new opportunities appear, which is assumed to be rather constant.
and of course we've only been capable of listening for less than 100 years. which is basically nothing.
need more from Dr Chapman
One thing that amazes me about this is how humans just think the aliens will use our conventional numbers to communicate PI.
They coukd send some random things we just dont kmow how to decode
We *ourselves* purposefully did NOT send 'random things' out - perhaps you missed that in the video. There are lots of ways to communicate without symbols; any countable number would do. Perhaps pi; perhaps (like in Contact) a sequence of prime numbers; the fine structure constant is another candidate that's been mentioned on this very channel (137 evenly-spaced pulses or dots would be understood by any sufficiently advanced listener). Any civilisation intelligent enough to send out a signal will already know whoever is listening might use different symbols and base system, and would use countable pulses or symbols and (possibly) a cipher to broadcast a universal number baked into physics or mathematics. They're not going to send out something 'random'. What would be the point?
The Drake equation is one of the most arbitrary things ever. When it comes to extraterrestrial, highly sapient life the current scientific assumptions all look for earth-like life elsewhere. It's just as plausible that life doesn't need to be water or carbon based, that's just an assumption based on those who believe abiogenesis occurred on earth through the use of liquid water and carbon compounds.
The statistics for earth like life are so low based on our modern understanding of the universe that even if it existed, it would be so far away that neither of us would ever know of the other.
Yes. part two. It's better than your equation lol
As far as I understood carbon and water based life is just statistically more plausible, both from how different atoms are formed in stars and how they chemically bound with one another. Other elements could technically replace carbon but they would be less/too stable and significantly less in quantity relative to carbon, meaning life would probably eventually replace it back with carbon anyway.
@@TheEnricoMicheliYup, OP is just incredibly ignorant on the subject. It's in no way "just as plausible that life doesn't need to be water or carbon based" nor is it "just an assumption based on those who believe abiogenesis occurred on earth...".
I think the Drake equation is _meant_ to be arbitrary, hence N=L
As Dr Chapman says, it's not meant to give us an exact number, it's designed as a jumping-off point for discussion about extra terrestrial life.
23:23 About sending signals: I think it'd be an absolute travesty if we didn't make ourselves known.
Even if we never get an answer before we collectively kick the bucket, our signals could show other beings that there are (or were) more cilizations out there. Which is pretty big, I think.
If the forest is dark and quiet, maybe we're just the first to set up lights and music for a good party.
An intelligent enough species would likely not waste energy with radio. They would have a different techno signature that we likely wouldn't know to look for or wouldn't know we are seeing even if it's within our grasp. To me the most likely method would involve advanced control over producing gravitational waves that would require a deeper unification of GR and QM. Perhaps that is the reward for attaining that level of knowledge.
You think producing gravitational waves would waste less energy than radio waves?
@@arnelilleseter4755 I think the point is you can't know if there is some way it could be. Maybe they have some way of hijacking celestial events that are already occurring to make them send out these waves in a regular pattern. The basic premise is that they are more advanced, we can't necessarily make judgments about how.
Stephen Hawking… “speaking out loudly”… to say “my god we’ve got to be quiet”… not sure you could script a more ironic sentence.
I really appreciate you bringing this topic to the attention of academia
I always want to know what Brady thinks!
4:00 considering that there are about 30 stars within a 10 lightyear radius from us, I wouldn't be too optimistic about this. Gonna have to do a lot better than that
I love how down-to-earth and sensible she is.
If Extraterrestrial Life can travel faster than light then they need nothing from us.
They might need to demolish the planet to make way for an hyperspace bypass.
Our best trade would be art and culture. Either as a novelty (Earthling music! How quaint!) Or something that we think is mundane but they inexplicably become obsessed with.
What "art and culture"? What makes you think aliens even have the same senses that we do, that they see the same wavelengths we do, etc.? The odds of alien life forms being remotely human-like is infinitesimal. We don't even understand (or care much about) the "art and culture" of species that evolved on the same environment we live in.
@@Lashb1adefunko pops
Life vs intelligent life is very different and the later might never be found
L is the Spherical Cow!? I disturbed the neighbors laughing!
Great vid. I believe the UN have protocols in place on how to communicate the finding that we are not alone. I suspect evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life will have a huge impact on society eg religious beliefs
The Drake equation needs an update fr.
There are several papers each year presenting updated Drake equations, full with probability distributions and not just a number for each factor. But in essence they do not really yield more than the original Drake equation so you can aswell just talk about that.
Finally a video that returns some credibility to crazy Alien hunters...👍👍
23:50 A game theoretical perspective keeps bothering me, though. Even though if they wouldn't _want_ to take over per se, they might want to make sure _we_ won't take over them. And if the concept of game theory or the thought of "attack is the best form of defence" ever comes upon them, we aren't necessarily dealing with a peaceful race.
fantastic upload, thanks dr Emma and great job again mr Brady
as much as we love stories and heroes, our species loooves to freak out, it's our 'go to' default reaction to unknowns :)
This woman would be a good politician. "I don't think the public can handle it"
only 4:30 in, but I wanna say: awesome video
Hope you watched the rest.
@@sixtysymbols Yes, it turned out even better!
Maybe Astronomers should look for a barren planet that shouldn't be barren as proof for (former) ETI ... that shouldn't be as hard as looking for suspicious radio waves 🙄
I can't understand why extra terrestrial life, which we will never meet or communicate with (at least in our lifetimes) would result in 1) existential crisis, or 2) chaos.
The idea is very abstract and presented to us in many different media already, so is familiar to the average human in modern society.
If they magically turned up on our front door, yes maybe. I can see some people behaving in very strange ways but just a confirmation? No.
There is already a deepening divide in the US and many parts of the world between a populist, anti-intellectual, religious majority, and academics. Something like this, I could really see it causing an escalation.
Imho if an alien civilization visited us then we won't be able to stop them. I mean if they managed to travel many light years to come here, then they probably gonna be prepared for combat.
Interesting topic. Taking under consideration, how old universe is - scale of time, with how big it is - scale of size, and how fast actual information can spread through it what is speed of light in a vacuum ~300K km/s it is so slow, I think that there is highly unlikely to get anything. Universe is so absurdly old a big that 99,999% of humans don't even imagine what is the scale of it, compare to what we understand as size and time.
Plus, our level of technology and understanding of things might be impressive for us, but there is a chance that we could be very much a caveman in scale of other potential civilizations.
If there is no other way of sending information trough spacetime than with speed of light, it is kind of pointless in the scale of the universe.
More technical question.
I agree that π is very universal, even if the more real one that I would expect to see be the actual pi 6.28... not the half of it that we are using, and it will be another random numbers. What about π but in different systems, not in decimal, are we looking in that too? What if the "1" for them is not even a natural number from our perspective - probably not, but who knows. It can create such odd π in broadcast that it will look like noise I guess?
And if you don't register that broadcast from the beginning, it can be even tricker. Let's say they are broadcasting π since 2 billion years 1 digit every one second, we would even don't know that it is a part of π, unless there is a just 1000 first signs on repeat?
Succeeding at S(E)TI has to be easier than succeeding at STI.
I wonder how many digits into pi you can start listening and still realise it’s pi. 100? 500?
Won't panic. At least not now, initially. But, as it sinks in... Who knows?
The fact that there are "random Russian billionaires you never heard of" giving money to SETI of all things must be fascinating for most westerners.
Some people already expect that there is life out there. Some people can't believe it, because their scriptures say humans are what everything is about. There won't be just 1 reaction to the announcement.
Looking at how quickly humanity progressed technologically in just the last 50 years, I don't think you can say with full confidence that a radio signal 500 light years away isn't from a civilization that has since discovered FTL travel (or communication).
I'm kind of tired of the condescension about how "tut tut, we're too warlike. We'll never survive." that comes up in every discussion about this kind of thing. We're not THAT warlike and we're not THAT likely to destroy ourselves. Little skirmishes happening at different parts of the world at a given moment mean nothing on the scale we're talking about for communication of this type. Even during the Cold War, it wasn't all that likely that we were going to destroy life on Earth. The US and USSR weren't just sitting there salivating at the thought of killing everyone and just looking for an excuse to do it.
4:33 - I'm sure that clip can't be taken out of context. 😜
13:05 good to clarify you were using the Drake Equation to look for clothes, it reminded me of someone who was using the Drake Equation to look for a girlfriend, might have been in Big Bang Theory or maybe somewhere else.
I honestly believe if there is life elsewhere, it would have to be very close to how biology works here on Earth. The universe seems tuned for our existence, the Anthropic principle and all that. And this seems so extremely unlikely to me, that maybe there really isn't anyone else out there.
I love Lucy was a bit after that german guy with the mustache - his broadcasts would arrive first
Those broadcasts were way lower power. Fingers crossed they became indistinguishable from noise before getting 4 light years out.
@@PopeGoliath that makes sense. Let's hope they are garbled by then
The process Brady describes has been happening for decades.
That was awesome
Amuamua was a ship here to visit us, but when they got here, it’s captain turned to his science officer and yelled. I thought you said there was intelligent life on this planet. 😁
I'll be honest, if I learned for a fact that there were intelligent aliens out there right now, I would only kind of care. Like, do they see the condition our planet and civilization is in? Help if you're so smart. Otherwise, get back to your rock.
It's entirely within the realm of possibilities that if we don't make noise now, we won't get another chance. This is likely all gone in 100 years. Hothouse Earth. Sorry to be a bummer, but 🤷🏻♀️ blame Exxon for being quiet
None has read the Three Body Problem Theology? I think those books predict what will happen.
but jeremy corbell told me they were already here!!!
I’m wondering; are we (mankind) sending digits of pi into the universe?
Start the announcement with how far away they are.
How can we be sure Keith Richards is not an alien, I mean, really?
I don't think I will care too much if some distant aliens are confirmed to exist. Aliens won't help me make rent
It’s when people realize Mars Attack! was a documentary that people will panic!
Mork calling Orson, Mork calling Orson....
_"He was taking LSD and talking to dolphins, and people thought he was serious."_ - Well, he was real, LSD is real, dolphins are real and he did talk to them. And they probably talked to him, too.
Now, it's unlikely the dolphins *understood* him (or vice-versa), but if we can't even achieve a basic level of communication with other species on Earth (species that seem reasonably able to communicate among themselves and share 90% of our biology and environmental references), maybe it's a _wee bit_ arrogant to think we'll be able to communicate with (or even identify the presence of) completely alien life forms on other star systems.
But let's just laugh at the guy trying to communicate with real dolphins (or at Carl Sagan for thinking maybe his presence there was relevant). He didn't have expensive servers and brilliant algorithms and millions in funding from Russian oligarchs trying to buy a reputation. Ha-ha.
The fact that “intelligence” emerged only in humans but not in the other millions of animal species which also adapted to evolution and survived up to now tells you the odds of developing intelligence life. Intelligence seems to me the biggest dealbreaker
I agree. I think microscopic life might be fairly common as it developed on Earth almost as soon as the conditions permited. However intelligent life, not to mention technologically advanced civilizations, will be rare and far between. I doubt there are any other civilizations within our galaxy.
The wise have told me nobody really cares what we say.
Extrapolate.
So this channel specifically is why we are about to get taken over by aliens? Thanks!
The digits of pi... any number combination you can imagine will be found somewhere in the digits of pi.
Will I still have to go to work on the day after we find out there are aliens?
@13:45 Then next time someone asks you what the Drake Equation is, you can totally answer with 'Hakuna Matata'
I believe, that we are not the only ones in the universe. But I think we are the only technological civilisation in the milky way. And if i'm wrong, and there are a few others on our level of intelligence, (there may be "many" planets with bacteria or similar liveforms) we will never meet them because the space between solar systems in our galaxy is just too big. A succsessfull, thousends of years lasting journey through interstellar space, is impossible in my opinion. So we will never meet, see or hear aliens from outer space. At least thats my opinion.
Do not tell them about the Potato. That is Earth tech.
K.
could there be a natural explanation for the digits of pi being broadcast in binary? if not, why did we bother with the Arecibo Message?
706
Here's a question though. How do the units of pi very indifferent base counts? We deal with a base 10 system, so how can we expect that aliens also use this base count?
Base 2 is fundamental. Use base 2.
@organ3345 No it isn't. It's convenient for computers. Even programmers don't use binary, they use hex.
I've heard there's a large group of people that want to switch to a base 12
@@hazard7732 Those people are silly and ridiculous.
@o930 I wasnt implying that anyone uses base 2 for everyday tasks; its painful. I meant simply that if you want to communicate numbers between two civilizations, the lowest possible common denominator is base 2, so use it. And yes, I am a programmer.
Before searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence we should fix home grown stupidity...
Aliens are super boring, because of Einstein.
Basically we only get some useless alien microbes.
Otherwise we may get a radio signal, which is only kind of a message.
If Aliens would ever come, then it is just like canned food.
-They take very long to get here.
So yes none of the options are exiting.
Even with unrealistic close to lightspeed travel, they cannot come from afar.
It takes way too long.
So even if aliens exists, just based on „C“ as lightspeed, aliens are the most boring thing ever.
Not excited about communicating with demons, but you do you.
It will be very exciting until the next Taylor Swift concert.
I wonder what they'll taste like?
i think aliens may send 6.28.....
Did someone say they needed an existential crisis?
Describing the digits of pi as 'universal' is truly dumb. Choose any base different than 10 and you'll not recognize it as pi. The only constant part is "3." afaik (except in base 2 and 3).
We can check other bases too. Might take a few more minutes depending on such a signals length
@@pacotaco1246That's beside my point, but ok. If you start checking other bases, the likelihood that you get a random match increases. At some point you're more likely to get a match than not.
It drives me nuts when academics flippantly remark how humans are boring, insignificant garbage and that aliens wouldn't bother visiting us or even be interested in us. The universe is almost 100% empty space and inert dust and rocks, thereby making any place with life, any life at all, one of the most interesting places in the entire universe. This woman is part of a team of people who are extremely interested in finding the existence of aliens, but her view of humanity is so warped by post modern nihilism that she can't see that obviously aliens would be interested in aliens (us) too. I bet if she were told that primitive aliens were discovered and she was asked if she would like to go study them, she would be ecstatic for the opportunity. But at the same time, she thinks that humanity is violent, ignorant, rapacious, semi-semtient pond scum that the noble enlightened aliens would turn their noses at. This is what happens in universities now. Your optimism and faith in humanity is ripped out of you and you're taught that the lower you think of humanity, the higher you can think of yourself.
She's very attractive
Plot twist: They are not sending pi but 2*pi
If they're smart, any aliens will avoid coming here at all.
stop watching the news
I think they would still be curious and observe us. If we could discover alien life, even non intelligent ones. Who wouldn't want to observe them and study them?
@@jamescollier3Actually, aliens may have been watching our news and decided not to bother...
@@MZYY We might be the most boring species out there. We might be the "religious data entry worker who likes watching TV and lives in a town", among all interesting kinds of aliens.
I like her :3
The digits of π? In what basis?
Why are you speaking about millionaires sponsoring science like it's a bad thing?
SETI, or as someone used to call it, a "silly effort to investigate". The cognitive dissonance here is huge.
There are NO aliens !! Next topic.
There won't be a moment of first contact with an ET but there will be a moment of realizing that there are already contacts with them, in the science world.
Existential crisis? No!
Smash
Noice.
Don't get the 'talk to them' hope at all. "I Am Not A Scientist At All" but surely either they're in your back yard and you'd already know about them, or they are so far away that they all likely died before that signal got here?!
Watch The Abyss! they are already here! We are the aliens!!?