Episode summary: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is actively looking for signals sent by aliens. Carl Sagan appears, as do some dolphins. Are they examples of intelligence? The plants sure didn't pan out.
Bike summary: 2.5 miles, 129.1 calories.
Following the alternate reality episode last week where ESP demonstrably exists and can be used to solve crime, we get something more down to earth: SETI and the search for aliens. In fact, we get aliens and dolphins -- it's like Nimoy was already working on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. (People went wild for whales and dolphins in the 80s -- at one point Star Trek: The Next Generation was supposed to have dolphin and whale crew-members.)
This episode is a really interesting time capsule. For mainstream science, the study of solar systems outside of our own was basically non-existant and I suspect that even the general public was more skeptical of the possibility of extraterrestrial life than it would be today -- and yet official interest was at it's height. There was a lot of funding available to build and operate radio telescopes. Now there's loads of interest and a lot of ground-breaking work being done and no one has any money. This episode was before any exoplanets were known to exist and even came before the WOW! signal was intercepted
All we knew was the Copernican principle that the laws of physics should be identical everywhere and therefore there ought to be exoplanets. We don't really know much more than that, although the existence of exoplanets is teaching us a lot about how solar systems evolve and form -- for instance, the "hot Jupiter" phenomenon, of gas giants orbiting their primaries very closely took scientists by surprise -- as well as just how common planets are. Just in the past two decades we've gone from thinking that planets were rare to thinking that rocky planets are are and now we think that planets capable of supporting life as we know it are rare, although if the James Webb Space Telescope is ever launched it might even prove that wrong.
Anyways, the basic idea of SETI is that if the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe, there ought to be planets around other stars. Some of these planets will be capable of supporting life and some of these life forms will be intelligent and develop a technological civilization capable of sending and receiving messages encoded as electromagnetic waves, which could be intercepted by another civilization, eg, us. There are a lot of assumptions there, only one of which is supported by actual evidence. We assume we know what life is and that we would recognize it, we assume we know what intelligence is and that we would recognize it -- civilization is perhaps the thing that we would most easily recognize, but the nature of the search in a way dictates the results: essentially SETI researchers are looking for themselves in outer space.
The episode mostly talks about what's called "active SETI" (although they don't name it), which is where researchers deliberately send high-powered radio signals at star systems considered possible locations for planets with life. In practice this means stars most like our own Sun. (With a few exceptions, these tend to be stars known only by a catalog number, since most stars that can be seen from Earth and so get either a traditional name or a Greek letter and constellation are too big and often too young and too short-lived to to have planets or life.) They talk about the Areceibo Message, sent in 1974 and directed at M13, 25,000 light years away and the better known Pioneer Plaque, designed by Carl Sagan and attached to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 probes. I don't think anyone really expected these to produce some kind of response (even in the 70s, I think astronomers knew globular clusters like M13 were not only full of radiation but tend to consist of very young stars, while neither Pioneer probe will come close to another solar system for 90,000 years)
After a brief look at Ohio State's Big Ear radio telescope -- watching this I was surprised they didn't talk about the Wow! Signal, but it wasn't detected until August of 1977 and this episode was broadcast in May of that year -- we get to the dolphins. Nimoy says dolphins are obviously intelligent and have a language, but we have yet to exchange one word with them (except, of course, for "So long and thanks for all the fish").
Podcast summary:
Right off the bat we learn that Jeb doesn't like SETI. He thinks it's too speculative and the assumptions are too unwarranted and he compared it to a "technological search for angels."
Blake says the episode is like a brochure for SETI. "We broadcast a message from on far, perhaps even from a pon farr."
Another problem Jeb has with SETI is that they believe aliens must be more advanced and therefore peaceful and enlightened, because in all of human history a people with better technology has never conquered and exploited a people with worse technology.
Then Blake said that "they found Smokey the Bear in Roswell" and he's actually Bigfoot. This really sent me down a rabbit hole, since Bigfoot is French Canadian. The most recent governor general of Canada, Julie Payette, is a French Canadian former astronaut and Quebec City's NHL team was the Nordiqes -- like the Nordic aliens. This is big. This goes all the way to Rideau Hall.
Jeb also suggests that sci-fi caused space exploration fatigue and that SETI is overpromising. I really disagree with this. There was a lot of scientific and technological optimism in the 60s and early 70s -- there was something like 30 years of continuous, double digit economic growth in most western and even many Soviet bloc countries. Standards of living were increasing, international cooperation was making strides -- this was back when the Peace Corps was respected and not just a thing for rich white kids to get a few weeks experience of white savior syndrome, while the World Heath Organization was running succesful vaccination programs; Norman Borlaug was doing his work on wheat, the European Coal and Steel Community was getting France and Germany to become friends. Yes, there were low points like the Cuban Missle Crisis and the Berlin Wall and the ever-present threat of nuclear war -- but science and technology, and middle-aged men in dark suits meeting in summits around the world, would keep things in check. We have the benefits of hindsight to know that DDT, polyester, Teflon and Freon weren't wonder chemicals and that middle aged men in dark suits don't always have the best interests of people who aren't middle aged men in dark suits at heart.
But man really did walk on the Moon in 1969, at a time when there were some elderly people who remembered the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, who remembered centuries-old monarchies in Eastern and Central Europe fell, who grew up in homes with outhouses and without refrigerators and died in a "push button age". I cannot describe this better than David Szondy and his Tales of Future Past website.
The fatigue came because once we got to the Moon, we realized there wasn't a whole lot to do. The fatigue came because the energy crisis, the Nixon Shock and stagflation suddenly made space exploration an expensive luxury when people were losing jobs and having to go to gas stations on alternate days. Still, there was a lot of optimism -- in 1976 Gerard K O'Neill published The High Frontier, charting out a future of the space program. In real life, there were only five space shuttles built (and only four at any one time) and they made 135 flights over 30 years from 1981 to 2011 -- but in his book he used what later turned out to be wildly optimistic projections based on NASA's anticipated 50 flights per year and payload costs (in 1976 dollars) under $200 per pound (even cheaper with amortization).
As it turned out, everything was more expensive than anticipated and NASA's approach to human safety was similar to that of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Predicted advances in spaceflight also didn't occur, while computers attracted talent and interest away from space.
Anyways, Jeb and Blake note that the episode didn't discuss Frank Drake at all, who is kind of the father of SETI. He developed the equation named after him to estimate the number of civilizations in the Mily Way Galaxy (when he pitched Star Trek to TV execs, Gene Roddenberry knew of the Drake Equation but didn't know the exact thing, but he realized the suits didn't know, either, so he made one up).
They talk about how the UFO believers tend to dislike SETI -- and if you believe aliens are capable of visiting earth regularly and doing so, then looking for their old radio signals is kind of pointless. They also didn't like the parts with the dolphins, which I can't blame them for. Dolphins and whales are no longer the cultural juggernauts they once were.
